Some angry people out there. A quick poke at a couple of them:

First up we have an angry but hugely ineffectual pile of protestors at the WIPO meeting. Numbering over 500 by some counts, the various scientists, economists, and "legal experts" want the WIPO to change its charter. Somehow they think they're going to dig the WIPO out of the hip pocket of the Cartel and stop it from pushing more and more IP restrictions around the world.

The biggest backers of the measure, Brazil and Argentina, have a set of ultimately valid concerns - the point is that IP protection should not be an end unto itself, but rather a means to effect useful ends (such as compensating creators). Sadly, they've got absolutely no clout. The US doesn't want change, so it's not going to happen without a very large counterweight (something like the EU++) pushing for change. This will happen approximately three weeks after the Easter Bunny hops through the WIPO meeting distributing free range chocolate eggs to all and sundry.

An equally ineffectual, if more amusing, throwdown apparently happened at Digital Hollywood in Santa Monica, CA. There (we are told by Stefanie Olsen of CNET) P2P execs and audience members did their own Jerry Springer impersonations. On one side were Altnet and Morpheus; on the other Microsoft and Overpeer (maker of fake files to be distributed on P2P nets). As you'd expect, nothing was resolved and little more seems to have come out of it than a restatement of well-known positions. The P2P nets want to go fully legit, the Cartel wants them exterminated and ordinary consumers just want an easy and friendly digital music experience. Everyone agrees artists should be compensated; nobody agrees on models for how it should happen. I'm wondering how long we'll keep seeing stories like this.

Meanwhile, Karlheinz Brandenburg - the guy who more or less 'invented' MP3 format - is complaining that the proliferation of incompatible musical encoding formats and DRM schemes is doing more to impede the business than anything else. His point is fundamentally the same as above - if you make it too hard on people (like, even a little bit hard) they'll revert to free and open (if illegal) MP3s. A little less head-bashing and a lot more cooperation and user focus would go a long way.

In the "do something about it" camp continues to be Creative Commons, which opened a Canada branch recently in Ottawa. The goal, as before, is to permit people to craft strategies for content protection and use that suit the content and the marketplace rather than a rigid busines model. The biggest hope I see here is that educational institutions are starting to try this stuff out. If they do and we get tens of thousands of students exposed to and used to the ideas that could do a lot to break the stalemate.

I also think it's worth noting the degree to which Creative Commons is paying attention to the user experience. Their goal is to have a Web site where a novice can, with a reasonably few mouse clicks, create human-readable, lawyer-readable, and machine-readable forms of the same set of instructions.