Overcoming Property: Does Copyright Trump Privacy?

Online copyright enforcement represents one of the greatest current threats to online privacy. As a byproduct of the asserted imperative to control flows of unauthorized information, copyright owners and their technology partners are building into digital rights management (DRM) systems a range of capabilities that implicate the privacy interests of users. These include both the ability to collect extraordinarily fine-grained information about uses of DRMprotected content and the ability to reach into users= homes and restrict what they can do with copies of works for which they have paid. Copyright owners also have exerted political and legal pressure on third-party providers of technologies and services to build similar capabilities into their own systems,