The ongoing battle surrounding digital rights management (DRM) -- the software that prevents unauthorized copying of music and video files -- is raging in full view today. You may recall DefectivebyDesign, the activist pranksters who showed up at a Microsoft conference last month in Hazmat suits to protest file formats that restrict users from sharing songs or movies. They're now asking volunteers to telephone executives at the Recording Industry Association of America to register their displeasure with these "crippled" files.

Meanwhile, fellow DRM foe Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing amps up the buzz surrounding a biting ad taken out by the Consumer Electronics Association in Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper. The ad features comically technophobic quotes from radio and television industry executives over the last century, making the point that the industry has a long history of knee-jerk opposition to technology change. Radio, for example, was once said to spell an end to the public purchase of music, while videotapes were nothing less than a threat to the American economy, according to the Motion Picture Association of America in 1982: "Now we are faced with a new and very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the videocassette recorder." Note to the MPAA: It looks like the economy has survived quite nicely, which is to say nothing of all the profits Hollywood studios rake in from DVDs.