'Exploiting' a DRM speech

In a speech at Microsoft last week, Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation sought to show that digital rights management technology is a "bad business move" for the company. It was an interesting speech, especially considering the amount of money and effort that Microsoft has put into various forms of DRM, technology that lets companies and people set limits on ways that others can use music and other types of digital files. (See stories here and here for more background.)

Doctorow's speech has gotten a lot of attention online, not only because of its content, but because he is offering it under a Creative Commons public domain dedication -- sort of the opposite of putting DRM on a file -- allowing it to be "exploited by anyone for any purpose."

That inspired people to offer versions of the speech as an annotated wiki, in standard html, in html with permalinkable paragraphs and -- best of all, in my opinion -- as an audio file, read by Jason Kottke in the style of an audiobook performed by a narrator. I was able to download the MP3, put it on my music player and listen to Kottke's reading of the speech while doing laundry and other chores around the house over the weekend.

Kottke, concluding his post on the subject, notes that he'd "love to see someone other than Cory give this talk at a conference. Now that would be 'exploitation by anyone for any purpose.' "