While Gabe’s famous line still holds true, I find that repeating it without qualification is increasingly glib, because vendors are making the matter a technology issue instead, thanks to years of investment in DRM techniques. In the long term, either side’s ability to enforce its will on the other will come down to availability/control of compute resources, and unit economics.

Keeping corporate at bay is going to require a combination of maintaining the commons, seeing genuine competition in cultural production, improving consumer legal frameworks, and becoming politically conscious of our entitlement to digital rights.