Social software & DRM

Spent an absorbing day talking with City Law School staff on Friday, undergrad & postgrad courses, about IT and legal education, especially the use of social software like del.icio.us and blogs, and of course the potential of the web for simulation learning.  Travelling back, it struck me that peer-to-peer sharing has led to the development of digital rights management software (Stevens v Sony Kabushiki Kaisha Sony Computer Entertainment, etc — Sony lost this particular skirmish) — effectively highly sophisticated DRM protection measures, such as region locking — but that nothing of the same massive effort and finance has gone into the creation of p2p learning software, which still remains limited, unintuitive, undervalued, certainly by the legal ed. community.  Profit, the potential loss of profit, the targeted technological solution as quick-fix — all these are reasons why this is the case; but it’s a situation that definitely needs reversal.