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prevent "Fair use" by computer users who "Rip, Mix, Burn"? Just like Microsoft is? Ouch!

http://www.pdfzone.com/news/101548.html   

Looks to me like these companys want to keep the Govt from making laws about hardware copyright schemes.

What the motivation?

Do they want to impose their own hardware protection, much harsher than the Govt laws would mandate?

Do they not want customers looking to buy non copyrighted hardware outside the US?

Or something else?

"All the parties who are in agreement--including Dell, Microsoft and Apple--pledge to argue against hardware copyright protection schemes as well as against new bills currently before Congress that explicitly give consumers the right to make a limited number of personal copies of software under the "fair use" doctrine of U.S. copyright law"

I've seen other articles on this which stressed the supposed principle of "no Government interference" ... and which said the tech companies would stop pushing for any legislation to reaffirm/strengthen Fair Use, etc.  There was an implication that the tech industry might work on non-Government-mandated DRM.

What you need to ask is why a tech company would implement DRM in the first place.  Some possibilities:

1. Because the tech company is owned by a record company, or their interests are subordinated to those of a record company belonging to the same conglomerate.  (Think of Sony's interest in copy protection before and after they bought CBS / Columbia.)

2. Because the record industry uses the (sometimes implicit) threat of withholding content (a threat made possible only by Government interference with the free market in the form of copyrights) to get the tech industries to "voluntarily" build crippled equipment.

3. Because the record industry uses the (sometimes implicit) threat of lawsuits to get its way.  The threat of >= $1 billion anti-DAT lawsuits kept consumer DAT out of the US until the Congress passed copy protection + royalty taxes on technology that was protected by the Betamax ruling.  Later, the RIAA sued Diamond over the Rio using the AHRA -- the very law supposedly meant to put an end to anti-technology lawsuits.

4. Because the tech company hopes to make money as an "arms supplier" -- selling a key piece of the DRM technology (preferably one that's proprietary and universal).  This motivation was largely missing back around the time the AHRA passed (when the tech companies fought to protect computers from the SCMS/tax mandate), but if you look at the news around SDMI, digital TV, copy-protected pseudo-CDs, etc., you'll see how (divisions of) certain large firms have positioned themselves in this way.  There are companies working on encrypting digital TV signals all the way to the very pixels of a flat-panel display!

5. Because a company thinks that pleasing the content industry and filling their own coffers in any way possible is more important than pleasing end users.  See:  DIVX (extinct) and DataPlay, two systems built to give most or all of the advantages to the vendors, and precious few to the users.