There is a great deal of literature out there on digital copyright, and while much of it requires you to already be deep in the discussion, familiar with case law, and technically savvy, there are a select few pieces that attempt to situate the case and its significance in broader terms. I hope that my book, or at least the first few chapters, do this, but it is a very difficult thing to do: talk to the uninitiated without losing them, or talking down to them, or being useless to those more familiar with the issue. I would say that Jessica Litman’s book Digital Copyright is one of the best in this regard, just in terms of being introductory and comprehensive while also taking her reader right to the edges of the question. Lawrence Lessig’s book Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace is a close second, valuable because it not only addresses copyright but the broader issue of what shapes Internet activity more generally, but less perfect because it moves quickly from providing introductory ground to the argument itself. For the specific issue of “digital rights management” as an outgrowth of the copyright controversies, Mike Godwin’s essay “What Every Citizen Should Know About DRM, A.K.A. ‘Digital Rights Management’”, written for Public Knowledge, is an excellent primer. But my new favorite essay for this task, especially when educating non-lawyers on the subject, is

Healy, Kieran. 2002. “Digital Technology and Cultural Goods.” The Journal of Political Philosophy 10(4): 478-500.

Healy’s discussion of the copyright controversy is comfortably situated in the sociological literature on technology, without it becoming a lesson in theory. Like Paul Starr’s The Creation of the Media, he gently puts the focus on how choices made around a technology like the Internet are consequential for the practices that follow, and tend to settle in as norms and arrangements that can be hard to undo, or even recognize, later on:

In this article, I have emphasized the importance of basic choices about the architecture of the Internet, the system of property rights governing it, and the kinds of laws regulating it. These choices will greatly affect how art and culture are consumed, the kind of work that artists can do, and the rewards, financial and otherwise, that consumers, artists and others will be able to reap from the Internet. Yet the success of new technologies tends to obscure the choices made about them. Once the opportunity passes, it can take a great deal of scholarly and imaginative effort to reconstruct just what the alternative possibilities were during a technological revolution. Constitutive choices about digital technologies are being made now. We should make sure we know which — and whose — principles these choices further, before we forget that alternative paths ever existed.

This is not revolutionary insight if you’re in the midst of this literature, but Healy presents it as beautifully as anyone I’ve seen. His discussion of these constitutive choices focuses on three levels: decisions about the architecture of the Internet, the social organization of ther medium, and the symbolic choices of individual users — often scholarship in this area have trouble taking all three of these seriously in the same breath. He also frames the discussion of copyright with a quick attention to other kinds of dilemmas involving the “politics of information”: the problem of how content is located, the “daily me” problems raised by Cass Sunstein, the politics of moderating online discussion, censorship and Internet filtering, and open access publishing. Its a two-page primer on the sociology of technology, a survey course on the sociological issues of digital culture in ten pages, and then a smart discussion of copyright, DRM, the DMCA, and the premise of copy protection.