When people talk about Digital Rights Management, or DRM, the real subject of their discussion is usually Digital Rights Enforcement. The basic use case seems to be how to prevent a teenage boy from duping “Rush Hour II” for his friends, or some variation thereof—what you add to the DVD storing the movie, what you add to the players to check on the DRE components of the DVD, and so forth.

I’m writing this from the third day of the O’Reilly Tools of Change publishing conference, and I’ll have a lot to say in the coming weeks about ideas I’ve had here. I wanted to start with a theme from the opening keynote speeches: whether content is king, and if not, what is.

My small appreciation for opera focuses more on specific composers like Alban Berg and Puccini than on singers, but WFMU’s Beware of the Blog led me to an interesting Pavarotti duet, and YouTube showed me that it was one of a truly strange collection. For example, there is the goofy and gimmicky: with Barry White. The less goofy, but still gimmicky (and I’m a bigger fan of Lou’s than of anyone else mentioned on this page): with Lou Reed. Strangely powerful and moving: with…

At least that’s what his hometown paper says. He also got quoted by the New York Times, whose Harvey Araton felt the need to explicate what our man Snee meant.

Since the beginning of RDFa’s history, many of its advocates have stressed its value in adding machine-readable semantics to personal web pages. This example from the RDFa Primer is typical: