The Right to Assert Rights
William McGeveran at Info/Law thinks that Digital Rights Management should be called access control. He makes a number of good points. DRM sounds like it should describe a government process in which the digital rights of copyright holders are managed. Access control (as McGeveran points out, mirroring language in the DMCA) is really what content creators are after: who can use my creation and how. Of course renaming DRM does not address the issue that the rights that many governments are granting content creators are not aligned with the best interest of the people or the culture, but it reframes the debate in terms of what legal protections (above and beyond copyrights) we want to award content creators for asserting technological control of their content.