A number of news aggregators and blogs have picked up this Broadcasting & Cable story, reporting that HBO CTO Bob Zitter wants to stop referring to content securing technology as DRM and begin referring to it as DCE, for Digital Customer Enablement.  Are you kidding me?  Enablement?! Seriously.

Look, if you own content, you have every right to cripple protect that content however you see fit. I certainly won't debate that.  I also believe that companies that build platforms to host this content, such as Microsoft, Apple, TiVo, etc., must provide core technology to support the desires of content owners, even if those desires include DRM.

However, I'm also a big believer in free markets, and I'm confident that DRM'd content (at least in its current form, where the "D" in DRM could stand for Draconian) will ultimately lose in the market to companies distributing content in more convenient, customer-friendly formats.

But, all of this aside, don't try to make the rest of us use your weasel words.  DRM is not about customer enablement of anything.  It's about restricting what customers are already able to do in order to support a particular business model.  Again, I support a content owner's right to do this, but I will vote with my dollars for content owners with more customer-friendly approaches.