DRM converts copyrights into trade secrets

From Mark Sableman’s “Copyright reformers pose tough questions” (St. Louis Journalism Review: June 2005):

It goes by the name “digital rights management” – the effort, already very successful, to give content owners the right to lock down their works technologically. It is what Washington University law professor Charles McManis has characterized as attaching absolute “trade secret” property-type rights to the content formerly subject to the copyright balance between private rights and public use.