Background/original story: NBC “accidentally” distributed American Gladiators with the Broadcast Flag turned on.
EFF podcast/discussion:

Alan Wexelblat:
I’m talking about traveling back in time to late 2005 when the ‘net was buzzing - angrily—about a Cartel proposal to require DRM to be embedded in every broadcast signal. The end of ‘free’ TV? No more time-shifting allowed? You remember [...]

Besides the limited (or outrageously expensive) production tools available to non-studios for producing Blu-ray discs, the Finishing Line breaks down the costs for developing your first project:
_$2,500 : License Fee to author and distribute Blu-ray
_$3,000 : One-time fee to AACS. (I think this is billed per production company / individual)
_$1,585 : Per complete Blu-ray project
_$.04 [...]

Seth Schoen at the EFF has posted the group’s concerns about the forthcoming implementation of DRM for Flash video. But is it really “DRM” in the strictest sense? Some clarifications from Flashcomguru:
…I think the author has missed the point here, or does not understand the purpose of RTMPE, the new encrypted flavor of Adobe’s Real [...]

YouTube has released a “beta” of it’s content identification and filtering tools for Copyright owners.
Google Blog: Latest content ID tool for YouTube.
YouTube Video ID Beta page.
Time will tell how this effects both Fair Use and YouTube’s popularity.

Adobe released a public beta of it’s anticipated Media Player. Content partners include CBS, Yahoo Video, PBS and Blip.tv among others. In addition to Flash video (flv) playback, it also catalogs, saves, and implements Media RSS feeds, as well as DRM. AMP is an AIR application, requiring the installation of the AIR runtime.
Adobe Press release.
Download [...]

On Apple’s iPhone firmware update that killed 3rd party applications:
Did I buy these phones or am I just renting them?
—Brian Lam at Gizmodo

Notes on the public beta of the Amazon Digital Music Store—
_They’ve gone out of their way to make it as x-platform as possible-even a Linux version on the way.
_Automatically adds downloaded tracks to a user’s iTunes or Windows Media Player library
_No re-downloading.
_The user interface needs some(much) work. While your at it, do [...]

Of course, referring to “Hollywood” movies as “Culture” is often a stretch.
I was going to link to this yesterday but never got around to it. Ken Fisher at Ars explains the consequences of AACS adoption. From Alan Wexelblat at Copyfight:
It’s not clear to me is where we go from here. In under a year we’ll [...]

This graph says it all. Story at Ars: webcasters favor indie music over major labels.

via Reuters:
The technology, developed by engineers at YouTube-owner Google Inc., will help content owners such as movie and TV studios identify videos uploaded to the site without the copyright owner’s permission, legal, marketing and strategy executives at YouTube told Reuters in an interview on Monday.
The so-called video fingerprinting tools, which identify unique attributes in [...]