By the way, this article was written by John Walker, who was a founder of Autodesk, and wrote AutoCAD. He's not a paranoid, just a concerned technologist.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/

Once you've had some fear put in you, check out the Freenet project, a different vision of the future of the net, though not necessarily less dystopian.

http://www.freenetproject.org/

This affects people in Los Angeles because we are the media hub of the world. The business interests that support DRM are in Los Angeles, and some of us work for them.