The EFF and, though this is less directly their fight, the FSF, are pretty much all we have. Free software and open source people are quite good, in general, at making code available to do legal things, and to a lesser extent illegal and legal-in-countries-that-aren't-the-US things. In the long run, though, any purely technological fight will be a losing one as long as we continue to have the best laws that corporate money can buy. Right now, cracking protected systems isn't all that hard, comparitively speaking and it is usually legal somewhere. As the lockdown mechanisms get more sophisticated, more connected, and more tightly integrated, cracking will get a lot harder. Downloading libdvdcss2 is easy, importing an HDCP spoofing dongle for your noncompliant DVI panel isn't too hard; but isn't cheap, either. Modding your motherboard to defeat some sort of TCPM(or a future version thereof, I don't know exactly how long this one is going to take) will be quite tricky indeed. Modding your CPU, Northbridge, Southbridge, GPU, and NIC will be pretty much impossible for anyone without a university class lab and some serious skills. Things get even worse when all this stuff becomes illegal.
There have been limited attempts at resistance(see the European Software Patents scuffle, for example); but things look pretty grim in the longterm. The MPAA/RIAA and their ilk can afford to send more or less the same old filth into congress every year, each time with a new fuzzy name(The "Saving America's Televisions from Godless Communism" Act, to be followed by the "You Love American Idol More Than You Love Those Smelly Geeks" act, and so on and so forth). Each time there will be a bit of furor in certain sections of the blog scene, and the good folks at the EFF will protest; but that will only stop them that time, at best. The main problem is that, of the two groups that see this matter as really important, the bad guys are by far more powerful.
Obviously the RIAA/MPAA are all for this, Intel has been making good money on DRM(they are the chaps behind HDCP) and, while they make token efforts in the direction of "consumer's rights" they mean "the consumer's right to do computationally expensive transcoding on Intel silicon, into a format protected by MS in software and Intel DRM in hardware and to stream said content onto a limited number of local devices that licence Intel hardware DRM and MS software DRM." MS, of course, is happy to acceed to the media companies demands, if only to protect the PC's future as an entertainment device(since that is perhaps the last area where MS is decisively superior to their competitors). I doubt that they are crying too hard about the fact that it will make life more difficult for OSS, either. Apple, of course, isn't exactly the countercultural good guy here. They tend to be more competent, and vaguely less abusive than people like Sony; but with the move to Intel platforms, and their already demonstrated willingness to impliment DRM when it is in their interests, they seem likely to be at the vangard of making DRM seem chic and relatively painless until it is too late. Most other hardware manufacturers are somewhat less extreme than Apple, in that they have less stake in media directly; but there isn't a one who can afford to buck a trend that MS, Intel, and all major media companies are demanding. They don't much care; but they won't help.
Government isn't a much cheerier story. Our own has shown a fair willingness, especially of late, to assent to pretty much anything that includes the phrase "intellectual property" and makes the corporations happy. The EU seems perilously close to the stance that "Rationalization means taking the most restrictive climate of any member nation and smearing it over the entire area" which doesn't help too much. China has been useful in the past, particularly in providing lovely masses of grey market hardware(DVD players without Macrovision, regions, and the like, and similar kit). I'm not sure that this can hold for the future, though. If American and European import controls tighten, that sort of hardware will go from being cheap at any big box store to being contraband pretty quickly. Worse, the more complex and connected the DRM scheme is, the harder it will be for contraband hardware to survive routine remote checks as part of daily use. Worse, the Chinese willingness to provide stuff that makes violating American laws about IP easy has basically nothing to do with concern for freedom, and basically everything to do with concern for profit. If the legal climate makes such gear unprofitable, they won't make it anymore.
Even less cheerful are the other implications of the sort of technology that will need to be rolled out to prevent piracy. Pretty much, to prevent piracy to any reasonable degree, we'll have to have remote attestation, unique keys on all hardware, cryptographic verification, remotely administered, per file, controls on who can open and execute what, etc, etc. It isn't only the media companies who will love that. There isn't a government on earth that doesn't salivate at the idea of having a really easy time controlling what goes on on people's computers. There are already some attempts in place(great firewall of china, the colour laser printer tracking dots, etc.) The same techniques that will be needed for DRM will be ideally suited to making these attempts by govornment much more effective than they are now.
The public at large, of course, doesn't much know or care. Sure, the current crop of P2P suits isn't playing well with the public; but the future isn't about these goofy little lawsuits, it is about changing the very infrastructure of modern computing so that the activity being cracked down upon becomes formally impossible. That, the public knows little and cares less about.
I hate to be all doom and gloom; but I'm really worried about this too, and I really don't know what to do. The situation just doesn't look at all hopeful, and I'd hate to see the death of the general purpose computer within my lifetime.
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