Also thanks for the information on the gaming industry. That’s an arguably bigger can of worms than the publishing industry.

Andy

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

I’m on the same side of the debate as you, but in the PC gaming industry, piracy (and the response to it) has been a largely destructive force. Many publishers have either dropped projects altogether in favor of releasing them on home consoles instead, or have expanded DRM to the extreme.

The most likely solution, with PC gaming at least, will be digital distribution models, such as the very popular Steam service by Valve Software. The user has a Steam account to which all of his or her purchases are tied. They are free to download the game as often as they want and on as many different machines as they want, as long as the user is signed in to his or her Steam account at the time they are playing the game. This does not reduce piracy to 0%, but it has proven to be far more effective than everything else in the PC gaming DRM arena.

This episode of DBS was great. For general feedback about DBS, I would personally like it if you could expand on subjects a tad more in the episodes, making longer segments, but then I suppose it wouldn’t really be “bits” anymore. Keep up the good work!

Speakers at a Federal Trade Commssion event Wednesday argued that controversial DRM (digital rights management) technology may actually be good for consumers because it could give them more choices for downloading or buying copyrighted content, despite previous high-profile failures of such projects.

Selected quotes from the article:

Before DRM, “you could do what you want with it,” he said. “But is that a good thing?”

…and…

But Andrew Moss, senior director of technical policy at Microsoft Corp., claimed that DRM will be important to consumers as more of them began to create their own digital content. DRM will allow them to control how their creations are used, he said.

“What [DRM] is intended to do is give people choices,” he said.