We saw this astonishing quote from Dan Glickman of the MPAA over at the Beeb, when asked about the effectiveness of DRM:

No, it is not correct to assume that one clever hack dooms all use of DRM. Content owners use DRMs because it provides casual, honest users with guidelines for using and consuming content based on the usage rights that were acquired. Without the use of DRMs, honest consumers would have no guidelines and might eventually come to totally disregard copyright and therefore become a pirate, resulting in great harm to content creators.

Isn’t that just the reaction you’d expect from an MPAA bigwig? DRM isn’t there to stop criminals, because it can’t; it’s there because, without DRM, honest consumers wouldn’t have “guidelines” on how to properly (read: prohibitively) enjoy their legally owned product. In other words, this is a clear admission by the MPAA that DRM’s only purpose is to annoy honest customers. Great!

There’s some other interesting Q&A’s about film industry rationale, ranging from region-encoding to simultaneous DVD/cinema release. And Lavinia Carey of the British Video Association cites this astonishing statistic: ” UK research shows that, on average, downloaders are film fans who view the same number of legitimate films (cinema, rented and bought DVDs) as the average active DVD consumer (24). On top of that, they also consume illegitimately acquired movies. ”

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