Hollywood vs. Your PC: Round 2

Playing Fair

Only the most rabid BitTorrent users would want to live in a world where copyrights don't exist, but nobody wants one side to call all the shots either.

"Hollywood is speaking with one voice, holding the reins on the one thing everyone needs: content," says EFF's von Lohman. "In that kind of environment, consumers are going to get screwed."

But Microsoft's Matthias says that it's in everyone's best interest to find solutions that media firms and users can live with. "At the end of the day, if consumers don't see a value proposition for next-generation content, there are a lot of very big companies who've made some very big bets that aren't going to pan out," he notes.

As happened with the backlash against Sony BMG's copy protection technology, users must reject bad DRM schemes--not because they violate computer security, but because they punish the people who actually paid for the digital content, say consumer advocates.

"One approach [to piracy] is to make it as hard as possible to create and share illegal copies of digital content," writes Navio's Roever in his corporate blog. "Another is to make it as attractive and easy as possible to buy digital content. The more successful the industry becomes at achieving the latter, the less it will need to rely on the former."