It’s not news that the main reason the movie and television industries are wary of BitTorrent is that they’re freaked out by the music industry’s experience with piracy. Although they see the economic advantages of P2P distribution, they’re concerned that once they put their stuff out there, even wrapped in triple layers of kryptonite DRM, it might be cracked and then circulate in unprotected form. For movies, that’s lost revenues. For TV shows, that means ads could be stripped out, expiration routines could be removed and (gasp!) content could be modified or remixed.
All that counts as Very Scary Stuff to industry executives, and as a result they’re looking for "strong" DRM before they consider letting their premier content circulate online. This is a mistake, for two reasons:
The first is about the user experience: Any protection technology that is really difficult to crack is probably too cumbersome to be accepted by consumers.
We’ve seen all sorts of failures of this sort before, from dongles to laborious and confusing registration schemes. Each seems better at annoying consumers than at building markets. The lesson from these examples is that zero-percent piracy is not only unattainable, it’s economically suboptimal. If your content is uncrackable, it means you’ve probably locked the market down so tight that even honest consumers are being inconvenienced.
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