The BBC has published a Q&A with entertainment industry execs that's worth reading. The questions cover a broad range of topics, including: Why not have simultaneous global release; What's being done to save cinemas; Why not illegally download; Why have region encoding on DVDs; and What's the point of DRM?
The response of the MPAA's Dan Glickman is noteworthy:
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.
DRMs' primary role is not about keeping copyrighted content off P2P networks. DRMs support an orderly market for facilitating efficient economic transactions between content producers and content consumers.
There's some truth to this point of view.
