The companies that sell this stuff are, at best, bunkum peddlers and, at worst, out and out fraudsters. Their wares simply can’t work – not without changing the laws of physics, maths and information science.
DRM costs millions, takes years, and is defeated in days, for pennies, by hobbyists.
This is an interesting angle. I’ve worked in enough corporate environments to understand that, outside of technology companies, top managers are seldom conversant with technology and view any attempt to understand it in depth as a waste of time best left to the losers in the IT departments. So, when someone shows up who looks and talks like they do, and tells them what they want to hear — i.e. that their precious ‘content’ can be ‘protected’ from pirates and others who would ’steal’ it and impact their ‘revenue stream’, they are inclined to believe it, even if it’s bullshit. Perfect DRM could only have a chance in a tightly controlled environment where every advantage would accrue to those who wanted to do the protecting. Think a situation where technologies of production are both incredibly expensive and technologically opaque, distribution is a single-player closed shop, and marketing is achieved via exclusive access to a closed channel …. uh, wait … that sounds a whole lot like the world of media and popular entertainment, pre-internet.
I think the only way DRM will succeed is if the Internet can be turned into or replaced by a neo-broadcast technology, that is a technology that is bi-directional, but massively asymmetric in favor of the broadcaster … in other words, the channel down to the audience is broad and rich, and the channel back to the source is narrow and small to facilitate purchases, and little else, save maybe an old fashioned letter to the editor or two ….
