Note to Sony CEO Michael Lynton. If, as you say, Sony has been harmed by the Internet and "The primary culprit is piracy," then you have at least part of the solution in your hands, according to Cambridge law professor Patricia Akeste. The good Professor's most recent research shows, rigorously and convincingly, that restrictive DRM forces honest people to pirate content, even content they have already paid for and own.

Of course, we already knew this in an anecdotal way. There are numerous everyday, real-world examples (such as wanting to copy a DVD you own to your iPod so you can watch it on the plane), but Prof. Akeste's 208-page study goes much further. "For example, data collection within the film lecturers and students/researchers community revealed two problems: DRM protection of cinematographic works is leading to difficulties in extracting portions of those works for educational use and those difficulties are triggering isolated acts of self-help for academic and educational purposes."

MPAA shows you how to LEGALLY defeat DVD CSS encryption for Fair Use of clips in your classroom! (Hysterical).

Hehe. Translation: Film lecturers that want to show a clip from a movie (unquestionably legal, covered by Fair Use) legally can't (because of the DMCA and whatever the UK equivalent is) and, therefore, violate the law by circumventing DVD-Video CSS (easy!) or just downloading a torrent copy of the movie (even easier!).

Now you can stick your fingers in your ears and yell "LALALALALALA!" with the MPAA, the RIAA and Sony and pretend that DRM is not an issue that concerns honest consumers and that evil peg-legged pirates are ruining the Internet, but the reality is that this is not a simple problem. Period.

For example, educators could argue that we need a Fair Use exception (well, we already have that in Fair Use, but we need an exception to the DMCA and breaking CSS). And the big media companies could argue (and, in fact, do argue) that this is one tiny fraction of all "piracy" cases. Granted. So, if this is just one tiny example, then make an exception for it already! Sheesh.

The next step would be to move on to the other 208-pages of Prof. Akeste's study, which cites a few more examples (like a blind person being unable to use a Text-to-Speech tool because of DRM on her e-book that she bought from Amazon). Again, I'm not claiming this is simple or easy, like Michael "lock the doors" Lynton and the MPAA ("you can just record the screen with your camcorder") claim it is. The big media conglomerates, publishers and their armies of lawyers can be a part of figuring out what this complex solution looks like for all of us or...

...they can prepare to be boarded. Avast!

References:
 * Landmark study: DRM truly does make pirates out of us all
 * Technological accommodation of conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM: the first empirical assessment