DRM (Digital Rights Management) helps honest users

Again with an Ars Technica link.  Here is a wonderful write-up by Caesar about the MPAAs claims that DRM is good for honest users.  I’m going to steal this great quote off the Ars page, too:

“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,” he said.

In other words, people can’t be trusted to not steal, so we’re going to make stealing impossible.  Of course, DRM fails to do that.  But the people who weren’t going to steal in the first place, and therefore don’t need restrictions put on their media, aren’t going to be able to accidentally steal content.

[tags]DRM, MPAA, piracy[/tags]