Is DRM-protected content the way to go?

What’s the value of a bit? It seems that going after folks who have traded songs or movies online is a huge expenditure of effort and money. Is DRM-protected content the way to go? If you don’t agree, propose another method for the distribution of digital multimedia so that content creators can still be compensated.

Today, computers are making it easy to copy and distribute information without permission. To make this difficult or near impossible, one would need to actually change computers which is not easy to do. According to Abelson, it can’t be done at all without sacrificing the computer’s ability to function as a general-purpose device. That is why Digital Rights Management (DRM) was created in order to “access control technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to try to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices” (Wikipedia). While DRM is argued as to be needed by copyright holders to prevent unauthorized duplication of their work, either to maintain artistic integrity or to ensure continued revenue streams, others find it misleading. Even with encryption, attackers could save the encrypted material and distribute those copies all over the internet. A solution that Abelson comes up with is to build a chip into every computer that checks the operating system each time the machine is turned on. If the system has been modified, it will not boot. This chip has actually been worked out and is called a Trusted Platform Module and should become more pervasive in upcoming years.