I predict a DRM riot

DRM is, it seems, doomed to fail in the short term. There is just no way around the fact that for now keys will always get cracked and when they do that crack will always find its way into the public domain. Try to stop it, as Digg inadvertently discovered, and you will have a full scale Internet riot on your hands. It is no exaggeration (well, OK, perhaps a small on) to say that Digg users took over the site and forced the owners into changing their opinion and reversing their actions. The same will happen again, and again, and again until the powers that be realise that DRM in its current guise just cannot work, it is a dead duck.

But, and here is the kicker, this has frightening consequences for anyone in the business of protecting their intellectual property. When the line between discussing copy protection technologies and politics its crossed and piracy by proxy, as the posting of decryption keys most surely is, comes to the fore then the result will be anarchy. Information may want to be free, but in the real world someone has to pay the developer for the work required into producing that information in the first place.

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