Organizations that invest millions of dollars in movie content are very concerned about protecting their investments. That concern is perfectly reasonable. Technology companies have been happy to provide copy protection as part of their digital rights management (DRM) offerings, and movie owners hope to use these offerings to fight unauthorized use of digital content. Technical copy protection, however, will not stop piracy. The notion that copy protection can prevent digital theft is fatally flawed because it ignores two critical differences between the physical and digital worlds. the physical world, a good lock can keep out most thieves. In other words, a physical lock that is 99% effective will stop 99% of break-ins and thus prevent 99% of potential losses due to theft.

The second difference between the physical and digital worlds has to do with the concept of quantities. In the physical world, there is a one-to-one relationship between the quantity of an item that is stolen and the loss incurred by the rightful owner. In the digital world, however, a thief can make an unlimited number of duplicate copies from one stolen original. Unlike analog content (e.g. VHS tapes), which degrades every time it is duplicated, the 1s and 0s that make up digital content allow anyone to make perfect copies. So, for example, if one TV "falls off a truck" (a euphemism for theft), then the rightful owner incurs a loss of one TV set.

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