Sure, I'd give Library of Congress having DRM-free masters. Taxpayers wouldn't want to pay for the costs of storing masters of everyone's movies though! Those files are huge. I have ~50TB of drives in my apartment alone. And that's just me.

You also feel that the people who worked on Inception were not fairly compensated? How do you know that? I have no idea personally. Also, they didn't risk losing money if it bombed. BTW, $160mil doesn't cover marketing costs, distribution costs, the take of the theaters, the opportunity cost (eg if Warner Bros just invested the money in something else over the same time period). Filmmakers are generally free to choose the best deal for their careers. Usually the difficulty is finding multiple parties whom you trust and who are ready to get into a bidding war for the chance to risk >$160mil on your film!

RE: "the laws are rather tilted towards copyright holders" - if you buy my movie, then share it online, am I not allowed to sue you? That seems reasonable to me. I do agree that damage amounts seem weird but lots of damage amounts seem weird to me when people sue each other. Anyway, if you don't want to get sued, don't put my film online without asking me first!

You seem to feel that people will generally do the legal thing. I think people will generally do the cheapest, easiest thing that they can morally stomach. Sorry I am a pessimist about human nature. Anyway, thanks for the discussion! It's fascinating to know what folks feel.

It sounds like you voted with your wallet for buying a DRM'ed product from a questionable publisher in that case.

How about you lean towards buying something DRM-free next time? Or at the very least, support a content creator that uses DRM but doesn't do that nonsense?

That's how voting works - if they suck, you can't undo your vote. Just don't vote for them next time!

Yes, people don't only create stuff to get paid. But if you're a filmmaker, the bills rack up pretty quickly - and without money, they scope of what you can do is limited in some ways. For example: Inception would probably not have looked as good as it did if Chris Nolan and Warner Bros just planned to give it away DRM-free and ask for donations. Some things cost a lot of money to make! Personally, I like ambitious movies being around in the world. I want them to be profitable. If the studios feel they need DRM in order to get the money to do those films, it's their choice.

If the consumers hate DRM so much, they should vote with their wallets, not pay for any content with DRM, and start funding ambitious independent projects. They haven't done that so far in the scale necessary. Hopefully it will change - we are getting closer to this goal. Kickstarter etc is very promising but the money people are putting in needs to grow by 10. Fingers crossed.

As for the idea of giving a movie away and selling toys or product placement... that kinda limits the art, doesn't it? There are a lot of good art films whose primary value is just the 2 hours you're watching them. You're not going to buy an action figure of the main character of your art-house drama. If DRM was banned worldwide tomorrow, there would likely be less of those films around because if art houses had to switch to donation only, the money would decrease.

Also: when I do film post-production, I pay for the software I use. I don't get all indignant that Autodesk, Adobe, Avid, etc charged me money and put DRM in their software. It's their right. If I don't like it, I can protest by using Blender. If I used an illegal copy of Maya and framed it as a righteous anti-DRM protest, that'd be really shady. I've probably put $40,000 into software over the years. I'm happy to have contributed to some coders' paychecks. But if they watch my film, why can't they contribute back to mine?

So, yeah: People who don't like DRM can similarly protest by watching only content that's DRM free and giving money to those artists who make DRM-free content. If more people did that, there would be more creatives making good DRM-free stuff. That's the only moral way to do it. The rest is just a slippery slope. End rant! Yay! What do folks think?

Yeah, movie quotes are too easy. It's much better to use first letters of memorably-outrageous things you want to do to people you know! It's pretty easy to fit some numbers in there too...