• The Wall Street Journal, Friday, February 16, 2007 11:48 AM

Steve Jobs' music essay has broader implications for Hollywood than just the music biz. Movie makers are worried that it's only a matter of time before the bubbling debate over copyright protections for film comes to a boil. After all, digital rights management software is something TV and movie studios also use to protect their work from piracy.

But it's also one of the biggest internal issues the studios face these days, as many technology execs and engineers believe that DRM should be abandoned. As one Hollywood technology exec says: "Consumers can find ways to get our content anytime they want to. They get it from a friend, [or] the Internet. By putting on an onerous DRM, it's making an honest person want to go to the illegitimate side."

Still, home entertainment sectors wouldn't be too happy to see the abandonment of DRM, especially because the damage to the movie industry hasn't been nearly as great as in the music biz. This may be due to longer download times, but as Internet connection speeds improve, the problem could worsen. DVDs, unlike CDs, have copy restrictions embedded in them, though there are ways of getting around this.

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