They are becoming part of the distribution infrastructure Companies will have to spend time and effort exploring the proper intersection of pricing and gratification to drive distribution and, ultimately, higher profitability for their products. Wide distribution, not restriction, makes content successful. As the music majors held their product back from the Web while they sought the right watermarking technology, they allowed others to exploit their products and listeners desire for instant gratification. Going forward, entertainment companies will need to drive the distribution of their products on the Web. Encryption and digital rights management technology will only provide them with minimal protection.
Lawsuits can go only so far in eliminating the threats.
The real challenge will be to construct business and pricing models that create an easy way for consumers to do the right thing, rather than an easy way to do the wrong thing. In the earliest concept of interactivity, entertainment companies believed they would attract consumers by allowing them to choose the ending to movies or kill off the characters they didn t like on their favourite TV shows. Many a CD-ROM lies buried underneath that flawed theory. Instead, users have defined interactivity as the ability to get what they want, when they want it, in any form, in any place. For infotainment companies and others that need to use infotainment it s not a question of offering the reader a chance to choose the ending to The Lady or the Tiger.