Among these, he cited existing watermarking technologies and the "broadcast flag" that was heavily promoted by U.S. broadcasters before it hit regulatory snags in Washington.

By eliminating the casual content thief, the industry can focus its energy on serial content theft. "Keep honest people honest, and make it easy to use legally obtained content and difficult to use illegally obtained content," said Reitmeier.

However, he added, "There is no way to stop a determined thief."

Munro was even more blunt, stressing that one of the burdens of DRM software developers is that they must constantly respond to successful hackers. "We'll never be able to win the battle against piracy," he said. "It's an arms race."

Munro offered some surprising numbers indicating how the arms race has escalated. He noted that half the satellite TV signals being "consumed" today are stolen. The market share of stolen cable TV is about 33 percent, adding, "One-third of Internet bit traffic is stolen video from cracked DVDs."

The "cracking" of the industry-wide DVD DRM standard, called CSS (Content Scramble System), was accomplished, Munro noted, by a famous Danish hacker named DVD John, who "destroyed CSS with seven lines of [computer] code."

As a measure of the low public esteem for content protection, Munro cited an L.A. Times/Bloomberg survey released in July. Sixty percent of respondents thought it would be "OK to copy a DVD and give it to a friend," the survey found.

All the panelists opined that ultimately DRM will be able to protect most content. They agreed on this despite the fact that the two most broadly deployed proprietary DRM systems, Apple's FairPlay system for iPod, and Windows Media DRM, have both been compromised by hackers.

None of the panelists were optimistic that victory in the arms race will be based on a single industry-wide standard. "If we had a simple one-size-fits-all DRM, life would be easier," said Reitmeier, but he sees no momentum in this direction. "Lacking a standardization effort at the DRM producer level, I don't think we're going to get that standard."