AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Everyone wants digital rights management (DRM) technologies that protect copyrighted audio, video and broadcast content from hackers, pirates and ordinary file-sharers, but nobody wants to pay for them.

DRM experts convening here Thursday (Sept. 7) on the first day of Europe's biggest broadcast conference, IBC, equated DRM costs to a "tax." Worse, according to Jean-Luc Moullet, vice president for software and technology solutions at Thomson USA, it's a tax that offers few benefits for consumers.

"Who gets hurt?" asked Moullet, adding that Hollywood studios, the music industry and broadcasters are the main victims of electronic content theft.

Moullet said content owners, not customers, stand to reap the rewards and revenues from a broad deployment of DRM security measures. "I'm not sure the consumer has anything to win."

DRM panelists represented companies with various solutions to the security problem, but they agreed that the broader the reach of any DRM solution, the more vulnerable it is—especially when content hits the Internet.

"The Internet is a vector for piracy," said Tom Munro, CEO of Verametrix, a San Diego company that focuses on Internet Protocol content security.

Glenn Reitmeier of NBC Universal offered a modest example of this proposition. His company has counted 675,000 illegal copies of Universal Studios movies available on the Web.

Reitmeier, however, offered some consolation to the panel's otherwise bleak consensus, saying Univeral's approach is to "take the offense" against hacking and piracy by distributing content legally in as many ways as possible. Most consumers, he insisted, will prefer legal movies, music and TV shows if they're easy to access. The "ordinary consumer," he added, can be steered away from illegal content, through simple security measures.

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."