What would happen if the movie and record companies offered Digital Rights Management-free downloads?

When I read stories such as the one about The Pirate Bay being shut down, inevitably comments turn to the Motion Picture Industry's use of DRM to restrict access to movies. DRM can take many forms, such as the relatively weak flavor that appears on DVD's and the relatively strong variety that exists in windows media video files from movielink.com.

When the pirate bay came back up a few days later, the comments on digg and slashdot were predictable. Many posters echoed things we've heard before, stating that pirates will always be a step ahead of the regulators and that until the MPAA offers DRM-free downloads of a wide selection of movies, that they will continue to download. This has been happening over and over with different P2P services for the better part of a decade, starting with Napster, then Scour and Audiogalaxy (which was awesome by the way) and Kazaa, and now Limewire and Bittorrent.

Clearly something has to give. People aren't going to magically stop downloading even if the RIAA says downloading is stealing and supports terrorism. And the media conglomerates aren't going to stop trying to recapture that glory days of the mid 90's when CD sales were strong. (Sometimes that seems like its the main goal of drm: To frustrate and restrict customers so completely that they give up and go to Wal-Mart and buy the disk).

I see this all leading to a DRM-only world, where you can't rip DVD's or CD's to your computer because of ultra strong encryption. I think this is a bad road to go down because I think it hurts everyone involved, both economically and culturally.

So I thought to myself, what if the media companies offered DRM-free downloads? They could do it so each download was a little different and therefore didn't hash nicely into P2P programs (to avoid seeding a bittorrent swarm, which could be a problem). You'd still have the same subset of people trading files online and you would open yourself up to a whole new market. I can't believe they still haven't tried it as an expirement with a movie or two to see what the share rate of the movie would be. And then after that maybe they can increase the size of the catalog on movielink beyond the current 2% of releases. Give the customer what he/she wants, right?

But why should media companies reach out to consumers? Why should the copyright holder pay for the actions of illegal file-swappers? For a couple reasons: Music and movies enrich our cultural experience. They make our lives better. It's good for society. Secondly: Corporations are greedy, and properly planned, you can reach a larger audience and make more money. If you tie together the freedom and portability of drm-free content, reasonable prices, and global cooperation (I'm looking at you Sweden and Russia) then the copyright holders stand to make a lot of money.

(They could still use DRM for rentals. Really, who objects to DRM for rentals? A rental without DRM would be like Blockbuster not requiring you to return the movie).