A group of Microsoft researchers, including Paul 'Mr Secure PC' England, has delivered a paper which concludes that all efforts to stop content swapping/theft - possibly even including Palladium - are in the long term futile. This message, particularly the bit that dealt with the economics of DRM-enabled versus 'clean' content, must have gone down a storm with the audience.

So for example, you could buy an MP3 file or you could buy a DRM-protected version of the same content. The MP3 file has equal utility to the darknet version, whereas the protected one is worth less, people will vote with their feet, and WMA format is doomed (no, they don't say that specifically, but...)

Vendors should therefore compete on price and convenience. This is a moving target, because it's dependent on the level of the price and the increase in convenience over stealing the stuff instead. So for music, the price of unprotected legal content would have to be quite low, and the convenience quite high, whereas for video the price could be higher, because the darknet hosting bandwidth isn't up to it yet. Think about it being just nicer to not steal than to steal, and how that could be achieved in particular areas of content.