If you buy anything with DRM protection you should not expect to ever own it, according to a top lawyer who represents the MPAA, RIAA Steven Metalitz in a letter to the legal advisor at the Copyright Office, said that that copyright owners and their licensees are currently required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works.

However no other product or service providers are held to such “lofty standards”, Metalitz said. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so either.

The Music and Film industry is worried because the content they shipped with DRM only seems to work for a few years because they cannot maintain authentication servers. Apparently users who bought the content for full price will not get the same amount of use out of them because the music and film industry insisted they buy it with there DRM installed.

Of course Metalitz is not quite right either. You can still play music on LPs and even Cylinders if you have the right gear. Most people would be able to live with DRM if there was a legal requirement for it to work on original equipment for 70 to 100 years. However it seems that the Music and Film Industry's motivation for DRM was not to protect themselves from pirates, but to force punters to keep buying the same tracks over many years.

The biggest threat appears to be, not the pirate, but those people who have record collections and want to keep them.