Because you could track the movement of each copy of digital media and in the same manner as Bitcoin prevents double spending the owner of a copyright would be able to prevent identical copies of digital media in two different places.

Because each bitcoin client is dependant on the rest of the network. How will your DRM make standalone software dependant on a network in an unpatchable way?

Doing that would change nothing about file sharing.  Protections will be removed and the media shared no matter what they are.

Indeed, (un)fortunately there is nothing special in the Bitcoin protocol that will suddenly make DRM work.

As soon as you protect your creative work with your magic-bitcoin-drm,  I will remove it and stick the unprotected version on thepiratebay

Simples

Come on guys, it really is not hard. DRM does not and can never work.

At some point the user will need to have the (music/video/software) in non-encrypted form so that his (ears/eyes/cpu) can consume it.

So please tell me how your magic will prevent someone copying an unprotected version of this and sharing it with 50 million other people?

It is quite frankly impossible.

The thing you 'it can be done' guys are missing, is the fact that there is nothing about the bitcoin protocol that prevents applications from being patched and having its DRM removed. It doesn't matter how clever your DRM is if it can just be removed.

This is not correct. Most propriety software developed in the last 15 years has DRM. Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) such as GNU/Linux does not and in fact then GPL v3 is by design highly toxic to DRM making it an excellent FLOSS license for this reason. Also Microsoft software between the mid 1980's and roughly 2000 was free of DRM. This is the period when Microsoft provided the best returns to its shareholders debunking the common myth that DRM is necessary for propriety software and content.

DRM is typically implemented in one of two ways. Hide the key somewhere on the end user's property and hope the end user will not find it. In the early days this consisted of deliberatively creating bad sectors on 5.25in floppy disks. The location of the bad sectors on the floppy "locked" the software to the floppy. Then came dongles, and the more modern method of locking the software to the hardware characteristics of the computer effectively turning the whole computer into the dongles. All of these DRM methods could be defeated with the adversary (the owner of the computer or device) finding the decryption key that had at some point in time to be on her hardware.

The above problem was solved in a much more insidious way. Take root or administrative and thereby control away from the adversary (the owner of the computer for device). This is the model used by IOS, unrooted Android, and Windows 8 RT Windows phone. Windows Vista, 7 and 8 also use this method since the "Administrator" is not a true administrator as she is locked out from certain "protected" parts of the OS. The consequences of this are very insidious since the "protected" parts of the OS can be used to for example to spy on the user, force the user to only obtain content and software from an approved and censored source and yes also to launch a 51% attack on a distributed cryptocurrency network such as Bitcoin.

The GPL v3 is a very effective tool against the locked device device situation above if it is present in components the OS which require root access to modify, since it requires the ability of the owner of the device to be able to modify the software as a condition of distribution. This is why modern GNU/Linux distributions provide the only assurance that an end user has complete control over their computing devices.


 

You are an audio producer, you have just got a brand new album and you want Bob to check it out. You don't want him filesharing it so you use your magic bitcoin protection system.

You give your copy protected MP3 file to Bob.

Bob runs your software which checks that he has the rights to play the audio. He does.

He records the audio and uploads the unprotected version to the internets. The next day 50 million people have it.

There is zero solution to get round this.

The real issue is that it is time for studios to step up to the digital age and stopped hiding behind 100 Year old copyright licenses.
Mickey Mouse Legislation is just delaying it.
One could argue though that a whole new form of content creation is being created already that is usurping the old role the big studios and bitccoins could have a role in that but that's another story.