The software world has undergone an incredible shift towards openness, with the heavy-handed copy protection techniques common in the 1980s giving way to the widening use of unrestrictive open source licensing that we see today. The media industry, for which digitial distribution has become an issue only recently, is ignoring these trends and is attempting, like early software vendors, to use coercive techniques to protect its digital assets. Unfortunately, this approach serves only to alienate honest customers without doing much to hinder determined pirates.

In this talk, we discuss the specific techniques that media companies can learn from the open source movement. These include correctly choosing price points, developing one-to-one marketing relationships with customers, fostering a sense of community, and allowing customers to reuse, remix, and extend the digital content that they purchase. Consumers are more likely to "do the right thing" when they feel that they are being treated with trust and respect, rather than being targeted by scattergun lawsuits and cinema ushers kitted out like commandos with metal detectors and night-vision goggles.

To achieve this transformation, media companies must have access to the right tools. We use the example of AllPeers, an extension for the open source Firefox browser, to illustrate how open technologies and protocols can be used to empower content vendors, whether individual artists or multinational media conglomerates, to implement the progressive, consumer-friendly business models that they need to survive the shift to digital distribution.