Consumers, fans, and control: what the games industry can teach Hollywood about DRM

Through legislation and technology the film industry has been seeking to fully control usage of the bits it creates; their model is "restrictive" digital-rights management (DRM) that only allows the user to view the film rather than copy, edit, or create new content. Meanwhile, the experience that the Internet generation has of interacting with, rather than consuming, content, could be the basis for a new business for Hollywood: films that enable users to interact directly by putting themselves (and others) into the movie. In this paper we examine massive multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs), in which players exercise design technologies and tools that further their roles and play. MMORPGs are rapidly gaining audience share. We posit that non-restrictive, or exible, digital-rights management is in the movie industry's economic interest.