Borland International had the right idea, you bought a license to use the software, you could install it everywhere, as long as you agreed that only one instance of that installation would be active at any one time.

I want to own the music I like to listen to from time to time and I’m prepared to pay for it, after all, it cost money to produce it, but I also want to ensure replacement is a reasonable cost. If my car gets stolen I want to be able to simply duplicate my CD’s for the next car. Again, only one instance of the license is active.

Fair use.

DRM that prevents me from watching a movie I bought or listening to a CD I bought or even playing a game I bought simply means I won’t buy it.

I have the technical skills to circumvent the protection but why should I if I paid for the license?

I respect the authors of the works I license, unfortunately they don’t respect me as a paying customer so I take my custom elsewhere.

And by all means name a single example of an anti-copying device that prevents unauthorised reproduction of a copyrighted work. Just one. This is a most basic tenet of cryptography: you cannot give a person encrypted content AND the secret key to that content and hope that all will be well.

Copyright was meant to be a bargain between the copyright holder and society. In return for the right to profit from the work for a limited time, the holder would eventually cede back all rights to the public domain. But copyright holders haven’t kept their side – they’ve repeatedly stolen from the public domain. They also lie when it comes to what their product is. When a CD of mine is scratched, I’m told to buy another one because all I’ve bought is the physical medium. But when I want to make a copy of it, then I’m told I can’t because it’s not the physical medium but the rights to the music that I’ve bought instead. Which is it? It can’t be both at the same time.

The fact is noone under 25 sees value in the artificial scarcity of something that can be copied at zero cost. Instead value is found in things like personalisation, exposure, experience, differentiation and interpretation – not paying over and over again for the same thing. The astronomical rise of free and open source software, the increasing irrelevance of mainstream music and media companies and the shift towards self-production and consumption in Generation Y might be a hint that the world has changed.

Copyright needs to change with it, perhaps even go back to what it was supposed to be originally.