Mobile DRM to cost Europe €3.5B this year

As a follow-up release to yesterday's Frost and Sullivan report on mobile digital rights management (mDRM), the lack of effective mDRM solutions leading to revenue leakage from pirated content will cost the European mobile content industry an estimated €3.5 billion. The Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) is evangelizing the F&S report as a way to encourage the industry to deliver an "open and interoperable mDRM solution based on a clear open standard." The report estimates that 80 percent of mobile phone content has been hacked or downloaded onto phones illegally from Web sites, BlueTooth, memory cards or other storage devices. If true, that is an astounding figure. Critics of DRM say the technology devalues content by making it inaccessible on various platforms and limiting the buyer's use of the material.

For more on mDRM:
- see this press release from the MEF