[Kalbuth]

Well, good thinking on the dongle or whatever USB thing, problem is :
It's easy to have a software emulating presence of the USB drive (see any CD emulator on the market).

What if : 1 guy buys title, and bundle the title along with his secret key in a downloadable content, anyone able to mount his key will be able to read the file. File paid once, used by many.
knowing the key is like a fingerprint, content owner will be able to trace back to original buyer, which in turns will mean :
* the system to deliver the key has to be able to track every customer, making it heavy, not easy to use, etc... ie, quite the opposite reaction to pushing out content that is easily available to customer (which would be a sane reaction against piracy, instead of spending even more precentage of product costs into protection measures)
* the illegal distribution circuit will go underground, to avoid being caught. That usually means it will benefit illegal 3rd parties making profit out of it.

We've had a very similar case here in France.
Illegal copies were distributed via free peer2peer softwares. They issued a law where a 3rd party, private company was able, by checking who's sharing what file (it's a publicly available information in torrent trackers and such) to ask (after several warning) an ISP to simply block customer Internet access (and such user would be unable to get Internet access via other ISPs, the list of banned users is shared amongst ISPs).
Initially, all this was simply bypassing any form of Justice involvement. It was an automatic process between 2 private companies leading to user Internet acces blocked, without any way for the customer to check if charges are true, how it was proven, and to try to defend his case.
It was fortunately deemed not conform to our Constitution, and now, the last stage of it (ie, cut of Internet access by ISP) must now go through judiciary process, and be properly judged, with possible defense by the customer.

You know what happened? French internet users stopped using peer2peer to share illegal content. Did any money go back to artists and such? Not a dollar. what happened? People subscribed to 3rd party file sharing solutions (MegaUpload and consorts) to share their trafic, because no 3rd party company can yet spy on customer trafic toward these file sharing clusters, and so they can't get caught.
These MU offers are not anymore free for customer, so they are paying something.
The money IP holders wanted is going into MegaUpload pocket

EDIT : I work in a ISP, and the whole trafic shift from peer2peer to filesharing solutions is very visible for us, we consistently lost trafic between ISP since the bill passed, something which had never happened before (and trafic between ISP is typical of Peer2Peer), and trafic toward rather new actors on the market (Leaseweb, Carpathia Hosting) grew at insane rates. These actors are hosting companies hosting .... MegaUpload servers ...

They strengthened their security, made all very complex (and the whole things costs tons of money), with zero good effect, and their target is now hiding from them spending money on ways to evade them.
The next step for them will eventually to spy on every communication, and people will begin to encrypt and use VPN (for a cost, of course).


It's counter productive, and the worst of it all, is that all the bills that are forced on people in every country have 1 thing in common : they evade completely their local Justice system. It's always some specific technical system set in place which bypass any independant judge who could be on the way and use both point of view (the victims AND the "thief"). This makes you wonder what are the real motives behind all this. It's not about protecting IP (because none of the measures will work, and they know it), it's about control over what happens on Internet.