Digital rights management (DRM) has gone from the wayward stepchild of wonkish startups to the designated savior of the media world in an amazingly short period of time. All it took was Apple's iPod showing the music industry that if you gave consumer reasonable choices that made them feel good about owning rights-protected content they'd at least take a bite. Now everyone from film companies to financial companies are taking a bite of DRM. Two forums last week, the SIIA Executive Roundtable and JupiterMedia's DRM Strategies Conference laid out the state of the art for DRM, offering insights and data that seem to indicate some progress towards content companies accepting distribution of rights-protected content. At least from the podium. What was most remarkable about these events were the off-the-record comments by some presenters and panelists once out of earshot of anxious media companies to whom their current meal tickets were owed. The consensus of these in-the-know experts on protecting intellectual property rights was: where were these guys for the past decade? Yet the reluctance of media companies to embrace the end user as a primary content distribution node is not significantly challenged by the companies that have the most to gain by having these companies pour money into DRM schemes that probably won't change the realities "on the ground" in any significant way. Put simply, DRM is content packaging, packaging that should provide features and capabilities that are as clear to users as a CD's "jewel box" and as inexpensive and easy to use. Standards-based solutions such as those promoted by the Content Reference Forum that can interlock with content identification initiatives such as DOI offer an inkling of hope that content providers can adopt a universal framework that can service everyone's needs for content security effectively. In the meantime, individuals and institutions are going on their own paths managing content value with or without DRM. Any content company thinking that DRM will stem the tide of new usage patterns will be sorely disappointed. Only by getting in front of those usage patterns and offering new content value will DRM become a readily adopted means of securing content profits.