PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) is a leading business and media consulting company. It recently issued a white paper entitled "A New Era for Content: Protection, Potential, and Profit in the Digital World.".

The PWC paper suggests that Hollywood could greatly benefit by employing digital rights management (DRM) technologies both to protect its products from piracy, both casual and professional, and to build new business models for the distribution of its content.

Not coincidentally, on July 2, 2004, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), the people who run the Oscars®, endorsed a suite of media protection technologies from Cinea, a Dolby company, that could conceivably protect "screeners" (DVDs sent to AMPAS members for their consideration in voting for the Oscars®) from being pirated, a worry that last year forced the Academy to ban screeners, which led to considerable unpleasantness.

While AMPAS has endorsed the Cinea system, no studio has yet said it will use it.

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PriceWaterhouseCoopers just completed 70 years of "ensuring the accuracy and secrecy of the Academy Awards winners." Read more about that here.