BitTorrent Fires 20% of Its Employees
Found on Torrentfreak on Thursday, 07 August 2008
The company, which also develops the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, had been struggling to make money from their download store, which is one of the causes of the layoffs.
There never was any real competition however, mainly because the movies are infected with Windows DRM.
BitTorrent's Ashwin Navin was a bit more outspoken about it. He said that DRM is "a time bomb waiting to happen," and that it will inspire people to pirate content. One thing we can be sure of, it didn't help to convert illegal downloaders to go legal.
They are trying to compete against free content that works on all platforms with an infection you have to pay for and which only plays on a few selected operating systems. While there are always some users who can be fooled (see the "I Am Rich" iPhone application), the vast majority actually prefers the better deal. DRM might work in the heads of managers, but it's a total failure in the real world.