> Once a popular piece of information—say, a movie, a song, or a software title—"leaks" into the darknet, stopping its spread becomes practically impossible. This, the engineers realized, had an important implication: to prevent piracy, digital rights management had to work not just against average users, but against the most tech-savvy users on the planet. It only takes a single user to find a vulnerability in a DRM scheme, strip the protection from the content, and release the unencrypted version to the darknet. Then millions of other users merely need to know how to use ordinary tools such as BitTorrent to get their own copies.

There are quite a few people out there who still don't understand this, who believe that a "speedbump" will work. They see things like SatTV protection schemes that are intact because people want content and they're not going to take the hard way out until they have to. Like how the PS3 got hacked once there was an incentive to.

I even remember one specific conversation with a security expert here on HN telling me about how good the PS3's security was DRM working. I predicted it would get hacked when necessary. This was not long before the hack. But it's a fundamentally biased prediction: I only needed on lucky break in the security to be right while they had to be perfect for me to be wrong.

That fundamental asymmetry, however, is exactly what makes the part I quoted work.