DRM has very little to do with piracy. Hollywood know perfectly well that DRM will not stop a determined pirate and a movie only has to be ripped once to be pirated indefinitely.

It's about control. It's about the studios always having a seat at the bargaining table when new products/devices are being floated. They fear becoming a commodity supplier.

You know, I'm really not convinced they do. Everything I see from these people leads me to think they literally think this stuff is magic, and they want the snake oil so badly they'll believe the people selling it over the people telling them the disappointing truth, every time.

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2014/10/new-tpp-leak-canada-emerg..., ".. shows Canada as the strongest opponent to TPP IP demands, signalling its opposition to a proposal 56 times, more than any other country. The strongest opposition comes in the patents, enforcement, trademarks, and copyright sections.

.. the U.S. wants Canada to eviscerate many of the recent reforms found in copyright and counterfeiting legislation along with court rulings on patent protection. These demands focus on enhanced criminal liability for copyright infringement .."

Screeners are from DVD/Bluray copies sent to academy members and such? If I'm not mistaken?

[1] http://dcimovies.com/specification/DCI_DCSS_v12_with_errata_...

Of course Hollywood knows that any given DRM scheme will be broken at some point. How much they care about this depends a lot on what exactly "at some point" really means. Almost all money from movie sales comes in a spike when the movie is first release, hardly any movies go on to become long-term cult classics that people are still buying years later. If a DRM scheme is so good that it takes three months to crack once disks hit the street, from the movie studios perspectives that's a huge win because during the movie's peak people had to cough up the money to buy it or put up with some truly crappy low quality version.

The same economics holds for other things like video games. Nobody cares if you beat the DRM on a game that's five years old.

So the real question is, can DRM give studios and other content creators such a window of time? The results are mixed. Sometimes the answer has been yes. Other times the answer has been no. It's complicated and depends on a lot of fiddly things.

> The same economics holds for other things like video games. Nobody cares if you beat the DRM on a game that's five years old.

Yes, they do. Japanese game companies wanted to make it illegal to sell games to the second user market; MAME rom sites are routinely shut down.

Disney initially resisted releasing films on VHS because they would not be able to extract a charge from everyone in the room watching the movie. Disney uas investigated a bunch of different rights protection mechanisms. They invented video cassettes that had a ratchet meaning they could only be watched once and needed to be sent back to a factory to be rewound. They invented a DVD that oxidized in contact with air. It would be sent to you in special packaging. You had about 48 hours after opening the package before the disc degrades.

Early music players had weird schemes - one digital copy; weird software needed to load music to the device.

All of these are about controlling how the consumer uses the product. The intent might be to make casual piracy harder, but the effect is to make life really freaking hard for honest people.

DRM's stated goal was dealing with piracy, 20+ years ago. That does not mean that that is what it does now. Goals aren't results, to say nothing of the fact that goals 20 years ago aren't necessarily goals today. It is highly arguable that, given that it has failed to stop piracy comprehensively, that its primary utility to the people that use it is actually platform control. For instance, please see and think about the stuff discussed in http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/04/understa...

One of the reasons I don't accept "DRM is about piracy and nothing else" is that it doesn't make sense of the observable facts. DRM costs money and basically doesn't work. If it were really about piracy, I think the "DRM is about piracy" theory would see one of two reactions to that fact: Either we'd see a great deal more investment into DRM than we do now to the point where it could actually be relied upon [1], or it would get dropped to save money. Neither is happening; DRM continues, its advancements are quite perfunctory overall, and breaks proliferate. On the other hand, "DRM as platform control" implies that the currently level of DRM tech and investment makes perfect sense, it's already the correct amount as investing a whole bunch more would not increase the already absolute control over platforms that it yields. So I am inclined towards the platform control theory, as it seems to match reality better.

As for the fact that the DRM users "say" it's about piracy... feh. Words. Words are meaningless nowadays. Look to the actions.

[1]: While "it can always be cracked" triumphalists haven't been looking, the previous gen consoles took an awful long time to be cracked. I'd say there's evidence that this could in practice be made to work for software, at least. The 3DS is still only pried open a bit, just shy of 4 years after its release, and that only recently! I wouldn't care to bet when the XBone or the PS4 get cracked; a straight interpolation of existing trends can easily suggest six or seven years. Music and movies are still going to be hard to fully protect due to the fact that what is output to the AV system is the content. Software allows for more opportunities for DRM.

... or studios have found a sweet spot they're happy with (or at least, not totally unhappy with) where spending more on DRM wouldn't be justified by the incrementally smaller increase in sales.

i.e. if you double your spending on your copy protection and it lasts an extra week before getting cracked, how much that extra weeks worth of sales is worth depends a lot on how many previous weeks there were before the crack. At some point the ROI curve stops making sense.

I suspect it's not pure business though - people in the media live off their creativity and seeing people pirate your stuff can be emotionally difficult. I would not be surprised if some places over-invest in DRM because they feel a moral and emotional imperative to defend their work from piracy as much as they can.

BluRay DRM is probably as good as you can technically get for movies distributed on discs. For movies distributed via the internet it's easier. But the economics of DRM are tricky - the key thing that hurt BluRay DRM (and the designers were fully aware of this problem) is that movie producers have a strong financial incentive to push player prices low, and player manufacturers have a strong financial incentive to push movie prices low. Movies and players are "compliments" of each other in the economics jargon. Not surprisingly, player makers make the absolute minimal effort when it comes to DRM and that's one reason why cracks keep happening.

One of the most obvious tension points here is PC software players. They're much harder to defend. But they increase the size of the player market (and therefore the movie market) a lot. So movie studios ended up deciding to allow them, despite knowing it'd weaken the DRM.

BD+ was designed to try and resolve this problem by allowing movie producers to spend the money on copy protection rather than player manufacturers, and it was remarkably effective for a long time. BD+ ended the era of open source players for good, only full time reversing teams that are willing to keep up continual effort on a disk-by-disk basis can break it. But in the end it wasn't enough for a fully convincing solution.

Impossible. I have no goals for DRM, except maybe to see it die. While I do not believe that DRM is currently related to piracy, it is hardly a bizarre idea that it is intended to restrict piracy... that is the stated goal.

The only way the studios would become a commodity supplier is if there were numerous other sources of content people would pay money to watch. That's what it means for your product to be a commodity. E.g. consumer PCs are a commodity because if you don't like Dell, you can get an identical product from HP. But with movies, if you want Harry Potter, you have to play ball with Warner Bros., because consumers want that specific movie, not some generic equivalent.

The studios want DRM not because they don't trust consumers, but because they (rightfully) don't trust the tech industry. It doesn't matter that Harry Potter isn't a commodity if you can pirate it without doing business with Warner Brothers. The tech industry sells hardware and software services for consuming content, and it helps its bottom line if piracy is easy and prevalent. See, e.g., Youtube's being built on the back of infringing Viacom's copyrights. DRM gives the studios a toe-hold in the process to deter products that blatantly promote copyright infringement.

You are indeed a commodity if the consumers can get their Harry Potter fix from anyone.

(And that is basically what "pirates" have been saying for ages, that distributors are ice block sellers in the refrigerator age, and that distribution is destined to move up the value chain in the digital age.)

The distribution channel is really the commodity. Hell, pirates do it for free.

I'm a pirate, but I realize the worst thing that could happen is widespread piracy. Someone has to pay to create the media.

Note that a commodity still exists, but it would probably mean that the age of exclusive distribution deals would be over. It also implicates prices should go down, so more money should reach creators.

Even a cursory look at their position that places like pirate bay should be allowed to be openly run would lead to creators not getting compensated.

Of course if pressed on it, they'll say, "oh, they can work on donations or whatever people feel like paying." But that's forcing content creators to act like street beggars. Like a movie theatre is going to put a hat in front of the Avengers 2 movie to raised 300 million of Avengers 3. It is ridiculous.

I've had a small bit of dealings with political "pirates", and I have yet to encounter the position you describe. "Information wants to be free" (which I guess you really mean) is really an old catch phrase more associated with the cyber liberty movement of the early 90s and the crypto wars, more than with modern political pirates.

Nobody has suggested movie theaters run on donations alone, but there has been suggestions that movie theaters should be free to license movies outside the distribution agreements. Again, the underlying idea is that distribution will become commodity. Argue against that instead and I will gladly explain the situation further.

The situation with sites like The Pirate Bay is not a matter of letting them operate or not, but a matter of where the common carrier status lies and where the legal responsibility falls (with the uploader, the downloader or the various infrastructure providers).

I'm not sure I understand what that means. Any deal they make to license the movie is a distribution agreement, by definition.

It's all a bit of a power play over their heads and it's one of the reasons why you can't start an online streaming service in today's environment, which was one of the questions that was relevant to the political pirates last I've heard from them.

I don't know much more because I'm out of touch with the whole piratism thing, I just wanted to correct the "why u no pay" attitude earlier. It's a bit silly to think they could have reached parliamentary representation on that party line, and slightly condescending to everyone involved.

Video and Audio DRM will never stop scene pirating. It's easy to just copy the output. But it stops me from just copying movies I rented on Amazon Instant to my brothers PC.

If 10% of the population is pirating you shit, you aren't losing very many sales. Sure it hurts your profit margin a little. But most dedicated pirates are junkies for content.

But if my mom can't figure out how to pirate your content, you are fucked. That's why Napster and the P2P ruined the commercial music industry. It not only took a huge chunk of the revenue, but it changed the perception of the value of music itself. Instead of 12 bucks per album, people wanted 20,000 songs on their IPOD for free.

The fight against piracy isn't a fight to exterminate it, but to keep piracy out of reach of the critical mass.

Some DRM really works. PC multiplayer DRM works great and is the only reason the PC industry is surviving. Movie theatres are the best DRM there is. Not being able to sideload stuff on a nonjailbroken iphone is huge.

Buying moving legally: Trouble with DRM (Windows, OS X), often impossible to play on Linux.

Let the customer decide. :-)

And it's even more sad that the most computer illiterate, "honest" people are the most vulnerable to this strategy. People that want an honest way to watch movies have the most problems watching them.

The content industry wonders why they can't stop piracy. Maybe they could start by providing a product that's as good as what the pirates get.

We got a portable DVD player to add to our arsenal of distractions for our toddlers on long road trips. One of the DVDs we purchased—an Elmo sing-along—prohibits the viewer from skipping the five-minute donation plea that plays before the menu. This is especially frustrating because the kids will inevitably bump something requiring playback to be restarted (even with the button lock enabled, the disc door can still be opened) at least once an hour.

Whoever made the decision to set the "unskippable" flag on that track must have absolutely no familiarity with their customer base. For the vast majority of parents, I'm sure the effect is exactly the opposite of what they intended: if I was ever considering donating to Sesame Workshop, I'm certainly not anymore.

You paid for HD. You got SD.

Of course, you could go pirate a full HD copy of the movie and play it back anywhere. The effectiveness of these inconveniences is overwhelming.

(1) I'm not positive it was even possible to redeem an HD rental in HD. I don't know anyone that didn't get forced to play in SD.

The intel video driver on Linux is open-source. I am sure there would be forks disabling this functionality in case it would be implemented. I find it outrageous that there's software that disables a functionality like screenshot taking, that's malware to me. I own that framebuffer, not intel.

Does anyone have any resources for capturing HDMI, stripping HDCP and recording on a computer?