Re:Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot
by mike_hearn on Monday January 05, 2015 @09:22AM
(#8838868)
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.
... 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.
... 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.