Pirates Plunder 4K Hateful Eight, but Did They Crack DCP?

Aside: Saw Pets with my kids this week; Large Soda is now more than a Bud Light at a Football game ($8). Consider me among those who would gladly stop going to the theater.

Box office sales have generally increased over the past 20+ years. Possibly people in your peer group may not, but this does not seem correct. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/ http://www.the-numbers.com/market/

That's the problem that Sean Parker is hoping to address with his proposed streaming service[1]. At $50 a movie, that doesn't seem unreasonably priced. Until then, though, there's always the Prima Cinema option[2], but then you're looking at $500 a movie, plus $100k+ for the the initial setup, so it's not a great choice if you're impoverished.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/sean-parker-streaming-rental-... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/prima-movie-2016-4

eBooks are problematic because finding DRM-free stores for current titles is near impossible and I hate that my notes and the book are tied to a B&N/Google/Amazon account unless I use tools to extract them (books + notes). I'm essentially paying near the same price as a used copy of the physical book, but I'm renting the book. If Amazon of Google ever give up their books service in a prolific blaze of fire, customers lose all those purchases.

> who knows how many people have downloaded from them

BT trackers do. And with enough seeds / pretend-seeds you can get a fairly precise numbers of downloaders.

There's still a number of countries where Spotify is not exactly cheap. Or where you can't get easy access to a permanent connection for streaming. But those places aren't huge record label customers either.

The top movies are getting ten of thousands of seeders. They get thousands in each of their localized version (French, German, Spanish...).

Go to one of the "current-best-streaming-site-of-the-moment.inwhatevercoutry" [1]

Some of the streaming sites publish the "views per video" (or downloads per video for DDL site). The top 10 videos are all in the hundreds of thousand of views.

The English streaming sites are in the millions of views per top video. They get more audience because of the language.

In comparison, it seems to me that music is not very popular for streaming/DDL/torrenting. If anything, it should concentrate all the views in a few places only because songs exist in a single version in a single language.

[1] easy to find in the "top 100 most visited site per country" with alexa.com :D

This all works due to proprietary hardware - the modifications to the 4k cinema projectors that enable decryption almost at the lens/imaging chip can cost as much as the projector itself, doubling the price of the projector (last I heard from around 15k to 30k USD).

With a more sane key distribution (no master keys in equipment, like with dvds) - I don't believe DCP is likely to be cracked in the same sense CSS was: probably the more likely scenario is that some insider leak some of the distributors private keys which would allow certain releases to be cracked - but would likely also trigger key roll over.

Also worth nothing that the DCP format is pretty nice, has optional encryption - and you can make your own. With the right contacts you can view your own footage on on a cinema screen :-)

See eg:

http://www.knuterikevensen.com/?p=2559

Yes and now, You cannot say that people who pirate games are necessarily going to buy the game if it were not "free". That's the argument used by the industry to justify DRM and it makes no sense whatsoever since the market would be like 100 times bigger if you calculate things this way. It would not.

This can't be true as written, as long as people expect it to show up there eventually. Every day it stays off piratebay is an extra day of revenue intermediate between full and "already out on piratebay" levels.

The DRM works because the value of these things appears to be greatly time-sensitive -- most of the cost is already getting-it-right-away, which DRM can protect, rather than the fundamental timeless value of the product, which DRM can't protect.

  Modern DRM schemes like AACS 
  employ methods to change keys 
  for new works. So when crackers 
  find a key that allows them to 
  circumvent the DRM scheme they 
  can't publish it or it would 
  soon get useless and they would 
  have to do the work to extract 
  a key again. 

Who would EVER care about a cipher key, when YOU STILL NEED TO EXPOSE THE RAW PIXEL RASTER, AND AUDIO CHANNELS TO THE END USER, IN ORDER FOR ANYTHING TO BE VALUABLE AT ALL?

Users will always eventually get the whole thing in the clear, in straight-up plain text somehow, eventually anyway. And all anyone needs is a buffer big enough to capture it, and it's trivial to assemble one.

You need to be able to watch a movie with the naked eye, and hear the sound with your ears. That's how movies work.

It's trivial to capture the raw data, and people have been living with NTSC quality picture and sound for decades.

This is not about perfectly matching the SHA256 hashes of the original MPEG artifacts. People just want a copy, and it's easy to skim one, somehow, one way (cracking) or another (brute force direct copies of the image frames and pulse code samples, at the signal source).

In the end, copyright is based on laws created by governements as trade agreements, rarely involving the voting public when it's not a dictator or monarch making the rules. In effect copyright is a matter of law, not moral, and sometimed the law is not moral. In this case, I stay my judgement as it can only cloud the real issues.

Personally I think everybody who is not an adult, without a job or a home should by default be allowed free access to anything we call culture. Being part of society is - which everyone should be - is down to having a shared context. The so called entertainment is a major part of this, and without access to it you become an 'other', the outsider.

Moral or not.

So many movies are only available commercially in their objectively worst version (pan and scan, poor subtitles, no subtitles just dubbing, missing scenes, censored scenes, poor audio or poor picture), people who actually care for the film more than the copyright holders go out of their way to combine several awful versions into a version better than commercially available because they actually care about what they're distributing because it's for passion not profit..

And this is the framework the US is pushing the rest of the world to adopt.

> That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

--Thomas Jefferson

Sure, they make it look all secure, pass it through all that crypto and stuff but ultimately it has to be passed to the projector chip in some form which is unencumbered to be turned into light. At which point it's fairly trivial to dump. Anti-tampers on the case are probably fairly limited.

What tech is used on UHD consumer Bluerays?

Still, as other commenters note, these large disc sizes accommodate for high quality. If we have a 100GB disc format, and you want the 4K video to appear in the best possible quality, you will choose some encoding options that fill up most of that 100GB disc, minus whatever the special features and audio tracks cost. Most consumers won't care about the size: it's on a disc, they're not ripping it to a hard drive of their own.

A VCD release fits on a 700MB CD, why did we need a different disc format for DVD?

You can make video files come out any size you like - even 1 MB - if you're willing to make the tradeoffs (on both quality and time-to-encode dimensions). There's also a limited amount of hardware you can put into a set-top player while keeping a consumer-friendly price point.

Your literal minded response suggests that, a product with a low incremental cost is a valid measure of of the total cost of production, which it is not. The cost is writers, actors, foley artists, costumers, grips etc. All of whom lose money when someone decides it's okay to steal a copy. That is a thief who will never pay a legitimate fee for what they have taken.

In fact piracy can cost so much, people pay actual money to avoid it. I think that is why Spotify et al. are so popular among prior pirates.

It is the classic example of market failure.