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Comment by ukdm | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to know what drives the decision making when it comes to adding DRM to media. The people who buy DVDs/Blu-ray/Games wouldn't pirate the stuff even if it had no protection. Those that do pirate find a way around the DRM, if it isn't there that's just a bonus. This is my opinion.

Is it the fact some department or person at a media company is tasked with deciding how to protect the content and all they have is a DRM solution? Would coming up with an alternative that's classed as thinking outside the box make them fear for their job?

I'd also like to say I'm getting pretty tired of every device I own needing an update. If I don't boot up my PS3/360 for a week I can't play a new game without having to wait for some update to install, reboot the machine, and test it has fixed some obscure vulnerability.

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The media producers care about the new release window, where they capture a disproportionate share of the revenue for each title. The new release window is measured in days, not weeks. If DRM spares 50% of the new release window from readily-available high-fidelity copies, they've potentially saved significant revenue.

All this boils down to a simple point: the goal of DRM isn't to protect titles from being copied. It's to make copies more expensive, which in turn makes it take longer for copies to spread.

Isn't that argument counteracted somewhat by the distribution of camcorder copies? And pre-release leaks where someone at a distribution center managed to take a disc home, burn it, and upload it. When a film is officially out I think you see a copy appear online day one regardless of the DRM being used.

Have you ever watched a cam (or even a TS) version of a movie? I wonder whether the studios put them there on purpose.

Especially in the case of Avatar, did anyone really watch a cam and thought of it as a substitute for seeing it at the cinemas?

The ostensible reason is to prevent casual piracy. DRM needs to be just hard enough to get around that those who can't bittorrent also can't copy a DVD.

But you don't need to be constantly updating DRM to meet this level of difficulty.

Well... you kind-of do. Once something like DVD-Decrypter or Handbrake comes out for your format (making ripping a one click affair) then the casuals might start figuring it out... that's why they adapt.

I think they view the music industry as a cautionary tale. The start of their big decline coincided with the rise of Napster. Rightly or wrongly, movie people drew the conclusion that music was killed by piracy and they would be next.

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