This hasn't been the case with Blu-Ray, right? We've gone weeks and weeks without breaks in whatever the most recent updates to BD+ are.
PS: I will torrent a show I my DVR fills up or something. But, I don't cancel cable and download everything and I still pay to see movies in the theater. Why? Because there is no penalty for downloading it just becomes a moral choice and that's where I draw the line.
I think it’s morally right to not jaywalk when there are children around. That’s even less harmless than downloading files, but it’s still a moral question.
It means a lot because the majority of a game's total sales will be in the first 3 weeks. After one month, you're more or less done. Very few games have any sort of tail, let alone a long one. [EDIT: I'm speaking in general for high-profile retail games]
Assuming that even a small percentage (say 1%) of pirates will try piracy first but will resort to paying if the piracy option fails, then having DRM that is unbroken for the first week could mean the difference of $millions in revenue.
Now done well or even just unobtrusively DRM clearly can work, most notably with consoles, phones, and Steam. My point is simply buying 48, hours which is considered a success in many DRM circles, does not mean you actually benefit monetarily you need to look beyond time to crack in expectations that it will be cracked and how enticing you can make the guided cage. It's possible to make always on DRM orders of magnitude harder to crack but doing so will cost you many upfront sales some of whom will wait for that first crack unless being online is already inherent to game play.
Not necessarily true on either count.
I understand the rational explanations for that, but I'm just as sure that people aren't that rational. Essentially, they're trying to be too good at the negotiating game. Ever been too good at a game? Nobody wants to play with you any more.
EDIT: I was referring to the DRM part of it. The fact that people are impatient (and that this drives piracy) is kind of my point.
Maybe it's the case that everyone has backed off Blu-Ray because of Slysoft, but either way: BD+ has protected the new-release window for Blu-Ray disks in several instances (you can check out the Slysoft message boards to see when that's happening).
If you want to see an example of an (as far as I know) unbroken DRM scheme, look at the modern crypto cards in satellite TV systems.
That imbalance means that DRM will always work, even if it doesn't 'work'.
The problem would be to avoid the situation where it's released, and nobody buys it for the first week/month/whatever, and then it's immediately distributable.
The answer might lie in the 'ransom model', which is a bit like kickstarter, except "Once we've made $n million or sold 5M copies, we'll open it up"
You then get that money almost guaranteed (avoiding the simple delayed purchase option), and if done carefully, you might even hit your targets before it's cracked, which if you can do that with any regularity, crackers may just stop bothering (Or they'll take it as even more of a challenge - hard to say)
The BD+ scheme that protects Blu-Ray disks was designed by very, very smart people (outside the content industry) to make it maximally easy to update the protection scheme, potentially on a title-by-title basis, without ever having to ship new players (and ideally never having to update player firmware).
The other thing about satellite TV is that once broken for one person the knowledge has to be given to many other people for them to gain anything from it. With breaking Blu-Ray one person has to rip it to 1080p video and the rest can download it...
Today, you apocryphally know of several people who are pirating satellite TV.
I'm going to go ahead and call this one for DirecTV.
Sure, call it for DirectTV/Dish, I would definitely agree that they have raised the bar significantly. I know several of the people working at Dish that are working to make it even harder (and they do toy with the hackers :P).
We still consider md5 broken, even-though finding collisions that make a real world difference is still considered difficult and isn't done by the layman.
The fact is, DRM isn't an academic exercise. It's software written in order to make content producers money by (for the most part) protecting the new-release window of new titles (or, in DTV's case, by making it riotously expensive to pirate satellite TV).
Nerds look at the graph of facts around any given DRM scheme, create the all-pairs shortest path of conclusions in their head, discover one or more cases in which the DRM scheme isn't perfect, and declare it "broken". But business owners could care less: as long as the title is making more money, DRM was a win for them.
Somewhat tangentially: MD5 is still unbroken in some constructions.
MD5 is broken, but the concept of cryptographic hashes is solid. There's no theoretical problem with the idea of a function where f(a) != f(b) implies a != b to an extremely high probability. The only trick is coming up with real-world systems which approach the theoretical ideal.
DRM, on the other hand, is a theoretical impossibility. It aims to show content without allowing it to be copied, which is a concept that makes no sense. In practice it can work to an extent, but this is only done by coming up with real-world systems which run in the opposite direction from the theoretical ideal.
I'm not at all convinced that business owners couldn't care less. They keep raising the bar, both technologically and legally. Breaking DRM, even for purposes that would otherwise be legitimate, has been illegal in the US for over a decade now. And this is ultimately the crux of the problem, and what causes people to frustratedly declare that DRM is a broken concept. It is a crime to express certain mathematical concepts, and the only reason that's the case is because businesses make up for the lack of theoretical rigor in DRM by bringing in the power of the law.
Imagine if the cryptographic community's response to the break of MD5 was to lobby for a law that made it illegal to generate hash collisions or create or distribute code that could do that, because theory prohibited anything substantially better than MD5 from being produced. MD5 is still a useful hash through the present day and well into the future, but in that hypothetical and counter-factual situation, I think it would be reasonable to call the concept of cryptographic hashing broken.
I'm also pointing out that MD5, though "broken" is actually cryptographically viable in some constructions --- in other words, there are cryptographic applications of MD5 that have no known viable attacks, even though MD5 is itself a weak hash. It's a tangent, but I thought a telling one: even though the nerdy vantage point is "MD5 is broken, avoid at all costs!", the reality is that it still works in some settings. Just like DRM.
Finally, if you want to reason through the legalities of DRM laws, start thinking in terms of contract law instead of technology. The reason content owners would like it to be unlawful to break DRM is that they shouldn't need to incur an arms race merely to enforce otherwise binding contracts. The fact is that it is entirely lawful to make access to an entertainment title conditioned on acceptance of a contract not to distribute the title. Violating that contract is unlawful. DRM exists in order to make it harder to violate binding contracts. In fact, the laws regarding DRM even anticipate the hardships DRM creates for normal users, and creates exceptions for breaking DRM in cases of interoperability and security research.
It is no case a "crime" to express mathematical concepts, except under exceedingly silly definitions of the term "mathematical concept" (any piece of content can of course be described mathematically; that doesn't make it lawful for me to steal and publish your credit card number).
DRM does not solely exist to make it harder to violate that law. DRM also exists to prevent use of the buyer's own rights. DRM prevents fair use as well as infringement, and I'm pretty sure the media companies consider this to be a feature, not a bug.
When I say "mathematical concepts", I'm talking about algorithms, not content. I think that e.g. the core of DeCSS qualifies as a mathematical concept, and it's illegal to express it under current US law, although that law is widely ignored.