4 ms·
I don't understand why the film industry bothers with DRM. Their product is fundementally easy to pirate, and always will be.
by activitypea 5y ago
I don't understand why the film industry bothers with DRM. Their product is fundementally easy to pirate, and always will be.
- sneak 5y agoIt's not about piracy, it's so they can segment the market and charge different amounts in rich and poor countries based on region-locked media. Otherwise first sale doctrine would allow people to sell mountains of imported cheap discs from poor countries in the USA legally. It's to protect the margins in places where $5 isn't much money. Vastly more units are sold in places where $5 is a lot.
- MaxBarraclough 5y agoUHD Blu-Ray doesn't have region-locking.
- izacus 5y agoThe DRM isn't there just for end-user piracy, it's to enforce contractual obligation on middle-men distributors and for those middle-men distributors to be able to enforce exclusivity onto users (e.g. pay rights for a certain region, to dubbing and then prevent people from watching that content in the same region elsewhere to maximise the moneyed return). It also allows distributors and content houses to repeatably charge for same content as it goes through media conversions (pay once for DVD rights, pay again for BR, pay again for localized BR, pay again for UHD-BR, pay again for iPhone Apple TV version, pay again for version with extras and special edition)... it's a legal hammer that enforces each middle man to stand in the line and to make sure each piece of content extracts as much money as the overextended copyright system allows. And if anyone DOES pirate the content, it's used to cover the middlemen asses by being able to show the abusive DRM practices and saying "we did all we could, YOU ceritified this DRM as good you see!"