6 ms·

Blu-ray is an interesting case; the 'pirates' seem to have gotten quite lazy because SlySoft has been doing all their work for them.

daeken 15y ago
There's also the odd case where BD was never properly broken, because it's never been needed. People have just depended on broken players, which has worked remarkably well so far.
- mikeash 15y ago
  I think this is what shows that DRM really is hopeless. For DRM to work, it has to work every time. For DRM to be broken, it only needs to fail once. After one guy has extracted the media, it can then be distributed to the world even if nobody else can break the DRM.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Not really. The content providers only have to hold the line (a) on high-quality and (b) during the new-release window. It's true that eventual failure is inevitable, but the economic case for DRM doesn't rely on permanent protection.
    - Retric 15y ago
      Considering it rarely takes a week for a popular games DRM to be broken the window between copy protection and the lack there of does not necessarily mean much. What many people forget is there will always be leechers out there but there are also people who will make the moral choice and buy the content. 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.
      - Karunamon 15y ago
        Equating the downloading of a file with "morals" is silly.
        ugh 15y ago
        Morals aren’t just for when you decide that killing people is a bad idea. 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.
      - teamonkey 15y ago
        > Considering it rarely takes a week for a popular games DRM to be broken the window between copy protection and the lack there of does not necessarily mean much. 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.
        tptacek 15y ago
        Based on my understanding of the market from friends who work in this space, this is exactly correct.
        Retric 15y ago
        I can point to games that I did not buy specifically because they had horrible DRM. Most notably Crisis 2 and Spore which I had reordered and then canceled after I read how bad the DRM was. Granted the fact they both got many poor reviews also helped that decision. But, DRM costs company's significant amounts of money to deploy and also costs them sales. 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.
    - Natsu 15y ago
      In other words, they only have to fool themselves into thinking it's doing them any good?
      - tptacek 15y ago
        I'm not sure what this comment is supposed to mean. Maybe if you rephrased it?
        Natsu 15y ago
        I don't believe it actually helps them economically, though Hollywood has a pretty funky take on accounting so you never know. I can't imagine a sane business being glad that they were able to successfully delay selling things for X months. 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.
        tptacek 15y ago
        Piracy is not the reason there's a new-release window in which most titles make a plurality of the total return for the title.
        Natsu 15y ago
        I don't believe I said otherwise? 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.
    - mikeash 15y ago
      Maybe my statement needs to be modified a bit, but the general idea still holds. DRM needs to work to prevent (a) and (b) for everybody, whereas if just one person can break the DRM with high-quality results during the new-release window, they lose.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        That's true, of course, but modern DRM schemes anticipate exactly that, and so they put lots of effort into making it cost-prohibitive to break the scheme in under 2 weeks. 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.
        daeken 15y ago
        You totally hit the nail on the head: DRM 'works' if it makes it difficult to get access to content, not impossible. And of course, I say that having spent the majority of my teenage years reversing DRM. Nobody believes that DRM will hold up forever, but there's a huuuuge imbalance here that favors the DRM creators, which is that it's really, really easy to put together modifications on a DRM system that make a reverser's life hell. For a while, iTunes was rolling out a new version of their store page crypto with every release (and deprecating the old one) so I'd have to go and reverse it to keep my iTMS client working; I may have kept up for a while, but eventually I stopped because it simply took too much damn time, and they won in the end with a fairly small amount of work from their side. That imbalance means that DRM will always work, even if it doesn't 'work'.
        mikeash 15y ago
        This actually seems to paint a nice picture where everybody wins. Content producers win because DRM only needs to work for a short time. Everybody else wins because it can still be cracked in relatively short order.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]

daeken 15y ago

There's also the odd case where BD was never properly broken, because it's never been needed. People have just depended on broken players, which has worked remarkably well so far.

mikeash 15y ago
I think this is what shows that DRM really is hopeless. For DRM to work, it has to work every time. For DRM to be broken, it only needs to fail once. After one guy has extracted the media, it can then be distributed to the world even if nobody else can break the DRM.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Not really. The content providers only have to hold the line (a) on high-quality and (b) during the new-release window. It's true that eventual failure is inevitable, but the economic case for DRM doesn't rely on permanent protection.
  - Retric 15y ago
    Considering it rarely takes a week for a popular games DRM to be broken the window between copy protection and the lack there of does not necessarily mean much. What many people forget is there will always be leechers out there but there are also people who will make the moral choice and buy the content. 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.
    - Karunamon 15y ago
      Equating the downloading of a file with "morals" is silly.
      - ugh 15y ago
        Morals aren’t just for when you decide that killing people is a bad idea. 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.
    - teamonkey 15y ago
      > Considering it rarely takes a week for a popular games DRM to be broken the window between copy protection and the lack there of does not necessarily mean much. 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.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        Based on my understanding of the market from friends who work in this space, this is exactly correct.
        Retric 15y ago
        I can point to games that I did not buy specifically because they had horrible DRM. Most notably Crisis 2 and Spore which I had reordered and then canceled after I read how bad the DRM was. Granted the fact they both got many poor reviews also helped that decision. But, DRM costs company's significant amounts of money to deploy and also costs them sales. 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.
  - Natsu 15y ago
    In other words, they only have to fool themselves into thinking it's doing them any good?
    - tptacek 15y ago
      I'm not sure what this comment is supposed to mean. Maybe if you rephrased it?
      - Natsu 15y ago
        I don't believe it actually helps them economically, though Hollywood has a pretty funky take on accounting so you never know. I can't imagine a sane business being glad that they were able to successfully delay selling things for X months. 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.
        tptacek 15y ago
        Piracy is not the reason there's a new-release window in which most titles make a plurality of the total return for the title.
        Natsu 15y ago
        I don't believe I said otherwise? 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.
  - mikeash 15y ago
    Maybe my statement needs to be modified a bit, but the general idea still holds. DRM needs to work to prevent (a) and (b) for everybody, whereas if just one person can break the DRM with high-quality results during the new-release window, they lose.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      That's true, of course, but modern DRM schemes anticipate exactly that, and so they put lots of effort into making it cost-prohibitive to break the scheme in under 2 weeks. 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.
      - daeken 15y ago
        You totally hit the nail on the head: DRM 'works' if it makes it difficult to get access to content, not impossible. And of course, I say that having spent the majority of my teenage years reversing DRM. Nobody believes that DRM will hold up forever, but there's a huuuuge imbalance here that favors the DRM creators, which is that it's really, really easy to put together modifications on a DRM system that make a reverser's life hell. For a while, iTunes was rolling out a new version of their store page crypto with every release (and deprecating the old one) so I'd have to go and reverse it to keep my iTMS client working; I may have kept up for a while, but eventually I stopped because it simply took too much damn time, and they won in the end with a fairly small amount of work from their side. That imbalance means that DRM will always work, even if it doesn't 'work'.
        mikeash 15y ago
        This actually seems to paint a nice picture where everybody wins. Content producers win because DRM only needs to work for a short time. Everybody else wins because it can still be cracked in relatively short order.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]