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Even with all of this onerous encryption and DRM, it's not hard to find pirated copies of movies. It makes me think that the sacrifice in ownership rights for t

• ajsnigrutin 1y ago
  Yep, and those pirated copies are DRM free, work everywhere, no HDCP and other crap, no internet connection needed, so they're "better" in that way too (not just price-wise).
  • eastbound 1y ago
    Totally possible that watermark identifies cinemas and showtimes uniquely, and that pirates are due for a lifetime of prosecution. Or that studios will shut down some cinemas, until it stops. For 15 years you let paid options progress. Then fewer people pirate, then you catch the rest. At the beginning you don’t see it putting its clamps; then suddenly you don’t find piracy anywhere.
    • ajsnigrutin 1y ago
      Yes, and those paid options were one subscription that had "everything". Then paid options broke up into 5 different subscriptions, some not allowing more than 2 devices, some having ads in paid plans, some not available in your country, some only having seasons 3 and 5 of the series, some having the series you wanted to watch but remove it half way through, some give you a "buy" button for the media, but then take the movies away after a few months, etc. And people go back to piracy, because the user experience is better.
      • Mindwipe 1y ago
        > Yes, and those paid options were one subscription that had "everything". It really didn't. It's incredible this collective delusion exists when it's not true.
        • alabastervlog 1y ago
          It was a lot closer when they still had a streaming + disk option, but even then, they were missing lots (and lots, and lots) of stuff. I think people don't realize how many tens of thousands (maybe into the hundreds, IDK, I wouldn't be surprised) of films there are, let alone how many hours of TV content. This is like when people talk about how everything's on the Web, when it comes to books. 1) This is only even sort-of true if by "on the Web" you mean "piracy sites have an epub/pdf of it", and 2) even then, extremely not close to true, the time from "I'm going to deep-dive this topic" to "... and now I need to go to the library, and possibly a specific library, maybe on another continent" is often not long at all.
          • baud147258 1y ago
            > "I'm going to deep-dive this topic" to "... and now I need to go to the library, and possibly a specific library, maybe on another continent" I remember an history professor saying that for a subject he was working on he had to borrow a book from the library of Congress (through the library of his university), where the only publicly available copy in the US was. Of course it was an academic book, so it's not exactly a common situation.
    • kelnos 1y ago
      > For 15 years you let paid options progress. [...] then suddenly you don’t find piracy anywhere. And then they completely ruined it with fragmentation. When all I need to watch everything I wanted to watch was three subscriptions (Netflix, Hulu, and HBO), I was totally fine with the ~$40/mo and reasonably-ok-UX offered. But now it's a mess. I need subscriptions to 7 or 8 different services (which now each cost twice what they used to for an ad-free experience), and the experience is crap. Netflix no longer plays on my Linux/Firefox setup (same thing happened with HBO years ago), and their anti-password-sharing mis-features constantly trigger for me even though I don't share my Netflix password. The Android apps for most of them are glitchy and buggy, and Chromecast has somehow gotten less reliable over time. The irony is that usually I would say more competition is a good thing. I suppose if we had lots of streaming services, but studios were required to license all their content under RAND terms to anyone who asks, we'd have real competition, and streamers would compete on the quality of their platform, lack of ads, etc., and not just on what titles they were lucky enough to be able to license. I do agree that pirating became less popular for a while, but that golden age is over. The piracy scene seems stronger than ever these days.
      • Freak_NL 1y ago
        > Netflix no longer plays on my Linux/Firefox setup […] I know Netflix doesn't support anything beyond 720p or so on Linux, but that never bothered me. Otherwise it just works. Is your Firefox out of date? > The piracy scene seems stronger than ever these days. I hope so. A lot of damage was done. If it wasn't for archive.org a lot of older, regional stuff would not even be accessible. We need piracy if only for the collective digital archives. I refuse to take out more than one subscription. We just hop services.
• gruez 1y ago
  Most pirated copies aren't from theatrical releases; they mostly come out when the titles are available on streaming/blu-ray. DRM might be a failure in other fields, but it's working pretty well in this particular case.
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  • johnisgood 1y ago
    I think the question remains, is it still worth it given these holes?
    • lb1lf 1y ago
      It presumably is, as the effort is kept up despite the cost and inconvenience. My guess would be that the plan is mostly to ensure that when a new release premieres in theatres, going to a theatre is the only way to experience it in high quality. It doesn't really matter all that much if the people who waits for it to arrive on Netflix gets a pirated copy; it does matter if the ones forking over $20 to see it in a theatre does, though.
      • sethhochberg 1y ago
        A really important element of this is that much of the burden of maintaining the DRM is on the theaters, and the theaters themselves are the ones who care about protecting the theatrical release period: you might be less likely to pay them for a ticket if you can get a high-quality copy at home before the actual streaming/media release It’s a different dynamic than we typically talk about with DRM. Most of the time DRM is something imposed on a consumer who doesn’t really want it. But in this case, the consumer is the theater and they really do want the protection.
        • fmajid 1y ago
          While at the same time dealing with potentially untrustworthy employees and the prisoner's dilemma.
• perryflynn 1y ago
  It also contains watermarks. So theatres which failed to prevent recording will run into serious issues. See https://dcpomatic.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2372 https://dcpomatic.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2372
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  • thr0w 1y ago
    NexGuard is a wild product.
    • stavros 1y ago
      The flea repellant?
      • thr0w 1y ago
        Nagra's forensic watermarking tech.
  • coppsilgold 1y ago
    If the software to watermark is widely available (as it appears to be) then an adversary has all they need to corrupt any existing watermark. These steganographic watermarks depend on no knowledge of the process. If the method is particularly ingenious (one of the inputs is centrally stored entropy which the extractor references by trialing them all) then knowledge of the process alone may not be sufficient to obtain a high quality result (as too much corruption may be required) but could be used to inform the next step: If you obtain two or more copies of the decrypted content you will be able to diff them and work out what you need to corrupt even without knowledge of the watermarking process. This probably won't work with pirated CAM's or take quite an effort to find the signal in the noise. Edit: After some more research it looks like they don't actually watermark the distributed data (the movie sent to cinemas). The projector inserts its unique watermark during playback. There may be other secret watermarks put in by distributors not mentioned anywhere.
• codemiscreant 1y ago
  There is essentially zero piracy from these digital cinema releases. The pirate copies are generally from once it starts digitally streaming on one of the services including PPV, and when pirate copies exist earlier it is almost always someone with a camera in a theatre making a terrible quality screener. Piracy is inevitable, but in this case their model is much more robust that I would have predicted.
  • tptacek 1y ago
    Most importantly, the industry concerns itself primarily with the new-release window; that high fidelity copies will eventually be widely available doesn't break the model.
    • kelnos 1y ago
      I suppose this would help keep pirated copies from getting out before the theatrical release date (presumably theaters are given these digital releases at least days before their first projection date). But it seems that more and more releases are straight-to-streaming, and/or sometimes simultaneous with the theatrical release. High-quality pirated copies often show up within a day of a streaming release. Sure, many are still theater-only for a week or more after initial release. I get that a big part of their business model for some titles relies on theater ticket sales within the first days or at most weeks after release, but all this DRM just feels like an exhausting, expensive, ultimately-losing game for them. Especially when we consider how theater-going has declined over time, especially recently.
      • plastic3169 1y ago
        There are no high quality pirated versions though. The streaming version and even blu-ray is compressed way heavier than these DCP files. I’d buy these cinema versions of films in a heartbeat if they were availble.
        • loeg 1y ago
          1080p/4k as encoded by the streaming sites / blu-ray is sufficiently high quality for virtually all of the viewing public. You're weird (no offense).
• Aurornis 1y ago
  Pirated copies of theatrical releases at the time of release are much more rare, though. The value of protecting releases is extremely high in the narrow window of finalizing production and getting it into theaters or online launch platforms. If there was no DRM and watermarking then these would be pirated constantly before release.
• anal_reactor 1y ago
  Most people are completely fine watching a 720p x264 1GB version half a year after release. Sure, there are some purists who want as good image quality as possible as soon as possible, but that's a tiny minority. I think the actual motivation is that cinemas are becoming less and less relevant in the age of streaming, so they're doing anything they can to protect the little revenue they have, because the only way cinema can make money is to hype a movie to the moon, and then have it shown exclusively in cinemas for some period of time. But with streaming services investing in their own movies, the days of this distribution model are numbered. Having a cinema in 2025 is like having an internet cafe in 2010.
  • yladiz 1y ago
    This really downplays the cinema experience. Yes, many people are fine watching a movie at home while doing something else (the current Netflix model of filmmaking is precipitated on this), and others are fine to watch at home in general, but few people would truly say that their setup is close to what you get in a cinema. The screen is much bigger, the image quality is higher, and the sound system is much better as well, compared to anything short of an actual home cinema setup. It’s not the only reason of course, but it’s one of a few reasons cinemas still sell out for big films like Dune 2, and why people will go out of their way to go watch it in the cinema. Streaming will never fully replace cinemas, even if it dramatically impacts their operating mode, and to argue otherwise is naive.
    • anal_reactor 1y ago
      > but few people would truly say that their setup is close to what you get in a cinema. The opposite is also true. Few cinemas have a setup that imitates the comfort of watching something at home.
• fmajid 1y ago
  Quite often it's industry insiders themselves who release rips from the Blu-Ray screener disks sent for Academy Awards consideration.