James Berardinelli has a great post on movie studios, copyright violation, and why a lot of what the MPAA says doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
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I’ll admit that the vast majority of people who download movies illegally have most likely made up their minds about whether they would buy it or not before they download. I think most of the DVD sales come from the special features and the higher quality, but I’ll admit that if we weren’t able to get DOA for free off the web that I would have rented it, thus there is a loss to the rental industry.
I honestly don’t think there’s anything the movie industry can do about fighting pirating though. Even the best measures will be broken. You know more about security than I do Mike, what sort of advances are being made in the security of DVDs?
Blu-ray’s copy protection is the current state-of-the-art; it actually utilizes multiple layers of DRM: AACS, BD+, and BD-ROM Mark. All of these have been cracked in some fashion.