Slashdot | Censoring a Number

An insightful comment:

they hardly do themselves any favors when they decide not to support all these geeks' OS of choice, so that if they want the shiny new high-definition movies, and many of them do, they need to marshal all of those computer skills and idle time towards utterly destroying the 'unbreakable' copy protection scheme that accompanies each generation of media.

So, there I am, merrily skipping along through comments about a certain unspeakable number (kind of a "We do not speak his name!", but related to HD video discs).

The comment above is simple and unassuming, but man does it ring true.

Think about this: who do you know that's the first one to have all the high-tech/high-performance gear? First one on the block with surround-sound? A DVD player? An HDTV?

I'd bet even money that it's a geek. More than likely a single 25-35-year-old male employed in some sort of tech job who has money to burn and a desire to have the newest and shiniest of things.

Let's entertain another thought: who do you know that's the most likely to tinker with something? Attatches item A and item B together when the two are ordinarily not connectable? Writes a program to be a coffee timer and then solders together a serial cable, a relay, and a wall outlet to make the whole thing work? Decides that they want to run some variety of Open-source operating system because they can make it do whatever they want it to do?

There is, I believe, a significant overlap there. The simple fact that a large quantity of people appreciate both newer media formats (assuming they offer increased fidelity reproduction of the source material) and the freedom to tinker means that there's incentive to make something happen.

The fact that the creators of said media formats purposely make it as difficult as possible to view the content they encode on anything other than their approved devices means that the "something" will be discovering a way to overcome that limitation.

"saviorsloth" had it exactly right (and said it in a lot less words than I just have), but it bears further discussion. What can the creators of this digital content do to improve the situation?

Basically, they have two choices. They can abandon the arms race, or they can maintain the status quo.

In the second case (the status quo), they still spend big wads of cash developing encryption, worrying about rampant copying, and trying to get stereo makers to encrypt the signals going to loudspeakers.

I'm not a business analyst, but I am a consumer, and I know that I'm getting *really* tired of having to deal with intrusive technology that forces me to either spend a lot of money or accept a lesser experience (Time Warner cable replaced a DVR with a newer model that has replaced my previous DVI connection with a component cable...it sucks).

In the first case (standing down), they could use the money saved on not developing arbitrary encryption to distribute the media at lower prices (thereby eliminating both the need to hack the encryption and much of the incentive to copy).

Why is there a market for pirated versions of CDs or DVDs? People don't think they're worth the full price. It's bad enough to have to pay 8 bucks a pop to go to a theater for a new release that turns out to be not-so-great, but 15-50 dollars for a movie released on DVD (or even HD-DVD/BluRay) is probably the wrong price range.

If we're talking about production costs, let's think about how much it costs to make a pressed DVD/CD/HD-DVD/BluRay disc today, and then factor in the cost of packaging, etc. For a typical run of 1000 DVDs, you're looking at $1 each for pressing and a little more than that for the cases with outer wraps. Let's add, say, another 50 cents for the cost of the little miscellaneous flyers, brochures, and menus that get stuffed inside. I'll be generous and round up to $3.00 for all of that.

Tack on another 50 cents each for the cost of getting them to a distributor's warehouse, and we're at $3.50. Add in 10 cents each for the cost of the distributor getting the disc to a store. Tack on 2 dollars in markup so that the content creator makes a profit. We're talking $5.60 before it gets to a retailer.

So, now the disc is at a store that's paid 5.60 for it. They want to make a profit, too, so they sell it for $10.00. At that point, they sell every single one of their DVDs and there's still consumer demand (plus you'd have a hard time downloading them or getting a pirated version for much less).

Over-simplified? Of course. Basically correct? Probably. The RIAA and MPAA can, of course, continue to shoot themselves in the feet, but who **in their right mind would want to do that?

**I have no idea what the mental state of the person or persons in charge at the [RI|MP]AA is/are. They may very well not be in their right mind.