It's a serious question. Considering Sony's track record for protecting it's content on DVD, PS1&2, and utter failure at stopping home brew on PSP, what gives them or others faith that they will succeed this time around?

Because it so much more than just sony it about 12 or 13 of some of the most powerful CE companies and movie studios on the planet.

There is also hope that an safety measure that can be upgraded, or at least be unique for each title launched can curb(not totally stop) those pesky copy softwares and delay the more resourceful pirates. BDA studios were right in considering that AACS wasn't strong enough. Of course, BD+ might fail as well, and then all studios will be back at square one when it comes to curb piracy.

I know that there are people that are 100% against any DRM and copy protection, and given the previous experience with those, I can understand why. But when you go on the streets here in Brazil and see people selling pirate DVDs for 2-5 dolars, you can also understand the predicament the studios are in. If High-def content becomes so easy to copy as DVD is, they're still gonna be losing lots of money to piracy.(Obviously, I am not talking about end-user piracy, but one cannot protect the content from one group without doing for the other too...)

It will be cracked, just like all of the others.

Has SACD been cracked? Isn't that a Sony product? I can get a DVD-A rip in about 13 seconds (well it would take a long time to DL but you know what I mean:) ). I'm not saying that BD+ won't get cracked. It might however take a while. Some of the mechanisms with BD+ remind me of ssh, the key system specificially.

HD-DVD fans will love it when/if BD+ gets cracked. However, BD+ is possibly the last good hope of the physical optical media market. We might hate DRM, but studios are businesses and they see piracy as lost sales. If there can't be a secure way for them to distribute their product, I don't think they'll do it. Lucas said he's done with movies because of piracy. *Wanting* bd+ to fail is wanting the industry to stop giving us what we want.

It doesn't matter if it gets cracked. Even if it only delays piracy for a few weeks, this is when discs sell the most copies, so a big impact on piracy can be made by having no pirated copies available in that time. If it gets cracked, they just implement a new scheme for the next title, which will delay the pirates again, and so on, ensuring each title is protected for the early sales period.

The only problem would be if it proved to be crackable within just a few days, which would still allow pirated copies to become available before legitimate copies.

Let's face it, none of the CE companies are truly serious about DRM.

There are a variety of methods that are usable to ensure secure data transmission (banks do it all the time) and the CE companies instead use hacky, easily defeated encryption methods. Look at the recent crack of AACS because of decryption keys left in memory on PC-based BD/HD DVD playing software.

For all the arguments, sometimes I think the studios aren't as worried about piracy as they let on.

I'm not sure that Sony will even use it, at least at first. I think the rest of the studios are looking to Fox to beta test BD+; if it works, then maybe they'll use it. Not sure about any of the other studios, but Fox is the one who wanted it added to the spec, and they are the one's who bring it up at every opportunity.

It doesn't matter if it gets cracked. Even if it only delays piracy for a few weeks, this is when discs sell the most copies, so a big impact on piracy can be made by having no pirated copies available in that time. If it gets cracked, they just implement a new scheme for the next title, which will delay the pirates again, and so on, ensuring each title is protected for the early sales period.

The only problem would be if it proved to be crackable within just a few days, which would still allow pirated copies to become available before legitimate copies.

Nut's is correct. This is the exact same philosophy in the computer software world. Software developers KNOW that anything they release will eventually end up on the internet. The hope is that during the initial release that no copies are easily available, and people will buy the product instead to waiting for it to show up weeks later online. This is where the most money is made from software releases.

Copy protections purpose is not to safeguard content forever, but to delay the inevitable as much as possible. It is a cat and mouse game, and BD+ is the same. It's purpose is to just to delay easily available rips of movies.

Even if BD+ is not cracked, bootleg copies will show up. This takes a lot more time to encode, fine tune and make as close to the original as possible, unlike ripping a pristine ISO in 20 minutes and uploading it to a warez site the same day of release.

See the difference?

so far the only thing content protection has done is prevent paying customers from accessing the content they bought their hard-earned money. what's worse is if the studios didnt spend so much money on R&D for the protection schemes, the actual media can cost less.

if a music cd cost $6.99 instead of $12.99, i'm willing to bet many people would just buy a copy instead of downloading and burning to a blank media.

Piracy?
Who has the upload bandwidth to be uploading 19-50GB files?
Piracy of BDs is a joke!
Yeah yeah, I know you can find them... still! Not from me on Comcast you won't!

Not to mention, the rips I have done(private use), still get finiky when I play them. Finiky like in... ya can't just play them anywhere, they are still BDMV.
PowerDVD Ultra is needed to play them.

Laptop, 200GB HDD space(129GB free without movies)... not having to carry the discs themselves - Priceless! :)

Piracy?
Who has the upload bandwidth to be uploading 19-50GB files?
Piracy of BDs is a joke!
Yeah yeah, I know you can find them... still! Not from me on Comcast you won't!

Not to mention, the rips I have done(private use), still get finiky when I play them. Finiky like in... ya can't just play them anywhere, they are still BDMV.
PowerDVD Ultra is needed to play them.

Laptop, 200GB HDD space(129GB free without movies)... not having to carry the discs themselves - Priceless! :)

Go to www.newzbin.com
You will find over 1000 HD files posted in newsgroups. Up to 30 gig each.
As dvd's get bigger so does bandwidth. Hell if you have FIOS you could download 30 gig in less then 2 hours. People have terabytes of hard space now. Maybe if they spent less money trying to stop piracy and sold the movies for a more reasonable price like $10 then more people would buy them instead of stealing them.
I'm not trying to endorse piracy but Just think it's a waste of time to try to stop since they have had no success in almost 30 years from video games to video to music.

Yep!
Find them on several BT trackers too.
Ripping is not as hard/complicated as some would have us believe. ;)
There are 1:1(bit for bit) copiers if all else fails.

Thing is, piracy is not as widespread as "normal" DVDs because BD file sizes are a great deterrent.

I have a friend on Paxio. He has a 100/100 connection.
He can upload faster than probably anyone here can download.
I cannot!
*MOST* people cannot.
*MOST* people do not want to trash their connection for days to upload a single BDMV folder - once! Seed it? No, sorry... not happening here!

Ripping is not just for piracy. With HDD sizes climbing, a ripped BD(or three) is not an issue.
I have three ripped BDs, and 10 DVDs on my AR laptop.
No need to carry around a stack of discs. :)

If its created by man, it can be cracked by man. They should stop wasting time on DRM. The better they say the encryption is, causes more people to try cracking it thus it gets cracked faster.

Yep!
Find them on several BT trackers too.
Ripping is not as hard/complicated as some would have us believe. ;)
There are 1:1(bit for bit) copiers if all else fails.

Thing is, piracy is not as widespread as "normal" DVDs because BD file sizes are a great deterrent.

I have a friend on Paxio. He has a 100/100 connection.
He can upload faster than probably anyone here can download.
I cannot!
*MOST* people cannot.
*MOST* people do not want to trash their connection for days to upload a single BDMV folder - once! Seed it? No, sorry... not happening here!

Ripping is not just for piracy. With HDD sizes climbing, a ripped BD(or three) is not an issue.
I have three ripped BDs, and 10 DVDs on my AR laptop.
No need to carry around a stack of discs. :)

Disclaimer: I no way shape or form condone Piracy. I speak solely from experience in the IT field for over a decade. This post is educational in regards to just HOW bad piracy really is, in the real life without media fluff and mis-information.

Dadkins, I'm sure you mean well, but for piracy and the internet you have no idea just how far the rabbit hole goes. I'm not going to wave around my credentials, but lets just say I have been involved in Information Technology for a very long time. I was operating chat servers before yahoo messenger was developed. As a result, over my years I've kept tabs on the warez scene. As far as history goes, torrents as they are today are a relatively new way of file sharing and are generally the last chain of the trickle down effect. Heck, if we want to get down to it, file sharing for the "public" like kazaa, emule, or torrents as it exists today is relatively new. Before people had to have a little bit of a brain and personal connections to get them.

Although you might not think so, HDM warez is just as prevalent as software warez. I knew about the HD-DVD and BR rips before it was newsworthy here. Each and every HD-DVD and Blu-Ray title has come out on the warez scene before or as soon as it hits the shelves. In some cases, released a week or two early. HDTV recordings have been out on the net for quite a while, and are popular. These rips have taken their place. You would be surprised at the number of people that download their favorite TV shows in High Def.

Don't fool yourself, there is quite a demand for it.

The people to be concerned about with piracy distribution is not your everyday average person with DSL or cable. The "Professionals" have tons of bandwidth and a very elaborate fast distribution system in place. They have their own set of insiders that gets their hands on titles before they are shipped out to B&M stores. They trade back and forth hot titles before their release date, and then release them to the public when they see fit (Oblivion for an example). These same people take pride at bringing a title first to the scene, wither it be console games, HDM, or software before release. Price doesn't matter to these people, they could care less.

Books are even subject to piracy, and they are as cheap as you can get! Someone explain to me how a $10.00 novel is to expensive if price is the only reason why this happens. The last Harry Potter book was victim to piracy, and released a week early to boot.

Uploading 50GB for these types of groups is like you uploading a .jpg to a web page. It takes these folks minutes -- not hours or days, to upload complete movies to the world. They directly send these types of files right into a fast pipe. Although IT has a set of guidelines and rules, most cooperations simply do not follow them. To expensive and to much time. Instead you have a System/Network admin that can cover his tracks and multiple fiber channels. That same system admin sets up an old Pentium box with lots of storage hidden neatly between server racks. Upper management generally is to stupid to even notice the bandwidth increase (they call IT in a panic if their monitor is turned off). Non IT people look at network monitoring logs like it was written in greek. I could say that our network utilization was .1% when it's really 90% and this log proves it, and they would be non the wiser.

Even my work has a counter strike server from the previous admins -- still running -- hidden in a ceiling or catwalk somewhere that I can't find. And believe me, I've looked.

The "seeding" you talk about with Torrents, is actually the end user whose already downloaded a fully distributed item from somewhere else. By the time you see these pop up on torrents, it's already been distributed globally. To the scene, torrents are for newbies.

Technology is on their side as well. A 30GB movie can be cutdown to 8 or 4GB using different video codecs and still maintain higher quality than DVD in hours. Movies are simply re-encoded to 720p or re-encoded with more efficient codecs, extra fluff material removed, and the sound is downscaled and distributed. This is well within the range of your average 'end user' downloading torrents. In fact, most of these re-encodes are designed specifically to fit on DVD9. Better quality than DVD and the same size to boot, this is a no brainier for those actively participating in piracy.

Or for those that want a untarnished BR or HD-DVD image, they can download those too. With fiber doing 30/15Mps it takes only a couple of hours. 1.5 DSL maybe a day. And those in server rooms and backbone connections? Minutes.

Now do you see the danger of Piracy and what content providers really face? Again, the goal of content protection is to PROTECT the content only until the main profit cycle for the title is over. 30 days of a release is generally the main revenue generator of any given software or movie. The philosophy is that if it is not available for download, that person will go out and buy the movie/software/etc.

jason_grumpy you make a lot of good points and I agree with all of them as I am familiar with what you talk about. If they really wanted to take down piracy they would have more raids on the topsites and take down all of the newsgroup servers. I mean you see a raid ever few years but not as many as there should be after hearing the studios complain so frequently. After being around it for some time, I have decided that I am not against the copy protection, at least for right now. This time, instead of downloading and make my own rips, I am actually purchasing Blu-ray movies. Sure they are a little expensive but that is what we should expect for a new format. I can't justify downloading 10-30gb for a high definition movie (even though I have FIOS). I do however have to give all those IT admins credit for risking their jobs to provide much of the world with timely releases. :) I guess as I'm getting older I'm turning into an old man and I'm only 25. God that sounds awful :)

They are naive, I guess.

jason_grumpy,
Yes! I am well aware of piracy.
I do know how long it has been around my friend.
I have been watching it happen since the BBS days... what's your point?
You and I do not have this kind of bandwidth(even the Almighty FiOS is anemic).
My friend Joe in Santa Clara, CA can pump it out at roughly 90mbps from his house!
Google Paxio...
Paxio will blow Fios away!

http://img67.imageshack.us/img67/7216/snag0003ac0.jpg

Joe can, but does not, upload pirated items.

*I* have Comcast, most other people in the U.S. do not have uber fast pipes.
These people(WE) are not the ideal source for pirated Blu-ray Discs, right?
With 768k(724k nominal) I am not exactly the ideal source for *ANY* file. ;)

Anyone who considers a ripping application is solely for piracy is... they are misinformed.
I rip any disc that I wish, period!
I *DO NOT* upload for anyone else to use("piracy is a no-no").

I too have been in "The Field" for quite some time... ;)
Please do not assume anything about me.
Thanks!

If its created by man, it can be cracked by man. They should stop wasting time on DRM. The better they say the encryption is, causes more people to try cracking it thus it gets cracked faster.

EXACTLY!
Something else that many seem to not understand...
If it can be played/displayed, it can be copied/recorded. Period!

Whether that is done by interception of the signal(s), or done at the driver level, it can be done!
;)

*I* rip for *MY* personal use.
NOTHING is bulletproof!

Because it so much more than just sony it about 12 or 13 of some of the most powerful CE companies and movie studios on the planet.

Yes, contrary to popular belief, Sony alone did not invent Blu-ray, nor are they the only manufacturer or contributor to the format.

BD+ is a completely different approach from other encryption/protection algorithms. It is a virtual machine that can do whatever it wants. Sure, it may be possible to crack it, but the virtual machine and the reverse/decrypt algorithm might be completely different from one title to the next. It would take a significant effort to crack one disc.

As long as I can take my disc, drop it in my player, and have the movie play, I don't care if it has any encryption algorithms or doesn't have them.

If the rumors around are correct. Fox foisted BD+ onto the BD standard and got HP riled up about managed copy onto PCs. I don't believe BD+ was Sony's idea, it came from Fox.

Who's going to use it. Probably only Fox initially. If each Fox movie takes 1 month to crack before they show up on the torrents, I suspect Disney will probably follow and so will Sony.

if a music cd cost $6.99 instead of $12.99, i'm willing to bet many people would just buy a copy instead of downloading and burning to a blank media.

Doesn't matter how cheap something is, people will still download and burn it. I've seen people asking for a torrent to something that costs $3.50.

.... reverse/decrypt algorithm might be completely different from one title to the next.

Correct

except there is one issue. The Private key. Without it makes decryption of the other titles impossible. they must all have the same private key in common or a list of private keys, which if comprimised puts you on square 1 again.