Both Pirate films cracked before their HD Launch (1 Viewer)

Dated 5/17/2007
AACS Fails Again.

There is confirmation that Both 'Pirates of the Caribbean' films on Blu-ray have already been cracked and are being distributed freely across the Internet.

Blu-ray news


Paul

So I guess Fox won't be releasing Blu-Ray movies now? Ya know, since BD was chosen because of it's security.

Although this was only to be expected. If you know where to look on the net there are HD-DVD's & Blu-ray films regularly ripped & posted. Films are even re-encoded from 1080p transfers down to 720p for reduced file size!! The mind boggles...

No matter what copy protection is introduced someone will always manage to crack it. Unfortunately, it's only going to get worse when blank 50gb Blu-ray and 30gb HD-DVD's become cheaper to purchase than the films themselves.

Give me the original HD-DVD or Blu-ray on my shelf any day

Doing my best to follow all this DRM stuff but I believe the new AACS keys were originally retrieved/cracked from the new Matrix HD DVD release. Once again AACS LA makes a critical security error by putting the same keys on both media types.

BD+ is the additional security and it's not available yet. Till then it's only AACS.

Then I guess Fox won't release any BD titles until BD+ is available.

It's kind of been looking that way for a while, save some day-and-date releases. It only makes sense to release them with the DVD since they'd rather you buy the more expensive BD counterparts over their DVD bretheren I would think.

At least it used to be the pirates were stuck watching their HD movies on their 17" computer monitors, but now that people can watch them on their X Box add-ons hooked up to home theater systems piracy really is becoming a threat.

Threat? Guess I would have to be in their shoes to fully understand. IMO, I think Fox puts their faith in too many paranoid advisors. They definitely have good reason to worry, if they value a Scrooge mentality of squeezing out every cent that's legally possible.

Those that can afford Home theater systems and HD audio/video equipment, niche or not, are going to want the real, original media disc, that has a responsible studio behind it that is answerable for quality control, not a pirated copy.

Warner Bros. knows this, and like Disney was to television in the 50's & 60's, WB will be the early bird that catches the worm.

I agree with the signature statement of shodoug, in another forum: "I think that the only losers in the format war will be those who wait for a clear winner."

Umm, they still are making good money and there are more consumers buying the stuff than d/ling/pirating it.

Sorry but I find the piracy stuff to be outright lame and is just fear mongering to get the masses to actually think it is such a huge issue when reality it isn't.

The problem that most people just TOTALLY ignore is that most who d/l stuff simply have NO DESIRE to buy the product regardless and do so simply because it is there. If you have NO PLANS to buy something then why (in a financial sense) does it matter? Companies too often assume every d/l of something is a lost sale and that annoys me to no end. I know a guy who d/ls a lot of stuff and he simply does not have much cash to buy stuff and most (ie 95%) of the stuff he d/ls is stuff he would not buy even if he had the extra cash to do so. Again, no lost revenue since he wouldn't buy the stuff in the first place. i'd guess the % of piracy that actually results in lost sales is TINY.

It'll be funny when BD+ is implemented and people crack it and people go on and on about that. I am of the opinion all these supposed security enhancements are just a waste of time/money since they all end up cracked and I am then spoonfed a line about how they and piracy are causing the prices of my software to be where it is. Sorry but that is back asswards and BS. Companies will charge us what they do for the simple reason they know they can. If they truly wanted to combat "lost sales" to piracy they'd lower the prices to give those more incentive to buy rather than d/l...but again, the % of that group is most likely tiny so they keep with the higher prices.

My problem is that anyone down loading movies/music/games whatever that they say they would never buy still gets the oppurtunity to enjoy those things without having to pay for them. That in and of itself is unfair to everyone who does pay for them.

Um,

Try living in a country with 98% piracy. It's the well to do who are the biggest purchasers, simply because they can and no one is stopping them.

Think globally.

Well, the movies they chose are sure appropriate. All I can say is ARRRRRR!

So would the headline read "PIRATES PIRATE PIRATES" ?

Napster showed that left unchecked, it becomes a very large problem. It was growing exponentially, and there's really no arguing that with such growth it would never have an impact. Especially since one can point to China and Russia and say "look, this is what happens if Piracy is left unchecked. Eventually, you can't sell a retail disc."

There's also no evidence that these people have "No desire to buy the product", in fact, it's really to the contrary. Why go through the trouble of aquiring something you don't actually care about?

Regardless, there's already legislation going before the U.S. Congress on the topic of domestic piracy. Each time this happens the companies can say "Look, we tried, they bypassed it anyways." and it gives them a little more credibility. I'm guessing following the U.S. elections domestic piracy is going to be a very big issue for congress.

Every reasonable attempt has failed, the only remaining options are physical marks that prevent "Fair Use", or Anti-Piracy laws. One of the two has to happen, otherwise we get global piracy equivalent to China/Russia.

In China, though, it's not a question of downloading. You're talking about "people buying retail discs", just illegitimate ones. Not just DVD-Rs, here, but factory pressed DVDs. The problem is an entirely different one from people getting samples of content for free. (I'm still interested in the question of why, if Napster was so bad for the music companies, their sales are reported to have risen during that period, and fallen since. Correlation isn't causation, but if the effect of sales depression by substitution is greater than the effect of sales enhancement by advertising, one would expect them to have been cut into unless the industry was pushing some very compelling products at that time.) I might possibly download a video from the Internet if I am trying to decide whether to buy it, or if I intend to buy it but can't find a copy, but I certainly wouldn't download it in High Definition. The "have no interest in buying" category, for me, might include wanting to know what something is, or to find out if someting is as bad as it's made out to be. Regardless, it isn't really something I do. Since I don't buy DVDs, I might easily justify downloading all kinds of things with the argument that I wouldn't be buying them anyway, wherefore there is no lost sale — but I don't. In other words, the argument is purely intellectual as far as I am concerned.

No, what Napster showed us was that the then current CD/Music market was woefully outdated and people didn't want to pay $17.99 to listen to one song.

It is still as easy to download music illegally now as it was then, but when you offer a way to purchase the music legally, and it is easy, viola! people will pay for it.

I still can't see this as a threat.
Why would anyone would spend 40-50 hours downloading 50gigs of a movie to watch on a PC when they can buy a perfect hard copy for $25 that day.
Someone who would do that would never buy the movie anyway.

Fios offers a 15 megabit/sec for $50. Works out to around 1.9 megabytes/sec, allowing 50 gigs of material in 7.5 hours. They already have a 30 megabit line as well, but it's prohibitively expensive. Give it 12-24 months and 30 megabit+ will be at $50 and something else will be the ultra-expensive one as tech advances.

The bandwidth isn't a big problem anymore.

As far as the CD market goes, that's the arguement the movie pirates try to use as well. "But the movie market is outdated! We don't want to pay $15 dollars for a disc!"

Nor is it anywhere near as easy as it once was. All of the major websites that offered html/ftp downloads were eliminated shortly after Napster and P2P runs the risk of a civil suit.

Maybe in a perfect magical world where 10 guys who live on your block all have the fastest lines and are all tied in together and have all ripped the movie.

The reality is, you would be lucky to 100kps download speed from a popular torrent, nevermind a niche HD movie.

The piracy issue is currently such a small threat, it kills me that they are actually delaying releases because of it.

I'm sure everyone who owns a Blu-Ray player is ready to jump on the illegal 50gig download of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, therefore, Fox delayed it.
Doesn't make any sense to me.

I'm a little computer savvy and I could easily rip the HD movies I rent, but why would I?
I have a nice av PC setup but it doesn't match my home theater system.

The real issue, and Fox will turn a blind eye or never admit, is their highest possible price point / lowest possible amount of extras on their discs.
Why would I buy a Fox BD when I have the SD with more content?
I'd rather rent it, watch it, and return.
A good example is the new Pirates BDs from Disney. I didn't think a second about buying it (the first BD I have bought in awhile).
Every release should have that kind of care.

Is it though? Instead of looking at it today, what happens down the road? I see nothing stopping it, and it only getting easier to use if unrestricted.

I mean honestly, the new formats were cracked in record time. PC game developers are switching to Consoles because of piracy. I'm running into people left and right who're pirating who are lucky if they can push the power button on a computer. Are they downloading it? No, they're either getting it from someone who did, or buying it at a flea market.

Heck, I just recently had 300 spoiled for me, because of a conversation between an hardcore console gamer, and a 62 year old man who couldn't turn on an IPod if his life depended on it(I watched him try). The console gamer was teasing the 62 year old because he'd "Converted" and "Got the bootleg" to watch instead of going to the theater and paying.

Then there's the 40-something Nurse who walks into work with burned DVD's she picks up at a friends once a week, the 20-something Nurse and her boyfriend who don't have cable because he just downloads everything for them, then there's the 2 20something CNA's who run P2P 24/7 for music/movies, the 4 mid-40's CNA's who shop the fleamarket for Bootleg's weekly, and more.

Then there's the college I attend where I see at least 2 "Cease and Desist" manilla envelopes in students hands each week.

I'm far from convinced this is "Little", or that it would stay "Little". I'm seeing too many instances of people who don't fit the "Pirate gotta collect 'em all" demographic around me.

Sad part was, when I was talking to one of them about my HD-DVD player, his response was "Yeah, I downloaded one the other day. I won't buy a player, I'll just download them and run it to my TV."

Even worse is if you read the tech sites, it's filled with people complaining about the DRM because they feel entitled to pirate. It's really not good when people seem to think they're "Entitled" to it, rather than realizing it's illegal and they shouldn't be doing it much less announcing it to the world.

Maybe other people's experience is different, but what I'm seeing says anything buy "Minor problem" to me.

Ryan,

the question is in those cases are the movie studios and record labels actually losing sales because of this pirating? A movie or CD ripped doesn't necessarily equate to a lost sale.

I know people who download movies and copy from DVDs, they still go to the theatres when there's something they really want to watch and still purchase DVDs of movies they really liked. The movies they download and copy are ones they'd never pay to see - and in the cases they were pleasantly suprised in the movie they'd go and purchase the DVD afterwards.

The point is however many people are downloading movies and music, only a percentage of those downloads result in true lost sales.