Perilocity

DRM: The Secret that Can't be Kept

Cory Doctorow on why DRM can never work:

It's great for email, but it can never work for movies, TV shows or music, because in the case of "copy protection" the receiver is also the person that the system is meant to guard itself against.

Say I sell you an encrypted DVD: the encryption on the DVD is supposed to stop you (the DVD's owner) from copying it. In order to do that, it tries to stop you from decrypting the DVD.

Except it has to let you decrypt the DVD some of the time. If you can't decrypt the DVD, you can't watch it. If you can't watch it, you won't buy it. So your DVD player is entrusted with the keys necessary to decrypt the DVD, and the film's creator must trust that your DVD player is so well-designed that no one will ever be able to work out the key.

— Pushing the impossible, by Cory Doctorow, Guardian Unlimited, Tuesday September 4 2007

So as long as you can keep a secret from yourself, DRM will work....

-jsq

Lucas Speaks

It's an odd experience to have Steven Spielberg [er, I meant George Lucas] validate a speculation I made only a few weeks ago:

"Those movies can't make their money back anymore," he explained. "In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theatres will be indie movies. I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15m."

Lucas: "Blockbuster days are numbered" by Miriam Zendle, Digital Spy, Monday, March 6 2006, 16:43 UTC

A few weeks ago I compared Hollywood comedies to Restoration spectacular plays and wrote:

Hollywood will either adapt eventually to some form of production that doesn't involve ever-higher costs for ever-larger blockbusters, or people will stop buying them and Hollywood will have to adapt.

Restoration Blockbusters, Perilocity, February 04, 2006