AACS, DRM and Hollywood
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The latest blow-up over efforts by AACS LA, the group that supplies anti-copying technology for Hollywood’s high-definition movie discs, to suppress information about how to circumvent that technology reflects how much the debate over rights management has become a religious war. The sides are highly polarized, with Hollywood insisting that DRM is an essential element of its home video releases and movie hackers arguing that consumers are being treated like criminals. But as the weaknesses in AACS mount -- I’m particularly intrigued by the conversion of the XBox HD DVD drive into a machine that converts high-def movie discs into unlocked movie files -- it makes me wonder what happens to the rental market.
One of the reasons that studios put anti-copying technology onto home video releases is that it makes it harder for people to copy the movies they rent. Without that deterrence, there would be no reason (other than compunction) for movie buffs to buy a DVD -- they’d just rent (or borrow) and copy them. The studios’ profit margins are much higher on the DVDs they sell than on the ones that Blockbuster or Netflix rents, but given the ‘first sale doctrine,’ the only way to stop a disc from being rented out is to not produce it in the first place. In other words, simply selling a DVD version of a movie guarantees that it will be available for rental.
On the other hand, even a broken DRM can be enough to, as studio execs like to say, ‘keep honest people honest.’ That’s largely been the case with conventional DVDs, which continue to rack up more than $16 billion in North American sales despite the fact that their Content Scramble System was hacked long ago. Of course, Hollywood fought hard to keep mainstream retailers from carrying programs that could circumvent CSS and make usable copies of their DVDs....
The skirmishing between hackers and studios has just begun, so it’s way too early for AACS’ troubles to change Hollywood’s attitude toward home video. Even if AACS is thoroughly defeated, the Blu-ray format offers additional layers of copy protection that have yet to be implemented. Still, I wonder if the results so far suggest a premature death for the high-def disc formats. Downloadable movies and high-def video on demand can be protected in ways that discs can’t. It’s worth wondering which of these things will be more common in U.S. living rooms two years from now: HD-capable set-top boxes linked to high-def movie services (say, from their cable or satellite TV provider), or HD DVD and Blu-ray players.