eWeek: Cryptography Guru Paul Kocher Speaks Out

Ian Grigg iang at systemics.com
Thu May 1 12:24:39 EDT 2003


> ...  This would seem to suggest that raising the
> level of investment and technical sophistication required beyond mere
> triviality is, in fact, the correct target to shoot for, from the
> studios' point of view; and that Kocher is probably really doing a
> reasonable job at that with his proposal.

No, the point with print is that the cost of each
additional print is very high.  In fact, the cost
of each additional copied print may be higher than
the bribe ...

Whereas, once Kocher's high fixed cost first digital
stolen copy is made, subsequent clean digital copies
are (more or less) free (a number that is as low as
GB and bandwidth costs permit).

It seems that you need five players.  Then a whole
bunch of hacking or processing.  And that gets you
one movie.  Probably, the cost of the 5 players is
less than the cracking cost of the one movie, so
what we have achieved is a shift to per-movie fixed
costs, something that Hollywood did not have with
the DVD system.

(Digital copies still remain near-free ... for that
one movie.)

So, if there is a high cracking barrier to each movie,
one can guess that if any movies get cracked, it will
be the big budget ones;  the 10 or so 'big' movies of
the year.

As a postscript, it's almost certain that this level
of analysis has already been done.  There will be
some document sitting somewhere which states that
the fixed cost per movie cracked is X.  And Paul K
will have got the studios to sign off on that number.

-- 
iang

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