Hollywood has formed a new company called Movielabs to research
anti-piracy technologies. Six of the big boys — Walt Disney,
Paramount, Sony, Warner Brothers, Universal and 20th Century Fox — are
pooling $30 million to get things started. You can read more in this BBC article

Personally,
it sounds like a decent idea. At least they’re learning a thing or two
from the music industry. Of course, I’d imagine nobody expects it to
catch all piracy, but it will keep the casual folks away — like one of
my friends, who rents DVDs like crazy and copies them with AnyDVD for
his personal collection.

I don’t think it’s going to help one of
the biggest problems: Mainstream piracy in Southeast Asia. When I was
in Ho Chi Minh City, there were very few legitimate places to buy DVDs.
Pirated DVDs were $1 a disc.

Even in Bangkok, where the Thai
government has strict laws against anti-piracy and legitimate DVDs are
rather cheap, piracy was rampant. In one popular technology "mall" I
visited, half of the stores were empty places with a couple employees,
a desk, and a xeroxed catalog. You look through it, place your order,
then come back in about an hour after they retrieve  your DVDs
from some unmarked van in the parking lot. It was comical. As the
police patrolled the mall, these shops would close up in front of them
and reopen behind them.

And why wouldn’t they? They’re as hungry
for entertainment and luxury as we are, but when your average income is
less than $1,000 a year, who can afford $20 for a DVD? It seems to me
that what is needed is more SOCIAL engineering than technological.
That’s why iTunes is so successful — it’s easy, reasonable, and
actually quite fun to use. You can still easily convert your purchased
tunes into unprotected MP3 if you want to, but my guess is that your
average person doesn’t bother.