My thoughts on copy protection range from "it's not needed" to "waste of my time." I don't understand why electronic content providers feel the need to add copy protection to their products. There hasn't been a copy protection process developed that hasn't been cracked, hacked or broken. 

I can remember back in the old Commodore 64 days there were to copy protection processes that stood out:

1) Bad sectors on disks. This one was a classic. Vendors would purposely damage the floppy disk that held their software. Their program would do a check to see if the disk was damaged before it let you run it. Guess what? Hackers either stripped out the check or told people where to nick their disks.

2) Documentation checks.  This one is stupid and might be going on still. The program would load and ask you to enter a word from the documentation. Most of the time the questions were limited in number, so if you had seen them all you could type them up. If not, you could always copy the documentation. 

This is all relevant since I cannot figure out why people pirate DVD movies these days. Software is sometimes over priced for the value, so I can see why someone would want to steal it. The music industry is broken when it comes to ownership rights and access, so I can why someone would steal it. Movies, though? I don't get it. 

Movies typically cost 10-100 million dollars to create, but they are sold for as low as $5.00. You can find streaming movies for a small fee at Netflix and Hulu. It's amazing to me that people would still pirate movies. 

I guess it comes down to a few things:

1) Perception of value: Maybe people don't think X amount is worth it for a movie. I mean, heck, the movie is shown on cable for free. 

2) Need it now: Oh my gosh, I need to see it right now. I cannot wait for the DVD. I cannot wait for it to come on cable. I need it now. 

3) Availability: This sucks that the movie isn't out in the US yet.

4) No ethics: I don't care if it's stealing. They don't need my money. 

Why would someone spend hours downloading something using bittorren? Why would they risk prosecution? Why not buy that DVD for $10 at WalMart?