How encryption for Cinema Movies works

Even with all of this onerous encryption and DRM, it's not hard to find pirated copies of movies. It makes me think that the sacrifice in ownership rights for the theaters over their equipment isn't worth it.

There is essentially zero piracy from these digital cinema releases. The pirate copies are generally from once it starts digitally streaming on one of the services including PPV, and when pirate copies exist earlier it is almost always someone with a camera in a theatre making a terrible quality screener.

Piracy is inevitable, but in this case their model is much more robust that I would have predicted.

Not sure of the GP's core message there, but I think this is kinda the point: even with all this onerous encryption on the cinema releases, high-quality pirated copies still very quickly make it out.

So basically they have this very secure scheme for getting movies to theaters, but everything else is full of holes. Makes you wonder if all the effort and cost to secure the theater distribution chain is worth it. If you're going to allow playback on devices in "adversarial" hands (streaming, home physical media playback), it's going to be incredibly difficult to restrict copying. Tightening up the one instance where the hardware and people operating it have less incentive to pirate (and more incentive to not pirate, given the risk to their theater business) seems like wasted effort.

Certainly this does make the case of a theater-only-first release nearly impossible to pirate. But there aren't quite as many of those anymore, and all this DRM must be expensive, both in the hardware/software, and in the logistics. I guess they've found it's worth it, but... oof.