Chinese Pirates Crack Blu-Ray DRM

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Piracy of movies isn't anything new. Its been happening globally for years. However, China has a reputation for pirating movies and exporting them internationally. They did it with DVDs, and now Chinese pirates have taken up selling Blu-Ray 'Mini-mes'.

The pirates have cracked the DRM encryption in the Blu-ray disks, then re-encode the files in an HD format which has a lower quality than actual Blu-Ray, but is still looming somewhere above a DVD format. However, because the file type has been re-encoded after being ripped off the Blu-ray disk, its smaller and can fit on a traditional DVD disk, making them much cheaper to mass produce. These disks have been outfitted with fake cases and holograms to appear legit and are sold to unsuspecting customers. Although the people who buy these movies are aware that they are pirated copies, and therefore illegal, what they don't know is that they aren't getting the Blu-ray quality they think they're paying a whopping $7 for. Real Blu-rays are sold at prices of $30 upwards.

Blu-ray has already faced serious problems with a failing economy and the extremely pricey movies and equipment in which to play them. Blu-ray players and PS3s are all very expensive machines, and the media that they play is equally as expensive. These machines are so pricey because they cost a lot of money to make, and it costs a lot of money to make Blu-ray disks because of the vaster memory space than a simple DVD. Because of these factors, most movie customers are sticking with the old school DVDs and DVDplayers because they aren't so taxing on customers' bank accounts.

The movie industry is very worried at this point, especially with most of the people buying these pirated movies being fooled by the lower quality of the movie. More people would spring at the chance to buy a pirated film that is less than half the store price, but again, are completely oblivious that they aren't getting everything that they thought they were buying.

This threat to the movie industry is most likely growing, especially from prior knowledge based on what we've seen from China in the past. Chinese pirates will jump at the chance to enterprise, no matter what the product is.

Actually, there was a raid on a warehouse involved in the fake Blu-ray movies. There were over 800 disks dressed to look real. This was the first seizure of those types of disks in China, but I'm sure that its only a small part of the industry that is making them.