An article (available to subscribers only, sorry) in the September issue of Scientific American, talking about HD-DVD and Blu-Ray encryption being cracked, includes the following quote:
Noting the futility of access-control measures for digital material — even Microsoft security engineers have acknowledged this problem in a 2002 analysis popularly called the Darknet Report — content providers seem to be considering other approaches. At the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, Disney chief executive Robert Iger remarked that "the best way to combat piracy is to bring content to market on a well-timed, well-priced basis," which would make media piracy less lucrative, if not irrelevant. [...]
It must have been ten years ago that I read an interview with an Eastern European professional media pirate who said, as best I recall the comment:
"There is only one thing the [entertainment] industry can do that would put me out of business, and that is to start charging a fair price for their products. But they'll never do it."
The entertainment industry finally gave up fighting DeCSS, but they thought they had everything locked up with the AACS content-protection system on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs. Now they're finding out that crackers can break new AACS codes faster than they can change the codes, and ten years after that interview, the light is finally beginning to dawn. Perhaps we may yet see a future without AACS or regional coding.