I live in Mexico. Here, piracy is said to be heavily prosecuted - it is not. In most major streets you can see tables with hundreds of bootleg VHS tapes (DVD is still very new, and few people have it). Often, we can find VHS copies of films before they even hit the movie theaters - and we get the movies often only a couple of weeks after they appear in the USA!

Anyway, let's get to the point :)

Attempts to inforce copy protection in the past have never been successful. DVD region-encoding? Most people buy multiregion players, although they are at least 50% more expensive. (BTW, is it true that region 1 DVDs are multregional?) All the mechanisms that appeared to avoid software duplication during the 80s were easily defeated - or the code itself was modified. Although they were very expensive some years ago, almost everybody and their cousin have CD recorders. How long will it take before we see digital cable equipment hacked to ignore copy protection.

Many people will trade a bit of the picture quality and record what they want on older medium (VHS can be ideal for this). I know, modern equipment with no hacks will not record protected programs - but hacks can be pretty trivial, IMHO.

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