It was good that CSS was a lousy scheme, for everybody, including for the DVD producers.

As long as CSS was not broken, I bought neither discs nor drives, because I believe that only naive customers (to not say losers) are willing to buy any kind of information that cannot be protected from the certain eventual destruction due to the decay of its storage medium, by making copies of it on any other kind of storage medium.

After CSS was broken and the tools to read DVDs became available publicly, I have bought several DVD drives during the following years and many hundreds of DVDs.

So the breaking of the CSS was how the DVD industry got my money, and presumably the money of many others. They should have been grateful to the one who did this.

When you "buy" copy-protected information you are not really buying it. You are just renting it until the time when its storage medium will become corrupt, which is certain to happen, sooner or later. (Or until your reader becomes defective and you can no longer buy a replacement, due to obsolescence.)

The copyright laws are stupidly named and frequently stupidly formulated. Making copies not only is not a crime, but it is a fundamental right of the owner of any kind of information, being the only way in which information can be preserved.

Only the distribution of copies to third parties may be criminalized. While most stupid copyright laws claim that even making copies by the owner is a crime, that is not only unjust but it also not enforceable against any careful owner, so the laws are doubly stupid.

You're not the average consumer. The average consumer is less likely to buy a DVD if they can pirate it, not more.

The average consumer won’t pirate it unless it’s easier to obtain the pirated copy than a legit version. They’ll suffer through ads, poor quality, high prices. A good example is music - I’d bet audio piracy is bordering on a rounding error of 0 because of Spotify, Apple Music and YT music. Meanwhile, for video content you need to subscribe to Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Apple TV, and even then you won’t get access to all of the “big” shows. Sky sports and co show that the vast majority of people are willing to pay for the content but when the service and availability suffers they’ll go elsewhere

You massively underestimate how price sensitive the average person is. Stuff like Spotify ended music piracy by driving the cost of music to nearly zero.

Good for you. Good for the guy who sold disks at the flea market too.

DVDs/BRs/etc were always a scam imo, unless it your favorite movie that you will watch repeatedly forever. For most people buying DVDs was just expensive PPV.

As they say, piracy is a service issue.