I got this from a friend in an email. Apparently the movie industry has DRM so good not even they can view the films encoded with it !
The preview of the film avatar apparently failed on Wednesday, in some 3D theaters. As visitors of the Cinestar chain in Eisenhuettenstadt, Mainz, Garbsen and the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, said that they were told before the movie began , that unfortunately the 3D digital copy of the film could not be decoded, therefore, the film could not be shown. One theater offered to show the 2D version that existed on analog film.
The problem was the DRM keys for the digital movie files. The stripes are encoded in JPEG2000 from 20th Century Fox and delivered by courier on external hard drives that are AES128 encrypted. At the cinema, the data must be copied (in the case of Avatar over 150 gigabytes) to the cinema server. Each digital projector has a server-generated combination of its own certificate and transmits it to the appropriate DRM service provider created for each film and a unique key is returned to the cinema. The key is only valid for that print and projector and can be limited to certain periods and times.
Cinema technicians tried for several hours, but the huge mountain of information was too big to decipher, by the time they finished transferring the film and fixing the DRM issues the time for the keys were no longer valid.
Some blogs say hundreds of theaters were affected . Neither 20th Century Fox nor the digital distribution service Deluxe Digital were willing to make a statement . A spokeswoman for the Cinestar chain said that they are still working to verify the full extent and will publish information shortly, together with an official announcement.
Because it's breach of contract.How is paying for something and not getting it not a theft.