But I was trying to explain that it was avoidable and DRM "fucked itself up again". I don't disagree with you; I think we just have a different understanding of the term "licensing issues".

There are two different reasons for licensing issues: One are merely technical reasons (the system is somehow broken). The other one is that the system legitimately refuses to work, for example because someone didn't pay the licensing fee. The poster I replied to suggested that the theater or the DRM service had not paid for the license and I was trying to argue that this was not the case, but that the system itself was/is broken.

So what I did was restrict the term "licensing issue" to the meaning "the system is working correctly, but it cannot play the movie because we do not have the right to show it". Maybe this usage is too narrow. Sorry about that! I hope I could clarify what I meant.

No, it is not a licensing problem. I read the German article and it clearly states that everyone paid, but the company providing the final keys (it is a process with several stages) could not produce the correct key. It was due to technical difficulties, not licensing issues.

Here is my non-Google translation of the important part that explains what went wrong technically (sorry for the slightly unidiomatic English; I tried to stay as close to the original as possible so that the text would not become my interpretation of the original):
Apparently, the DRM-keys for the film files were the cause of the problem. The distributor of 20th Century Fox sends the JPEG2000-encoded and AES-128-encrypted movies on external hard drives via courier. After that, the data (in the case of Avatar 150 GByte) needs to be copied to the theater server. Each digital projector/server combination generates a different certificate and transmits it to the DRM service in charge. The DRM service creates an individual key for each movie and sends it back to the theater. The key is always only valid for one copy of the film as well as one projector and can be limited to specific time periods and times of day.

Yesterday (Wednesday), the transmission of the correct keys for the 3D screenings did apparently not work in several cases, though. Theater technicians tried for several hours to decrypt the gigantic pile of data, but apparently the service responsible for the digital distribution of the film, Deluxe, could not provide valid keys yesterday.

Sure. But since this thing only measures an increase or decrease in brainwave activity, it cannot be explained by a simple "We are all different.". That's why the fact caught my interest in the first place.