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Post-Hacked DVD: Where to Go? 336

Posted by Hemos from the where-do-we-go-now dept.
Bolero writes "Wired News has an article on the future of DVD after the CSS hack. It is an interesting read, and focuses on why the crackers (who Wired describes as Linux users) did what they did. " So, I'm sure you all have opinions - what's going to happen now?
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Post-Hacked DVD: Where to Go? More

Post-Hacked DVD: Where to Go?

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  • VHS tapes have *no* copy protection

    Not true. VHS tapes can (and do) have Macrovision copy protection, which prevents casual copying from one VHS machine to another.
  • My brother is a Beta fan, and he's noted that Macrovision is keyed to the way VHS works (VHS and Beta encode video differently). Apparently, older VHS machines [roughly 1978-1985, though a few newer machines can do it] are immune to Macrovision as well.

    If you're in the market for a Beta deck, Sony does still make them, but there's only one model available (at least, if you don't want to drop at least 4 figures on professional Betacam gear, which many TV stations and production houses use) and it's kinda bare-bones (I think it has Super Beta and hi-fi capability though). You may also want to check out the auction sites like eBay; older Beta and VHS gear sell there all the time. A few stores also still stock L-750 Beta tapes (in Manassas, Target is the place to find them, but of course, your mileage may vary).

    -lee
  • How does all this fall out when related to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [loc.gov]?

    Specifically, the part which makes code-cracking illegal [loc.gov]?

    There's a lot of language in there about how the bill does NOT reduce fair-use rights, and the penalties section [loc.gov] talks only about code-cracking for "commercial advantage or private financial gain"

    Has anyone seen good discussions an all of this?

  • The truth which the various media industries (music, film, games, etc) must someday come to face is that piracy is inevitable. It's not that they can't invest millions of dollars in ever superior security technology, but simply that hackers and crackers will relish the challenge.

    When they realize this truth, they will have a choice: Either they can ignore the market presented by computer users and the Internet, that very market which is coming to the center of the economy, and lose billions of dollars in return for the paltry millions they save from piracy, or they can continue to exploit this market with the understanding that piracy will be with us forever.

    This is not to say the media industries will stop fighting piracy, whether it be by investing in technology or investing in lobbyists. Ironically, absolute freedom, the very thing which gives the Internet life as a community and a large driving factor in its growth, is the one thing these companies cannot tolerate.
  • You have a secret chip, only available from a few foundries, which decrypts and decompresses. The disadvantage is that you have to handle the uncompressed data stream after that, which is very wasteful. The advantage is that if someone wants to rip it off they have to rip off the decompressed version. They can't burn a new DVD with that so they have to compress first. That is difficult and lossy, and so there's a limit to how often it happens (like analogue tapes), and there is a bonus for paying for a genuine copy, you get better quality.

    Of course hardware will be cracked eventually, but it's much much harder. Markus Kuhn did some fun stuff on that at Cambridge, and people working on smart cards have headaches about it. But it looks a lot more tenable than a software solution which is just going to get cracked again in no time.

    Best socket those chips, since it's going to get cracked sooner or later anyway.

  • DVD has been broken because it became a high profile target - a large number of people wanted to break the DVD security system [including people running Linux who want an Open Source player].

    A few weeks ago I watched a program on car security, and the statement on that which caught my attention was that no car was invulnerable, but better security took longer to defeat.

    A lot of crypto algorithms that were previously though to be invulnerable are falling due to either the advance of technology or new methods of breaking such algorithms.

    I believe even if a new encryption method is introduced, the scrutiny will be so intense that it will be cracked within a couple of years.

  • "One more thing - many authors (and publishers) hate libraries"
    Those who hate libraries absolutely deserve to be ripped off.
  • DeCSS and mp3 are just steps in the evolution of media. The existant distribution organizations don't fear piracy, they fear obsolecence. Mp3 puts the power of distribution in the hands of the artist, should they choose to exercise it, and can remove Columbia/Sony and Time/Warner from the gravy train of artistic exploitation. Open production and independent distribution of movies, the ability to create inexpensive physical media formats attacks the studios' stranglehold on production, threatens their ability to prostitute those artists who create. They should fear digital media, for it is through these various channels that their exploitative, manipulative relationship with their customers will be overthrown by artists who strive for a more individualistic, human connection with their audience. Musicians and actors don't perform for money only; they perform because they can, they enjoy the act. And their audiences enjoy rewarding them for it. And all these advancements enable, once society has matured enough to accept it, is more efficient exchange between these two groups.
  • Your totally missing the point. I'm saying that if they had provided a way to play movies on DVD we wouldn't have put so much energy into trying to crack it. Sure someday it probably would have happen. But it provided a motivation.

  • Either way, I still like the movies. Yeah, even Phantom Menace. Yes, I do. If you don't, bite me.

    Okay. *CHOMP*

    ;-)

  • One of my favorite comments a while back regarding tape sales was something to the effect of "Look at how many cassettes are being sold today... You can't tell me they're all being used for dictation." Unfortunately I can't attribute the initiator of that quote, but I think it's funny as hell when people start talking about how CD-R and DVD-R will ruinsales of copyrighted goods. Also, who is to say that someone might come up with a bit-by-bit copying of a DVD. Where's their encryption then?
  • Any system that depends on 'tamper-resistant software' running in an unprotected machine is vulnerable, no matter how hard you protect the key. The system was doomed, only waiting for the enterprising individual to break it, and then the Real people saved this individual all the trouble. I think it was fairly considerate.

    But wait, there's more....I question whether their business model allows for good security at all. A real secure system might introduce too much extra cost.

    -tpr
  • "
    Does this mean that I can mirror Slashdot, but without those pesky ads?
    "

    Of course you can. It's pretty easy to do. A number of people already do it using internet junk buster, which in essence mirrors slashdot locally without the ads.

    Could you then redistribute it to the world? Easily. There's no way short of physical force they can stop you. (calling in lawyers counts as threat of physical force, since after the lawyers come the cops). If you find a way to accomplish this anonymously, slashdot can't do anything.

    "
    IP isn't forfeited in theory or in actuality just because someone has a copy of it. I can hold a Coke can in my hand, but I could be sued if I made my own Coke
    can. I can copy a DVD and distribute it to my friends, but I could be sued (or put in jail) for theft of intellectual property.
    "

    Of course, if you had a replicator, you could make a coke clone, exactly like coke, and market it as something else entirely. When chemical analyzers get sufficiently good, this might actually happen. Imagine if you will that walmart soda tasted _exactly_ like coke, instead of like the crappy generic soda it is. Would you pay the extra 500% premium for generic coke? (last time i checked walmart soda was 10c vs coke at 50c).

    Intellectual property is going to become very very difficult to protect for the kind of financial gain the property owners currently expect. Realistically, they need to find better ways of generating income (live performance) if they want to survive. They are certainly welcome to try, it's just going to be hard, and they'd be better off focusing their attention on other opportunities.
  • People have been pirating movies for a long time on video cassette. Now granted I'm young and can't remember a time when there weren't recordable video cassettes, but I don't remember a huge uproar about people being able to copy movies from one tape to another.

    Wow, you are young. Ok sonny, sit right down and you'll hear a tale of how we were one supreme court justice away from not having VCRs at all.

    Universal sued Sony (inventors of the Betamax) because they thought that the ability for people to record movies off of broadcast television would violate their copyrights. By one vote, the supreme court held that even though such illegal acitivities were possible, the machines themselves could not be outlawed because they had legal uses as well. (Hope they'll take the same stance on encryption software when the time comes!)

    So with legal video copying machines out there, there was a lot of concern over piracy. But the solution was not a technical one. Even though Macrovision copy-protection was and still is widely used, it is easy enough to defeat. You can buy "stabilizer" devices for $20 today, and even way back them you could buy kits or plans to build it yourself. No big deal. What brought piracy under control was the fact that they dropped the price of a movie on video tape from an average of $70-$100 down to $10-$20. Because at that price point, it's not worth it for most regular folks to pirate a movie instead of just buying it. Plus the fact that - surprise,surprise - most people don't want to break the law. Of course there are exceptions, but they are exceptions. (!) And now, in hindsight, Universal's case appears insane. The industry they were afraid would be destroyed by home video is now bigger than ever, because of home video.

    As has been said often in this forum, copy machines didn't destroy print publishing. Audio tape and CD-R didn't destroy the record industry. Video tape didn't destroy the movie industry. And neither will copyable DVDs.

    This whole hullaballoo is simply the product of big company suits who are so short-sightedly greedy that they've turned into paranoids with their heads up their asses.

  • I don't think the movie studios are worried that you'll copy your friend's DVD instead of buying a legal copy. I don't even think they care that much if you put the entire movie up on your ftp site, unlike the RIAA.

    What they are worried about, however, are the factories in Asia that now have the ability to produce millions of identical copies of big-budget DVDs. This will definitely make a dent in the DVD business... In a few months, a lot of DVD mail-order joints will probably be full of pirated merchandise. It's the exact same product, only cheaper... who could resist?

    I'm really worried about this. While I wholeheartedly support efforts to reverse-engineer proprietary technology, I think maybe we should take a break from cracking DVDs for a moment, and instead try to come up with a way for the movie industry to regain their control over DVDs... because if they don't have control, they're just not going to make them.
  • Will Real or Xing be financially responsible for damaged "due to lost revenue from piracy"?

    That would be interesting to see the DVD people go after them.

  • nah (Score:2)

    by mcc ( 14761 )
    it would have happened anyway. The fact that CSS is cruddy would not have been changed by linux players for DVD being available.

    The difference, though, is that CSS would have been cracked later and for different purposes. Meaning the people cracking css would have done it for the purpose of doing illegal things, not for the purpose of using dvd players they paid money for in a linux environment. Meaning that the hackers in question would not have been able to take the moral high ground, and the companies would have actually been able to complain about illegal acts without sounding hypocritical and stupid. The companies just hurt themselves.

    On the other hand, let's think about this a little more. Linux hackers are likely to be promoters of freedom of information, not people making illegal copies. If linux dvd had been available, would the dvd hackers have been someone like MoRE, a small group of brilliant hackers doing it for glory and freedom of information who come out looking like heroes? More likely it would have been a group of people in the pay of a DVD piracy syndicate in a third world country. Such people would not have been likely to even let the outside world know they'd broken CSS encryption-- they'd have just pirated DVDs without anyone knowing what was happening. (it's possible this has already happened!..but not very likely)

    On the third hand, what's the likelyhood they could have gotten away with a linux dvd player that wasn't open source and free in every sense of the word? If a free player existed, how difficult could it have possibly been to turn it into a vehicle for software piracy?

    Lets face it-- copy protection is a joke. All it does, and all it will ever do is hurt or annoy or otherwise limit people who want to use the software for purposes that ought to be OK.
    OK now can we go back to "css" being html style sheets?

    -mcc-baka
    INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
  • As much as I am a fan of fair use, it has already been eroded by the latest revisions to the copyright act which make it illegal (in the US) to defeat encryption of digital data. Since the fair use concept was enshrined in Copyright Law to begin with, it can be changed by a simple act of Congress.
  • The reason that I do not plan to buy a DVD player before Christmas is the technical problems that have not been ironed out with the format. There are just too many complaints of DVD's that don't play properly - lip sync is off, or skipping, or certain discs won't play in certain recorders.

    The explination that I have heard is that the standards are murky in a lot of areas, and the interpitation is giving rise to incompatability.

    I am sure that this will be worked out in the next few months. But until it is, I'm keeping my money in my pocket.


  • It might interest you to know that in China, the following series of events occured with Jurassic Park:

    1. A print of the movie was smuggled out of a theatre.

    2. The print was used to create a laser disc verion of the movie.

    3. Thousands of pirate tapes were created from this pirated laser disk version, and sold the way pirate goods normally are.

    The point? The block stopped you from copying the tape but not the hard core pirates. Hmm, as to getting around the block, I assume there are ways to do it (as there are for Nintendo games, eg z64 copy machine for Nintendo 64 games [z64.com] .) I don't know how but if you check the Internet you may find one (with the disclamer "for personal use only in making backup copies of legally obtained tapes," sort of like the way loaded dice always have the disclamer "for amusement purposes only." : )

  • I really object to the implied tone that the only use for DVD-R drives is to pirate DVDs. I've got a CD-R drive and I've never pirated a CD in my life, the one (and only) time I've used it to burn an audio CD was from some public domain sources.

    Restricting technology because some pirates might use it is just plain silly.

  • First, as I'm sure your aware, Lucas has embraced DVD whereas Spielberg (last time I checked) had not. Spielberg may have no choice at this point. Second, Lucas has stated many times that they want to release all the Star Wars movies at once (basically 2005) in a boxed set with all the goodies on them. I really doubt the ability to copy them will have any effect on Lucas' decision.

    BTW, I stood in line with some people for 2-3 days. We had a good time. It was a lot of fun and I plan on doing it for Ep II and III. I didn't dress up, but I plan to for the next ones.
  • Do you we know they were linux users or are we now facing the old stereotyping... and all hackers now are *obviously* linux users...

  • DVD 2 (Score:2)

    by heroine ( 1220 )
    The EEs in the big companies are going to create DVD-2, utilizing a 1024 bit encryption standard incompatible with existing DVD players and impossible to crack. The problem is that our college crackers are breaking things that engineers create but they aren't creating anything themselves. The only way to solve the intellectual property wars is to create a new format to begin with instead of breaking into what other engineers create.
  • I personally think that this could damage the companies profits in the long run,but WTH Im a consumer so... CRACK on CRACKERS!! Wha HOOO!!!
  • It strikes me that

    1) DVD was intended as computer media from the start, rendering it pretty much completely insecurable. (Software - or more specifically, software-based DVD players - can be cracked. Even if the folks that did it first hadn't gotten lucky, even if the encryption didn't suck, it would have happened eventually.)

    2) The developers of the DVD medium and the copyright holders of the DVD movies knew this.

    3) The developers and copyright holders decided to use a really lame 40-bit-key encryption system that would get in everyone's way without protecting anything. A system that would have been laughed at in 1970.

    So, now, the copyright holders can claim that a pirate not only broke copyright laws, but that said pirate must have engaged in questionably legal reverse-engineering activity to make the copy possible. If the DeCSS system is patented, the studios can claim patent infringement.

    It's just one little thing the big-dollar copyright holders are doing to assemble a group of very special laws to protect their wallets.
  • If the industry had simply given the linux community a way to play DVDs all of this may have been avoided. The movie industry has only theirself to blame, and punishing their consumers for it is not the way to go.
  • a few possibilities:

    1] Recall Everything - Not very likely considering the sales that are already out and stuff. It would be really bad and very expensive for the companies. They would recall everything, redo the encoding and resell?

    2] DVD-II -screw everything and start with a new Encoding Standard, make everyone get new DVD Players. Then its Class Action Lawsuit Oh-Rama!

    3] New Addon Chip and New Series of DVDs --> Probably in my opinion the most likley option, give everyone who has a DVD an upgrade chip and it in new encoding schemes and encode the new DVDs to such new scheme. So that all new DVDs will need the new chip/scheme therefore not work with the old ones.


    Note: 1st useful intelligent Post!!!!!
  • Absolutly Right... If lucas is so much of a tight ass about his movie than the hell with him. I personally saw it 4 times and I am not a typical "star wars" fanatic. So I figure lucas has at least $12 of my money already. The other issue with this whole DVD copying thing is the same with software... Personally if I use a piece of software that I deem to be an everyday application (VMware) you purchase it. The same holds true with DVD... You make the choice to pay for the movie because you like it and the developer or producer deserves the money for making such a great product. For that reason the DVD industry shouldn't do anything to stop the DVD burning... It not efficient... and most people 99.9% will pay for the darn thing anyway. And about the bootlegs of Episode 1 lucas is pissed about... If he would just release the damn thing on DVD he would have $25 more of my money... bootleg or not... So basically, George Lucas needs to make the next to episodes, die, and goto hell.
  • According to the article, all software DVD players except Xing has their key encrypted in software. Even if the key is encrypted during compile time, won't it be decrypted during run time? Can somebody please explain this tit-bit for me?

    TQ.

    Hasdi

  • The whole thing reminds me of the horrible copy protection schemes for games back in the day. The code wheels, disks with a bad sector, etc. All it does is annoy the paying customers, the pirates broke thru all that shit and disabled it. Same thing here.

    I really think copy protection is self-defeating. DVD players have Macrovision copy protection (which the disk can turn on or not), which unfortunately causes small but definitely noticeable blue streaks to appear on the left side of the screen. This annoyed me (a paying customer) to no end, so I bought a device that defeats Macrovision.

    I probably wouldn't have bothered if it weren't for the blue streaks. I wasn't really that interested in copying tapes, but hey, now that I bought that device.. heh.

    In my case and in others, the "copy protection" serves no real purpose other than to degrade the quality of the product. The harder they try to protect something, the harder people are going to try to defeat that protection.

  • For what it is worth, the regional/anti copy coding on a playstation game is just some data written to a part of the original CD that CD burners cannot write. (I'm not sure, possibly it cannot be read in a conventional rom drive either, doesn't matter anyway) Well, most burners can't, some can, with suitable mods, but they are few and far between, mostly old SCSI devices with altered firmware, I've never personally seen one. Anyway, all the 'hidden' track holds is, IIRC, a single ascii charachter indicating region, which may or may not be repeated, either way, it doesn't matter much. If the playstation gets this charachter, and it matches it's region, it is a happy bunny, and will play your game. If not, it sits there catatonic. Now, for some reason best known to Sony, this 'authentication' data is clocked along it's own serial line. A line that does nothing else. If the device at the end of the line gets the right data clocked to it, it is happy. Think about that for a moment. Not very clever, Sony. So, your $15 mod chip is an absolute bottom of the line Microchip PIC, (12C508 or 12C509 for those technically inclined) which uses one input to pull the serial line low on one side of j-random buffer, and an output line to clock out all the possible correct country codes, regardless of what comes in. They can be internally clocked against the PIC's oscilator, or externally by the Playstation. The playstation's authentication mechanism is then so fooled, it will try to play belly button fluff if you give it the chance. Thoroughly lobotomised. I know all this because I managed to lash up a PIC to do this for my flatmates little brother. It is a doddle if you have a PIC programmer and a couple of spare pics lying about. As regards the commercial modchips, they are just what I described with nice clean code and the chip identification scrubbed off. The PICs themselves cost about $1 in small quantities, and take about a squillisecond to blow. A nice little earner, I'd say! Mark you, why anyone would want to play a playstation game in the first place is beyond me. :) Dermot Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than open your mouth and prove it. C. M. Conner.
  • Actualy, while at uni, my friends and I did something like that: we pooled our money (over $70AUD I think) together to get a game (Eye of the Beholder 2) and shared copies. Because I put in the extra cash (it didn't divide evenly), I got to keep the originals, which are now sitting on a cd I burned a couple of years ago. The photocopiers at that uni were probably used more for copying game manuals (for those pesky copy protection quizes) than actual school stuff. Piracy (and virii) was rampant there.
  • The movie industry will continue to release DVD's. Why? For the same reason that they continued to release VHS tapes after people found they could hook up two VCR's together and make copies of the movie. Just because DVD can now be copied doesn't make it a less valid method of distribution. People still buy VHS tapes, and CD music, and playstation games, and what else has copy protection been skipped on?? People will continue to buy DVD movies. This changes nothing.
  • Absolutly Right... If lucas is so much of a tight ass about his movie than the hell with him. I personally saw it 4 times and I am not a typical "star wars" fanatic. So I figure lucas has at least $12 of my money already. The other issue with this whole DVD copying thing is the same with software... Personally if I use a piece of software that I deem to be an everyday application (VMware) you purchase it. The same holds true with DVD... You make the choice to pay for the movie because you like it and the developer or producer deserves the money for making such a great product. For that reason the DVD industry shouldn't do anything to stop the DVD burning... It not efficient... and most people 99.9% will pay for the darn thing anyway. And about the bootlegs of Episode 1 lucas is pissed about... If he would just release the damn thing on DVD he would have $25 more of my money... bootleg or not... So basically, George Lucas needs to make the next two episodes, die, and goto hell.
  • A bunch of ex-Divx engineers and I are laughing our butts off now. Everyone in the industry knew that CSS as lousy security and that sooner or later someone would take the time to break it. Divx had real security which was and still is unbroken. Now that CSS is meaningless, the studio's just may decide to withhold their valuable digital content until much later that VHS day-and-date release. If that happens, DVD will become the laserdisc of the 90's (or maybe 00's). I think all you hate mongering Divx bashers need to bow toward Richmond and pray to the deceased spirit of Divx that the studios don't withhold content because of poor security.
  • OK, so we've got a nice new format, but now all of a sudden it's insecure. So now people are afraid that people won't put out DVDs? What's the alternative? The oh-so-secure VHS? The now-defunct LD? VHS has been the standard of choice among most movie buyers for years, and most VHS tapes have no security whatsoever. Has this stopped the industry from releasing VHS tapes? I just don't understand all the concern with dvd and security. Everything becomes insecure eventually, if this hadn't been cracked through what was basically luck now, the fairly weak encryption probably still would've been cracked later. There will always be a market for the real thing, despite pirated material, just like there's still a market for cds right now despite mp3s. And I still think we're a *bit* off from the point where people are going to routinely download 9gig dvds off the net. Sure, people can convert them to other formats, but doesn't that defeat the point of having a dvd in the first place?

    In closing, I don't see how this changes *anything* in reality. Piracy has always existed. If this slows industry acceptance, it'd just be completely silly. Fortunately, I don't think that's going to happen...I think we're past the point where DVD's gonna be so easily killed. Let's hope, anyway.
  • Well, first off, why do people feel the need to sue for every little thing ?? It's truly sad. I'm sure everyone has bought something that didn't make it.

    But I paid $300 for my player, and if within a couple of years there will no longer be any titles released for my player DUE TO THEIR INCOMPETENCE, why should I suffer for it?

    Even DIVX buyers (who arguably should have known better) got back the $100 difference between their player and the typical market price for a normal DVD player.
  • I can't believe this conversation is so US centric... DVDs are ONLY cheap in US or UK. They cost over 100 bucks in malaysia and only the wealthy get them. The thing about the music and movie and software industry is they consistently refuse to come up with "Asian editions" like they do with books. Because of this, Win95 costs about 500 bucks, so does Office, etc. That's why piracy is so rampant in Asia. Fortunately, I use Linux :)

    andrew
  • I assume there is a huge witch hunt going on amongst those with big dollars at stake here.

    Given that the crypto was only 40 bit, it was inevitable it would be cracked. Sooner rather than later. Why was it 40 bit. I assume this is due to the US government's export laws which are designed to ensure that the NSA can spy on whomever they please.

    These laws are costing American companies a lot of money!

    The other lesson from this is the lameness of almost all commercial security software. Security by obscurity does not work.
  • It's absolutely possible to make a disk without the region codes - they are a side product of the encryption. Simply don't encrypt the movie, and it will play wherever. I know some people may not like this solution, but the encryption is, and always will be, a joke anyway.

    The wired article mentions that they are considering upgrading the encryption format on DVD's to make them more secure. I think this is completely pointless. All it will do is create a short window of time before the encryption is cracked again. In order to make the decryption fast enough for playback in real time, you are, by definition, making it crackable in an equally reasonable amount of time. This is especially true because of the constantly increasing speed of computers.

    Think of it this way - for satellite communications, we commonly use frequencies around the 20Ghz range. Based on the continuous miniturization of chips, and improvement of semiconductors, we should be able to lock a microprocessor to these types of frequencies. It may take 10 or 20 years to get to that point (if this society doesn't self destruct by then) but we should eventually have computers that are this insanely fast.

    My point is, that you can't make a player that is fast enough to decrypt something in real time, and make that same data very hard to crack. So it's really just a pointless race of changing standards way too often just to protect the greed of the people producing movies.

    I say - just leave it the way it is. And maybe even make the later released foreign versions completely unencrypted. I know the IP "owners" may not be fond of this, but they are fighting a pointless battle.
  • 2] DVD-II -screw everything and start with a new Encoding Standard, make everyone get new DVD Players. Then its Class Action Lawsuit Oh-Rama!

    Let's not forget that this new standard could be cracked too. What are we going to have, complete backward incompatibility every couple of years?
    DVD players aren't computers! :P
  • You completely forgot several important factors such as compression, color bit depth and so on.

    Current TV is sampled at about 1000x1024x24. All you need is another layer or a two sided player or a slightly better compression scheme to get 1600 x 1200 x 24.

    DVD can handle this easily.
  • Because the movie companies want to reuse the expensive film stock.

    Also, I suppose, they have to get the movies by forgin censors/ratings people, which may require re-editing the flick. This would mean that they cant reuse the stock though...

    Incedently, movies sometimes are not "done" until realy, realy, close to the premier date. Star Wars was in post production 72 hours before it was in theates. It takes a long time to copy film.

  • This is not entirely true, for at least two reasons:
    Commercial Piracy is dealt with by diferent means, you can target either the pirate or at least some distributor with lawsuits. This makes sense since you can target few people and can expect that taking one out has some effect.

    With consumers burning/distributing copies the problem is, that if every consumer makes (on the average) two copies (or at least more than one) copies spread exponentially. The other problem is, that if you expect about ten copies per sold DVD reaching someone who would have bought it otherwise your income from that cds is reduced by a factor of ten.

    Exponential distribution won't work if each copy is a little worse than the previous one. But generally the industry wants to make it hard to make copies, so noone bothers and only a percentage of sold media gets copied. So the thing the industry really doesn't want is Joe normal putting their DVD in his computer, running DeCSS over it and handing the copy to his friend in a matter of minutes.

    For now the impact of the decryption program is small only because the resulting huge amount of data still makes copying hard. (I think this is also one reason why nearly every game on the PC market is bloated with films etc. so you need at least 3 CDs for it"). But with storage densities becoming ever higher this might not hold long.
  • If you want to kill practical computing for average users, this is a good way to do it. Ditto if you want to kill the music or film industries. Publishing is safe as long as people still like paper due to the non-trivial effort and cost to duplicate that, but it'd be stuffed as well as soon as e-books became widely accepted.

    Why did George Lucas and Fox put down quite so much money and effort on producing the Star Wars films? Because they knew they could sell them. Why did Vertigo and Mettalica put so much time, effort and money into recording Load? Because they could sell it. And why did AT&T fund Bell Labs - specifically Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan in their development of Unix and C? Because they could - well, could then :) - sell the results. You can argue with my taste in films and music, but the point stands with other examples.

    People, IP is good. Without IP anything becomes reproduceable and (in the case of the information market) entirely impossible to make money from, sue to the imbalance between R&D and manufacturing costs being the reverse of the norm elsewhere. You're using a PC? OK, you wouldn't have it. Lotus wouldn't have been able to develop 1-2-3, because that nice man down the street would have just copied the disks and undercut them. Microsoft wouldn't have been able to produce Windows - whether that's a bad thing or not depends on your perspective, but it encouraged a lot of people to buy PCs.

    Now, let's imagine what would have happened without either of these products. Someone else would have developed a spreadsheet for the PC in all probability, but as powerful as 1-2-3 entirely for love? Unlikely. How about GPL development, someone's going to cry in all probability :) Go for it, try. Go and produce me a competitive spreadsheet, probably one of the dullest tasks out there for a programmer. Yes, I know there's a project out there happily cloning Excel, but that hits the nail on the head - they're doing this because they want a free-speech Excel, not because they want a spreadsheet. So, you've lost your speadsheet, which is widely accepted as the killer app for moving PCs into offices.

    Then take Windows. Much as I dislike it, too, clueless wonder newbies who fold 5.25in disks to fit them in their new 3.5in drives like it. It's simpler to use than Linux for the vast majority of users. It's also a cohesive standard, which the Linux GUI market could sorely do with. Now, remove it. How many home PCs do you have? Really not all that many. So, the price goes through the roof and the performance through the floor as there's no real reason for any of the companies to push the boat out on making faster products for less. After all, there's so few sales that you just can't support the massive R&D needed to support the current effort. Moore's Law? That's as much market pressures as technological advancement.

    I'm not a supporter of the FSF's aims myself, but I can understand the viewpoint of others who are. But we need IP if any business is going to be based around information and, if it's not, then we can watch everything go back to 'for the love of it' hobbyists, which I for one don't want to see. I mean, how are the software companies supposed to survive, support revenues? Do you really want a world where software companies have a financial incentive to make their products unstable and difficult to use? The only reason RedHat and others can survive off this at the moment is that their development costs are vastly lower than for comparable developers and their support rather more necessary due to the average user's unfamiliarity with the product. If Microsoft tried to survive on such a business mdoel it'd be chaos and software quality would go through the floor.

    IP on information is good. Without it, we'd be a lot poorer.

    Greg
  • Actually, a lot of public libraries have been carrying a limited selection of VHS movies for years, as well as some music.
  • The text of the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" _specifically_ states that it does NOT infringe on fair use. Which is interesting, since this obviously doesn't jive with the "encryption hacking is criminal activity" part of the act...

    One for the courts, I suppose. :/
  • There is one drawback with any anti-piracy scheme: if it is possible to view a DVD (or head a CD), it is equally possible to record it (to a VHS tape, or a computer hard drive, or whatever). No copy-protection scheme for movies or music will be able to change that.

    Of course, the "digital quality" duplicates will be better, but despite the encryption people use, eventually someone will break it.
  • While I still think giving all the credit to "linux users" for this hack is a bit of a stretch, having major hardware, software and closed codec vendors believe just that might not be a bad thing. eg: "Damn we better release something so these linux bastards can use or they'll just reverse engineer it and the we'll _really_ be screwed."
  • There is another reason for the regional lockouts. The big movie companies have exclusive rights deals with distribution companies for distributing their films in a given country. Since these distributors have a monopoly in their own region, they can charge whatever they want to.

    IF someone were to independently (and perfectly legally)import movies from another region (perhaps one where the retail prices are lower) they would cut into the distributors profits.

    This is exactly the same as the way video games, cars and many other things are sold world wide.

    The manufacturers put a lot of energy into preserving their official distribution channels by persuing these "grey market" importers. I had a friend in Australia who used to sell privately imported video games at much lower prices than Sega sold them for. Sega eventually shut him down by threatening to sue. He may well have had a case, but once again he didn't have the funds to push the issue and lost out to the corporates.

    Regional lockouts don't just stop piracy, they protect the distributor's monopolies and are therefore a bad thing (IMHO).

  • Er, have you ever heard of an arcane concept known as "data compression"? Motion picture data is very highly compressible because of its high redundancy (i.e. almost every frame is very similar to the one before).
    /.
  • If you are using Betamax, Video 2000 or
    8 mm video tapes, Macrovison is ineffective,
    because exploits a flaw in vhs' recording method.

    And then you could buy/build a sync restorer,
    a get away prom macrovision stuff (as a side
    effect you get better copies when the source
    tape is non perfect)
  • The problem is that they hav not learned the lesson from the DAT experience. In the case of DAT, a simple copy bit made the use of it cumbersome and definitively unsuitable for home users. The professional DAT recorders among having variuous sampling rates, sample widths and high quality analog i/o, are not blocked by the copy bit. Maybe because a 39 cm/s open reel recorder has a good quality anyway.
    And the DAT cousin (aka DDS) for data storage has
    some limited success but is incompatible with audio format for technical reason (ie: if you use the DATA/DAT format you have to deal with TOC and some other things anc can't mt/tar so easily AFAIK).

    Laserdisc is analog an not copy protected (was born before the audio CD) but has the same success of Betamax (except Pioneer's karaoke machine use
    Laserdisc). Make a modification on DVD's firmware,
    so old DVD will be obsolete, make a device suitable only for video reproduction, wait to computer manufacturer to switch to a similar format suitable for data incomatible with video DVD, et voila, you have another Laserdisc...

    Then use the Computer DVD to stream satellite
    MPEG video into it...
  • When one designs a crypto system it should be designed with renewability (sic) built in. So, if the first set of keys gets broken somehow then the entire keyset gets renewed and off it runs. DirectTV has this capability (via sending out new smartcards). Divx had this capability which was never exersized because no one ever came close to breaking it; although they tried.
  • I'm not too sure if you could "burn" DVDs (either DVD-Rs or DVD-RAMs) to be read by any DVD Player. Of course you could probably write a decrypted movie onto a DVD, so that anyone with a DVD-ROM drive and appropriate DVD player software (capable of playing single files) would be able to watch it, but it won't play in the common under-your-TV player, would it? The real threat to the movie companies, IMHO, is that people would virtually duplicate movies (with boxes, booklets etc.) and resell them. And as long as you can't easily make copies that won't play on _any_ DVD player, nobody will. The occasional computer enthusiast who copies a movie for another friend does not really threaten the revenues of the movie companies. And I don't think that DVD-RAM media are readable by the common DVD-ROM drive anyway... -- There is no spoon...
  • Why do theatres continue to use this very strange format? Surely there must be a cheaper, more reliable digital solution.
  • The CSS encoding does nothing to stop the guys who want to make a million copies. They will just go right ahead and make their copies of the encoded data. If they wanted to make multi-region copies, there are lots of ways for them to get ecryption keys. Too many people have access to keys at too many companies for them to be truly secure.

    The only thing that the CSS encryption really stops is John Doe making a single copy of the DVD for his friend Richard Roe.
  • There is of course, the possibility that Divx is uncracked because no one tried - no one liked it enough to bother.

    It's also possible that it's been done, but rendered irrelevant and obscure by the death of the format.
  • Well, the movie industry deserves this and it should teach them a lesson.

    Think about it as far as a movie renting thought goes... (i'll just talk about vhs, altho dvd should be similar)

    A movie costs about 3 bux to rent and on a rought estimate it'll probably be rented at least 20 times in its lifetime. So that makes 60 dollars for the rental store. which means to turn a profit, a movie must cost them 50 bux or less to buy (it'd be more than it'd cost a normal person cuz of licensing). Where as it costs a normal consumer 20 dollars to buy the vhs. Lets say most of the people renting it are one time.. so that its actually 20 different people renting. If movie makers made VHS recordings cost only about 5 dollars i think most ppl would buy instead of rent. So what's 20 people times 5 dollars? 100 dollars where the movie company would have made 50 or 60 (whatever, less than 100)

    So if movie companies would sell them cheap where they're sorta accessable and not overly priced, both movie company and consumer would win. They're stupid, hopefully they'll learn :)
  • Ahh, you speak from ignorance and bias.
    There were a large number of attempts to crack Divx security. Most of them by individuals acquiring players and doing all sorts of obscene things to the security chip. I personally saw a number of players sent to Divx Central from the CCS stores that had been returned by their owners. The players would have broken warrenty seals, and all kinds of scratch marks, burns, etc on various parts. Poor, thing...it's been tortured. None of them spilled their guts.

    So, you see, Anonymous Coward, that attempts were made, and all failed. Ha Ha we all laugh from the unemployement line.

  • >> Seriously, let the studios withhold their movies if I want- most of them aren't worth watching anyway.
    That's why Divx was a good format. Because most movies suck. Why spend $20 for a movie that you're embarassed to admit you watched once, much less twice. With Divx you only had to waste $4.50 for a sucky movie. :)
  • But DVDs take 9GB or more, and its already compressed! Illegal videos ripped from DVDs are not going to start flying across the "internet" like this journalist implies.

    Normally, I wouldn't be picky about typos, but you put the sneer quotes around the wrong word. They should be around "journalist"....
    /.

  • Actualy, while at uni, my friends and I did something like that: we pooled our money (over $70AUD I think) together to get a game (Eye of the Beholder 2) and shared copies.

    That's the point of view taken by the IP owners. The other question is how many of you would have bought the game at full price. Only one? ->No loss to the producer. None (because to expensive?) -> they are even better off with illegal copying ;-)

    Counting the number of copies, multiplying them by the cover price and crying "Billions and Billions of loss!" is a tactic that might impress politicians, but has no basis in reality.

  • Here in Switzerland, practically all the DVD players on sale here do regions 1 & 2. Many are region free. Only suckers would buy a region 2 only device. (Pity that these suckers will be the Joe Average consumer who will be upset that they cannot play the region 1 DVDs that are also routinely on sale over here (with a warning sticker attached)).

    I've just bought a DVD set-top box and am very happy with it. Finally I can start buying movies at US prices now that the *real* regional lockout of NTSC/PAL is effectively over.

    Regards, Ralph.
  • They didn't steal that story from reuters, or anything...
    --
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

  • Your comments reminded me of Eben Moglen's excellent essay Anarchism Triumphant [columbia.edu]. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it.

  • With improvements in video projection technology (eg extremely high definition), digital video and increased bandwidth, release of films to theatres on filmstock is going to be obsolete in a few years anyway. The trend to smaller theatres helps, since a smaller screen means less energy output required for the projector (which makes it easier/cheaper to build, etc.)

    New (or retrofitted) theatres will have some sort of high-end digital video projection system and the films will be distributed either by a server and high bandwidth feed (possibly a dedicated satellite link) or high capacity digital medium (multiple DVDs?), saving money on the film stock, film duplication process, and shipping costs of those reels.

    This also allows for wider simultaneous release, although possible censorship/language/etc issues in other countries may still mean delays in international release.

    Movie theatres won't go away, but movies won't be "films" for much longer.
  • So, I'm curious. Do you think they'll learn from this.

    If you don't support Linux, there are people who will help to get it for themselves. Then you get things like this. I bet if SOMEBODY had just released a Software DVD player for linux (even a commercial one, binary only) this wouldn't have happened! Hell, I'd STILL pay my $50 to watch a fully enabled DVD under Linux (using Menus and subpictures and everything). Open source would be NICE, but in the end I just want it to work.

    Too bad we're going to go to some 2048-bit key now for DVD^2. And I doubt Xing will make the same mistake twice, so somebody will have to brute-force it. I'd help. Run dvddes instead of rc5des? Sure.
    -- I'm omnipotent, I just don't care.

  • DVD, encryption, and Everything (Score:3)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Thursday November 04, 1999 @01:56PM (#1563462)
    It's my prediction that mass DVD pirate proliferation won't happen for several years if ever. Think about it, mp3s have gotten popular only in the past year. Before the mp3 boom most people had no idea what they were. What brought about the mp3 proliferation was high bandwidth home connections and portable mp3 players.
    Diamond's case against the RIAA was probably one of the most important factors in the wide spread use of mp3s. Before the case became a major item on the news most people had never heard of mp3s. What do mp3s have to do with DVD? Well for a long time (until the Rio came out) you could only listen to mp3s on your computer which is by nature pretty stationary and in many cases doesn't have much of a sound system. A CD with a bunch of mp3 files was useless in anything but a computer. Then came the portable mp3 players and now mp3 players as home stereo components. They have made the format popular for distributing music. Copies of DVD movies face similar obstacles. As of now they can only be played on your computer and take up massive amounts of space on them, your set-top DVD player will not play a DVD disk without it being encrypted since it assumes it's a pirated copy, and lastly anyone who builds a machine to play copied DVDs will have several companies breathing down their back (ones with real legal claims as opposed to the RIAA against Diamond). Even though people can copy the hell out of DVDs now it will be a very long time before it becomes as easy and convienient as copying a CD to mp3.
    High bandwidth is the second limiting factor after convienience. Even with cable and DSL access it would take several hours to download an entire DVD movie. Even after the download it takes up massive amounts of space on your hard drive. Sure you can go down to Best Buy and pick up a 22GB hard drive but even that can only hold so many movies. So to keep your drive empty for all your mp3 albums you need to fork over a few hundred bucks for a DVD writer. You soon find that buying the blank DVD disks costs you as much as it would to just buy the DVDs themselves. This will keep 99% of people from downloading and burning DVD movies for their personal collections.
    Afterall what good is a disk that won't work in a DVD player at your friend's house, takes 10+ hours of work to make, and costs you 25$ or more.
    I truely hope that DVD manufacturers pay attention to this kind of argument before they issue a recall on all DVD players and issue firmware updates that keep DVD drives from reading movie disks. For some people their computer is their DVD player. A drive costs under 70$ and a decoder card costs about the same (they can even plug it into their TV). Not being able to play movies would piss off way too many people. Any attempt to replace the encryption on DVD will cost a whole lot more money than they would ever lose from a handful of people pirating their movies. I don't want to hear about Divx either, if it had been popular it would have eventualy got itself cracked. Some people tried and failed because they gave up before they finished. Any encryption can be cracked with enough time and skill. If HDTV people have their way, DVDs and such will be obsolete anyways. Who wants to pay 25$ for a DVD when they can watch a movie with true widescreen resolution of 1920x1080 from a movie on demand service. No disks or hard drive space required, just a HDTV and receiver.
  • Can a software company or a movie or record company get a tax break because of projected losses due to piracy?

    Can they get tax breaks for actions they take to curb those losses?

    The simple truth is that movies and CD are usually sold and rented cheaply enough that it doesn't make a lot of sense to pirate them. I can see a few people with some sort of collecting fetish pirating a bunch of DVDs because they have to "own a copy" of a lot of movies, we're talking about a very small minority though.

    Blank CDs cost about a dollar a piece and blank DVDs cost a bit more. Plus you have to read the music off the CD on to a drive and the write it back and hope nothing goes wrong in the process. By the time the whole process is done with, I'd rather just pay the $15 for the CD or the $1-$3 and rent the movie instead of giving up an hour of my life and $1, plus I get the lyrics and pictures and stuff that come with it. Why isn't the industry attacking the problem that way? Make better packaging and include more art work and pictures with CDs and DVDs so that there is some non-piratable value-added and give people more insentive to buy the original. They could even do something like putting front-row tickets in a few CDs so you can "win" something by buying the original, it would cost them next to nothing. Unless of course they want to keep inflated numbers for their "losses" due to piracy.

  • Studios will learn to cope with status quo. (Score:3)

    by SoupIsGood Food ( 1179 ) on Thursday November 04, 1999 @09:34AM (#1563468)
    It's either A) Loose enormous amohnts of revenue because you won't release DVD titles or B) find other means of copyright protection.

    The distributors and studios can't turn back the clock. DIVX is dead, VHS is on the way out. They will have to cope with piracy like they do with audio CDs and movies on tape.

    In the end, it;s all about the greenbacks. DIVX was a harsh wake-up call to the industry: the consumer -won't- go where they are told to. Instead the distributors have to come to the consumer. They -could- choose to withold all future DVD releases, but they will loose waaaaaay more revenue than pirating could ever possibly account for.

    SoupIsGood Food

  • Who would really pirate movies? (Score:4)

    by blazer1024 ( 72405 ) on Thursday November 04, 1999 @09:36AM (#1563477)
    I'm sure there are a lot of people (like me) who don't buy movies because they would get bored with them quickly. I like to rent a movie, then maybe a few months later, rent it again. At say $3 a movie, that's only $6 rather than spending $20 to buy it. I don't really like watching movies 27 times in a row.

    Another thing, even if there are a lot of pirates out there, are people going to buy some movie from a stranger with a DVD-R disc? If I was going to buy a movie, I would go in to a nice video store and buy one there. Also, some people actually have a conscience(I know those corporate types probably don't :) and they would feel at least a little guilty buying an illegal copy.

    I mean really, has movie piracy been a big deal before? It's not like it's really that hard to copy a VHS tape. But anyone I know that may have a bogus copy of a movie has ONE movie, and doesn't have a big collection. They're protecting something that doesn't need protection. Computer games are easily copied, and they still make lots of money. Music CD's can be easily copied, and again, they still make plenty of money.

    So.. I think they should really give it a rest.
  • Even if DVD-writers with the required capacity
    are available, the number of copies should be
    irrelevant:
    - price for the raw DVD medium
    - much more people are using a cd-player
    than a computer with a burner, same will be
    true for DVD
    - If they really want to earn money, DVDs have
    to get really popular and the few people which
    are able to decrypt and copy DVDs might even
    help to make them popular (same with Microsoft)

  • BS (Score:3)

    by Randy Rathbun ( 18851 ) <slashdot.20.randyrathbun@spamgourmet.com> on Thursday November 04, 1999 @09:38AM (#1563494) Homepage
    I am getting so tired of this "Those meanies cracked my weak encryption!" stuff. The Wired article does no good for the matter either by implying that MusicMatch is a "tool for pirates". Far from it.

    I am currently building my very own MP3 server for my living room. Why? Because I have over 600 CDs and never can find the one I want (I am a terrible housekeeper, and I have CDs laying all over the place - most not even in their jewel cases.)

    As long as I am using legal copies of stuff I have in my posession that I purchased, who the hell cares? I don't give copies of stuff away - not to my relatives, not to my friends, and not even to strangers. Why should I?

    I am also getting mighty sick of the recording taxes the industry is forcing us to pay. You pay a tax on cassette tape, minidisc, and now on CD-R audio discs. Why should we? The stuff I am recording at home is my stuff. It is stuff like the tape my cousin made of my grandmother when she came back from her trip to Czechoslovakia in 1980. If I want to make a copy on tape of that, I get to shell out money to "the man" because he is implying that any tapes I buy are going to be used to record the latest Spice Girls album.

    I am sick to death of it.


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    80124569890476636201512012315668018651125564087489 7980465063

  • I was really disappointed by the article. I think what is was that turned me off was the authors assumption that anyone who wants to copy a DVD is doing something illegal.

    "Rendering CD/DVD drives for computers incapable of reading music CDs or DVD movies might be another way to go"

    So, do I have to buy another copy of the song if I want to listen to it on my Rio?

    I can't say anything coherent, because even though I'm used to this kind of stuff from corporate PR goons, I thought Wired was on the side of the reasonable and unlobotamized.

    -kevin

  • Why indeed, there is digital cinema [qualcomm.com] from Qualcomm. The idea is to have a digital projector project a feature film that is sent digitally in encrypted form from a central hub and locally stored.

    One of my professors at HMC worked on the project and said the result is quite impressive. There have been some demonstrations including screenings of the Phantom Menance, but no wide commercial release yet.

    Something like this is clearly the wave of the future, since film duplication and distribution is so expensive. It remains to be seen whether it's Qualcomm or some other technology that prevails.
    --

  • Such a shame; Wired used to be a decent news source. However, now they're too busy playing friend-of-big-media to care about the rest of us.

    Anyway: It's better to limit hardware than content? Why do either one have to be limited? I mean, the software industry has learned that people no longer accept copy-protection, but that's certainly not stopped production of new software.

    Get over it, Hollywood (et al). Admit that you're losing the stranglehold monopoly that you used to have, and figure out what the rest of us have known for years:

    Better content, not better copy protection, is your only key to the future.

  • with a lot of the other posters. If there hadn't been the itch, coders would not have been tempted to scratch.

    The industry's repeated failure to treat Linux and Linux users with common courtesy and decency is hardly the way to encourage them -not- to clone, examine, de-protect and decrypt.

    I'm NOT advocating piracy, here. I believe people should respect the conditions they agree to when they buy someting, and respect the person who made the product in the first place.

    On the other hand, nobody (except, apparently the commercial sector) can be oblivious to the fact that depriving any community of a product won't prevent that community building their own.

    Hopefully, the result of this will be that the commercial sector will sit up and pay attention to these "lowly serfs" and "penniless geeks". I doubt it. More likely, they'll press for Open Source and long hair to be criminalised.

  • Clue-factor: 0 (Score:5)

    by |DaBuzz| ( 33869 ) on Thursday November 04, 1999 @09:40AM (#1563506)
    I read this earlier this morning and was amazed at some of the conclusions drawn regarding how to fix this problem.

    First off, he suggests making it so PC's cannot play DVD discs ... he obviously does not realized that the DVD install base for PCs is 5-10 times greater than set-top boxes which is currently 3.7 million according to CEMA. That puts 18.5 to 37 million PC-DVD ROMS that this guy wants to LOCK OUT from viewing movies just to avoid the use of rippers like DeCSS.

    Next he suggests that all the 3.7 million set-top players receive a firmware upgrade ... I assume this would hold new encryption keys. What does that do to the existing 3,000+ DVD with the old keys, what would this upgrade cost, and can you opt-out? These are all very important questions which lead to answers as to why this is a bad idea as well.

    The problem here is poor planning and implementation of a security system of a product that can NEVER be secure.

    I've heard it said many times and I'll repeat it for those in the cheap seats ... "If you can see/hear it, you can rip it."

    The industry needs to focus on the REASON why people would want to get the encryption keys. In this case, lack of Linux support for DVD. Other reasons people would want this is to pirate discs which cost too much. Much of the basis behind theft is the feeling of entitlement ... if an industry sticks it to the consumer for too long, there is a backlash where people feel that they have paid too much for too long and are entitled to things for free. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just a fact of life and human nature.

    The entertainment industry has a choke hold on the wallets of America and anything that give the user some power to breath for one second is immediately attacked with a knee-jerk reaction to snuff it out (i.e. MP3) via regulation and restrictions on private citizens right to own and utilize products in any way they choose.

    Instead of treating us like cattle who carry money around for you to milk from us ... why not try to build LOYAL consumers who will pay a fair price for a quality product ... then your piracy fears will disappear because 90% of people will pay for your product.

  • Fair use again (Score:3)

    by El Volio ( 40489 ) on Thursday November 04, 1999 @09:41AM (#1563512) Homepage
    Once again, we run into those pesky ol' fair use issues. Just like with software and music, I can make copies of content that I own. If I want to burn myself a copy of every game or audio CD I buy, I have that ability -- and right, as long as I don't distribute it. Same goes for movies.

    So don't restrict the technology. Protect your IP legally if you want, but just remember that fair use is exactly that: FAIR.
  • A lot of people seem to think that intellectual property is like physical property. That you can own it, buy it, sell it. Well they're completely wrong. Owning information makes no sense at all except in a culture whose technology is too primitive to make copying easy. Well those days are over now. It's going to be interesting watching how our culture adapts - especially the effects on an economy that thinks it can control the distribution of information for profit.
  • The people that do mass copying of this sort of stuff are likely to be unaffected.

    After all, they're the ones buying a "Control Free" DVD burner for $50,000 so they can build a "Pirate DVD Factory" in Malaysia.

    They're not making a piddling couple of copies of Phantom Menace; they're making 20,000 copies.

    It is likely that this "Commercial Piracy" is of considerably greater importance than anything that would occur from consumers burning their own DVD...

  • The real usage for this is to take movies which are "region coded" and make a new version which does not have that restriction. Pirates in Hong Kong and Taiwan have already been able to make a bit-for-bit copy of American DVD disks. However, because of the region-lockout, these disks are still playable only on American DVD players. By decrypting the bitstream, they can then master a new disk which has the territory lockout removed.
  • Not a terribly good article, but there was one point in particular that was well, pointless. The statement was this this is the second time that computers had enabled the piracy of copyrighted material. First of all its untrue, computer enabled piracy was there as soon as commercial software was available. Scan the alt.sex.binaries.all.things.great.and.small newsgroups and you'll find many gigabytes of computer enabled content piracy.

    What really bothered me was that it didn't mention that copyright violation is common even without the computer. I've got friends who've probably never bought a CD (or tape or LP going back a few years) in their lives yet have large music collections on readily available magnetic tape.

    Despite this the music industry obviously still has made an enormous amount of money. I'm not trying to condone piracy at all. I'm trying to put the problem in perspective. The DVD industry can continue on, business as usual, and make billions for themselves and the movie studios. They can also sink millions into a new and improved encryption format and still make billions for themselves and the movie studios. If they do a good job they might be secure for quite some time but eventually the format will be cracked again. It'd be interesting if when one of the small players in DVD based decoders goes bankrupt an OpenSource friendly entity buys the IP.

    The industry would be better off ignoring casual copying (much like is the case in the music industry now) but get legally hostile with anybody who tries to make money off of piracy.

  • This was not a good article at all, it was half a page of repetition of everything we already heard. The article also assumes that this was a bad development, failing to notice that while bad for the IP industry, this is a freedom issue for many users. I don't mind paying for my movies, but I don't like the idea that the producers and the player are conspiring to keep me from the accessing the actual movie. My machines work for me, following my agenda: I do not like the idea of having any machine that is doing somebody elses bidding in my house. period.

    It also makes the assumption that the problem can be solved by simply tightening the security. Recalling all the millions of cdplayers that are out there would cost a fortune, as would halting the production of DVDs until all new keys were in every player. Who is going to pay? I doubt most of the electronics companies care enough.

    And on top of that, what is about the new system that is going to make so magically more difficult to crack? Yes, the code got out easy because Xing were clumsy (or intentionally leaked it, who knows), but if they start again I can promise some other company will be clumsy next. And
    even if it isn't as easy next time, trying to make software running on somebodies PC safe against side channel attacks is a garantuan, if not impossible task.

    And if they try to make the crypto stronger so people can't known-plaintext out the other keys once one is compromised, they have crypto restrictions to deal with. Wow, maybe the ip industry could do us a favour here...

    The only way another CSS, or for that matter SDMI (any bets as to how long SDMI holds? A month? two?) will work is if the content creaters hold complete control over all the hardware that can decrypt the media, and allows no software players what so ever. How many would like to see new formats like that?

    Maybe they should just bring back DivX. There's an idea (bar the fact that people realized you could "crack" DivX players by plugging them out)...


    -
    /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
  • Okay, assume the DVD guys panic and rapidly implement some other way of "protecting their interests". Is there a way to crack it no matter what encryption they use?

    What about doing something similar to what unfuck.exe does for the Microsoft "secure" audio? I mean, for a software DVD player what's stopping a program from capturing the images straight from the memory on the video card?

    Okay, it would be a processor hog, but I'm sure it can be done. For software players, the data has to live somewhere on the system.


  • This is OT for DVD, but to answer your question:

    It's called `Macrovision' in all probability.

    Basically the signal outputted from the tape plays with the gain control chips in your VCR. This results in varying image brightness or blackness, as you've seen.

    The signals are ignored by the television set for all intents and purposes.

    Disney loves to use this to prevent copies of their movies ... and sometimes VCR's have issues with the scheme, resulting in crappy playback of even non-dubbed tapes. Chalk another one up to the wonderful world of corporate paranoia.
  • Although I agree with the previous post in general, there are a couple of parts I don't agree with. AC brings up a good point with libraries, but I don't think they're actually the same as pirating. I don't know about the libraries elsewhere, but at mine, I can borrow CDs and tapes (audio and video) as well as books. I'm sure DVDs will be available there soon. The thing is, the selection is still limited, and I have to return it (or pay for it) eventually. With piracy, I have a permanent copy for myself. Also, as far as copying books, it's a lot simpler to copy a CD than to photocopy an entire book. Try it. One more thing - many authors (and publishers) hate libraries.

    While I personally agree that it is better to have an original copy, with all of the manuals, packaging, etc., I know many people who don't feel that way at all. And economically, things would have to get really cheap to match the price of making a copy. That alone is reason enough for some people to pirate.
  • Does this mean the end of the GPL? Does this mean that I can mirror Slashdot, but without those pesky ads?

    IP isn't forfeited in theory or in actuality just because someone has a copy of it. I can hold a Coke can in my hand, but I could be sued if I made my own Coke can. I can copy a DVD and distribute it to my friends, but I could be sued (or put in jail) for theft of intellectual property.

    You're unable to conceive of something as property unless you can hold it in your hand, or sit on it.

    How do you think our "culture" will adapt to the realization that trademarks, patents, copyrights, are all smoke and mirrors? Who will write novels or create cheesy sci-fi props [demon.co.uk] if there is no intellectual property?
  • One thing I couldn't help but notice about this article is that it heavily criminalizes the authors of DeCSS. They wanted a way to view movies, and although DeCSS does theoretically enable someone to pirate a movie, that's not the intent for which it was written.

    Also, the key was only 40 bit. I'm surprised they didn't just brute-force it.

    I wouldn't blame the coders of DeCSS. I'd blame DVD for using such an asininely stupid encryption scheme, where every DVD needs to have decryption keys for every registered player. That's just stupid... it means that if some new vendor comes onto the market, they need to use someone else's established decryption key just to play the current installed base of movies. And all it takes is a rogue person with the sacred knowledge releasing (on purpose or accidentally in the case of Xing) one of the decryption keys.

    No, I'm not saying I can think of a better scheme. :) Go to the article about DeCSS for stuff like that. I just think it's quite an unfair light this author has put the coders in; he also makes it sound as though DVD->VCD conversion has been a rampant problem now, but didn't DeCSS just come out a few days ago? It seems that they've been confusing 'speculation' and 'fact.'
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

  • Now, let's see, here...

    The industry is going bonkers because there is now an easy way to transfer contents from a medium unto a computer. The industry is screaming bloody murder, as they figure this will mean the end of old-fashioned, healthy and amoral capitalism and empower users.

    Sounds familiar? MP3, anyone?

    Well, tough luck. The truth of the matter is, they're making a fuss over nothing. I may download "pirated" MP3s from the Internet, but the sheer time it takes means I'll usually settle for a song or two, then buy the album in a record store if I really like it.

    Same goes for movies, really. Right now, I don't have a DVD reader, so I deal with VHS. I watch movies in theaters or on VHS, and if I like a film a lot, I'll buy it on VHS. Sure, I could just copy the VHS from the video rental store, but guess what? It's so much nicer to have a nice box, and feel like you have the real thing. Superficial? Maybe. But I'm not the only one doing that.

    I think the same will go with DVDs, however easy they are to copy. Some people will get the movie for free, but so what? Other people, like me, will keep on buying the real thing. At $30 or lower, it's not that much to have a nice little video collection. It's the same reason I have original CDs in my music collection.

    The movie industry should take a long, hard look at the CD and gaming industry. Has Sony gone bankrupt since those PSX chips hit the market? Is David Bowie on the streets because he places free MP3s on the net? Will the Wachowsky brothers have to resort to begging if you get a free copy of the Matrix DVD?

    Anyone with a modicum of common sense will know the answer to all of the above is a resounding no.

    "Knowledge = Power = Energy = Mass"

  • If you're just capturing what's appearing on the screen, you're copying the movie, but not the DVD. That's a different issue. No one can dream of stopping someone from taking a VCR to a DVD deck and recording their favorite movie to VHS. What you won't get are the choice of aspect ration's, alternate languages, etc...

    no one needs to write an unfuck.exe for DVD's, so long as VCR's have an input connector.
  • Actually, the outputs of most DVDs players have the macrovision stuff on it, so you can't copy the movie to video tape. The same goes for a lot of the ppv movies you can watch on DSS

  • Stranger things have happened. In the Washington, DC & Baltimore area, Sprint deployed a mobile phone network called "Sprint Spectrum". It was supposed to be the eventual nation wide standard. Two years later, Sprint decided to use a different standard when they did the nation wide deployment. All Sprint would give previous subscribers was a $25 discount on the trade-in of their old phone. For those of us who purchased the $199 phone, it was a bit of a rip-off.

    Needless to say, a class action lawsuit came out of this. Sprint told people buying the phones that this was the standard for nation wide phones on their network. They changed their mind and stranded people who had made buying decisions on that fact.

    Is a situation with DVD-II signicantly different? The manufacturers told us that this was THE standard for DVD. If they roll out a new set of players that are substantially the same as the old ones (except for the encryption method) and don't take care of the previous purchasers, the class action lawyers will be all over it.

  • Here's the URL for the article. It is by Michael Robertson [mp3.com]....

    http://bboard.mp3.com/mp3/ubb/F orum8/HTML/000015.html [mp3.com]
  • While I generally have a lot more respect for wired writers than most journalists in general, I still see them as...well...just plain dumb and uninformed.

    I quote from the article:

    "But high-capacity recordable DVD is coming. In the first quarter of 2000, there will be 4.7GB recordable DVD drives, and DVD copying will be much easier. It may not be a bad idea to hold off on releasing the drives until the copy protection issue is sorted out.

    Why advocate such limitations? Because it beats the alternative, which is that movie studios will withhold future releases. And DVD enthusiasts are eagerly awaiting such film classics as Star Wars, Fantasia, and ET."

    Uh, well excuse me, but the studios can go to hell before I advocate holding back technology (at least technology that I see as good). What a pathetic encryption scheme to begin with anyway. It deserved to be cracked. Whoever approved this should be shot (people's head are probably rolling over this right now, hopefully).


    There are several things the movie industry can do:

    1) Do nothing.

    Probably the best solution for all. Piracy won't dent their sales that much (even the music industry hasn't been hit that hard yet). This will keep sales at a decent level (compared to the other possible industry reactions). They're already making boatloads of money off of DVD in spite of themselves when they didn't support it in the first place. In the original article on the crack there were good posts on how the movie industry was terrified by VCR's in the beginning as well (obviously unfounded), and the fact that it costs a lot less to make DVD's than it does to make a video cassette, even though the DVD disc will cost you about twice as much on average. Financially there just isn't that much to fear.


    2) Create a new encrytion scheme.

    Clearly not a good idea for several reasons, although I'm sure they'll be considering it. Any encryption scheme they come up with will be cracked eventually. It would also render all existing hardware obsolete, which is unfair, unethical, and a PR nightmare. This also includes any other "protection schemes" they might come up with that don't necessarily involve encrytion.

    3) Enact one of those "you're all pirates" "taxes".

    Similar to the charge that exists on all recordable media now (the extent of this I'm not sure of). In order to "offset" the "losses" of pirateing, they might just jack up the price a certain %. Another pathetic idea, but I included it since it's been done before.


    It was pointed out by a number of people why piracy won't be such a big deal in the short term (next few years) in the first article about the crack. In the long term it might, but they have something else to fear. This isn't directly relevant but I thought it deserved a thought, since it's related to current happenings in the music industry.

    Large record companies are quickly becoming obsolete middlemen with the exception of marketing. The same could happen to the movie industry down the road. Star Wars episode 1 was the beginning of this, I think (This may have been discussed here before, I've been a regular reader for only a few months now). With advances in computer technology, the price of movie making is coming way down. Star wars cost about 60 million I think? Thats a lot less than the typical action/sci fi movie with lots of explositions, etc. This could radically alter the movie industry landscape in the future. Every writer/director/movie maker could have their own small company, with a small studio for actors to act in, and a back room full of computers for all the rest. They'll be able to do actors digitally down the road as well. With the costs reduced (maybe to around a million bucks per film?), maybe I could go see a movie for a dollar. Wouldn't that be great? Of course, savings like that are rarely passed on to the consumer. Oh well, I can always dream :)
  • Regional lockouts were demanded by the movie studios. They want to be able to release movies first in the US and later use the same film stock (which is quite expensive) to release in foreign markets. The foreign release often happens about the same time as the domestic video/DVD release. They don't want people to be able to mail order a DVD from the US instead of going to the theater.

    Not that this necessarily make much sense, but movie studios apparently strongly believe that it does. It helps that the US movie studios don't care that you can't purchase a french DVD that is unavailable in the US, since they probably didn't make it.

    I'm not sure if it is possible to make a playble video DVD without regional encoding, but if not there should be.
    --
  • You have the right to try to copy anything you own. And the DVD producers have a right to make it as hard for you as possible. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one.

  • Not sure I believe my eyes here. (Score:5)

    by Chris Johnson ( 580 ) on Thursday November 04, 1999 @10:29AM (#1563641) Homepage Journal
    "The best way to deal with this is to stop innovation and forbid consumers from having the technology"? "Perhaps computer CD-Roms and DVD-Roms can be made to not play audio CDs and DVDs"?
    Balls!
    Who _is_ this clown? I admit I stopped reading Wired a long time ago, but DAMN... are we seriously talking about intentionally making barriers to entry to the entertainment industry for anyone not a big money-spewing corporation?? This goes waaaay beyond the pale and is the most shocking thing I've seen in weeks. WHAT?
    First of all, trying to remove 'consumer' ability to record 'standard' audio CDs and work with them on the computer is already way out of line. I know people who've already begun to make teeny little record companies for spare change, releasing music that's really neat music, and xeroxing off gatefold liners or whatever just to do their art. They don't make a lot of money at it, but that's not the point- they have the ability to get in at the ground floor. Given enough money there are lots of processing plants ready to press 1000 CDs for not too much money, even with inserts included, even with printing on the CDs- and that'd be _standard_ audio CDs same as any chart-topper. The means of production have never been so available- and this Wired clown sees nothing wrong with taking all that away? (You _know_ that along with 'CD-Roms cannot play audio CDs anymore' would go 'or record them')
    Then, on top of that: has anyone seriously considered what DVD could mean in this context? Think 'Blair Witch Project', in another sense think of all the kids playing with 3DSMax and stuff. Isn't it obvious that, where the 80s were the beginning of the home _audio_ recording studio, the new century will clearly be the beginning of *tadah*
    The Home Movie Studio.
    Think of it. Forget copying storebought movies, that's lame and not the point and they suck more and more so who cares? Just think of what access to tools could really mean. Kids in their basements, groups of people in their spare time, 'bands' of actors and student cinematographers could start using the technology, and not be limited to Blair Witch production values- hell no! You could learn from the known techniques of the greats, buy a couple good halogen floodlights, or for that matter put together entire CGI films, or do anime or Disney-style animated movies depending on the amount of effort you wanted to put in. Disney's prewar multiplane camera cost millions. Today you can do that with Photoshop for hundreds, or with POV-Ray, even more elaborately, for nada, and there's no reason the GIMP couldn't be altered into specialised tools for such purposes.
    And at the end of the chain? No longer demo reels of 16mm film for which nobody has a projector. Not even VHS tape that's not great in quality and few people have genlocks and things to be able to work with it extensively. Suddenly anybody can produce creative work and release in the prevalent consumer digital format, same as with the CD! Suddenly people's creativity can express itself in FILM.
    Unless, that is, somebody just so happens to arrange matters so the technology is withheld. Unless somebody just so happens to make things so hot for the people who'd _own_ DVD duplicators on a large scale, that there ends up being _no_ way to get from the burn-one stage to the burn-1000 stage without signing with a movie studio. Unless SOMEBODY, imagine that, decides that instead of letting people have the technology and power to create, it's better to burn all the books, outlaw unlicensed arting and filming, and lock things down for good.
    Doesn't this seem like something to prevent at all costs?
    Does it have _anything_ to do with pirates at all?
    Aren't pirates a really useful excuse to make sure that people in general don't end up getting the technology they need to produce their own art, music and FILMS without depending entirely on the entertainment industries for anything of that nature?
    DON'T BE FOOLED. This isn't about the right to pirate at all! That's a side-issue, though it has some merit. What's really going on is this: these industries are so consumed with greed and desperation to control their revenue streams, that they are effectively trying to deprive the world of the technology to _create_ with. It's like forbidding the sale of paper in the Middle Ages. It's like allowing computers and mice and joysticks but forbidding keyboards because they could be used to type incendiary words. And that's such a serious threat, such a major problem, that the plight of ripped-off consumers wanting to copy their DVDs of The Matrix- well, that pales into insignificance. Being forced to buy another copy of The Matrix is _not_ that horrible. Being forced away from the tools that you could use to make your own movie like that- _is_ horrible.
    It's absolutely got to be stopped, and the real issues must be known. Think of the artists, musicians, filmmakers who are so close to having amazing tools and could be denied them over this nonsense. This is unacceptable.

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