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Self-Destructing DVDs: Son of DIVX
Stavr0 wrote to us with a return of an idea that already had its time. Yes, despite death of DIVX, a company is working on creating DVD discs that will work with existing DVD players but will stop working after a certain amount of time. The process is at least an interesting one: the company has created a special coating that is activated when hit by the DVD laser. From that moment of contact, the disc begins degrading, a process which can anywhere from minutes to three days.
Right now it is... but the fact DVD-RAM's are only... let's emphasize ONLY ... $500 or so, probably indicates this won't be cost ineffective for long.
Remember how expensive CDR's used to be? Look how cheap they are now, and how much they've dropped in price.
Now, if the same percentage reduction came about for DVD-RAM's, it'd be cheaper to burn DVD's than CD's. (Do you "burn" DVD's? If they're not ROM's, it must not be permanent... whatever. ;)
And for the most part I didn't mean this for a "home grown piracy job," just people who know they're getting this sort of "self-destructing" media will merely make a copy the first time and throw out the one they bought.
Interesting legal issue there, too... are they agreeing to only own a working copy for X number of days? Or is making a permanent copy legal? Hmm.... IANAL, so I can't comment. ;)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
That's exactly what I thought about Divx when it came out. I never saw any news stories even mentioning that angle in the piles of other things wrong with that format (and this one it looks like).
Consumers being inconvienienced, that's a story.
Planned environmental pollution, not a story.
The article says that the amount of the coating they put on the disc determines how long the disc will last. How are we supposed to trust that the manufacturer put 3 days worth of coating on the disc instead of 3 hours worth. oops. Even if they intend to put 3 days worth on, anybody who has ever seen a mass manufacturing plant knows that no batch of anything mass produced is ever completely the same. With the minute amount of material (200microns I believe it said) one batch could vary anywhere from 3 days to 1 day to a week and there's no way to tell until you watch it.
I'm not saying that the variances in a monitor plant would be enough to make the monitor explode or anything of that sort. What I'm saying is that at the kind of micron tolerances they're talking about, this chemical can't really be trusted to be accurate, IMO. It doesn't really matter if your computer's plastic case is 1% different as the next guy's. It does matter if I pay for X time with this disc and because of a 1% variation I only get 1/3 of what I paid for. Intel dumps huge amounts of expensive chips in the garbage because they are 1% off from the norm so my idea isn't that far-fetched. Whether manufacturers of these discs have the same standards as Intel remains to be seen.
I may be paranoid or not have much faith in big companies to keep my best interests at heart but if nobody raises the point, nobody will think about it until consumers start getting ripped off. It's happened before and it'll happen again.
And nobody moderated me up, I have the +1 added automatically because others have thought I made more than a few good points in my long posting life on Slashdot.
Oh lord, we mustn't question the corporations! They only have our best interests at heart after all. Companies wouldn't skimp on manufacturing to save money!
If it's so easy to get a +1, why are you posting anonymously? Why not get an account and rock our world?
Of course, why the hell would you want your advertising circular to _expire?_ You'd want it to be permanent. You wouldn't pay an extra 2 cents for the tech to make your DVD quit working. That's crazy. Now for the evil part- brace yourself ;)
If you can sell disposable DVDs at a profit of a penny for $3.00, and the degradation tech costs a penny and all of shipping and distribution costs a penny and the entire content costs a penny, then making your advertisement DVD as a disposable will cost you $2.96 for the media. On the other hand, it costs less to make the permanent sort of DVDs that are sold for $20 and up...
Isn't it interesting that this proposal reveals the true profit margins for the industry? The media clearly costs well under $3. So why are unit costs higher than VHS tapes, for which the media and duplication costs are drastically, drastically higher? Something stinks here.
I just hope we (as in, the public) end up eventually being able to do things like make little films or advertisements using this type of media, and being able to distribute them. It concerns me that these people on the one hand are successfully maintaining a trust holding the cost of DVD media at many times its free-market value (it should be _less_ than VHS, with some allowances made for additional media, but duplication and media costs are orders of magnitude lower than VHS), and on the other hand are also wanting to keep access to this technology out of our hands so only they can produce the media. That's just wrong, wrong, wrong...
Surely this could be challenged on environmental grounds? Aren't there laws about producing something that will become landfill? Or are the disc going to be bio-gegradable too...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
True, I don't (I'm a college student). But even if I did, consider the cost of theater tickets for oneself, one's spouse, two kids, and don't forget the refreshments. For that price I can just get a DVD I can watch again and again; after several viewings it ends up costing less than it would have with the disposables. And if you have kids, you know they're going to want to see the same movies many times.
Thanks for the mathematical argument. However, IIRC, it only applies during the "useful-life" phase, not the initial "early-life" or final "wear-out" phases. From their "useful-life" behaviour you might calculate a 10 year life expectancy through probability of random failue, but that doesn't mean their "wear-out" phase won't begin next week.
Meanwhile, I'm going to try and get references for my colleague's CD-R life expectancy theory. Watch this space.
Regards, Ralph.
Not quite, the manufacturing process for plastics (ie one of the ingredients in a DVD) generates waste, uses petroleum etc.
It's like the old argument against electronic cars being true "zero emissions" vehicles - even if the car itself produces no waste, you don't help the environment if you power it from a plant which burns coal to generate power.
At least with DIVX, the disc was still reusable if someone was willing to pay $2. This would result in huge piles of useless crap in landfills.
Ahh, you've paid far, far to much money.
I can't really argue against that -- I clearly paid a heavy premium for an arguably-marginal benefit -- but then I also can hardly complain about the price I paid: $30/GB still seems pretty cheap, when you can almost remember it being that much per MB, even if I could have had it four times cheaper. I guess the value you put on things like that is pretty subjective. For one thing, SCSI has less CPU overhead. Also, I now have a floppy, CD, Zip, and three hard drives in that system -- they can't all be IDE. Plus, I figured that the disk is by far the biggest bottleneck (other than the internet connection) in the system, so why not max it out? It seemed like the right decision at the time, given my priorities, even if it wasn't the best price/performance tradeoff. The thing is, the hard drive bottleneck keeps getting worse, because they keep getting bigger and cheaper, but not much faster.
Anyway, it looks like hard disk storage for a DVD movie would currently be about $30, which is not quite practical, when the movie itself is about $25, but it's even closer than I'd realized: less than one doubling away, rather than the two or three that I'd estimated. Better yet.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Who says I'm "only licensed to view it for one day"? Sure, that would have been their intent, but if I bought the physical disk, rather than renting it, what license is there? Even if they put a shrinkwrap license on it, like with software, would it be valid? The part about not reproducing and redistributing it would, I guess, but it seems that the exception for archival copying would still apply. If I own a copy of a work, I'm entitled to have a backup.
They may have sold it to me at a reduced price on the premise that I would only be able to watch it once, but that's their problem; I don't see how I would be bound by that. Try this: what if, instead of ripping it and making a backup, I found a way to prevent the disk from self-destructing (put some kind of coating on it, a player with a special laser that didn't trigger it, or some such thing)? Would I be "stealing" then? Surely they'd like us to think so, and the "best justice money can buy" might agree with them. I realize it would be overly optimistic to think that this would actually work, but I don't see any moral problem in either case.
Oh yeah, you're right that the original form of Moore's Law (about transistor sizes) does not apply to disks, but they seem to be following roughly the same growth curve.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Though self-destructing DVDs are pretty stupid for mainstream purposes, I can see a few uses - mainly for sending large amounts of sensitive data (with a short time delay), so that if the disk was intercepted enroute it would quickly be rendered useless. Maybe in a few cases movies or other media could be delivered that way, but I really don't see any advantage.
The difference is that this is just a misguided but mostly harmless copy-protection scheme, while DIVX was an evil, privacy-invading monster which only had the purpose of artificially separating users from the content they wished to purchase.
DIVX was far worse, bar none.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I hate it too, of course, but I have to admit loving it in a sick sort of way. It's so....nerdy.
Does anyone besides me wonder about the popularity of Mission: Impossible on this new medium? Oooh, I know. They should make an auto-degrading movie of William Gibson's auto-degrading prose poem Agrippa (that will probably be just as bad and sell just as poorly).
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
That's not the problem. The problem is that the greedy studios will use this opportunity to NOT RELEASE the movie in "non-degrading" format, so you won't have the choice.
This was one of the biggest gripes about DIVX; the studios figured a digital disc was a digital disc, and DIVX gave them a cash cow rather than a one-time sale, so many movies were never released on DVD until after DIVX died (like Di$ney stuff).
This would DEFINITELY get me to buy a recorder though. I bought DVD *because* the discs last forever. I got tired of buying the same tapes that I'd already bought because they'd gotten unviewable.
Remember that you STILL have the right to make backup copies of all software you own. The fact that the media is auto-degrading doesn't deprive you of this right.
Don't be ridiculous. The media companies would take the issue to the courts, and the courts would support them because it's piracy plain and simple. If you have bought an auto-expiring DVD in the full knowledge that it is *meant* to be usable only for one day, and that a condition of the sale is that you *will not* make a copy, then you simply do not have a leg to stand on.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
This isn't just for you Jared, it's a reply to all the others who responded to my previous post.
This is all just plain wishful thinking on your part.
All of you are forgetting that the sole purpose of the product would be to expire after a day's play. Even an idiot can surely see that if the user is allowed to make a backup copy then the product would not be sold in the first place. If an idiot can understand that then I believe the courts would too.
You're also forgetting that the law protecting you right to make copies is about "fair use" copies. This is not a "fair use" copy because it would allow you to keep a recording permanently when it was licensed for only one day's viewing. There can be no "fair use" justification for making a backup when the thing only has to last one day, for crying out loud!
With regard to contract law, IANAL and I'm not certain about the US in particular, but in the UK at any rate, when a sale is made there is an implied contract which does not require any signature. This is the basis for consumer rights so I imagine there is a similar provision in the US. What this means is that shrinkwrap licenses are legitimate - at least as long as the terms are displayed on the outside of the packaging.
So, as long as there is a prohibition against backups printed on the outside sleeve of these one-day DVDs, any laws about the right to make backups would be superseded.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Btw, IAAL.
LOL! I thought I'd never see that!
Pity you weren't working for the EFF. Looks like *their* lawyers were outnumbered (I'm trying not to jump to conclusions about their competence).
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Of course, once DVD-R discs hit the market and the combined price of a degradable DVD plus a blank DVD-R falls below the price of a regular DVD, the studios will drop this idea like a hotcake.
Remember that you STILL have the right to make backup copies of all software you own. The fact that the media is auto-degrading doesn't deprive you of this right.
If this came to pass, a smart person would amass all the titles of the DVDs they wanted at bargain prices, put them in cold storage, and wait until all the factories that are currently churning out 99 cent CDRs convert over to churning out 99 cent DVD-Rs. Then they'd start opening the discs, make PERFECTLY LEGAL backup copies, and keep the degraded master discs as proof of purchase.
This pay per view scheme hasn't been thought through very well.
- John
Actually, this isn't quite like Divx. The thing that bugged me (and most others, I'd imagine) about Divx was the fact that your DVD player was plugged up to a phone line and at any time could call in and charge your credit card for a viewing. Thus, if the babysitter was over, he/she could watch one of your expired movies and charge your card. Anyway, if it's cheap enough, these "destructive discs" may have their place. I'd like to be able to rent a DVD for $3 that I could just throw away when I'm done watching it. The more I think about it - the better the idea seems to me. It's like all the positive stuff of Divx (renting a DVD and not returning it) without Big Brother watching over your shoulder.
Right. A nitpick, though, is that Moore's law doesn't apply to magnetic media. Although we have seen big increases in HDD sizes and decreases in cost, it's not the same thing. Monitors have gotten better and cheaper, too, but it's different.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
So what happens if the phone rings or you have to take a crap while watching a "this disc will self-destruct in ten minutes" DVD? And what kind of shelf life does the coating have? Will DVDs need a "freshness date" on them?
Please. No. The discs will be sold in vacuum-sealed containers, and only when opened does the degradation begin. The (patented) process can be formulated to give you a lifespan of anything from a few minutes to a couple of weeks. Two days is currently considered a likely time.
Besides, do people really want throwaway DVDs? Sure it can be a pain to return rentals, but you
eventually have to go back to get more rentals anyhow. One big problem with DIVX was that you had to go all the way to Circus City, of which there might be one or two in any given city, rather than a local video rental place, of which there would likely be one within two miles of where you live.
The idea here would be to sell them in the drugstores and department stores and such. Since these will play on regular DVD players, they may not run into the resistance that the original DIVX did. In fact, I think they have a pretty good chance of succeeding.
One question that nobody's answered (in my hearing/reading/viewing) is whether the things are recyclable, 'cause that's a whole lot of nasty environmentally bad stuff to be adding to landfills if it succeeds and isn't recyclable.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Ref NPR Here & Now 1/19/99, the coating is activated by exposure to air, apparently not directly oxygenation but something to do with airpressure. Spokesperson was not a tech.
Besides, you could put a vaccum-sealed wrapper inside the cardboard sleeve. I'm thinking here of something like a packet of peanuts or potatochips.
Alternatively... Pringles come in a cardboard tube, and are vacuum sealed.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
I meant, of course, 1/19/2000, ie, yesterday.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
FYI, NPR is National Public Radio. I'm saying that according to an interview with a representative of the company, it was exposure to the atmosphere. I'm not saying anything about any web article. Which source you choose to believe is not my problem.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Are you kidding, or what?
Personally, I'd always sided with the Movie Industry during this whole fiasco. After posting a bunch around here, it seemed to be made clear that the only reason that this technology was created was to enable playing DVD's under Linux and other OSes that weren't being supported.
What I'm getting at here is that if you rent a DVD, or purchase one that is specifically engineered for ONE TIME VIEWING, you're breaking the law, in that you have no right to do that. You have no right ro back up that data to watch it once (again), just as you have no legal right to sell your older versions of software after using them to upgrade to newer version.
The more people like you talk like that, the more I can see specifically why the industry wants to kill DeCSS, LiViD, whatever. And I sympathize.
Just because of comments like that, part of me hopes that the DVD industry succeeds in blocking the software decryption from being distributed, publishes their API's instead. Or creates royalty-free read only libraries. Or something like that.
To to be all PC or anything, but I think we need to move away from all this disposable stuff. Yeah, we'll all be dead before we've filled this planet with garbage, but there should at least be a little bit of consideration. How hard is it to return a video that you rented? And even if you're late, you only pay $4 or so.
One of the great things about digitalness is that it doesn't degrade. Now we seem set on introducing a digital technology that degrades. No matter what the ethic behind it, I'd never buy a disposable movie for the simple fact that I'd have throw it out when I'm done. I probably rent one or two movies a week. So with just me, you can figure on 75 discs a year being thrown away. A thousand me's equals 75,000 discs a year.
Now imagine 1 million of me. That's 75 million discs a year being thrown out. And that's still a far cry from the total number of VCRs out there. What's the weight of a disc? 2 ounces? It may not sound like much, but 4600 tons of additional waste a year seems a bit much to me, just so we don't need to return videos and DVD's anymore.
How about we just WAIT for the bandwidth to arrive for video on demand?
This is a hell of a lot more pro-piracy than the Linux DVD player project. Whereas the DVD player project could tangentally have its worked exploited by pirates, this project actually encourages people to make copies.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Imagine a degradable-DVD vending machine, filled with the most recent big hits. The machine could sell the disks for cash. The owners just need to maintain the machine, restock it, and collect the money. They don't need to sink capital into "priced for rental" DVDs, and they don't need to spend money chasing down people who don't return movies on time.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
I hated divx from the beginning. I also hate this from the beginning...
Besides the obvious, think of the ripoff potential...unethical video stores (online OR b&m) could sell these as real DVDs, although that wouldn't last very long. But stores could also sell partially used (returned early) timed DVDs, and blame the early failure of the movies on "technical glitches". Dumbness and abuse potential...ah, the beautiful results of invention and greed mixing.
</rant>
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Ideas like these really seem to show how much high DVD prices and high music CD prices are real ripoffs.
It will not be any easier or cheaper for the companies to produce self destruction media, in fact they should be more expensive due to the fact that there are now research costs to recover. Yet, they want to sell these for less than current DVDs. How much is the mark up on DVDs?
This would not be so bad if there was competition but since the recording and movie industries have presented united fronts, there is no free market competition to bring down the prices. Isn't price fixing illegal?
I think there is a huge untapped market for cheap movies. I go to the video store and there are a lot of older movies I can't find. Same with old music. I think that it probably would be profitable to sell to this market in the traditional manner we look at profit and loss. but the limiting factor, the reason they want such a strangle hold on the market, is the eyeball factor. Each person has only so much time to be looking at movies, advertising and the web. I think that companies want us focused on the new stuff with the huge advertising and merchandizing tie-ins.
Maybe I don't want to buy into the hype. Maybe I want to spend my entertainment budget on new movies. Maybe I would rather spend my time and attention on movies of the 1940's. Yes, there is expense involved in producing a larger variety of offerings, but I think it should be possible and profitable,but they want to steer comsumers toward new stuff as much as possible. They don't want to lose eyeballs. Companies won't pay as much for product placement if there are fewer comsumers watching. DVD's that last forever are bad to this industry, because they let consumers view movies even after the hype has subsided.
Broadcast networks faced this situation. Once they had the monopoly. I have heard that streets were emptied when Milton Berle's show came on. No time shifting, if you wanted to see it, you had to see it then. Very sweet for networks and sponsors alike. Then came cable. Then came VCRs, etc. The recording industry and hollywood don't want the same thing to happen to them. They certainly don't want to provide their own conpetiton bu making it easy to consumers to timeshift viewing and keep old media forever.
The competition for eyeballs is fierce. Companies will do their best to focus as many eyeballs on what is the most profitable for them. Competiton should mean cheaper prices, but it has not fr the recording industry, and for the movie industry. Something is very wrong. This product is a symptom of a sick culture.
--- If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question.
No, my view is not too narrow. If I buy a throw away CD at Wal*Mart there is no standing contract saying that I am obligated to return or destroy that article.
When you get a Blockbuster account you sign a document that is an open-ended rental agreement for any media item within the store. It states that you will return the item within a specified time frame or you will be billed extra for it. If you refuse to return the item by a specific date after rental they will bill your credit card (which they have on file) for the damages.
When you rent an apartment or a house you sign a legally binding contract that states that you will vacate the premises by a certain date and that you will leave the location in as good a condition as you found it, accepting normal wear and tear. You also put down a deposit against damages.
The same holds true for a car lease.
I seriously doubt Wal*Mart will require you to sign a legally binding agreement in order to purchase goods in their store. The overhead just to process such paperwork would be greater than the profits realized on the rentals. That leaves a shrinkwrap-eque copyright/agreement on the VDvd case. Those, just like software shrinkwraps, would have to be proven in court before they could be considered 100% legally binding.
Batteries are a good analogy. In both cases you are buying goods which provide you with short term benefits (entertainment or electricity) and go bad after a period. The batteries are mine to do with as I please. The VDvd would be also.
While IANAL, I should point out that (I believe) that there is no specific doctrine allowing the copying of media other than computer software for archival purposes, but one could easily say that the spirit of the law allows for it.
The specific clause that places making archival copies of software under "fair use" comes from the U.S. Software Act of 1980, which explicitly allows the making of archival copies. Nowhere else in copyright law is this right explicity allowed.
Of course, one could always argue that DVDs are computer software, since the information on them is stored in digital form and processed by a microprocessor, much in the same way a computer does...in fact a DVD player is really a computer....
My journal has hot
This could be a new form of copy protection for DVD-ROMs, as well. Install a program and the disc self-destructs... that's not so good.
______________________________________
um, sigs should be heard and not seen?
rooooar
Not that I like the idea of degrading videos to start with, but here's an e-mail I got from Spectravision when I sent them a complaint about the waste that would be created:
Thank you for your comments. We have been sharing your frustration as the new reports have failed to report this product will be a recyclable. Just a drop the disc in the bucket next to the butter container and milk bottle. It also eliminates the car pollution of returning the movie to the store. avg. 10 miles and 1/3 gallon of gas.
We appreciate your concern.
SpectraDisc
Now this I don't understand. To my knowledge the metal center wouldn't allow for easy recycling.
On the other hand, most DVD players now allow for layering, with the first layer being on the metal disk, and the second layer being semi-transparent and actually in the plastic medium. This recyclable statement leads me to believe that they may well be doing away with the aluminum center alltogether and simply putting writing all the data to the plastic. This is all speculation, don't take my word for anything.
hey, when did they take the 'cents' button off keyboards? I just noticed it =)
Did they ever have a cents button? I don't even remember.
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
-Linus Torvalds
You probably can't just remove the coating to reuse the disks because they would get scratched during normal use.
Even if you could reuse the disks (so The Matrix stays The Matrix until it's recycled) the logistics of collecting them with normal recycling would be a nightmare unless everybody took them back to the video store...
What about animals that injest the plastic (birds eat stones to digest, could easily get a chunk of disk)?
Also, I bet there's a lot more petroleum in the disk you're throwing away than the gas to burn to drive to the video store. Or you can walk or take a bike.
If they can be recycled and if the ARE recycled by the public, then the choice isn't so clear.
Many people have noted that by law you can make backup coppies of something you own. But what if when you buy one of these disks it is stated to be a rental, with an unlimited rental period? Then you wouldn't be able to legally make a copy for yourself...
I don't really like the idea of them myself - I think it would make it all too easy for movie companies to slip into the habit of making DVD's with no care at all with no special features and no letterbox versions. I wonder if they have figured out that was the OTHER reason why DIVX failed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Or would you rather burn gasoline/alcohol to return the disc?
Two major points of law:
1. It's legal to make copies of something you own for your own personal use (like mp3ing a CD you own).
2. Once you buy something, you're free to do pretty much as you please with it (Established when a foreign automaker bought a Ford and reverse-engineered much of it).
Therefore, it's perfectly all right for you to buy one of these disposable DVDs and copy it, because you are buying not renting it. If it were a rental situation, and you did not own it, the situation would be significantly different, because the DVD would not be yours to copy. However, the whole premise of this is that it does away with traditional rentals which you have to return. To conclude, it sounds like a very good idea - unless you're a studio trying to make a profit. Why buy a normal DVD when you can copy a "disposable" one?
Other major issues, already touched upon:
If it degrades when exposed to heat/light, wouldn't that mean that these things are inherently perishable? I seem to recall that one of the major advantages of digital technology was supposed to be its staying power...
And why, exactly do we need to throw everything away? Is it really that terrible to reuse things? Ever since environmentalism passed from the public eye, people seem to be rejoicing once more in expending non-renewable resources for silly things like saving a trip to the video store. Regardless of how you feel about the issue, the fact remains: we're running out of resources. As far as something this lame being worth contributing to our eventual exhaustion of resources and whatever repercussions that entails, I don't buy it.
So, yeah, basically, this won't fly, and will probably just engender more DeCSS-type lawsuits as the company scrambles to try to _make_ it work. Whatever.
---sig---
this might not be worthwhile for M$, but there are time sensitive data distrubutions (ratings information is one we use) that could use this degradable media. But outside of that...
...I'll be buying this for all my entertainment needs, nothing like pausing a movie only to come back and find the disc turned blue and unusable! Why use something an infinite number of times, when you could only use it once? I throw out toilet paper after I use it, why not storage media? Sign me up for 20 copies of Dumb and Dumber (comes free for every idiot who buys one), I can't wait.
+&x
Well, except that this doesn't bolster the rental industry at all -- it completely bypasses it. Blockbuster and Hollywood Video aren't going to want to sell the things:
Rental DVD
Self-destructing DVDs
I can see this making it to market, but it would be playing to a completely different audience than "conventional" DVDs. Kind of like those bins of grade-Z tapes and CDs you see at drug stores and gas stations. These aren't any threat to anyone.
I seem to remember several attempts to do this with VHS tapes back in the day. Some kind of gizmo that wouldn't let you rewind the tape more than X times comes to mind, as well as something that would slap a magnet against the tape after X plays. You can see how far those got!
(BTW, I'm a Netflix Marquee man myself.)
Ya' know, that's a REALLY funny idea, but there's something wrong with it. Would you pay the price of a rental plus the price of a DVD-R blank when the legit movie itself costs less? There's no way DVD-R media's going to come down in price for those reasons. It's not like it's expensive to manufacture now.
(BTW, I HATE America's disposable society. At least this isn't that horrendous disposable cell phone idea.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Almost all archaeology is done in land fills of a sort. What people throw out is often the only indication of how people lived and what they used. The odd thing about the guy who excavated this landfill is that he chose something so recent.
Vaccuum-sealed containers? They mentioned cardboard sleeves at Walmart (like AOL CDs). That hardly sounds vaccuum sealed to me...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
>buy for a couple of bucks to watch once or twice and then throw away. I would probably watch a lot of movies that I might otherwise pass up if I had to return them.
Ummm.. that's why I rent. It's $3 (for 5 days)[1], and if I return it the next day, I get a $1 off coupon... not to mention that, but you can usually find some promotion - I had a pack of 10 $.99 rental coupons. At least when you rent them, you have the full five days, without worry, and you don't have the enviornmental implications of all that plastic getting thrown away...
[1] - I've never seen these kind of prices at BuckBu$ter, but my local Hollwod Video is a little bit more friendly (and I don't think the local BB has DVD rentals yet... what good is large corporate muscle if you don't use it (for me) 8^) )
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
If I pay for something and feel that I own it, I expect it not to just go off and die on me. I do not beliece that these should be consumables, like milk or bread... If I buy a bunch of plastic with a movie on it today, I don't want to end up with a useless coaster tomorrow...
;-) )
Try netflix if you are lazy - just drop it back in your mailbox when you are done... and they send it to you, so you can never leave the comfort of your pajamas and still get your DVDs (assuming of course, that you can telecommute, and not have to leave the house anyway
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
ah yes, the media... we all love them around here (hell, even Jon Katz can't escape from /. trash talk)...
If I wanted an AOL coaster after a day or two, I wouldn't pay $3/4 for one, I'd just check my mailbox again 8^)
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
You(AC) certainly make a valid point, but I think there certainly is something to be said for the variance due to manufacturing tolerances. A three day coat might vary a little bit in either direction, but it wouldn't make a difference... a three *hour* coat could easily be off by twenty or thirty minutes - which is a significant amount of time if you were dumb enough to rent a three hour DVDegrade of something like Schindler's list ("But there's still movie left!!!"). Not as bad as he makes it out to be, not as good as you make it out to be...
Monitors generally implode, not explode (when they 'plode at all).
uProcs go under a lot of testing before they get sent out.
This coating could easily be activated by the testing - w/o teting you can't be sure, and with testing, you might get a coaster in the box (and who's going to believe you? "My DVDegrade doesn't work!" "Of course not - goodbye.")
"Bah!" - Dogbert
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
>Well,Well, that's fantastic. I'm glad we know what you want. But, why should we care? that's fantastic. I'm glad we know what you want. But, why should we care?
OTOH - why should we care what you wan, either...
>How is droping this disc in the trash any diffrent from droping a netflix in the mail?
No garbage, for one thing... product gets reused. The concept of this for everyday consumer use just doesn't make sense... the only way it even seems acceptable is because of our society, which seems to think that everything from paper cups to people are disposable... so why not DVDs, too. I'm not telling you to go hug a tree, but just think of the things you throw away each day. If you even consider pitching stuff like this (or if you even *own* a DVD player), you are doing better than most, and should make an effort to improve yourself and your community. You don't have to donate money, you don't have to spend hours down at a shelter. Just help in whatever way you can. Wasting time and $$ on DVDegradables certainly doesn't help this, and your attitude isn't helping anyone [/flame]
Just my $.05
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
And once you bring back your self-destructed disk
to the company, what then? They pay you your $3
for being a good, environmentally friendly person, then
chuck the disk out due to the fact it is totally useless.
Alternatively, it might be possible to have a way of
repairing the disk -- but then the pirates simply
repair the disk. Or copy the disk before it destroys itself.
Or....
The problem is, it doesn't matter if the disk
physically drives itself back to the rental shop,
unless someone finds a way to allow the disks to
be played, without being copied. Which IMNSO is
not possible. If there are cheaply available
'rental' DVDs, along with reasonably cheap DVD-RW/DVD-RAM
drives and disks, someone *will* be able to intercept
the signal going to the TV, and copy it.
--
David Taylor
davidt-sd@xfiles.nildram.spam.co.uk
[To e-mail me: s/\.spam//]
Also, you could go out and buy 20 movies you might want to watch in the future, and then not have to go out at all..
I would do this, if they were $2-$3, just for the convience of having the movies in my house already..
As long as this is kind of like a "trial version" of the DVD, and the non-crippled one is avalible if I want it, I would like the added choice...
However, if a movie I liked like the Matrix was only avalible as "crippleware" it would REALLY piss me off!
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
I believe what rental stores really want is the repeat business; if the customer is forced to enter the store to return the disk/tape, those chances are greater.
That's also why some rental places close their drop-boxes during open hours.
If it's just a color-changing plastic layer on the disc, it should be relatively trivial to abrade it away with one of those 'repair your scratched CDs' kit thingees.
Presto, replayable DVD.
gomi
...are doomed to repeat it.
/before/ DIVX.
People want to collect movies. They don't want disposable disks that self destruct. They don't want to have to keep paying for movies after they've paid for them once. This is why so many people have large collections of VHS tapes.
This might have worked a year ago,
In the end, I have just one question: Why go through all of this for something so thoroughly trivial? Video stores work. Blockbuster is a perfectly valid rental revenue channel for DVDs. Even if you add the convenience of throwaway DVDs, its just not worth the added costs.
404 Error:
Blah Blah, more of the same gas vs. everything else argument that never includes things like people doing more than one chore at a time and at one point in their driving day will be next to a videostore. Regardless of how you rationalize it, throwaways are usually bad for the environment.
Who's writing this stuff that shut in who will only order stuff from the net? I'm half expecting, "Its bad for your engine to stop it and start it one extra time at a videostore, might as well throw them disks away."
Hey now! I was just using Microsoft because I was reinstalling NT 4.0 due to a thrashed boot sector/unrecoverable registry whilst posting! It was a 'use what you got' thing, not a 'M$ is 3>17' rant. If it had appeared an hour earlier, I would have used IBM, as I was unsucessfully beating on a box that magically decided to forget it had a VM. Now that I think about it, IBM would have been a better choice, since they made extensive software provision so that you couldn't reinstall from the distributed media on some of their older minis. Stuff like wiping a bit of the LIC, rewriting a checksum so it wouldn't install, etc. They're already in the business of creativly destroying the install media.
Do me a fav.. Next time you see an obvoius, unfounded MS bash, please flame on! You are right in noticing there is too much of it going around.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Wow. who sold you that one?
Yes, once it is created, Styrofoam is inert and does little damage in and of itself. However, the process to create the styrofoam, including the oil drilling and refineries have plenty of well documented negative environmental impact on people and animals.
When styrofoam is incinerated, a practice that is becoming more prevalent as landfills fill up (with styrofoam) and close, it is also plenty toxic. I'd love to see you melt that styrofoam into a liquid and drink it instead. Or burn a few hundred pounds of it in a closed, unventilated room. Then I'll be convinced.
Then there's the aformentioned landfills. How many habitats do we need to destroy to have giant holes in the ground full of inert petroleum products?
You imply that the "green spin doctors" will have trouble with dumping trash in the ocean and have no trouble with radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain. You should actually talk to one of those "green spin doctors" once in a while. You'll find none of them advocating burying U238 in that mountain.
The microwave is your friend. Here's what I do to avoid wasting old CDs (AOL demos, promo stuff I dont want, etc):
put it in the microwave at high power for 3-5 seconds. you get to watch a wonderful little lightning show. (don't leave it in there longer than that or you'll break the magnetron.)
then take it out (caution: contents may be hot) and enjoy your new coaster. you can easily distinguish it from good discs by the fact that the metal layer is all cracked and shattered-looking.
Plastic is, environmentally speaking, one of the most harmful substances we have ever created.
One example of the impact of plastic manufacturing is this: chemicals used in the production of plastics emulate sex hormones and cause infertility and birth defects in amphibians. This is one of the reasons that amphibians are disappearing around the globe.
I wouldn't like to see this idea go mainstream... we throw out too much stuff already. Now they want to manufacture DVDs that are specifically designed to be thrown away? Definitely not cool.
"On the other hand, the early worm gets eaten."
I think the rental stores will push back the hardest on this. They *want* to collect late fees, and if you have to go back to the store to return the movie, you are much more likely to rent another one. This is a stupid idea, pure and simple.
Of course, I just use kozmo.com to deliver movies to my door and pick them up when I'm done. I don't have to go anywhere!
-Jeff
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
I thought the article was saying that the LASER LIGHT caused the degradation.
With a self destructing disk, it would force me to create a good copy of it. Sounds like they're just pushing the idea of piracy to many people who might not normally do something like that.
Hmm. Methinks the greed has blinded them.
I think a lot of people are going to have a knee-jerk reaction that they don't like it simply because of the reference to DIVX. However, I think this is a great idea.
If I could get a disk for $2.50 (or the average rental price), and not have to return it, this is a big win. I hate returning video tapes.
Note that this is not meant to be a replacement for the ability to buy permanent DVDs, which was the big problem with DIVX.
---
All the major CD-R manufacturers claim expected CD-R lives of at least 50 years, although (being manufacturers standing to profit from longevity) their results may be dubious.
The Special Interest Group for CD Applications and Technology has performed a study; after artificial aging, 3 (TDK, Avery-labeled TDK, and Taiyo Yuden) out of 8 CD-R manufacturers' discs could not be read. There are some limitations to this study, though. There were not enough discs to subject them to the full "Life Expectancy of Compact Discs (CD-ROM) -- Method for Estimating, Based on Effects of Temperature and Relative Humidity" (ANSI/NAPM IT9.21-1996), so there is not estimate of how long these discs are expected to last (which almost makes the aging section of the study useless). The aging conditions were 80C, 85% relative humidity, 750 hour period, ramping rate of half that of ANSI IT9.21 recommendations, and equilibration time of twice that of ANSI IT9.21 recommendations. There are some other links at http://www.cd-info .com/CDIC/Technology/CD-R/Media/Longevity.html that you may want to take a look at.
In my own personal experience, though, I have made about 40 (TDK) CD-Rs that receive heavy use that are about a year old, with no reported problems. Taking life expectancy to mean the average life span of a CD-R...
"Proof" by reduction to an absurdity that the life expectancy of a TDK CD-R is greater than 10 years.
If the life expectancy of a CD-R were less than 10 years, then (As x goes from 0 to (infinity), Integral(2^(-x/h))dx = 10, so h/ln(2) = 10) the half-life of a CD-R would be less than 10 * ln(2), or 6.9 years. Then, the probability of decay after t years would be less than than 2^(-t/6.9). So, the probability of a CD-R surviving one year is less than 2^(-1/6.9), or 0.90. Hence, the probability of 40 CD-Rs all surviving a full year is less than 0.90^40, or 0.018. This is approximately (within 1.1%) the probability of drawing the Ace of Spades from a deck of cards with jokers: possible, but unlikely. Since all 40 CD-Rs did survive a full year, it is much more probable that the original assumption was false (or my math is wrong :-); i.e., it is much more probable that the life expectancy of a TDK CD-R is greater than 10 years.
Now back to studying for my English midterm... :-)
Daniel J. Peng
Daniel J. Peng
Or you can just rent a DVD, DE-CSS it and its yours forever. This changes nothing.
This will encourage piracy....Think about it. Buy a cheap self-destructing DVD, DE-CSS it and its yours forever.
Right, except that it isn't piracy. Since you bought the DVD, barring a signed agreement to the contrary, you have a fair use right to "make a backup copy, solely for archival purposes in the event of the loss or destruction of the original."
I can see a couple reasons rental stores won't like this...
Taken together, these would seem to undermine the typical rental store's way of doing business. Your favorite rental store will no longer be a repository of movies that can be shared and enjoyed for years to come, but a clearing house for disposable wastes of time. Oi.
Only through hard work and perseverence can one truly suffer.
When you don't need the key anymore, place the DVDs onto a hard surface and use 1 hammer to mix. Cook in a 1000 watt microwave for one minute. (1:30 for low wattage ovens)
This will stop most spooks. Now, the NSA might have uncooking technology, but of course they're on our side.
The only cool part about it is that it makes the disk change colors. I wonder if they could make a coating that would change, but leave the disk usable, kind of like a freshness seal.
"We think it gets around what killed Divx," said Nabil Lawandy, Specra Science's CEO. "There's no phone line, no credit card transaction, no special player needed, and no Big Brother element to it."
The idea of a DVD that will degrade to an unplayable state does look stupid, but the thing that killed DIVX was the implied erosion of privacy. At least these guys pay very strong attention to bolstering the DVD rental industry while explicitly respecting people's privacy. You have to give 'em a little slack on that count.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
A DVD costs around $1 to manufacture in large runs. Add to this the price of packaging, destructive coating and distribution. Substract this to $3 (or even $2.50). What you have left is the total (and paltry) profit. The initial price of a DIVX was $4.49 and according to the DIVX business model they actually lost money if the buyer didn't use the disc again after the 48 hours window had finished. Besides, there are still severe undercapacity problems with DVDs; they can't just produce as many discs as they want and as a result, there are currently many delays with new releases and reprints. And some clever guys are speaking about destroying them? Bollocks.
As soon as I read this, my stomach turned.
:)
It used to be that you returned a rented video so that it would be there for the next person to rent, now it seems you return them because you're not licensed to view them for any longer then the rental period.
On top of this, imagine how much more trash you would have generated had you thrown out any rented media as soon as you were done with it.
What's next, libraries that only let you take out photocopies made with disappearing toner?
I just hope that the cost of new media for each rental will keep the technology too expensive (read more expensive than the current system) to ever get used.
P.S. First post (at least when I started writing
I believe he was talking about the ocean subductive zone... that's totally different then the ocean. The ocean subductive zone is where the Earth's crust re-enters the mantle. There would be NO negative consequences for dumping stuff there, in fact, it would be as close as we could come to putting it back in it's original place. It would be kind of like throwing it into a volcano, except that it would go back into the crust instead of being spit back out at us. The problem with dumping stuff with it is two-fold, and PR has nothing to do with it. 1. It's very deep in the ocean and increadibly hard to get at. In fact, it would probably be easier to shoot it into the sun. 2. We might need the stuff someday. I could have sworn I read an article on a expirimental nuclear power plant that used waste from the normal ones.
I used to work for a publisher of reference material on CD-ROM, who sent customers an update of their CD every month. According to the software license, customers were supposed to mail their previous month's CD back to the company when they received the new one. Instead, some customers would sell their old CDs to colleagues.
At that time, there was some talk of physically self-destructing CDs, which would eliminate that particular problem. The same principle applies here. I'll bet publishers of subscription-based library updates will jump at this technology.
I wish these companies would wake up and smell the land fill. When I worked for that same company, I saw rooms (!) full of throw-away CDs. As far as I know, there was never any effort to recycle them. There is no excuse for that kind of waste.
I started out with laser disc, and a manufacturing flaw in those discs would cause them to degrade over time (months to years). The manufacturers would replace the discs if this happened, as it was a flaw. It's called laser rot, and comes from an oxidation of the relfective layer.
Now some group tries to implement the concept as a feature. DVD uses a different plastic than laser disc, so classic laser rot can not happen to them, but it's the same basic idea.
Remember that DIVIX comes from a group of copyright laywers. It was funded largley by Circuit City. It failed because they tried to build a product the public didn't request. DIVIX got some content providers on board, and had to pay them advance royalties to do it.
Oh, well, let's hope this dies too.
Do you think BlockBuster will want to lose the money they make from late fees? I think not.
That is why this will fail.
BlockBuster was used as an example, this could apply to any rental place. Please don't sue me. If you do sue me, you could get 10s of dollars.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What a great idea, more disposable junk. I hope they come packaged in styrofoam. (sarcasm off)
It's like the *best* place to dump toxic and radioactive waste being in an oceanic subduction zone. It's the best answer but will never happen for publicity reasons. "You want to pollute the oceans!" The green spin doctors will have a field day with this. while burying U238 at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, where it can eventually get into the water suply.
There's a certain almost poetic beauty to the way this idea juxtaposes with the "archival backup" provision of "fair use", isn't there? When I rent an ordinary disk, I clearly don't own it -- I just have possession of it for the period of the rental and I'm entitled to view it, but that's all. However, if I buy a self-destructing disk, then I do own the physical medium. They may be willing to sell it to me for a rental price on the theory that it will self-destruct, but barring some really fancy legal footwork on their part, I don't see how they could justify denying that I am entitled to use it according to "fair use", including the right to "make a backup copy, solely for archival purposes in the event of [must...keep...straight...face] the loss or destruction of the original".
I think you're getting a bit carried away. There is no way that the courts would consider making a copy of one of these things "fair use". The very idea is ludicrous. Why on earth would you need an archive or backup copy when you're only licensed to view it for one day anyway?
Oh, BTW, Moore's Law was only formulated for integrated semiconductor devices, not magnetic media. Though I take your point about the similar price/performance evolution curve.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I have no personal experience with the DivX/DVD fiasco, but it seems to me that one of the major drawbacks to the DivX is that, after the 48 hour window was up, you either had to pay more money to get a key to unlock the disc, or you were stuck with a glorified coaster (the other problem being incompatibility with some DVD players, IIRC).
How is this new technology going to be different? Oh, that's right, you *can't* pay for extra time, the disc itself degrades under laser exposure. All the drawbacks of DivX with less long-term potential for the customer. In the end, you're still stuck with a coaster (or microwave experiment... kids, don't try this at home!).
Am I way off the mark here? Which was the bigger drawback of DivX? Heaps of coasters or lack of universal compatability? If it was the heaps of coasters, this technology will fail the same as DivX.
On the other hand, this technique could surely be useful elsewhere... I'm just not immediately sure where.
Eric
I'm sure an agency that REALLY wanted the one-time pad would be able to remove the coating w/o damaging the data on the disc.
You need something like an acid which REALLY melts down the data-storage layer of the disk...
What possibilities for data transfer would those be? I don't see how this is any more convenient than burning a regular CD and giving it to someone - and with a regular CD, I don't have to worry that I won't be able to read it should I ever need to use it again. Or do you see a use that I don't?
As far as I'm concerned, the idea of thousands upon thousands of dvd's being tossed into our already overflowing landfills is disturbing as hell. Rather than spend money on technology like this, we should focus on getting high bandwidth connections to the home. Want to rent a movie? Download it. That way there's nothing to return or throw out.
Your Working Boy,
All this talk about the dvd starting to degrade when the laser hits it is erronous. It starts to degrade when the sealed package is opened. Here is a better article on the subject. I found it a few days ago.r eport/pjb/stories/03064261.htm
http://www.projo.com/cgi-bin/frame_it.cgi?URL=/
Also, all this talk about pirating by copying it is really annoying. The disks will most likely NOT have all the goodies that are on a full dvd, and will probably be pan and scan only to boot. Who want's a copy of that? Certainly not me. Might as well just wait and get a previously veiwed vhs copy for all that's worth to you. I will pay the $15 - $20 it costs to OWN a dvd I want with all the enhanced features intact. I'm not rich, but I'm sure not that cheap, especially considering the cost of a dvd ram drive + the cost of media.
The one thing they need to iron out is some type of recycling effort once this goes into production, where you take your stack of watched disks back whenever you want, and they give you 10 or 25 cents each and send them in to be recycled into whatever they can to keep them out of landfills.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
With self-destructive media, that second trip to the vidshop is totally unnecessary. Only ninety percent of rented movies are actually watched. About ten to fifteen percent are kept one or more days late because they haven't been watched yet. And less than twenty percent of the time people go to the video store to return a rented movie do they rent something while they're there. Imagine never having to pay a late fee again, or having to return an unwatched movie. Imagine not having to waste twenty minutes and a third of a gallon of gasoline returning what could be thrown away more cheaply and more efficiently. Oh, and if you've got a two-evening rental and couple of five-evening rentals from Blockbuster, you could be saving two trips to the store.
The day will come when you can just download the movie, thereby eliminating the video store and all its related pollution altogether. Doubtless when that happens, illegal-vid sites will exist in the numbers illegal-mp3 sites do today. Until that time, I'll remain fairly happy not to have to fight traffic just so I can give something back.
And here is the absolute, hail-Eris best part: The video store will never, ever be out of what you're going there to rent.
Cheers
--
This is not my sandwich.
Well, the application that immediately popped into my mind is as a storage device for one-time-pad encryption keys. If the DVD degraded after being used to encode some top-secret message, then the key is automatically destroyed. No "bad guy" can get ahold of it, and no stupid encryption clerk can accidentally/purposfully usr the same one-time-pad twice. Not a bad use.
I cant believe that in this day of environmental consciousness that and idea like this would even make it through the concept stage. If this idea would take off it would be an ecological disaster. Everyone claims to be so eco-friendly but doesnt want to put up with 'minor' inconveniences like returning movies. How difficult is it anyway? This is just my 2 cents worth but I think it is a horrible idea...
I've just been hearing from a colleague that CD-Rs have a life expectancy of less than 10 years ... i.e. the data on them degrades due to the physical/chemical nature of the technology. Also heard that CDs sold today are a lot less stable than the earlier ones because the manufacturers are cutting costs.
So what is the half-life of a DVD anyhow? With its higher data density than CD plus the manufacturers corner cutting I wouldn't be surprised if it's only about 5 years at best. Just in time for them to sell you your whole movie collection all over again in whatever the new technology of the moment is.
(The MTBF for the players are only about 2 years anyhow.)
Might be wise to take the Hemos approach and occasionally have your house burn down.
(Anyone got any real figures on DVD life expectancy? Seriously.)
Regards, Ralph.
There's no way DVD-R media's going to come down in price for those reasons.
Put it this way: right now, hard drive space is less that $30/GB. That's based on an 18 GB Ultra-2 Wide SCSI drive I bought a few months ago for about $600. It's probably less now, not to mention how much less it would be for bigger, slower IDE drives. I haven't been paying close attention to such things, but I imagine it might be half of that. Hence, storing a 4 GB DVD movie on my hard drive would cost me about $120 worth of disk space on the U2W, or maybe $60 if I bought a cheap IDE drive. If Moore's Law stays with us for another five years, we'll see a little over three more doublings, bringing that down to $6-12 per movie, which is less than buying the movie normally, even if the disposable disk costs ~$5. So, even if removable media prices fail to keep up, ordinary disk space will become cheap enough to make "backing up" of single-use DVDs practical within five years, which is soon enough to matter. If I understand this right, the idea would be for these to replace rental DVDs, so the price would have to be in the same range (though no doubt they'll try to use this as an excuse to jack up the rental prices by another buck or two "in order to serve you better".)
Of course, I love the idea of being able to store my movie collection on a hard drive for the same reason that I like MP3s: not for making bootleg copies (remember, don't call it "piracy"), but for the convenience of having everything in a jukebox-like system, instantly available, without needing to flip disks around, plus track memory, playlist management, etc.
There's a certain almost poetic beauty to the way this idea juxtaposes with the "archival backup" provision of "fair use", isn't there? When I rent an ordinary disk, I clearly don't own it -- I just have possession of it for the period of the rental and I'm entitled to view it, but that's all. However, if I buy a self-destructing disk, then I do own the physical medium. They may be willing to sell it to me for a rental price on the theory that it will self-destruct, but barring some really fancy legal footwork on their part, I don't see how they could justify denying that I am entitled to use it according to "fair use", including the right to "make a backup copy, solely for archival purposes in the event of [must...keep...straight...face] the loss or destruction of the original".
Of course, what they should really do is just grow up and realize that they can't absolutely prevent bootlegging, and that they don't really need to do so, since it won't stop people from buying from them anyway, rather than continue to be such greedy bastards with their increasingly ridiculous attempts to control everything, which only serve to impede other desirable, and perfectly legitimate, uses (see above), but that's been said before.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
"Is it sexual harassment to force a female employee to watch a degrading DVD?"
"The Star Wars movies have been degrading ever since the first ones were released on DVD."
"Rental porn on DVDs pulled from shelves in favor of new, more degrading materials."
This company has successfully corrupted DVDs with one of the biggest gripes that consumers have with VHS tapes: they corrode over time and the image quality is reduced.
It makes you wonder what will happen when DVD writers finally become commonplace: under fair use doctrine, it's ok to duplicate your media to guard against unintended distruction (ie backups). Just copy the self-destructing DVD to a normal DVD disc, and you're all set.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
This will encourage piracy....Think about it. Buy a cheap self-destructing DVD, DE-CSS it and its yours forever. These kind of tactics don't generally work and I expect the general public to reject it for every reason including environmental pollution, and health reasons...(noxious gasses emmited by degrading DVDs....)
TDK tests have estimated 70 years for their CD-Rs, Pioneer CD-Rs are rated at 100 years, while this independent site states that life expectancies range from 75 - 200 years based on the color of the disk (green (cyanine) disks last up to 75 years, gold (phthalocyanine) last up to 100 years and platinum last up to 200 years).
On pioneer's site they have DVD-R's for sale and describe them as having 100 year life expectancy.
One problem I see with this is that the coating is just that... a coating. The data is in the middle of the disc, like the jelly in a peanut butter sandwich.
Then someone will come out with a "DVD Cleaning Liquid" which removes the ugly... uh... stain. Yeah, that's it, it's just stained. Yeah, I accidentally poured hot grits on my DVD. That's it, that's the ticket.
Interestingly, this is not the first time that optical discs have been degraded with a coating, just the first time for a "time-delay" coating. The original DiscoVision laserdiscs often used a "scrap" side for any title that used an odd number of sides. (Laserdisc is two layers bonded together, just like DVD.) These extra sides were coated with hairspray-like substance, which can be removed with isopropyl alcohol.
So what happens if the phone rings or you have to take a crap while watching a "this disc will self-destruct in ten minutes" DVD? And what kind of shelf life does the coating have? Will DVDs need a "freshness date" on them?
Besides, do people really want throwaway DVDs? Sure it can be a pain to return rentals, but you eventually have to go back to get more rentals anyhow. One big problem with DIVX was that you had to go all the way to Circus City, of which there might be one or two in any given city, rather than a local video rental place, of which there would likely be one within two miles of where you live.
Go outside and get some fresh air, already! The big room with the blue and/or gray and/or black ceiling won't hurt you.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }