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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.
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.
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