Industry Agrees On Next Gen Unified DVD Standard

scsirob writes "According to this press release the DVD recording industry will end the DVD-RW/DVD+RW/DVD-RAM mess and standardise on a new technology called 'Blue Ray'. Blue lasers are used to record up to 27 GB on each side of the DVD. This initiative is backed by all major players in the industry. The article contains many technical details." Several other people noted that the BBC has coverage as well. Yah for non-company specific industry standards.

Comments

Re:Flip side of coin

[DarkEdgeX]

I'm assuming the 'unique ID' is written to a normally non-writable part of the disc (for Blu-ray writers/burners), so yes, this is part of it I imagine (the player/reader would validate that this unique ID existed and was properly initialized). The other side of it that I can see is media watermarking using the 'unique ID' as a key to encrypt/mark with. Watermarking, if done properly (and I'm not claiming to be an expert), would be irreversable and potentially trackable (ie: Joe Nobody buys 'The Fifth Element' on a shiny new Blu-Ray disc from his local Fred Meyer/Hastings/Sam Goody. Joe Nobody rips the movie and encodes it into a semi-high quality DiVX (or some other format, VCD, etc). The watermark survives the recompression, but Joe Nobody doesn't know this and distributes it on Gnutella/FreeNet/eDonkey2000. MPAA Lawyer downloads enough of the movie off of one of these file sharing utilities and uses an application to 1) extract the watermark, 2) correlate the watermark with the store the disc was sold at and 3) identify the individual to whom the disc was sold. MPAA lawyer dispatches law enforcement to Joe Nobody's place of residence.).

It's disconcerting, to say the least. And this is definately an all-new format, nothing in the press release or BBC article seem to indicate that the discs will work in existing DVD drives, so this is the studios/MPAA's "second chance" to get copy protection implemented correctly.. I'm sure after the DeCSS beating they got, they're definately looking at every possibility they have...

The obvious uses

[Yankovic]

So much porn..... aghghghghghghgh.