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MPAA Finds First Actual DVD Copiers in U.S.
MattW writes: "Yahoo! is reporting that the first pirate DVD bust has occurred. Funny, isn't it, how the pirates don't need to crack any encryption to make copies of DVDs, but we have to ban DeCSS anyhow?"
Anyone out there know anything about movie-> DVD schedules? They mentioned in hte article that there were 3 movies yet to be released on dvd and that these were "wholly inferior products"... Its my guess that unless they were burning these dvd's onto cheese wedges(mmm edible DVDS) that thses were just high quality rips burned onto a dvdr... which would explain the inferior product. Again this article is lacking in details ...
I'm actually glad they caught this guy. I agree with the MPAA and RIAA that piracy is bad (although I don't agree with their digital piracy campaigns), and the more actual pirates that can be shut down, the better. If they actually start going after the pirates rather than the consumers, it would be a nice start.
Excellent point that copying the disc encrypted isn't a problem. Its like a cabinet we all have a key to. Any DVD player can just unlock it. Which raises the question is it possible to ever secure mass media from reproduction? Any schemes or ideas I've heard of ruin the ability to play the media in computers. Like the audio CD's that started popping up last summer. Look at the standards battle that unleashed with phillips saying they couldn't use the compact disc logo on those...
I somehow doubt that straight DVD piracy is truelly viable because of the current cost of blank DVD media, especially once all the other costs are added up.
Give it a year or 2 though & it definitly will be.
"Pirates seek to profit off the enormous popularity of DVDs by using the latest in technology to illegally manufacture DVD copies of Hollywood films, and again dupe consumers into purchasing a wholly inferior product," MPAA Chief Executive Jack Valenti said in a statement.
[emphasis mine]
Funny... I thought the whole reason the MPAA was scared of digital data was because it could be copied perfectly and not create a wholly inferior product. Or maybe it's inferior because Jack doesn't make lots of money off of it.
(not that I support this sort of copying -- this guy was obviously a parasite, trying to live off the work of others)
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
"Well, I don't know. There aren't any simple answers!"
I find it interesting they can claim losses to internet piracy when they don't even have an internet media. Because of that, they are saying that every single internet copy is a pirate copy and that they ose money to it.
What they need to do, to stop piracy, is first lower prices. It's a little hard to pay $35 (in an extreme case, RoboCop Director's cut was about that much...) for a DVD when you know they cost pennies to make. $15 is far more reasonable, but they insist on gouging. No Duh are people going to pirate. The problem is, you just don't know what you are getting when you spend money on a DVD.
Second, they need to provide an internet format. It is ridiculous that they look at how many people are trading movies on the web and then they say "we better stop them!". How come nobody in the industry saw this as a new market and leapt on it? That's a bit ignorant if you ask me, I'm not paying for their mistake. Seems like if 'billions of movies are flying around the web a year...' then somebody would be say 'we think we can make money from that new market.'
The funny thing is, the people using DeCSS aren't typically making money from it. It makes you wonder if fair-use at least partially protects them. Oh well, they got their poorly written DMCA. Seems like it wouldn't be that hard to trap the MPAA or RIAA using the DMCA.
"Derp de derp."
Look at the titles: "The Lord of the Rings," "Training Day" and "Ali."
Most likely, these are screeners, or some sort of other illegitimate copies from either a promo video or the distributed film. The quality is --not-- the same as a truly produced DVD, (though it is pretty damn good.)
Overall, I have no qualms about them arresting these people. This isn't just casual piracy. This is fairly serious bootlegging which, as much as I hate to say it, does impose an adverse effect on the studios' bottom line.
Imagine, would you rather pay $10 for a pirated DVD or go pay $7/person to go see it in the theatre. For those people that have surround sound systems and large tvs, there's not really much argument.
Quote, J. Valenti MPAA Chief Executive:
"Pirates seek to profit off the enormous popularity of DVDs by using the latest in technology to illegally manufacture DVD copies of Hollywood films, and again dupe consumers into purchasing a wholly inferior product,"
How is it wholly inferior? Are they skipping every 64th bit? Are they failing to copy the FBI warning at the beginning of it? Maybe they're disabling the commercials that you can't fast forward past.
See, I've ALWAYS been against people making copies, and selling them. But damned if this asshole doesn't make it impossible for me to have any sympathy.
When new bill is being introduced CBDTPA suddenly we hear and read a lot of stories about pirates,busting etc.
I wonder how long this bust been put on hold,to make strong statement by arresting individual in the
"right time"
Same situation applies to Valenti when he has started crying about all the losses caused by pirates.
You make it impossible to play on a computer, all you have to do is have a "legitimate" player convert the signal to analog for viewing, and put the analog output in to a computer input, and voila, any protection scheme has just been cracked.
Fast forward three years into the future. CBDTPA-compliant hardware says: "Watermark detected. Recording denied." And your pre-CBDTPA hardware has worn out after years of use. Now what do you do?
Will I retire or break 10K?
This will never work and has been tried before with other illegal activities (drugs spring to mind).
Here is were the problem lies. If you don't bust a good majority of the people on each iteration of the illegal activity then people are not scared. To be effective you need to get about 10% each time the crime is committed. Otherwise the chances of geting busted are to low for someone to worry about. it falls into the range of " Won't happen to me".
This means that if you download a movie ten times the chances of getting busted should be aproaching certany. Anything less and you are wasting time with this method.
This would not be hard to do if they were serious. You can grab casual users by the bushel basket all day long on Efnet or Dalnet. You could easily make a morpheus/Kazaa clone to track with. Lot's of trojan horse schemes to throw out there to grab users by the hundreds daily.
Then you hit the real problem. With millions of people everyday participating in this activity you are suddenly faced with prosecuting hundreds of thousands of cases to the full extent of the law. We are talking billions of dollars in legal costs, most likely aproaching the trillons quickly.
The hurdle comes from the fact that these are not poor intercity youth here who will get a public defender and plead guilty for the reduced charge. These are people of means, that is why they have an internet connection and a working computer, that is why they are sitting on a high speed connection at a university. If they themselves cannot afford a lawyer then you can damn bet their parents can. A lawyer who get's payed by the hour and is going to drag out this case for as long as they can. This means more work and more court time and more goverment costs. Meanwhile the citizens of the state/country are having a fit as their taxs rise and their infrastructure falls apart because all funds are being directed at internet piracy. Most people will agree that they would rather have a murder caught and prosecuted than have a pirate prosecuted. With such an overloaded court system the murders would be walking free because the prosecuters cannot handle the load.
This is the idea of Civil Disobediance put into words by Henry David Thoreau and so well put into action by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. If you swamp the system with so many targets then the system will fail. You can arrest hundreds or thousands, but you cannot arrest tens of thousands and millions of people for performing a harmless action. It will bring your state to a grinding halt.
Add to this the fact that every case is a potential reversal of the case law you find favorable. All it takes is one lucky or good lawyer to get this to an appels court, or the supreme court and all of a sudden your favoriable DMCA is being modified by the courts in ways that you cannot control with campaign contributions. Imagine an apeals court rulling that the DMCA means that the movie industry cannot decode disks to see if they are pirated once they are made and throwing all current cases out of court for lack of evidence. Stranger interpritations have been made and become law before. The politicians and the lobbiest would do a lot to keep this from happening, including making personal piracy legal.
The only course of action is to capitulate and modify your behavior so that the disobedience stops.
Piracy is consumer Disobedience on a grand scale. If your prices are gouging, your rates outragous then the consumer wil go elsewhere. This is the basis for Capitalism, just and unforseen side effect of that system. That if the alternative is Illegal the consumers wil become outlaws.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
"Police said they confiscated two computer towers, 15 DVD burners, 1,208 copies of pirate DVDs and about $5,200 in cash. Only one person was arrested" Yea...I'd say he's capable of producing at least 1 billion out of the 3 they claim to lose each year. The movie industry sure needs Congress and a Gestapo to protect themselves from this guy, don't they? Ironically, the 2001 Oscars are on tonight...and it's been the most profitable year in movie history...
As has been brought up over and over from the beginning of DeCSS time, CSS does not prevent bit-by-bit copying. CSS prevents playback on unlicensed (in theory) players. The point there, of course, is to drag in more profits by charging consumer electronics manufacturers to license the CSS decryption.
It's like a password-protected PKZIP file -- I don't need to know what's in it to be able to copy it, I just copy it to another disk.
I think that's two bad arguments rolled into one. They are going after individual lawbreakers, which is futile as long as there is a profit in it. They are using the government to rubber-stamp legislation to shackle technology and innovation without understanding it. And, in your own words, like the drug war, it's all for nothing.
You've got to admire the logic you are espousing,
I mean, imagine it: someone hears one day that you can cure a mild cold by shooting yourself in the foot. He figures, 'what the hell,' goes out and buys a gun, blows a couple of toes off and the bullet misses the neighbors head by inches.
The cold persists through it's normal course and eventually the bandages come off. Despite the lack of favorable results (and the hole in the neighbor's cieling), the next time he gets the sniffles, he reaches for his revolver...
Something about this is wrong.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
Wholly inferior in what way ? No spam insert ? No nice picture on the cover ?
Someone please correct me, but isnt the whole point of copying a DVD not to lose quality in the process ? What ? Are counterfeit burners going to drop a few 1 ans 0's in the process ?
I think the only thing inferior here is the money going into Valenti's pocket.
Marriage is considered capital punishment for the theft of a goat in some third world countries...
It doesn't matter to the MPAA and RIAA. They think you should have to go out and buy another copy if yours goes belly-up. Yet, they insist that a consumer only owns a license to view the content, not the content itself. So why can't I simply pay for replacement media, since I own the license? This is the question you're never going to hear the answer to, because the industry is so greedy they want to get you coming and going. This won't change as long as politicians are in the pockets of the corporations.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
"You analogy is flawed. Instead of attacking it I'll just just point out that if fair use applied to digital media (which it should), you could make as many copies as you please and distribute them for free, legally. "
Where do you get this idea? Fair use has only ever meant either redistributing small portions, for review, commentary, or criticism (I think use in new artistic works might be debated, although most people doing so don't attempt it), or archival copies for your own personal use.
These uses are under heavy attack, and need to be defended.
What you are talking about is NOT fair use, and it has been illegal as long as we've had copyright.
Seriously...Slashdot needs to have an explaination of what Fair Use is right on the front page, above the banner ads.
I am glad that they caught these guys. Pirating is stealing whether it's videos on DVDs or videos sent over the internet or music traded on-line.
All of the excuses I've heard for doing so is bullshit. Is the entertainment industry gouging the consumer with high DVD prices? Yep. Does that justify stealing their intelecual property? Nope.
Everytime we violate a copyright by illegal traiding we make the MPAA and RIAA arguments for built-in hardware copy protection more justifiable. It's going to be a hard enough fight without giving the corporations additonal ammunition.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
To my knowledge, such a beast should not be possible.
When I was younger, before CD burners were available to the public, I knew how CD's where made. Still, I remarked one day to my dad,"I can't wait until CD *RECORDERS* come out!"
He looked at me with a look that said,"Ah, son, how much you have to learn about the world.." and said (out loud, this time),"Well, do you know how CDs are made?", probably as way of breaking it to me gently that it'll never happen.
But I thought to myself,"Give them a year or two.. and they'll appear. I've seen much more amazing technological feats materialize with the right consumer pull.
You can run but you can't hide, except, apparently, along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
People keep saying "hey, it costs lots of money to produce a dvd." But look, no-one asked for all the Bullshit(tm) extras you get.
/. .. ok, um just ignore that bit.
Lets start with the menus. These menus are mostly made by idiots, and are possibly some of the most irritating user interfaces in the world. Ok, so they sometimes look cool, the first time. But after going backwards and forwards and seeing the same stupid transport 20 times, it can get kinda f*cking annoying. I click on something, i make a mistake, no, i don't want to see that menu, so don't start loading it. Just give me a list of the stuff on the DVD, in a plain text form. if i really want pretty colours, i will by a player that renders the text in fun and annoying ways. This way, i can actually look through a list and choose what i want in seconds, and save the producer months of work. Most DVDs have the same format - film, trailers, out-takes, music, documentaries. You don't need to re-invent the wheel with every single disk.
The next thing is the restrictions: the whole DVD format is a bloated mess of stupid protocols that serve no purpose - CSS has been cracked, why continue to encode it and pay royalties to the dicks who invented it? same goes for macrovision - I have a legitimate reason for plugging my player into my VCR: My TV is so old it doesn't have scart/composite sockets, i need to send it modulated. But can i do this? no, i just get a messy picture, so i have to plug it into my TV card instead. Why restrict people from fast forwarding? what are you trying to prove? The player decides if its gonna process these restrictions (no-fast-forward flag) anyone can design a player that ignores them. But of course, no-one can design a player that ignores them - thats not allowed. DVD is a closed format. Why did the people choose such a restrictive system? because it's the only decent digital system around, and its the only one that the studios want you to use. They invented it, they control it, they put their content on it. Its a monopoly, simple as that.
Now don't tell me that putting some out-takes and behind the scenes bits costs allot of money. If you want to interview people, make documentaries or expensive music videos, fine, just make a cheap 'lite' version of the disk with out these bits.
What gets me more than anything, is that the average person loves DVD, they have no clue about the crapness of this format. Its not like they did anything special, AFAIK they didn't even design the compression codec or the disk, and making a menu system is hardly a nobel prize.
I'm just a loony shouting in the street. I can see all you people reading this "ok... just walk away, hes obviously slightly mad.. keep going" I'm just gonna get ignored or modded down. Just like when I threatened the president and got my comment removed from
Ahh, screw you guys, i'm going home to watch my dvd
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
The problem is that the pirates in question (and most of them) had a DVD burner or array of them, whereas overseas pirates have actual DVD manufacturing capabilities. Therefore, they must have used DeCSS or a modern equivalent.
1:1 copying of course is what allows us to copy CD-ROMs whether they are encrypted or not because they simply copy all the data blindly. Right now it is impossible to copy a modern DVD using a 1:1 copy because most of them use a DVD-9, which has two layers and a maximum capacity of 8.5 Gb. If you do any DVD ripping at all you know that a typical 2 hour movie uses 6 Gb.
How do you 1:1 copy a 6Gb movie on 4.7Gb CDR? You don't.
So, you use one of Smartripper or one of the new DVD rippers (all of which are evolutions of DeCSS and break the DVD encryption) and copy the VOB's to your hard drive. You then transcode the DVD using Cinemacraft Encoder or a like industrial MPEG-2 encoding software to a smaller size. The picture quality hardly suffers at all because you use smart bitrate encoding.
Voila, a 6gb movie on a 4.7gb DVD-R. But impossible if you didnt transcode the DVD in order to recompress the video. And how do you rip the encrypted video in order to transcode it? DeCSS.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but THIS IS ILLEGAL. Not to say we shouldn't be doing it: we are being ripped off by the MPAA and RIAA. And those of us who do own the media should be entitled to replacement media. On the other hand, those companies do have a right to make a profit and the artists deserve to earn royalties for their work.
The logic on both sides of the issue is equally irrational. My real point is the DeCSS is an integral part of a DVD burner based pirating system. Unless you possess actual DVD pressing/manufacturing capability, you have to break the DVD encryption to either recompress or split the video in order to fit the smaller capacity of a DVD-R.
If they are duplicating the DVD's how is the quality becoming "worse"?
I see this as 100% advantage to consumers, they are getting same quality for less money.
Sounds like a winner to me.