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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 ...
"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.
Could someone please explain to me how a digital copy could be "wholly inferior" to the original media?
Not that I condone the actions of these people, but honestly...it's not like we're talking (S|X)VCDs...
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.
I mean I know it's technically a "bust" but come on. We're talking about two tower computers full of DVD-R burners from the story details. This sounds more like Uncle Joe's moonshine stand than the serious copy operations I saw overseas. I'd put this one on the same level as Johnny downloading music and burning all his friends a copy. Admittedly the amount of cash on hand leads one to beleive that it was a commercial venture, but the lack of "we've been investigating these fellas for quite a while" also makes me wonder if they didn't have a nice snortable sideline business as well and it was THAT business that got the whole shebang busted. When meth labs get busted locally there's usually a whole storm of other sideline illegal activities that also crop up... just my thoughts. .
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
"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.
Hm... This is an interesting statement. I wonder if the people who they busted were actualy copying existing DVDs, or whether they were instead videotaping movies in theaters (or from other sources) and burning them onto DVDs. In the latter case, I don't think that CSS would be involved at all.
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
When I went to this article, I got a flashing red banner ad with the words "COPY DVD'S!!!!" in big white letters.
Now that's what I call targeted advertising. Did anybody else get this, or was it a fluke?
Like whom has 15 dVd burner's anyway? I know they, I mean the one guy, are going down like a HELLIUM BALLON!
Thanks
Yeah, right.
"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."
The proper attribution is clearly written at the top of the article as seen on Yahoo. The story originated from John Borland at CNET News.com. That is who should be given credit for the story, not Yahoo. And you might have actually linked to the original article so that the originating site - a source of many /. discussions - could have realized a little revenue from the referrals. Nothing wrong with Yahoo, it's a very convenient place to find stuff from all over, but very little of the written content there is original to them.
Here is the article at the original publisher's site. Ironically, as I am looking at it right now, the accompanying advertisement is about a CD Burner sale at Gateway.
And of course, the article fails to mention that the LOTR and Ali bootlegs were videotaped in the theater, and that is why they were available before the movies were released on video or DVD. It always amazes me that the MPAA chicken-littles allow us to assume that most of the piracy problem is due to their own insiders bootlegging stuff before it is released. You'd think they'd want to make sure we all knew that this stuff was bootlegged with a camcorder in the movie theatre, not ripped off the production line by one of their own.
Edith Keeler Must Die
I would find it hard to download an entire DVD (what? several GB or so...) on even a cable connection. Consider the bandwidth required to serve up these movies too, even a 2.56 Tb/s line would end up being swamped should enough people try to use the service. Even if some sort of standard allowed better compression rates than even DivX or MP3 could allow, the size of a DVD could still be more than half a GB. Besides the fact that when I watch a DVD, I want to see absolutely no evidence of any sort of compression... that's why I watch em (well at least nothing I am sohpistocated enough to notice). Even compressed DivX files don't look real great. I agree with you that $35 is highway robbery though - all of the DVDs should be kept under $20 (maybe, just maybe $25 - although I would prefer to not see that until a couple more years go by). New DVD releases would go for the usual $19.99 and not-so-new movies would go for $14.99.
Implementing legit DVD distribution online would be difficult right now, hopefully new connection improvements in the future would allow such data transfer on an individual basis without loss of detail and value.
"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.
Well, when you copy a wholly inferior product, you get the same thing out, right?
Jagoffs.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
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.
Just last week I commented to my dad about how there must have been a major bust of pirated DVDs in the Bronx.
Being that I'm a traveling salesman, and everyday I'm traveling from one side of the Bronx to the other, I noticed that the DVD hawkers don't "carry" them in stock any more. From Fordham Road, East Tremont Ave, Jerome Ave, Kingsbridge Ave, Southern Blvd, Westchester Ave and a few other hotspots they just blinked out of site. One day I went to meet a couple of distributors in the commercial neighborhood-less area called Hunts Point, and there they were, the piraters themselves, with cajas y cajas del los DVDs.
Of course I stocked up, but that was 3 weeks ago. I havent seen them since.
I sig, therefore I was.
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.
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?
...because if CBDTPA passes I will seek out DVD bootleggers to obtain my movies. I'm even willing to pay more on a bootleg than on a "legit" disc just on principle.
Of course, I'm sure that the regulations imposed by the CBDTPA will insure that no more illegal DVD copying ever happens.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
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...
The New York raid caught a relatively small fish in its net. 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.
Boy... some people just have it all, don't they.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
The blurb linking to the article makes a reference to DeCSS and how it didn't have to be cracked to copy the movies... says who?
:) hehe.
There's nothing in the article about HOW the movies were ripped. If you visit a site like vcdHelp you can get all the information and software you need to blow past DeCSS and make VCDs, SVCDS, and DVDs at all kinds of quality levels. As long as you have the media to burn to, you can rip and convert those movies easily (but you're still breaking through DeCSS).
In fact by reading the article and seeing reference to movies that are stil in theatres or haven't been released, if we knew the source then it would be easier to divine the method of duplication.
If it leaks from the studio pre-copy-protection, I guess copying would be a cinch. If they taped it at a theatre, then you go back to vcdhelp, and with Vdub, TMPGEnc, and other tools you could custom create the dvd easily. Same with if it was post-copy-protection.
So unless they got it before protection was implemented, I think it would be safe to assume DeCSS bypass tools were used. But then again, assumption got us this story
Bull pucky. You can PLAY the DVD, record the analog signal, and encode that for VCD, and the quality will still be perfectly good, for VCD.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
(not that I recommend going in to this business...)
3 26050 for $4k. Buy one.
v 47gb.html for $250. Buy ten of them.
In traditional Slashdot fashion, I will now pull some prices out of my ass (sorry, that would be the Internet) and will "do the math."
The entry cost is not high. Less than $7k to profit.
Here's a DVD dupe machine with a 100-disc hopper: http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.asp?EDC=
Here's a spindle of 100 DVDs http://shop.store.yahoo.com/spectraimpex1/100pacd
Now load your dupe machine once a day for ten days.
Pick up the DVDs when finished and sell them to your dealers for $700/spindle. (they will then be resold at $10-$15/each, a very healthy profit for a street vendor.)
You have just paid for the DVD dupe machine and have made $500. You probably invested twenty hours in buying the hardware, setting it up, testing, and smoking pot with your dealers.
From now on, for every 5 hours you invest in buying and burning another 100 copies, you'll make $450. Not bad, eh?
The getting busted and going to jail part might suck, but you can get around this by doing the duping in a friendly environment. Of course friendly environments sometimes take a little away from the bottom line, but booze is cheaper in those places anyway.
Cheers,
JB
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.
Please, young people, stop trying to treat dictionaries as manuals that legislate the rules of a language, when what they in fact do is describe (and sometimes misdescribe) common usage.
"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!
well i logged out for this one because well... anyway i DO have a bootleg copy of one of the movies listed at the bottom of the article and i will say that it ISN'T a camcorder copy. they DO have an internal problem. I understand that this IS indeed illegal but i wanted to say that there are far larger operations using NON "wholly inferior products".
So if they want to samp out the REAL problem they need to work it out themselves. There will be no police to the rescue here.
This just proves that they arent interested in stamping out copies they are interest in getting some excuse for the SSSCA or whatever it is now.
-Coward, Anonymous
"Everyone seems to think that the only money studios spend on discs is the actual manufacturing costs."
Um, no, I was including that. Check out this site: http://www.moviefxmag.com/ I bought one of their 'mags', it's really a DVD. They charge $10 per disc and it includes 60-90 mins (lost track of time) of behind the scenes footage of a few movies. I find it hard to believe these guys could be in business if it cost more than $1 per DVD to make.
The simple fact of the matter is that the cost of making one DVD disperses across millions of copies being out there. It's a case of the DVD's costing pennies to make is a bigger issue than the cost of producing the content for the DVD.
The MPAA would have little problem selling DVD's for $10 each. If that would prove inprofitable (yeah right), then they'd need to tighten their belts a bit. It is not that hard to make quality content. The reason that a DVD costs say $25 on average over the $17 VHS format (I'm pulling numbers out of my head, I bet I'm not that far off) is that the DVD has higher resolution than the VHS counterpart. Therefore, it's worth more money. They make no mention of the discs being far cheaper to make. Yet VHS stuff has gone down in price as of late.
Trust me, the MPAA seriously inflated the price of their content.
BTW, if you are interested in movie making at all, go to Barnes and Noble or Borders and get this mag, it's called MovieFX I think. Here is the URL, you can find out more there:
http://www.moviefxmag.com/
I was totally shocked when i got one of these guys, gonna subscribe to them.
"Derp de derp."
I can't help but think of the difference between Martin Luther King and Malcom X: one an advocate of civil disobedience and peaceful protest (now an act of terrorism in some places, like Utah), and the other far more radical (the thought of 50 black men armed with automatic weapons providing protection for a peaceful assembly in a bigoted white town boggles the mind - the whole purpose of the Second Amendment, IMHO).
Imagine the police being ordered to arrest someone for the "terrorist act" of using DeCSS... to view DVDs he's payed for... on his computer... under Linux. Imagine the accused fighing back. Think automatic weapon's fire, with kevlar-peircing hollow-point rounds: a dozen cops dead in the first skirmish. As they retreat to regroup, the N2 UV lasers are deployed on the roof, powered by a couple of twin-Diesels in the garage: instant sunburn, while 20 KV fry the remaining cops one by one. A bunch of wireless MAN feeds as well as DSL and cable modem offer live, uncut video of the whole scene.
It's likely that someone mounting such a defence will eventually die in the process (proudly, on their feet). Maybe the message will get out: "I killed the 200 cops who wanted to arrest me for watching a movie I paid for." Maybe other cops would think twice when asked to enforce that kind of ludicruous law. But, if nothing is done, things will get worse.
Some of us object by wringing our hands, some by writing letters, some by peaceful (and perhaps not so peaceful) demonstrations, and some with violent retaliatory force. One can't ask anyone to endanger themselves in a manner they're not comfortable with in fighting this war, and I'm certainly not advocating enacting out the scenario above, but it is a war, and it will be fought -- human nature makes me certain of that.
You could've hired me.
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.
Okay. So how do you propose we set up a serious fund that gets the politicians into our pockets? Consider:
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Ugh. Does that mean we have to marry our representatives? They say politics makes strange bedfellows, but...
:)
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Somewhat OT...
<suspicious look> Is this a troll, or just an honest (mis)understanding? As far as I know, fair use does apply to the software industry. And yes you can take a GPL'd piece of software and use it any way you wish. This is probably the most misunderstood / overlooked clause in the GPL:
Does that settle the matter? Copyright law treats use (or fair use) much differently from duplication, aka redistribution.
Don't be fooled by commercial EULAs, or "click-thru" licenses. They do not fall under copyright law at all - they fall under contract law, and as such, it is unknown if they are actually valid or enforceable, since you never actually signed them. Of course the software industry will say they are legal, but think about it - that's what they would say.
Actually, the GPL is also a contract, but note that in that case it doesn't matter if you sign it or not, since it adds to the rights you already have (fair use) by giving you certain rights of redistribution. If you disagree with it, you haven't lost anything - you just don't get those additional rights. By contrast most EULAs take away rights you should have - the right to use the software in any way you see fit, on as many computers (that you own) as you wish. So the question of whether you enter the contract or not is important in that case.
(Go ahead, mod me offtopic, you know you want to. (: )
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README