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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?"
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...
"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."
No, the difference is that the pirates use the latest in technology to dupe consumers into buying a wholly inferior product, whereas Hollywood just uses fame and fortune... to dupe consumers into buying a wholly inferior product.
:)
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
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
It's wholly inferior because the bootleg "masters" were videotaped with a camcorder in the movie theater.
If the master was not videotaped in the theater, the the MPAA member companies must have an internal piracy problem. Their own employees are bootlegging stuff off the production line before it is released. If the bootlegs were not made from videotaped masters, then internal piracy is the only explanation for how this busted operation could have been copying movies to DVD that haven't yet been released to video.
In other words, we can add to their "sins" the fact that consumers are being punished for piracy committed by MPAA members themselves.
Edith Keeler Must Die
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.
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
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
(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
Of course Valenti wants people to think that these DVD pirates are "duping" consumers, but I doubt it in most cases. When you buy a LOTR DVD for $10 from some guy on the street in New York, almost anyone would assume it's not legit. But people still knowingly buy illegal DVDs because they the legal ones aren't released yet.
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.
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!