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In Stores Soon: Perishable DVDs
Makarand writes "Technology that renders optical media useless after a short lifespan will soon find its way into stores
in the form of perishable DVDs. Retailers in the Southern United States will soon start giving a sample DVD to buyers of a CD (by Nappy Roots, a hip-hop group). This promotional DVD from Atlantic Records will work for only 8 hours. This promotion is aimed at finding if music fans would be interested in buying a package with both audio and video instead of just plain audio. A special dye sandwiched between the layers of the DVD will interact with air making it opaque and unreadable later. If this media catches on you may not have to return your DVD rentals in the future." We noted this 2.5 years ago.
Pathetic attempt at locking out consumers once again.
If this media catches on you may not have to return your DVD rentals in the future.
Yet another way to contribute to the environment. Let's just dump more trash rather than get off our lazy asses to take the DVD back to the shop... Jesus...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
we will buy expensive hard drives that are designed to fail after a short time...
Oh wait... we already do.
Notice on the disk will read "You have 8 hours to listen to this music"
Geek reads "You have 8 hours to rip this data to your RAID 5 dedicated music storage facility".
hehe.
8 hours is plenty of time to rip and make an MP3 out of it.
You buy something that breaks after a few hours, its then just plain trash.
So apart from being bad from an environmental, consumer and most other perspectives this is a good thing because it helps push up the pollution rates even further.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Why is the entertainment industry so hell-bent on NOT giving us entertainment?
You'd think that will the failure of DivX (the Circuit City one), they they would realize that when someone buys something, they expect to keep it...
Even for Video rentals, I wonder if we're SUCH a disposable society that creating this much waste is worth it.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
DIVX! Think about the waste. "If this media catches on you may not have to return your DVD rentals in the future." The rental chains business model is based upon you not returning them on time. So why would they go for this idea? and Where do you think that get there money from?
Too bad I couldn't put the same coating on my dollar bills that would cause them to decompose as soon as the MPAA or RIAA touches them.
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
if the air can't reach the dye in between, I guess the cd stays readable, no ?
a just a thought.
rkoot
I'm not as think as you drunk I am
After a few years on the dash of a car, it all becomes "Best of Queen" anyway...
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
What do you want to bet that giving it a quick spray of clearcoat will render the disk substrate isolated from oxygen yet still useable?
What is to stop me from making a copy that is less unstable, for that matter (the article actual touches upon this at the end) once the price of blanks come down? A right, I might add (and we all know) that is codified in the Fair Use clause of Copyright law.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this isn't happening anytime soon.
My
Limekiller
I live in Germany were they have fairly high recycling laws.
When I asked about CD when I was turning in some batteries I was told to toss them in the bin where non-recyclable items are put.
Fortunately I live in a Neon/Argon atmosphere, so this shouldn't be much of a problem for me.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Stand back for a minute and look at the big picture. Take a breath, take a minute, and think about it. They encrypt their content and then store it on self destructing disks. HA! It's so pathetic it's funny. If there was ever an example of the dead horse (Rosen?) getting another whack (DMCA?) this is IT. They lost.
Imagine the munks, years ago, using disapearing ink in their scrolls so you didn't have time to read it long enough to place letters on a plate at a printing press! Same shit. Different day. "DISTRIBUTION" is dead. If any 5 year old can publish themselves WORLD WIDE 24/7, then the business of distrobution (of "information") is dead. Ever see a little kid make a homepage on AOL? They do... it ain't XHTML but it's there for the world to see 24/7. Tell me again why I need YOU to publish my info for ungodly sums of money? Tell me again why I should listen to one artist for one hour at a time on obsolete media?
I guess things are coming full-circle when Slashdot editors are pointing out the retread stories for us !
The question is whether the discs will pollute more or less than the average pollution of people travelling to the rental outlet to return discs. It's not automatically a given that creating waste is a bad thing if it has positive effects that outweigh the problems it cause. I'm not saying that it is good, just that automatically assuming it's bad because it create waste isn't very constructive.
Some company comes up with a way to distribute content in such a way that users can actually listen/view/try it in their home BEFORE buying, and /. readers are busy rubbing their hands in glee at the likely truth that will still be able to rip it off.
Where are the kudos for addressing a supposed itch that so many of the P2Pers out there use to justify the existence of unfettered file "sharing" ?
Seems like a disaster waiting to happen. No to mention that it will drive MORE people to rip this video in order to be able to rewatch it - exactly what the RIAA and MPAA do NOT want.
No rental chain will ever use this. They'd have to either a) store hundreds eachs video of these in thier store to rent out. Think how many differnt videos they have. Now, multiply that by every customer they have. Now, I know they could get away with less, but just think how many copies of lotr or Harry Pottery alone they'd need? Their other option would be b) let the clerks in the store burn them them each time for each customer. This means they're still going to need thousands of these blanks sitting around, and they've jsut giving thier $5.65/h employees the ability to make DVDs. There's no way these wouldn't be hacked to make real dvds.
Mod point free since 2001
right now my g/f has a $300 fine for having 2 videos that are like 6 mos overdue which is completely insane..
It is. She should have returned the videos. What a whiner.
God is real unless declared integer
The goal will be to make **ALL** media time sensitive, so you cant actually retain anything and must continue to pay for listening/viewing/reading time.
Would be applicable in the software market too, forced upgrades since your original cant be used after the next release is out. ( using estimated time of next releases )
Or in the case of E-books, ' sorry that document is no longer acceptable speech, that isn't available for lease any longer'
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If the process was reversable, I could see its usefulness. But, just rendering them useless sucks the big one.
We already can't find anything useful to do with the millions of AOL CDs floating about.
I think self-destructing DVDs are a great idea as long as I can pay for them with dollars printed with disappearing ink.
This is yet another glimps into the minds of the entertainment industry's marketing people. The holy grail is pay-per-use consumer products, which unfortunately is a concept that is fairly new in capitalism, especially in the United States where property laws reflect mostly tangible goods. This helps to explain why companies and consumers are having so many problems with each other.
Anyway, the distribution methods look somethin like this, from most desirable (and most profitable) to least:
Pay-per-Use - Require consumer to pay for each experience (i.e.: theater movies, pay-per-view, arcade games)
Subscription - if pay-per-use isn't possible, require the user to pay a recurring subscription fee for access to the material (i.e.: cable)
Media Ownership - if subscription isn't possible, sell the media in a permanent form to the consumer.
Media ownership is of course the most desired for the consumer. It allows them to experience themusic/movie/etc whenever they want, trade or sell it to friends, etc. Of course it's the least profitable for the industry.
The problem media companies are facing is that, as technology matures, it's allowing consumers to use the media in any way they want. For example, using a Tivo to turn subscription-distributed media into owned permemant media.
What we're seeing now is the entertainment industry scrambling to use laws that were originally enacted to protect companies from each other, and bend them to try and keep consumers from using the media for which it wasn't originally intended.
Here's a hypothetical situation: In 15 years medical science progresses to the point where they fix eyesight with little nano machines. In the process they also give people the ability to record what they watch and play it back (kind of like a Tivo built-in to your head). Thus turning everything you experience into the potential for permenant media. What do you think the entertainment industry will do then? Legislate congress to make all medical nano devices capible of recording motion images be part of a digital rights management royalty payment system, and likely called something along the lines of the Digital Medical Device Copyright Act. That's if the entertainment industry is still alive in the same for it is today, which I doubt.
_______
2B1ASK1
Like many of you I was stunned that this story is receiving covereage without any comment on the potential environmental impact of disposable DVD's.
A quick search of Google turned up the following:
http://enduse.lbl.gov/Info/VideoImpacts.pdf
Flexplay approached a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs to perform an environmental assessment of the disposable DVD technology.
This report is truly amusing. The scientist acknowledges that he was not given enough time to perform a standard Life Cycle Assessment on disposable DVDs, so instead he calculated the amount of pollution that would be prevented if disposable DVDs were depoloyed as a video rental option. He theorizes that if 10% of all consumers renting DVDs did not have to make a return trip to the video store the envirnmental impact of increased junk being sent to a land fill would be offset by a decrease in pollution.
What a hoot. I guess Flexplay didn't bother to explain their marketing strategy. It appears that these disks are being deployed as promotional items which are handed out for free and are never intended to be returned.
Flexplay is also persuing the Hotel market. Just how much pollution would be prevented if a guest didn't have to walk down to the lobby to return their rental?
If this is the best defense that Flexplay can come up with then we must believe that the potential evironmental impact will be pretty bad.
Are we really willing to trash our planet in the battle against piracy? Hollywood's answer seems to be a resounding YES.
This won't catch on. Rental companies have a significant revenue stream from people returning stuff late. (Blockbuster - 15-20%) If the stuff is disposable, then they can't charge you for not returning it. They mightn't care about the enviornment, but they do care about their shareholders.
-- We don't understand software, and sometimes we don't understand hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights
Nope. Get a 10 gallon aquarium (they cost like $10-$20), and a tank of helium (the party-balloon filling small tanks, they cost as high as $40 but half that you get back when you return the tank, and one full tank lasts almost forever).
;-)
Put the wrapped DVD in the aquarium. Take two rubber gloves and some saran-wrap to effectively seal the top of the aquarium (make sure to use enough that putting on the gloves won't break the seal).
Tip the aquarium on its side, and peel away a small hole in one top and the opposite bottom corner.
Light a votive candle and place it in front of the lower hole.
Add helium, via the PVC tube that almost certainly came with the aquarium (if not, pay the $0.15/foot for a few feet), to the upper hole. Add it slowly, and when the candle goes out, keep adding for a few more seconds.
Voila! You now have a home-made, inert-gas, anhydrous glove box! Put your hands in the gloves, unwrap the DVD, and apply the clear nail polish to the edge. Oops, you *did* remember to put the nail polish in the aquarium before sealing it, right?