Custom DVDs & Players For Academy Members

xyankee writes "In an effort to curtail the piracy and bootlegging of DVD screeners, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has endorsed a plan to distribute about 6,000 special DVD players to members that will play specially encrypted screener discs that would be earmarked for a specific academy voter and would play only on that person's machine. The Associated Press has the full story, while Laurence Roth, VP and co-founder of Cinea, Inc., the company behind the technology, says 'the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked.'"

Comments

Re:On Hacking

[Catbeller]

Okay: let it "phone home" to it's masters like the X-Box does. A naughty box that has been modded doesn't get to play DVDs. It also narcs on you to the video cops.

Hook up the MPAA with laws making it a mandatory ten year federal prison sentence if you mod the signed player.

Instead of selling the usual generic DVD from a stack of identical factory-made disks, change the method thusly: you buy a movie online or in a store. It is burned for you, with your credit card and Homeland Security database keys imbedded in the video. It only plays on your signed MPAA-approved player.

Then, make it illegal to import unsigned players.

Then, make it illegal to sell them.

Then, make it illegal to make them.

Finally, make it illegal to own an unsigned player.

It's how you boil a frog: one degree at a time.