Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
oh, this is mandatory:
how long till the "discs that cannot be hacked themselves" will be hacked?
two hours, or two weeks? (remember de-CSS code printed on t-shirts?)
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
Of course, they could just say they were doing this, and then send everyone an el-cheapo DVD player with a special decal on the front. That might be enough to psych out someone.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Well, actually, if each disc is only meant to play on one specific player that they distribute, it would be incredibly easy to make it "unhackable". Just use a shared key encryption scheme. The only way it could be "hacked" is if you found a way to extract the shared key from the hardware dvd player or the shared key for a specific player was leaked mpaa. That could happen, but it's not to likely. And if you managed to come by one of these disc, it would really be impossible to hack (at least without incredible amounts of time or computing power).
Best slashdot comment
but, wasn't decss possible only because one software player left its key out in the open? Seems to me you'd need to get hold of one of those special players if you were going to crack their partner discs.
Do you belive you can take 6000 people of any group and find one that isn't just flat out dirty and corrupt, or at the very least, easily corruptable? Or that many Academy members won't want to hook up a special DVD player each time they watch a movie? Remember, the studios want as many Academy members as they can to watch each movie, because only that gives them a shot of getting awarded. Every 'problem' a given member has with seeing a movie will reduce its chances come Oscar night.
These are all bandaids on a huge wound.
I thin this is the beginning of a new stratagem: In principle one could sell DVD players with individual signatures that can somehow burn a tag on an individual DVD, which makes it impossible to be read and played by any other player. Now THAT's DRM for you.
Black holes were created when god tried to divide by zero
This is an example where an open source solution
.. well, thats up to how much they
may actually benefit everyone..
- DVD player running uClinux, enabled with
- GPG private/public keys, and a
- Web of Trust of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
This would enable encryped DVDs to be distributed
securely. What happens after they are decrypted
and played
trust the people with the screener DVD's.
Sorry, you're right. What I was actually thinking of was never getting cryptanalysts get their hands on both the plaintext and ciphertext. IIRC, that was the main way the Enigma machine was cracked for example. Obviously, though, it's not very applicable to DVDs.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
Once I had a video cd that I had made, and when I tried to copy it to a tape using my DVD player, I had all sorts of problems. I looked around for a solution and found that by hooking up a mixer (audio, 2 RCA connections) I was able to "trick" the system into looking correct. So the Macrovision, at least for me, wasn't that big of an issue.
True. But keep in mind you don't need to crack the encryption, just reverse engineer the player.
Cinea will invest several million dollars to make and distribute the DVD players to academy members and possibly to movie critics and other awards groups.
Your movie-ticket dollars at work.
Just give 'em a private streaming video website...
<grrr>
here's all it'll take for someone to defeat this:
image:
- flat screen display
- tripod
- good camcorder
sound:
- grab stream from the entertainment center
put them back together... voila.
there's no place like ~
How secure is AES 128+ bits anyway? MPEG streams have a pretty regular pattern that offers a lot hints to cryptanalysts. I wouldn't bet on the security of a system that encrypts 2-8 GB of data with such a regular pattern!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I don't really see why they need to go to the trouble of making each disc specific to one player, because that would just increase the cost of making a run of discs. There really shouldn't be a problem with playing a disc on another member's player. Adding a unique watermark to each player though, that shouldn't be much of a problem. But watch them screw things up so that the player firmware can be copied to a budget player.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
'the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked.'
You gotta be kidding. If I were some sort of technology bigwig and I wanted to buy a product and someone said those words to me I would do an about face and try real hard to not let the door hit my ass on the way out.
I would be much more impressed with the figures of what it would take to hack the discs. Cause in my opinion - encryption is made to be broken.
Now if he is saying that it cannot legally be hacked. Well that is probably true....
It CAN contain noticeable artifacts. In fact, lots of movies these days have noticeable artifacts. You might occasionally see something in the middle part of the screen that looks like several little burns or dark spots. Those are watermarks used to keep track of what theater a film is being shown in. If it's good enough for the public, it's good enough for the Academy, who they aren't even trying to make money off of. Remember, we're talking specially coded DVDs here. They could just insert the Academy member's name at the bottom of each frame on the DVD as a "watermark" so they would be able to tell who leaked it.
While the RIAA would hardly like that either, the point in this case is to stop widespread distribution of a high quality print weeks or months before their official release date. Once a screener escapes into the wild (and many do) it takes a nanosecond to appear on hundreds of P2P networks. That's millions and millions of dollars in lost revenue (at least in theory).
This is what they want to stop. Personallized screeners with watermarking and dire threats would be an extremely effective way to do that.
Only if they make it a requirement that you must distribute your movie to the academy members with this encryption. What's to stop a small indie studio of just distributing a regular DVD? Especially if the movie has already been released on DVD?
What, me worry?
It's been pointed out and proven time and again that technology does not stop piracy.
A smarter move would be to offer the customer something extra that the pirates would find much harder to offer.
How about a few little freebies to go with the actual DVD? A free poster or stickers, interactive content such as a mini-game (which wouldn't be copied using the method of copying the film via a video-output or using a videocamera), a username and password to the official website so you can access online content and enter online competitions (the username and password expiring after X access times).
A little imagination from the distributers would entice people to buy the official product since they would get more than the pirates are offering.
Silly rabbit
My guess for the watermarking is that there won't be just a few artifacts -- that every bit of every image will be affected in a subtle way.
That said, it is probably true that the watermarking could be defeated with access to several of the players. It would take a serious effort, at least as serious as what Felton and his group at Princeton put into cracking the audio watermarking scheme a few years ago. As you recall, he had the advantage that the watermarking scheme was disclosed very completely in a patent filing. I can't imagine anybody but some kind of organized crime group putting in that kind of effort.
The most likely avenue for exploitation of screeners is that somebody's house will be broken into, and their collection of screeners and their player stolen. I'm willing to bet that this will happen. I mean, if the entire shipment of Academy Awards statues can be stolen...
Thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.