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Macrovision Releases DVD Copy Protection
msblack writes "The Los Angeles Times is reporting that the good folks at Macrovision have unveiled a new system that will thwart 97% of existing DVD copying software while maintaining compatibility with existing DVD players. Macrovision claims that DVD copying results in $1 billion loss for studios out of $27.5 billion in sales. With piracy resulting in only 4% loss, why are the studios making such a big deal? The article also reports (mistakenly) that the market is pressing 100s of billions of DVD annually. Who's buying all those DVDs?" I'm skeptical of their claims, since historically Macrovision's anti-copying measures have been little more than easily circumvented snake oil, but maybe this time they've got their plan down.
Suuurrre.. Then come the artifacts, the quirky behavior, then you have to shell for a new DVD player to get it all sorted out, suddenly your old DVDs are now flaky so you have to keep 2 DVD players... Sigh. If only there were a way to copy them all to one format so you wouldn't have these problems...
Macrovision claims that DVD copying results in $1 billion loss for studios out of $27.5 billion in sales. With piracy resulting in only 4% loss, why are the studios making such a big deal?
Obviously not posted by a business owner of any sort. 4% loss may sound paltry, but if you choose to look at that 4% as being taken out of your net profit it'll look considerable larger, i.e. 4% out of $27B - expenses, assume a profit margin of 50%, and it's 8% Would you be happy buying a 12-pack at the corner store, but having to sacrifice one can/bottle to some guy at the exit door for no apparent reason?
The article also reports (mistakenly) that the market is pressing 100s of billions of DVD annually. Who's buying all those DVDs?"
Maybe they accidently included the AOL CDs.
I'm skeptical of their claims, since historically Macrovision's anti-copying measures have been little more than easily circumvented snake oil, but maybe this time they've got their plan down.
Hey, it's a consumer driven economy, gotta come up with some new angle that everyone's going to give you 4% of for no apparent reason...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It would be a lot more humorous if they put "Nothing for you to see here, please move along" when you tried to rip it...
On to the serious stuff:
"If it takes a long time and the frustration level gets too high, you're not going to prevent 100% of it, but you can stop the casual user," Kaye said. "Why not try?"
The "casual user" doesn't give a shit. They rent their mainstream crap movies on DVDs at the local monopolistic rental store and they bring it back three days late. They aren't ripping movies to share, save, etc.
The technique confounds ripping programs without damaging computers, preventing the discs from playing or reducing picture quality, he said.
Would it damage the drive if a computer DVD player tried to play the disc and was constantly hitting the false errors it was creating? If it isn't going to disable the players how will it stop the rippers? So what, it takes real-time to rip the DVD? Oh no!
Consumer advocates said Hollywood had the right to put out unrippable discs. But such a move would ignore public demand for the ability to back up DVDs and take their movie collections on the road.
Public demand? Public RIGHTS. We have the right to make backups of our owned discs and put them into a format that is portable. The media continues to fall for the tricks being implemented by the MPAA's PR machine. I suggest that they refrain from spreading the misinformation created by the corporations PR machine as it does nothing but continue to erode the freedoms we are entitled to.
If they decide that we should not be able to make a backup of our media that is an identical copy then I should be reimbursed when the disc is no longer usable. Even if that means 25+ years from now. Don't like that and don't think it's realistic? Tough, it is realistic because I can ensure that right now by making backups.
Discs that do not allow me to fast forward through FBI warnings, commercials, etc, get ripped and burned in a format that is immediately watchable from the time I stick it in the player. I don't care about animated menus, extras, features, commentary, bonus scenes. I want the movie to play w/o interruption the second I close that tray. If I paid for something I don't see what I shouldn't be able to do with it as I wish as long as it stays in my possession.
If Macrovision and the MPAA want to end piracy they best do it in a way that doesn't affect my personal freedoms when I purchase a piece of media.
will thwart 97% of existing DVD copying software
So the 3% that survive will propogate the rest of the Internet. Or more likely the 3% that survive will propogate it's technology to the 97% of those that didn't. It's like antibiotics and resistant bacteria, the game continues. Until you find something that's 100% bulletbroof (MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!) it's hopeless Motion Picture industry....
...in bed
Whatever happened to being able to legally own your own backup? hm.
This sig is false.
With each more-complex layer of anti-copy protection, doesn't that make the discs less forgiving of scratches and smudges, given that the player has to use all this overhead to compensate for the enhanced security?
Because of the DMCA, sharpies were banned with that CD copy protection circomvention. I wonder what 50c piece of office equipment will defeat this one and end up banned?
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
In a just released survey, 97% percent of people who use DVD copying software have switched to software that can copy the newest Macromedia protected DVDs.
Software circumventing this new copy protection will be released, when, by tomorrow by 4PM?
that the system admittedly doesn't work on.
Wow, that was easy.
Macrovision have unveiled a new system that will thwart 97% of existing DVD copying software
That 3% of working software will just take 100% of the dvd copying market... evolution in action.
...where is my marker?
-Valiss
"a new system that will thwart 97% of existing DVD copying software[as of today]"
They're admitting that people existing cracks work on the new system! How long is it going to take for that 3% to become 100%? I give it about a month from the release of the first DVD with the new system
Pressing the Shift key while inserting the disk in your PC does not work anymore. Now you have to use the more complex Shift + CTRL key sequence.
Seriously... who IS buying all those DVDs? I go to the store to look at movies frequently, but more and more I'm just tempted to get stuff through NetFlix. There are very few movies that I actually want to own anymore. I just rent what I missed at the theatres.
In 10 years, it's not going to matter, as On-Demand channels will start carying every movie under the sun.
Nothing to see here.
With piracy resulting in only 4% loss, why are the studios making such a big deal?
Lol, go ask any retailer why they should care if their shrink is only 4%. They'll punch you in the mouth.
The other 3% will be on BitTorrent, and the result of this is $0 to the alleged loss of revenue. 97% of the people who use the software blocked will use the other 3%. Also, everything that Macrovision did so far has been broken. This will just add a few cents to the DVD price.
We can encrypt the content on the DVD! (oh.. that didn't work)
We can automatically install a driver on Windows machines to make the disc un-rippable (oh.. that didn't work either!)
We can add a special time-code that prevents ripping... (Defeated by a marker!)
Seriously.. when will these guys give up? Go after the people selling the shit on the streets and leave the consumers alone..
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
Control+Alt might work, though.
On the bright side, this might be a good challenge for Jon Lech Johansen.
Go Jon!
The bad guys have always been able to get by locks. It's easily circumvented protection but we all have locks on our houses and cars.
Macrovision's protection on VHS tapes makes it difficult to casually copy a movie. If you want to get around it you can. Same thing with DVDs.
The problem here is that if their system stops 97% of ripping software, then everyone using that 97% will immediately switch to the other 3%.
I can't understand how people count these numbers, there's people copying a DVD even if they wouldn't want the DVD in the first place, so these numbers aren't really near the truth. Actually copying can be a good thing for companies, I've bought a few dvd's just because I copied them from someone and they were so damn good so I wanted the real thing.
Most large industries are very competitive, and though a huge amount of money changes hands, the margin is usually quite small, especially at the manufacturing, wholesale, and distribution level. If a stock analyst noticed a structural 4% contraction in any company's sales, there would be a change in his/her recommendation to buy or hold that stock. 4% is big.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
A backup is fair use, true, but we've got law saying you can't circumvent these protections to make one. Besides, if you take care of your media you don't really need them -- "backups" are traditionally heavily abused -- and DVDs are more resistant than CDs.
It'd be nice if they'd put in a low-cost replacement program for damaged DVDs, though.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
It's just time for them to dip into the pockets of the RIAA/MPAA again. :D
They make things I purchase harder to use and make life more difficult for the me the end consumer. For the people who will rip the DVD's anyways and sell their copies on the streets of every third world country it won't even be a speed bump. Another step toward our collective serfdom.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
If People can see it, People can copy it, End of story. They are just wasting their time.
Most people I know and know of tend to have 100% original DVDs. One person I know was tempted by the availability of heaps of cheap discs in China, but generally people are honest.
Even people who don't have moral qualms about this tend not to run off copies for their friends for many reasons, because it's a hassle. It takes a long time when its easier to just lend a friend a disc.
The people who actually cause most harm to the industry are the ones who sell the pirated discs. This sort of technology isn't going to deter them. If it can be circumvented, they'll find out how. The costs are insignificant against profits.
"Who's buying all those DVDs?"
;)
That'll be Slashdot members' bimonthly subscription to "Hot, Young and Willing"
With piracy resulting in only 4% loss, why are the studios making such a big deal?
Foresight?
-a
There's more money in DVD than the theater now. Well they do get rather cheap. Often they are well below the soundtrack CD.
On-Demand will be nice. Been trying it out lately (Comcast)--it's even available in widescreen and HD now.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
It won't mess players? Good!
I'll use mplayer to extract mpeg2 and ac3 stream, and then prepare copy.
sales of 27.5 billion.. at fifty cents each, means 55 billion per year. at 10'c each, 275 billion per year..
sales = production? no... the mpaa makes money off production, the artists off sales.... screwy logic abounds!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Make real, HARD code, pass the cost to the Distrubitor, and He'll try to pass it to the consumer.
So we'll have 50$ DVD's that are unbreakable. Creating an insatiable demand for 20$ Bootlegs... Wait, we didn't fix anything did we?
Eventually someone will realize the profit's in the distrobution, not the product. We will reach a point where the 4% loss makes no difference. And the content will be neither Cost prohibitive or Impossible to access.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
...as well as banning cold medicine sales will stop meth production.
Lol, go ask any retailer why they should care if their shrink is only 4%. They'll punch you in the mouth
The thing is that this *isn't* shrink.
If you asked them why they should care that 4% of people won't buy something from them, what will they say?
"With piracy resulting in only 4% loss, why are the studios making such a big deal?"
In fairness to the studios, 4% is a lot. The industry average for shrink (basically theft) in retail is about 1.5%. And how many Loss Prevention detectives are employed these days?
in the p2p age, 3% is a hole big enough to drive a bulldozer through.
I'd like to see the submitter voluntarily take a 4% pay cut since it's not a big deal. Heck, when you start calling a billion dollars not a big deal, you must be richer than Bill Gates.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
This is they key quote from the article, in my opinion:
"We're always interested in another tool," said one executive who asked not to be named. "But until they fix the analog hole ... it doesn't solve the problem."
For those of you who don't remember the '80s, the "Analog Hole" was all we had back then, we used audio and video cassette for backup and sharing purposes.
This battle was fought two decades ago when fair use was upheld and we all got to keep our VCRs and double-cassette decks. I contend that the concern of the *AA is not only to protect themselves from the new threat to their business model that digital media represents, but to regain ground they lost twenty years ago.
Sounds like the copying software currently langushing at only 3% market share is about to increase that share substantially.
Just remember, Macrovision is not the consumer's friend!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It takes just one copy transcoded into an easily-copiable digital form, and their system breaks. And as the legal copies become more fragile and easily damage, that 97% will soon start looking for ways to get unencumbered copies...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
The bottom-line is that pandora's box is open. Hardware enables us, and unless the RIAA/MPAA bans all the CD/DVD burners, hard drives, and other equipment, there will always be another workaround and some smart person will make sure itgets distributed.
I think the only way around this is for the media industry to get realistic. People only have so much time to look/listen to digital media anyway so how much of what is downloaded is actually "consumed" anyway?
Is with your wallet. Buy beer not dvd's
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
There's another article about this from the BBC here
Your opinion is unpopular. Please refrain from voicing it.
Thanks,
The Management
And of course, DVDs do more than hold movies, but I suspect that they're only talking about movies and TV shows and such, not computer data on DVDs.
At Wallmart I recently saw DVDs on sale for $1 and $2. Granted nothing I'd like to watch, all old John Wayne movies and bad animation from the 50s, but at $1 dollar I have to admit I was almost tempted to by some very marginal crap (but restrained myself).
As for 4%, I have archived some of my movies, but it is a touchy time consuming business. For now, massive piracy is for East Asian DVD rings. BUT the MPAA is worried about trends, and home burning of DVDs won't always be above the average Joe. I only have a 1 layer DVD burner, which is what makes copying tricky, two layer burners probably would get the job done fine on the last generation of DVDs, but the blanks are over $10, so why not just get the original for $15? Of course dual layer DVD blanks will eventually be $1, and some years down the line so will Blu-Ray blanks. When you can archive 10 of your favorite DVDs to one Blu-Ray, well the industry is sweating about that.
Letter To Iran
It's quite a bit. What if MS lost 4% of the profit from Office? They now only make 71% of the ticket price as profit....
I expect the discs will contain auto-running Windows software that'll do its best to disable DVD copiers. It won't matter that it can be trivially disabled. All that matters is that the studios will pay Macrovision to add it to the discs.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
It absolutely does nothing to stop the piracy in Asia. Since they're made when the DVD presses are "closed" for the evening in China.
So let's see, they get to piss off only the people who pay for their products (people downloading torrents and burning dvds or rigging DIY DVD jukeboxes won't even notice).
It's hard to imagine them coming up with a more ill concieved plan which didn't involve ill tempered sea bass.
I'm already seeing fewer movies because of those fucking dots. I think the real question is, "Are they trying to get me to watch more on-demand cable, or play more video games?"
But even if this new scheme works, won't people just switch over to the 3% that still work? It's not like you can try the "kills 99% bacteria" line on DVD copying software.
Go somewhere random
See, market in North america is pretty much static, markets of the world are not, what they are trying to do is to control world markets not US markets. Myopic and fucked up vision from media companies, who scared shitless of facist china who does not give damn about ripping off their worthless media by way of stamping out millions of plastic duplicates, never mind whole new cars and electronics pieces. Everyone is trying to gain up on control of far east, China, India. While siting in labs in california, offices in new york looking west pondering the future , where North american market is only small fraction of world market and world market that does not like to pay for licenced goods.
It is the war and we are witnessing the remakings of the world. They are becoming more apparent to everyday live now.
Does anyone wanna guess when this new schema will be "cracked", when a program will be available to allow DVD copying on a PC?
Anyone???
--E--
'nuff said.
MacTacToe - for every problem, an elegant solution
Guess what, if you can view it you can copy it. It only has to happen once and the data is back in the digital domain.
Yeah, you're not going to be able to go see Episode III. But you can't get something for nothing; all change requires sacrifice. Has Full Metal Alchemist taught you nothing? (Equivalent exchange, for those not in the know.)
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Again, a media industry claiming a "loss" of n-dollars.
Let's go down to Steve on location who is going to sum this up for us, Steve? "Well it seems we've come to a conclusion, Hypothetical "losses" are just stupid."
"Back to you in the studio, Chip."
So yeah, joking aside, a 4% hypothetical loss, which likely is less than a 1% loss is probably not worth investing the money to establish a new anti-pirating technology. I mean, who pirates a DVD *instead* of buying it? I would imagine most people get "early releases" pirated, then go out and buy the real thing. At least that's what a friend told me.*looks around nervously*
Now audio CDs, well they have a much higher Hypothetical Loss(tm) percentage, so I can see them justifying such an investment.
It all comes down to them just pissing away what little PR they have left, bit by bit.
I'm too lazy to enter a sig. Hey wait a second! You tricked me!
This was in a press release from Macrovision last November.s detail.jsp?id=Thu%20Nov%2011%2016:50:07%20PST%2020 04
http://www.macrovision.com/company/news/press/new
...as you can buy DVDs at your local convience/grocery store for $10, rent many DVDs ate local rental shops. You know, $10 isn't a bad price for DVDs. And obviously people are making money at this.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
I spent a while trying to figure how you went from an estimate to 10 years to eleven... before I realized It was your sig (perhaps referencing Spinal Tap?) Be careful with a sig like that!
"Try not. Do or do not, there is no try"
I think it was Yoda.
...downloading the torrent now.
Instead of getting DVDs a month before retail, you'll have to wait until 3.5 weeks before retail.
I love this application; I can keep my originals safe and secure and use my copies for day-day use. But I read recently that there are some movies that are becoming hard to copy with it and that development of it has stopped.
Will someone be picking up the peices and continuing development, or is something else going to replace it?
Before I got a DVD burner I bought about 2 DVDs a year. Now I have a $25/month DVD rental subscription. I doubt they are losing money off of the majority of people who copy DVDs, and they are just going to stunt innovation for what consumers really want to do with their media (e.g. Kaleidescape).
If this is the same as the new protection that Columbia has been using recently on titles such as Resident Evil: Apocalypse and Little Black Book it has already been defeated. The latest AnyDVD or DVD Decrypter will rip those titles.
In order to rent you a DVD, the video store had to buy it. They're sharing it out among a few dozen people, but the disc is still sold and the movie company gets its inch of green (or in this case, millimeter of green, but millimeters add up.)
So while it's clearly faulty to assert that every downloaded movie is a lost sale, it's just as faulty to say that nobody who downloaded a movie would have bought it or rented it. The correct answer is somewhere in between.
I don't know whether the 4% figure means that for every 24 sales there is one illegal download, or if it's some accountant's estimation of the actual number of sales they would have had if the downloads weren't available. It could well be the latter; it doesn't sound completely unreasonable to me.
But we'd be having the same argument if it were 2% or 1%. I strongly doubt that it's 0%. As the grandparent post points out, shrinkage comes out of your profit margin and can mean the difference between profit and loss.
Just another tick box in DVD Shrink.
Macrovision should just sell blank DVDs.
Either that's a Homer stat ("47.5% of all statistics are made up on the spot") or there are 33 DVD-copying apps out there and one of them is about to become much more popular than it was.
Can I just say that I love your trolly sig? I've lost count of how many times I've seen people bite. :)
What's so hard to believe about "100's of billions"? The world population is almost 6.5 billion. So that could mean as little as 32 DVD's pressed for every man, woman, and child on the face of the planet.
It's skeptical nay-sayers like you that cause all the problems in this world. Shut up and go watch your 32 DVD's
The article also reports (mistakenly) that the market is pressing 100s of billions of DVD annually. Who's buying all those DVDs?"
Walmart customers.
I wonder if the MPAA and its hired goons consider the fact that some people break copy protection because it's fun. It's an interesting challenge, like a big logic puzzle.
And once more:
Dear MPAA and friends,
If it's perceivable, it's copyable. I know your brains are tiny, but it's important that you understand this for your own sake.
Signed,
The Rest of Us
With piracy resulting in only 4% loss, why are the studios making such a big deal?
Because double-layer DVD-Rs are just now hitting the market seriously. DL DVD-Rs have the same storage capacity as commercial DVDs, allowing them to be ripped directly rather than transcoded. DL media is currently $5-$10 per, which makes ripping not competitive with renting. In a few months we can expect to start seeing $1 media for the now-$100 DL burners: this is the MPAA's nightmare.
In the longer term, home network bandwidth costs are still plummeting. I'm up to 1.5Mbps/1Mbps on my cheap home link. When bandwidths like these and larger become widespread, the other shoe drops. Then MPAA finds itself in a position that in many ways is worse than the current RIAA position. It is much harder for MPAA to cut the cost of content production to establish a competitive position. Also, paid movie performances (movie theatres) are struggling in a way that paid music performances (concerts) are not.
I'd be grasping at straws like Macrovision too.../p
DVD2One is still under development. It only does the transcoding part, but DVD Decrypter is arguably the best ripper around today. I burn with Nero.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Mod parent up.
I can buy just-released movies on DVD from Wal*Mart (ick) or Target for $14.95. Wait a month and they are down to $9.99. So, why pirate?
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
Unless they're thinking of the old Laser Disks, I'm not sure what copy-protection enforcement they ever had. Cassette tape copying has been around a lot longer than twenty years. I used to copy music from vinyl record albums unto tapes, (without legal protection!) Its always been a matter of technology catch-up and it will continue to be in the foreseeable future
...if they would mind terribly pointing out the 3% of the DVD copying programs that arent affected by this new protection scheme? :)
The 97%/3% non-working rip software to working rip software ratio will quickly become 97%/3%.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I'm sure it's only a matter of time before we see guys setting up their camcorders in front of their tv's in order to copy dvd's.
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
I would have found this much more informative had they just told me where to find the 3%.
Now I have to go read and search the net...bummer.
My sigs offend the max # of people all over the world, regardless of race, religion, color, sex or creed. It's a gift.
I miss the days when audio and video were just ordinary data.
(Could be worse, though. Back in 1999, I had some long screaming sessions with Microsoft corporate support. Some bozo at Microsoft had put Macrovision copy protection on the Y2K update CD for Visual SourceSafe. It wouldn't read on high-end machines with SCSI CD drives. One major software company lost the entire history of their product due to that defect.)
DVD comes with duck tape and instructions on how to install onto your computer's DVD drive.
--- What?
"Software circumventing this new copy protection will be released, when, by tomorrow by 4PM?"
And GPL'ers wonder why BSD'ers don't take their "Locking up the code" arguments seriously. We don't even need a clause in our license to "force" people to not do something that everyone posting to this "The man can't keep me down" story feels is impossible anyway.
Bunch of hypocrites.
That 4% is an estimate, and if the RIAA is any indication of how they come up with these numbers, it is inflated. Not to mention that you can't just say "would you like to reduce that 4% loss?". The FIRST question that any retailer would ask is "How much will that reduction cost me?"
I wonder how much they have already spent on copy protection, and how much they have saved as a result of it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The rental companies seem to be making a lot of money off of renters who won't buy the dvd because they've rented and watched it. Does the MPAA get a cut from each movie rented, and if they do, how do they keep the rental houses honest?
Mmmm...cherry coke aaallghhhhhghhhgggggghhh
worried that your discs won't have longevity? easy - go and buy the pirate versions. as they say it won't be impossible to rip the discs, just awkward. this isn't going to stop the commercial pirates from doing their work.
Now lets have a look do i buy the £20 DVD with the fucked up error correction that might not survive when i drop it into my laminate floor and put a slight scratch on it, or a £10 DVD which is a pirate but doesn't have this wonderful protection system that screws me over because im sure as hell they won't be licensing the macrovision technology - and its half the price. Not a difficult choice.
oh and im intrigued - if pc players will have such a problem reading them, will they play in XBox and PS2?
From the article (and it leaves allot to the imagination) im guessing they've basically slowed down the read time of the disk to x1 speed (ie the same speed that a DVD player reads at when you watch a film). It doesn't seem impossible to do this, maybe by adding some fake errors or doing something to the disk's tracks so that it has to slow down for example. It would have to cause roughly the same slow-down on all players though no matter how well engineered they were. However TFA is confusing, at the top it says 'blocks' copying software and further down it says it stops copying software from ripping quickly, and then there's the 97% figure, it only takes 3% of programs to break it and _everyone_ will switch to using those 3% of programs. And of course it only takes 1 copy to make a million copies, but for the moment they just want to slow the process, that is until they manage to get the government to mandate the death penalty for the DMCA.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I am not a hardware/encoding guru by any means, so if this doesn't make sense, please educate me.
Wouldn't it be possible to write a script that reads the DVD bit by bit and places those same bits in the same order on a blank DVD? Since we are talking about digital media, isn't a bit-by-bit copy the same as the original? I'm not talking about cracking code or changing the data while maintaining useability, just making a copy. Or is something going on that would make bit-by-bit copying impossible?
If bit-by-bit copying is possible, what could keep a copy from working while allowing the original, other than watermarks on blank/non-blank media coupled with hardware that checks for watermarks? (Obviously, watermarking isn't what the article is about since they maintain that their system will work with existing hardware.)
So, if the kid in the basement can write a bit-by-bit copying script, doesn't that defeat all anti-piracy checks on digital media that don't involve the blanks themselves?
Since I have several small children I have ended up purchasing a number of Disney DVDs, all of which I've ripped back up copies to use. Why? Because Disney likes to limit their release schedules and take movies out of print so they can aritificially drive up the collector market. It only took one time of an unhappy four year old who couldn't watch a DVD that had gotten scratched, that couldn't be replaced and I started backing up all the Disney DVDs. Let's face it, 4 year old whining is almost as grating as MPAA whining.
You can have my cynical agnosticism when you pry it from my cold, dead logic.
It's a difficult thing to write a broad, sweeing standard like this, because it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to bypass it, ala DeCSS.
...Your BRAIN!
Eyes, ears, etc. WE are the hole. The hole is US! WE are the imperfection.
Ok, sounds silly but I think the second human beings can be 'jacked in', organizations like the HEAA (Headspace Entertainment Association of America) will be calling for brain DRM.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
>that will thwart 97% of existing DVD copying
>software
That's because 97% of them are amateurish and shouldn't be used to begin with. This shouldn't affect any already-useful pieces of software.
With piracy resulting in only 4% loss, why are the studios making such a big deal?
Macrovisions licensing agreement stipulates that 5% of all DVD sale profits be given to them for the usage of this new anti-piracy technology.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
They have found a way to make a killing off off the movie executives. They are selling them a pig in a poke. Their engineers have to know that the new system will be defeated in a matter of days. That doesn't matter, by then the DVDCA and MPAA will have paid unknown millions of dollarsto license their technology.
In the end, pirates will STILL be able to copy movies, we'll still be able to rent and watch movies but Hollywood will be out millions.
I am just worried that they will add the money paid to Macrovision to the total "Cost of Piracy".
I'm not sure what points you're trying to make, other than to associate DVD pirates with spammers. There's I'd say there's less than .03% people on the internet are spammers- and what's that got to do with 3% owners of DVD copy programs? I'd say you missed the analogy completely!
I read the article and didn't find a mention of what impacts this will have on computer DVD playback. I'm sure alot of people use their laptops to playback DVDs when they travel (I'm one of them), and was curious if this new copy protection would impede that.
On a side note, does anyone know if DVD companies are required to print on the box if the DVD has copy protection and what kind? The obvious response is going to be that people should not purchase DVDs with this copy protection so that the Motion Picture Industry will get the message, but who wants to try and track down what DVDs have copy protection in place before you buy them. DVDs are a huge impluse buy (hence their presence at most checkout counters), and it would be nice to know right then if you are making a bad purchase.
As we all know in /., PR0N is what drives media; from the VCR, to DVDs, and soon to Blu-Ray or whatever wins the next-gen duel.
The question now becomes "will the PR0N guys buy this?
I don't think so because...well, who the hell would WANT to copy that stuff? I mean, nobody ever stops me on the street to sell me copies of "Girls Gone Dildo" or whatever. However, I have been approached by people selling whatever movie happens to be in the theatres on that day. And as others have already stated, this will do nothing to stop the guys on the street.
This seems like a big waste of time to me if they can't sell to the PR0N industry.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
"Seriously.. when will these guys give up? Go after the people selling the shit on the streets and leave the consumers alone.."
Oh you mean like the drug war?
... Just use the handy Google Ads at the bottom of the page.
Even if they did put this copy protection on all the DVDs they sold it wouldn't work. The MPAA has no idea how there movies get on the internet it would seem. Its not as if some tech geek rents a DVD and rips it onto his computer then distributing it by himself to a P2P network. Maybe they think that but that isn't he way it works. In reality movies are stolen from reels or from a computer by employees of the industry. They copy it to hidden servers outside of the US which then silently distribute it to a huge underground that the MPAA can't touch. They are starting to figure this out but in reality who the hell cares about copy protection on DVDs? Most people who download illegal movies aren't even getting it from them. I think this translates to do better intial research before spending more money on research that will essentially be deemed useless.
What Hollywood is having a really difficult time understanding is that digital technology is causing a great transformation in how people think of their entertainment purchases.
The old 20th-century way, which Hollywood is based, is strictly pay-per-view. This is either through individual theater movie admissions or individual media (VCR or DVD) limited time period rentals. People select individual entertainment products (particular films) from multiple competing sources that offer products at the same price per view. Each theater and video store basically charges the same, but has completely different selections (the film currently showing at that theater) or genre specialization (theme-oriented video outlets).
The 21st century will probably have people getting unlimited entertainment from a single provider at a subscription price. This is what we're beginning to see now with NetFlix and will most likely continue when NetFlix begins to offer films that can't be seen through any other outlet. That would happen if NetFlix distributed through DVD the films of SunDance and/or Gaumont. Films that couldn't support the costs of wide theatrical release, but would be profitable through DVD subscription.
Another example is the public library. Libraries buy and distribute lots of DVDs. It is a subscription service in the sense that it is supported by a tax and freely available for all people in the tax-base. If you don't go to theaters or rent movies through video stores, then the library is the sole subscription service referred to above.
With 21st century models, encrypting and copy-prevention doesn't make any economic sense. The reproduction cost for individual copying of a single product is next-to-nothing and its distribution encourages people to join the subscriber base (which is like a fan club).
Furthermore, 21st century entertainment will be much more focused and consumer exclusive than 20th century mass entertainment products.
People will try to keep their culture and entertainments private, lest they get stolen by the global media corporations that will slap unbreakable DRM on them. The best stuff will be guarded, invitation-only, and restricted by mutual agreement of the private subscription society. Works of art will be privately commissioned by wealthy patrons and selectively distributed through P2P, like in 15th century Florence. This will be to avoid censorship and the political effects that all great works of art invoke.
People will be writing books and Master's degree thesises on this topic. So the ideas presented will seem disjointed and hanging in a Slashdot message.
But I don't think that there's any real future for film DVD copy-protection.
Or rather, if I'm unable to copy it, then I doubt I will be able to play it (Linux only household). Is it just some bad sectors or something they put on there to trick the drive. There are plenty of windows programs already that can directly read the physical media. And just rereads a bunch of times with these funny sectors to try and recover them.
If I start getting dvds I can't play, then I guess I won't be such a good customer (I legitimately own 500+ dvds)
Macrovision for VCRs is circumvented with a simple filter. (The tape has a signal on it that screws up the tracking of a record electronics, and to a lesser degree the playback head).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
what about the poor billionaires who bought this high-end dvd ripper ???
I buy my DVDs used anyway
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Wrong. Check out the law . The act of circumvention is illegal (1)(a). (IIRC there was a short period when the tools were illegal, but not yet circumvention. This period has passed.)
As far as I understand, telling someone how you did it is not illegal, but probably ill-advised. Telling someone how to do it is very likely protected speech. Giving him tools is clearly illegal, unless those tools have substantial non-circumvention use.
I do not see where copy protection of DVD's is going to save the movie industry as much as they think. New movies can be downloaded a couple days after there release in the theater. Wait a week after the release and a decent copy can be had. DVDRips are always better, but the copy you can get on opening weekend will tell you if the movie is worth renting or ripping.
A good movie will still sell the DVD when it hits stores, problem is most the movies being released are so bad after watching the downloaded copy you never wish to see it again. I have purchased many DVD's and/or have gone to see it in the theater based on it being a great movie that I originally downloaded.
If only there were a way to copy them all to one format so you wouldn't have these problems...
XviD + AC3. Easy enough to do with Auto Gordian Knot, and even at good quality (bits per pixel-frame of ~0.24) the file sizes aren't bad. Of course, this is much more convenient if you're running a HTPC rig, but even putting it back on a DVD isn't an amazing feat. Saving off full-resolution HD is also viable, as most TV shows broadcast in HD will have a 700MB release. And when you get your Blu-Ray-RW (god, that's awkward), you can burn your TV shows in all their glory.
I was the one buying those dvds
oh and yeah, they were all porn...
now with piracy thing i cant go to my local sex shop and buy billions of dvds because im afraid some pirate is going to capture me and send me to some slave boat in the middle of the caribbean sea
damm pirates!!!
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So 97% of the current DVD rippers cannot touch macrovision protected discs (I expect buffer overflow problems). That just means that there exist rippers that work. Guess what those that don't work will disappear, those that do work will get more popular.
Macrovision makes money, the ripping problem is not solved.
Now I'm not going to argue the numbers, but really "only" 4% ? If you are running a business then you have certain fixed costs and once they have been covered your margin on each additional sale goes up.
So the 4% represents increased profit, so it could be 50% of profit, even if it is only 4% of revenue.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The CSS title-key is in a fixed place on the disc. Commercial (re)writable DVDs have this section of the disc set to all 0s, and it cannot be altered.
So you can't just do a bitwise copy, unless the source DVD isn't encrypted, you need to break the CSS encryption and write the unencrypted data to your destination disc.
Phil
I guess today is a passable day to die.
"I tried not being an asshole"
They say missing by an inch is like missing by a mile.
Congradulations! You're not one of the vast numbers of inethical people stealing music! Put a Gold star on you're forehead!
I was working at Wal-mart when they switched to a strict only exchange for same movie policy. Policy is also to remove the shrinkwrap from the new copy on exchanges so there's no getting around it (unless you're lucky).
Exchange the defective movie for the same title. Come back a day later and do the same thing. Repeat until you've depleted the store's stock of that item. Once corporate notices that a particular title's defect rate has gone up, watch corporate investigate.
How this new method will give us a disc that can be played in DVD's, but not in DVD-ROM drives?
Unless they tweak with the data-check sectors (which can be already circumvented - modchip, anyone?), I don't think it's possible.
they are all lies - they are probably being funded by microsoft just to create incompatibilities.
Wal-mart can refuse. Its the biggest company in the world
True, Wal-Mart may be the biggest retailer in the world, but it's probably not the biggest home entertainment media retailer in the world.
Every time I see a movie, I remember it. Then I go around and tell people all about it. I quote lines and re-enact scenes complete with sound effects and pantomime. You can never stop me.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It's MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!, not MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! You missed that first A. MUHAHAHAH sounds very artificial. It's like you jump straight from the MU sound to the HAH sound without an AH sound to segue.
What I do not understand is how they can claim the loss in profit is a literal loss... If pirating were impossible, would every person go out and buy every piece of software that they would have pirated?
I don't expect to be using a DVD player 10 or even 5 years from now. I suppose we could all buy all our movies all over again when another format which does not involve shiny little discs becomes standard, or keep two players (3 counting the VCR) hooked up. But I think consumers are entitled to something better.
If 100s of billions of DVDs are made, and the annual sales were 27.5 billion, doesn't that mean that the DVDs sold for less than a quarter on average? Make that happen and I'm pretty sure that would stop a lot of people from ripping and sharing...
Telling someone how to do it is very likely protected speech. Giving him tools is clearly illegal
What's the difference between telling somebody how to do it and giving him tools? Speech describing an algorithm can be translated into tools implementing that algorithm by another algorithm called a "compiler". Or is speech describing an algorithm not protected?
My 3 yr old knows how to turn on and off the TV, DVD and stereo all by himself. He loves to take out DVDs and slide them across the floor.
Then why don't you keep your home theater equipment and copies of copyrighted movies under lock and key like a good citizen?
Back when I was a kid, about 15 or so years ago, my parents bought me a game for my TRS-80 Color Computer, called "Gates of Delerium", from a company in Canada called "Diecom". It was basically a clone of the old Ultima RPG. It came on a couple of floppies, and it had a custom copy protection scheme on the main game floppy that didn't allow it to be copied using the normal commands of the Color Computer disk system for backups, nor could you use anything else (the second floppy was for player data - it could be easily copied). I played that game often, but not fanatically, and took very good care of all of my disks. Then, I graduated high school, left home, went to school, time passed...
Fast forward many years: I decide to get my old system back, feeling nostalgic, etc - and having played with various emulators (mainly Jeff Vavasour's stuff), I want to get my old stuff converted and saved to preserve it. I set up my old system, and start going through the disks...
Most of my disks are fine - I am able to copy them easily. Some are corrupted, some of the stuff copies, some of it is garbled, likely lost. Some of disks are completely garbled. But then I come to my Gates of Delerium floppies...
Trying them out on my original machine, the game disk loads so far, then hangs - it seems like it is so close to loading, yet so far. The disk looks fine, not dirty, etc - but it won't load. I try making copies (even a supposedly byte-for-byte copy using various ROM routines) - but no go there, either. I try running it in the emulator (off the original floppy and a 1.2 Mb 5.25" drive) - no dice. Now I am dismayed - have I lost the game for good?
Through a lot of work, I manage to track down one of the principles of the company, one of founders, Dave Dies himself. The company Diecom is long out of business, and Dave (at the time) was doing his own software development for games on PDAs and cell phones (can't remember the name of the company off hand). I was able to get in contact with him, and talk with him about my problems, but he couldn't offer much in the way of help.
Off and on, I posted this story occasionally to various forums, most frequently here on /. - a couple of years passed since I talked with Dave, and I had basically let the matter sit - knowing that the disk might be getting worse with age, but what more could I do?
One day, I get an email from some guy in Canada, and to make a long story that was suppose to be short shorter - we ended up (along with help from another guy) getting Gates of Delerium working, at least in emulation mode. It took a special hardware disk copier made by a non-descript company in Germany which one of these guys owned, some custom code work to cause the disk controller on the CoCo to read and write non-standard tracks (which was how the copy protection mainly worked), some guesswork (which one of the guys had used to port other Diecom software to the CoCo emulator in MESS), and a little bit of luck (that three guys, only one of which owned a real copy of the game, -me-, which was partially broken - all could come together over the internet and do this - that is luck). Since that time, I have only seen *one* other copy of Gates of Delerium being sold on Ebay, and have only heard of a couple of other people who owned it or knew about it. It was -this- close to being gone forever.
In the end, would it have really mattered? No. Life wouldn't have come to a screeching halt, but the world would be just a little poorer for it, and the leftover CoCo enthusiasts and emulation fans would have also lost a bit of history, too. All this - because one company a long time ago decided that it was better to make it impossible or nearly so - to copy a piece of software. If it can happen to a lowly floppy, it can happen to a movie on a DVD - in fact, it is already happenning to DVDs - the funky "rotting" that is occurring, and delamination -
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The studios have no idea of how to deal with the vast differences of average incomes in various parts of the world.
They need to accept that people will only pay a certain percentage of their income for an entertainment product. The fact that is percentage is a much larger absolute amount in the wealthy parts of the world doesn't mean that the people in the poorer parts of the world are stealing product. They are paying the same percentage of their income for entertainment.
The studios should make deals with the 'pirates' in the poorer parts of the world. The 'pirates' would provide reproduction, marketing, distribution, and promotion in the local market and the studios would get a percentage of the price for the product that the local market will bear.
The studios get a stable payment and continued market share that will grow in absolute financial value as the local economy gets wealthier. The 'pirates' get legal legitimacy and market placement. They agree to only distribute at low cost a certain Hollywood studio's movies and to prevent the distribution of low-cost DVDs into the wealthy sections of the world.
Everybody wins; everyone makes money now and more money in the future.
Hollywood wants globalization of its products, but remains embarrassingly clueless about what this means in real-world terms.
You don't have small children, do you?
How easily can your small children brute-force a locked box containing DVDs?
By intentionally corrupting the error-correction data on DVDs (same as most CD protection rackets), the consumer gets inferior merchandise. Not only is it more difficult to make a backup copy, but it also means that dust and scratches on the disk surface are more likely to cause playback errors. A scuff that would be irrelevant on a normal DVD could render a "protected" DVD unplayable.
So what are you supposed to do when that happens? Buy another copy of the DVD, of course! It's win-win for the MPAA, lose-lose for the consumer.
I will want to buy one of those softwares that are in the 3% (1-0.97). So will all of other users.
Soon, someone will reverse-engineer that software and release it to the public and that 3% will become 100% and Macrovision will be at the spotlight again.
While this new scheme might thwart the software-based copiers, at least until new versions are released, I highly doubt it will get by such low-tech equipment as bideo stabilizers.
You can go to Best Buy, spend $40 on a Sima stabilizer (Note - This is a newer version than I have, but it should be the same. In fact at the Best Buy website, you'll see they're promoting a more expensive variation as being able to do DVD to DVD copies), and record while playing the video!
It might not be as high tech as the 20 minute software-based copies, but it works nonetheless, and if you're interested in watching said movie, you can record it while you watch it!
I honestly think that the only one getting suckered in by Macrovisions claims are the movie studios, since they're the ones continually spending tons of $$ on counter-piracy measures, only to watch each one eventually be circumvented by consumers who feel they should be able to back up their purchases.
Which brings up another good point: Doesn't this violate the "Fair usage" laws, on which VCR's were based? Is Macromedia basically stating that in order to backup my purchase, I must now become a criminal? Interesting stuff... Too bad I don't have the $$, or the lawyers to throw towards a class action suit.
will swell to include the other 97% of the copying market?
First, where does the 4% number come from and how accurate is it?
Second, and more importantly, the assumption is made that in a perfect world, where no one could pirate a movie, those 4% would buy it. That is an incorrect assumption. There are a LOT of movies and games I play/watch simply because I have access to them for free. If I couldn't get them for free, I wouldn't partake of them. What does that do to the 4% figure or whatever it really is...
With VHS copy protection, you need to buy a box to remove it. That costs a small amount of money (£25, say $50) and even then copies are imperfect.
With DVDs, you download some free software that will be released the same day as the first Macrovision protected DVD. No cost, perfect copies.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
97%, huh? That sounds suspiciously like Windows' marketshare...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
nobody ever stops me on the street to sell me copies of "Girls Gone Dildo"
You must be hanging out on the wrong streets then.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
.. With piracy resulting in only 4% loss, why are the studios making such a big deal?
Because that 4% in sales is a huge percentage of their PROFIT.
While I agree with the next guy that the studios are greedy bastards... if they don't make a profit then they won't make any more movies.
Then what will a geek do when his fingers get tired from coding?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The movie piracy industry is ablaze in Asia (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia) ...instead of calling out Macrovision with their snake oil, they should try to stop the piracy coming from Asia.
After all, even if you rent a DVD from Blockbuster and copy it to keep, the movie studios still get a few pennies from the rental. If you buy from a bootlegger, the only one whose pockets are lined are the bootlegger's.
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The thing I like about Shrink is its utter ease of use and single-software solution. Point, click, rip, transcode..
Decrypter *is* nice (I use it for burning my ISOs to -R media), but it doesn't do the transcodes necessary to fit DVD-9s onto -R media. I haven't checked out DVD2One yet, so it may not be a huge deal, but I hate the kind of glued-together solutions of yore that you find at sites like Doom9; 5 different applications, a couple of different codecs, yadda...
See how they like it when no one actually goes into Bustblocker and Mallwart anymore.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Except i this case, given that it's Macrovision, the moment's advantage would be more like orange coloration that implies toxicity -- like butterflies that don't get eaten because they just look like they'd taste bad.
Who wants to place bets on this evolutionary race? Will it be the ponderous industry that still hasn't gotten its head around the whole point-to-point (as opposed to broadcast) distribution model? The one that's still occasionally claiming, for form's sake, that VCRs were bad for their business? Or will it be the nasty piratical p2p types who've proven so much, much more flexible in the past? Which one of these is going to take advantage of a faster rate of mutation?
My money's on the scurvy dogs. (Arrr.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Garcia; you should submit what you wrote (#11678672, I mean) to the LA Times. Assuming they have a letters page like most papers.
I like what you wrote; more people should hear these sorts of points (especially thing like unskippable "FBI warnings, commercials, etc").
They cannot use any new encyption methods as it needs to be playable in all current dvd players and pcs.
Frankly, I'm smelling another Emperor's New Clothes product here... My guess is that this "Ripguard" either doesn't actually work as advertised, or only works with a carefully-selected subset of ripping software out there. (The fact that MV claims it's proven effective doesn't, by itself, mean anything, without knowing which version(s) of what software(s) it was tested against.) Nonetheless, it's a great little scam for them to run: they'll make a ton of money selling a half-baked solution to a desperate and paranoid industry, and then when the system is broken in six months (assuming it ever worked at all) they'll just blame those "eeeeeeevil hackers" and roll out the next half-baked solution which, of course, their now-even-more desperate and paranoid customers will lap up hoping that "well, maybe this magic bullet will actually work."
Libraries are often the largest buyers of an individual book.
Say a new author writes an incredible first novel. A publisher puts $40,000 into an author's advance, some promotional ads in New York Review of Books and other magazines, and the printing costs of 5,000 hardback copies.
And they sell 500 copies in the first six months of release. They have to store all the other copies, or pulp them.
Or they send several copies to influential library societies. These librarians read the book and write positive recommendations in the library journals.
A thousand libraries throughout the country buy one to five copies each. Thousands of people read the book "for free" through the library and recommend it to their friends. Word of mouth promotion builds and the author's next book has an advance printing of 50,000 copies and a thousand libraries buy five copies each (at full price).
Libraries and book publishers have a symbiotic relationship that each understands and appreciates. Hollywood has nothing that compares to this long and trusted relationship between publishers and libraries. And never will.
Because 4% is still a billion dollars. If you could turn another billion in profit with a software install costing in the thousands, they'd erect an obelisk to you at any corporation in the world. ;-)
Where they go wrong is assuming that I- er, that pirates will buy discs they can't copy. Heck, the only reason I- er, that someone I know copies is so they can keep the turnaround rate on the Netflix rentals high if they fall behind on watching stuff.
> the studios will be paying Macrovision a fee to use their new copy protection stuff on every disk.
s/the studios will be paying/the studios passing the cost onto you and my for paying/
ps. the last 12 pack I bought had 11.5 ox. bottles, os it's only half a bottle....
The question now becomes "will the PR0N guys buy this?
Probably not. Most porn DVD publishers don't even bother with CSS encryption or region codes. In fact, they don't seem to worry about piracy at all and yet they're still making money. Hollywood should take a lesson...
0 1 - just my two bits
Um, how exactly is this going to affect those who already don't pay for movies?
So Macrovision puts more copy protection on a DVD:
So basically, when it comes down to it, Macrovision affects only those who get their movies through legitimate means. It won't have any effect on those already breaking the law, and it will only further reduce any incentive of using the DVD format.
Why do I watch downloaded movies? Why don't I buy many DVD's? Because DVD copy prevention sucks. It's that simple - I don't feel like buying something from an organization that regards me as somehow criminal because I have an interest in their product.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Exactly, turn them in. They are the ones who hurt everyone. A few arrests like this would do some good, and might even get pressure off the net for a short time.
So am I alone in wondering if the ability to either copy or download a movie has increased the overall number of viewers for some/many movies?
I have not partaken of downloading or pirating or anything, but if I did, it might be to watch something I wouldn't ordinarily watch.
Kind of like what's on TV. I definitely wouldn't pay to see it, but if it's on while I'm bored, why not watch this 70's flick that is on SpikeTV?
Now accepting PayPal donations!
About a few months ago I remember I rented an older DVD in the video store and just after the FBI warning there was the Macrovision logo. It caught my eye because I didn't expect it. I sort of assumed they already had protection on the DVDs. So if this isn't true then why did they have the macrovision logo on a DVD? Can anyone explain this one to me?
(damn, wish I could remember the name of the DVD.)
I think I will try to avoid anything connected by SDMI - the secure digital multimedia interface - which is DVI with extra DRM connections.
This will contravene the assumed rights of 'Fair Use', but may end up accepted by the masses.
If you can play it, you can copy it. Why won't they just give up already?
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Do I need to add a SHIFT key to my DVD player, or do I just need a Sharpie?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
RipGuard just puts a filesystem with bogus data structures on the disc intended to cause any OS that mounts and accesses the data thru the filesystem trouble.
You can still copy an image of the disc and burn that image to something else or extract all of the dvd stuff using dvd player libraries that read the disc as an image rather than using the fs.
The DVD at some point puts out a stream of video and audio that goes to the display device.
Simply plug that into a Video/Audio input on the computer - and you can copy the darn thing, regardless of copy protection.
The only copy protection scheme for DVD's that is ever going to work is to overwrite the data with random noise - making the thing totally unviewable on a TV set.
Ill place bets that THEY will eventually dream this up as being 'a great step forward' one day soon.
I think the basic reason is that people don't agree on the value of a copy. They know that the "owner" of the copyright can produce copies that cost a small fraction of the advertised price. Why would anyone want to pay $18 for a CD when you know it only costs a few dollars to produce it?
The basic problem is that the whole pricing model for products based on IP is out of whack.
Supply and demand works fine for commodities and raw materials. Competition keeps prices near the actual costs of production. But IP based products don't have consistent costs of production, so there is no solid basis for a given price.
Software is the best example; generally all of the costs are R & D and support. There is virtually no cost per unit produced. Most software developers just make up a price that seems to work for marketing purposes. Buying a shrink-wrapped box at a fixed cost is an insane price model since it doesn't account for the costs of production in any way. If not enough copies are sold the company folds and no one can get support. If too many copies are sold then the company earns obscene profits, which is fine for the employees but not very efficient for everyone else.
The CPU market is a less direct example with some bizarre pricing anomalies. Intel has marketed CPUs for years with no connection between production costs and prices. They have sold CPUs with functionality diked off on the die. This would be like selling a car with a V8 engine, only 4 of the cylinders have been permanently disabled.
Intel also rates each CPU they sell for a particular speed and then locks that CPU so that it cannot easily run faster. If their yields at high speeds are good but there is demand for slower CPUs then they will lock CPUs at that slower speed even though they are capable of running faster. This would be like buying a car with an engine that could run at 200 HP, but the engine has been permanently modified to only produce 150 HP. And this modification has been made because the manufacturer can't find enough people to pay extra for 50 more HP.
I think there is something wrong when producers sell products that are less functional for marketing reasons rather than production costs. If the fully functional product costs the same to make then it should cost the same to buy. Whoever comes up with a business model that accounts for this is going to be very rich.
If only the Movie Industry were to reduce the price of a DVD for sale to a reasonable value. The cost of stamping a DVD and distributing it in an store is less than $3 for each DVD, yet to try and sell the DVD for $10 plus gives the Pirates the opportunity and the buyers the value they are looking for. There wont be a market for the Pirated DVD's if the price for the Originals were kept reasonable. Unlike the Music Industry, the download of full length DVD still is not as easy or possible to accomplish in the same amount of time it takes to download music. The Movie Industry knows this and is as in the past has always been very slow to adopt any new technologies or business processess. If the piracy issue were to affect say a Boeing or General Electric with their plans for the 7E7 Airplane or a GE Engine design being sold on the internet for a few bucks, there shall be a huge cry for blood from Corporate America, since it is Music/Movies it still is not a big deal to most in the Corporate world. Even for the Movie Industry they still are raking in profits and hence they are not truly bothered to find a different way to deal with the issue at hand.
Maybe Macrovision & friends are well aware that anything they come up with will be easily overcome by some simple hacks in short time.
In which case, they just have to come up with yet another half-assed copy protection scheme, and know full well that the PHB's at the movie studios will reach for their cheque books one more time.
What a brilliant market - selling stuff that will never work, knowing full well that you can sell a new improved version of something that still wont ever work all over again a few months down the track.
Macrovision might be a lot cleverer than we give them credit for.
Macrovision is not the first company to come up with additional copy protection (read: corruption) of DVDs. Some other companies have done so, and it typically involves putting unreadable sectors on the disk. Really, really unreadable areas, that make DVD-ROM drives churn for awhile before failing to read. The menu VM code skips over the unreadable sections, so the disc can be watched just fine in a DVD player or software player. But ripping software, which attempts to copy the entire disc, runs into the unreadable spots and grinds to a halt.
Ripping programs such as AnyDVD and DVD Decrypter are already starting to work around this type of protection. It probably won't be long before they'll analyze the menu VM code and only copy sections of the disc that a set-top player could read, rendering this protection effectively useless. Or, looking from Macrovision's perspective, ripening the market for RipLock 2.0.
After all, Macrovision is not in the business of preventing copying. They're in the business of selling copy-restriction technology to **AA fatheads who think they will improve their sales by crippling their products.
Analog / digital DOES matter now that the DMCA is on the books. Or did you forget about that part?
Won't this just make that 97% obsolete, and open up the market for the 3% that still work? There's more people writing and contributing to code to break these things then they could ever pay to create them. It's no different than when RCE was brought about. People will find another way around and use it. 97% effective might as well be zero, when it comes to this kind of use.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
1) Who would you turn them in "to"? I would pay money to see you call the local police to "turn them in"
2) why would the MPAA stop their pressure on the net because they caught Jose selling a few dozen pirated DVDs a laundry by the trailer park?
I think you really need to think through what you're saying.
Its about control of the consumer.. The money is a by-product of that control.
I am sure their numbers are inflated anyway, but that isht my point.
Personally, i dont care how much protection they build in. I no longer contribte to either the music or movie industries. They can all take a flying leap.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Ohhh macrovision. Ahhh, yes. The wonderful people who prevent me from watching DVD's on my TV using my computer as a DVD player. Well, they did anyway, until I found some tools. It took me what, 2 hours? Now I've never made a "high quality videotape copy" which is what they claim Macrovision prevents. I guess I'm a pirate though, since I circumvent their protection. Perhaps I am in the 3%? Gee, it's great to know that I am costing Hollywood billions...
It's also great to know that this new scheme will also be cracked very quickly. Oh I love this game so much. But hey, this is from the industry that provides DVD player software that turns your volume down while you use it and offers to SELL you the ability to hear movies at full volume as an add on...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Just thought I'd drop this into the discussion since no one else seemed to be doing it.
DVD tech basically boils down to a symbolic interpretive code that lets a content producer create programs that a standard DVD player can read. It's not just the MPEG4 data streams; there's this whole architecture that the designer can use to create nifty menus and DVD options and stuff like that. The code is limited and there's some question over whether the whole rig is Turing Complete (I think that's the term - it's been awhile), but the basis of DVD playback is via interpretative program code rather than straight decrypt and playback.
Just about the only way I could see that an aftermarket protection scheme could work is if they reencrypt with a new formula and then use that code architecture to create a wrapper around the CSS decrypt step. In theory, those DVDs would play back on any CSS-licensed player that accesses the title tracks through the menu code.. but any player that attempts to access the title tracks directly would be stopped by the new encryption scheme.
It wouldn't be long before someone broke the scheme, because that code *still* has to be read in order to be executed on software players, but the promise is enough to give a corporate-think exec a warm fuzzy. Ultimately the only way it'd stick would be to figure out how to exclude software players, but I imagine that'd do some damage to playability on hardware players as well.
I'm just saying this stuff from memory; it'd been a few years since I was really well-read on the subject. Maybe there's someone else here who'd be so kind as to clarify the details.
There is a list of problematic discs here: http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?thr eadid=46190
These use a scheme called ARccOS from Sony. I don't know how similar it is to Macrovision's technology, but I am comfortable speculating that both will cause problems on a few DVD players and drive up disc return rates, and neither will be effective against piracy. I wouldn't be surprised if some folks will have to use a ripping program that circumvents the corruption du jour just to play it on their set top DVD players...
What is the point, they are too late!
Billions of DVDs of thousands of different movie titles already exist throughout the world. Anyone with a DVD drive can still get one of the discs that already exist and make a copy of it or rip it on their home PC.
Sure, it may affect new releases in a year or two, but with so many back titles already out there without this new copy protection it won't be preventing a whole lot of piracy.
-dr. layyze f. tooth PhD
The RipGuard technology would defeat the most popular of the ripping programs, Macrovision's Gervin said, by tinkering with the format of DVDs to make it impossible to extract data quickly from the discs.
So much for fast forward.
There is one thing I don't really understand. I mean, whatever encryption, whatever copy-safety, WHATEVER the RIAA/MPAA&co is going to come up with... ultimately, all those images and sound is going to get transformed from digital to analog, right?
I mean, however you want to put it, when it comes down to it, our eyes have to see it, and our ears have to hear it; hence, the output MUST be analog. At that moment, you can copy it, regardless of the measures taken. So why didn't anyone invent such a tool? Don't try to avoid or break the protection, just let it come through, as it would normally, then capture it the moment it gets analoge and - if you want - revert it to digital again.
Now, you will have some minimal loss by the transition, but really, with the right tool this should be hardly noticable. And I know you have some analog protection too ('false signals') but those only work because the signalcapture is not done passively enough. Make a vidcard that capture it in a passive way, like our eyes/ears do it, and *whatever* the RIAA/MPAA&co come up with, will be futile.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
As he said, it's already been done! :-)
...will post torrents, so what diff does it make?
Burn Baby, Burn
We have the right to make backups of our owned discs and put them into a format that is portable.
Your mistake is that you're confusing the RIGHT to do so with the ABILITY to do so.
For example, I have the right to buy a $10,000 supa-large flat-screen TV. But no one is obligated to provide the TV to me.
You do indeed have the right to copy media for backup purposes, but you have no right to buying that media in a form that allows easy copying. Are book publishers OBLIGATED to send you their books on CD ebcause paper books are hard to copy? Of course not. If you don't like the means of distribution, then don't buy your movies on that media.
paintball
I have a question.
When I pause a copy protected DVD (flag on) on my PC, it is always fuzzy. I would like to make a screen capture to set it as my background, but I cannot get a non fuzzy picture.
Non protected DVD's are fine.
So are they phasing the images from frame to frame so that no single frame produces a good still, but still produces a good moving picture?
DVD Decrypter handles the RCE region protection stuff, so that's the full front end, but I'm sure you knew that already.
And of course, to burn a DVD in Nero, all you have to do is drag the transcoded vobs and the ifos into the VIDEO_TS folder of a DVD-Video, rename it, and click burn. So it's approximately half again more work than DVDShrink, which is basically no work at all :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's possible to create a DVD that plays portions of tracks based on a script. This is often how they manage to have two or three versions of the same movie on a single disk: they branch the video either to play the restored scenes or to skip them. There's usually a performance hit, but they may have worked out a way to minimize it. They may be being extra clever by encoding chapter numbers out of order so a player following the script will play smoothly but a rip of the track will get the chapters out of order.
Other ways to make the ripping task more difficult is to use the multi-angle features to put parts of the movie on different angles and script it to switch between them at the appropriate times. Such tricks could be performed for audio tracks as well.
This doesn't defeat rippers that seek a duplicate copy; it is more to defeat people who selectively rip then transcode (to other codecs or a different bitrate to fit on one layer), not bothering to pull unwanted data from the disc. It will hurt those that want to quickly distribute multiple copies for profit and are confident in their ripping to not bother with a quality assurance-playback that it was ripped successfully. They'll get bit and lose black-marketshare.
The players are supposed to support such scripting, so it should work even for software players, as long as you play the disc as it was encoded and not transcoding.
And I'll say this: if this turns out to be what they're doing, and they've patented it instead of keeping it as a trade secret, I'd say their patent fails the obviousness test and should not have been granted.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Wrong. Check out the law . The act of circumvention is illegal (1)(a). (IIRC there was a short period when the tools were illegal, but not yet circumvention. This period has passed.)
Check it out yourself:
US Code Title 17 Section 1201(c)(1): Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
While copyright infringment is indeed illegal, and bypassing a technological measure to facilitate infringment is indeed illegal, fair use is explictly stated to be a valid defense for copyright infringement.
However, distributing tools to facilitate such infringement is not infringement itself, and therefore Fair Use is not a valid defense to that. That's the catch-22 of the DMCA. They can't get you for committing infringement for fair use purposes, but they can get you for distributing tools to help others for their own fair use purposes.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Or at least credit. Just take the DVD back to Wal-mart or wherever you bought it and say that you want a refund, not a replacement. If they refuse, ask for a credit. Just say that the disk is damaged/broken or similar and they WILL allow the refund.
I've done this on quite a few occasions with no problem. As long as you insist for long enough they will give in.
Just be nice when you're talking to them it and it'll go fine.
Social Engineering can bypass these issues (even if you have to go up a level or two).
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
It means you can afford 4% less of them. If I were you I'd get the MPAA all over your employers case as they're interfering with DVD profits!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Comon dude, this is fucking Wal-Mart. The corporation that recently closed an entire store rather than have it unionized. The "the studios make us do it" is just an excuse for them, as they could be just as ruthless to the movie studios. Wal-Mart could stomp on this in a second if they wanted to, if only because one of their suppliers tried to dictate terms to Wal-Mart, rather than the other way around.
That is exactly correct, in my opinion - the whole problem has never BEEN "copying". It's distribution that is the issue. There is no reason whatsoever that you, or I, or anyone else should be prohibited from making as many copies of our legally-purchased material as we want. It's if and when those copies are distributed to people who haven't paid for the original that reasonable legal restrictions come into play.
As you (and most other sensible people) have been pointing out, the whole conflation of "copying" with "distribution" by distributing companies is simply a ploy for control to squeeze more money out of people. Somebody ought to update "copyright" law to strike all mention of the word "copying" and replace it with "distribution", and I suspect a lot of the unreasonable legal restrictions currently derived from copyright law would go away...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
"With piracy resulting in only 4% loss, why are the studios making such a big deal?"
ok. I'll cut your paycheck by 4% and see how you react.
They will overcome this just like they did CSS.
The Rebels are united against the Empire.
If you can play back the content of any physical media, you can copy it and re-record it to any format you want.
The only barrier is energy and that barrier is constantly being shrunk.
Example:
I bought some songs through the iTunes music store. They come with DRM. I wanted to include one of them in a home video I was editing as background music. It wouldn't let me. DRM. So I burned the song to CD and then ripped it back as an MP3.
I'm now a criminal, of course, according to the DMCA, but I just wanted to have friggen "Jungle Fever" as the background music for some some homemade pr0n. I tried to do it the legitimate way. I went on-line and BOUGHT the song. So I had to violate the DMCA to exercise my fair use rights.
Totally. Utterly. Ghey.
This kind of thing just pisses me off. I recently purchased a dvd burner for the sole purpose of backing up all our dvd's because I have 3 small children and they are destroying the movies we purchased for them. I want to make copies and hide the originals away. I am not a criminal. I don't share or download movies, but the MPAA and RIAA treat me as if I did.
If they want to save thier revenue stream, cut actors and exec salaries. Those people are paid WAY too much anyway. Heck, the lowest paid employees in a movie crew make more than I do in a year.
IANAL... But I play one on
IMHO, it's not the people out there who are backing up their own purchased DVD's or even sharing them with their friends that costs the industry the most money. Swapping MP3's or ripped DVD's can be compared to tape-swapping and lending out of personal media in how it influences how many people will actually end up purchasing a legit copy.
It's when the DVD's get copied and sold that they really cost the industry money -- why buy a movie for $15 when you can get what appears to be exactly the same thing for $3? If it's not legal in your country to pirate media, then you can always import media from countries where it is legal.
It really won't help the legit media industry in the long run to trample over people's personal rights and freedoms -- that'll make people disagree with their statements on general principle, even if the industry might actually, at some time in the future, have a legitimate point to make. If they concentrated on stopping the sales of pirated media, then they could disable an industry that is taking away from their profits without stomping on people's personal rights. Then they might have a leg to stand on with a populace that is, by and large, fed up with their posessive, money-grabbing attitude. They've cried wolf one too many times about piracy impinging on their profits, and I know that I, at the very least, am willing to let them get eaten by the big bad wolf rather than listen to them whine one more time.
I suggest you read the DMCA. The word "digital" may be in the title, but it does not establish any difference between digital copyrights and analog copyrights. Copyright is the same for analog and digital. In fact text is fundamentally a digital media. The copyright on text is not on the "analog" curves of the letters printed on a page, the copyright is in the fundamentally digital string of letters and punctuation.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Once the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) finds that Aust Consumers can't play most of the new DVD's, they will move to stop this kind of copy protection. They have already made it legal for multi-region DVD players to be sold here. My new Sony DVD-HDD recorder was Multi-region out of the box, apparently it was opened once it hit Sony's Australian warehouse, modded on the floor by Uni students (paid by Sony to do the work), then shipped off to the stores.
I have over 400 legal DVD's and If I ever buy a DVD I can't play, I'll be taking it back to the store asking for my money back, then I'll be writing a letter to the ACCC and Fair Trading.
Which reminds me... I once had a problem with a X-Files DVD (disc 1 was actually disc 3 with the wrong screen printing) after ringing FOX they told me they couldn't do anything as I had bought it over a year ago. So I rang ACCC and Fair trading, wrote a letter to FOX, and to make a long story short, I ended up with a working copy (and they didn't just replace the one disc, they send me another box set!).
But, I'm sure that this copy protection will be circumvented once they start using it.
I would say more than half of existing players would quit working. I record stuff on my set-top DVD-R recorder. Some brands of discs don't work in older players. I have 3 DVD players not including the recorder and computers. I've found only one player that can reliably (I use that term loosely) play the DVD-Rs. Aren't -R's the ones that are supposed to be the most compatible?
I've even seen pressed discs have issues with older players. When the Star Wars trilogy came out on DVD, we saw artifacting and even locking up the player on more than one occassion. A few years ago, a guy at WorstBuy told a co-worker (who had a player that did Dolby decode) that the older players couldn't handle all of the newer features and encoding, so he bought a new player. Now a few years later, he's having problems with some artifacting. He's thinking about going out and buying another new player. I realize the players have greatly come down in price, but having to buy a player every few years seems a bit ludacris.
Someone wake me up when I'm down to my last 1% of copying programs.
This is exactly how this is going to play out...
Macrovision will convince some studios to test market some DVDs with this new protection scam... I mean, "scheme". A handful of titles will come out, and people who object to this will buy the discs, rip them using any one of the remaining 3% of copying programs, and then return the disc as defective saying that it doesn't work in their player.
Studios will see these titles still showing up on P2Ps and combined with the high return rate will consider the test a failure.
Macrovision reminds me of the joke about two campers who come across a bear in the woods, and blah, blah, blah, the one guy says he doesn't have to out run the bear, just the other camper.
Macrovision doesn't have to be as smart as the consumers, just smarter than the studios. They have a history of doing this *very well*.
And here I'm been told that suppliers have to roll over and play dead every time Wal-Mart says they want things done their way.
Guess we won't be seeing those RFID tags after all!
Right from what i can gather it 'protects' the disk by basically messing up the audio channel so a ripped version has a corrupted soundtrack.
Now dvd players are supposed to correct for this in hardware yes?
What exactly is stopping someone from emulating the audio chip corrector thing?
this copy protection is at most a speedbump - its not sufficient on its own to prevent dvd ripping.
Laser discs don't have any copy protection that I am aware of. I can copy any of mine to S-VHS tape or to my hard drive for that matter, any time I want. Maybe some discs had some macrovision but not many. That was actually far more common on VHS.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I suggest you read the DMCA more carefully (assuming you've even read it in the first place). There are specific details about copying, copy-control, and circumvention. In particular you should note the section dealing with analog consumer devices -- they can no longer be sold in the U.S. unless they conform to the automatic gain control copy control. *However*, this restriction does not apply to so-called "professional" devices.
So two things to note here. One, is that Hollywood and Congress were not targeting the big overseas pirate operations with the DMCA. They were targeting Joe Consumer. Two, is that they left open several loopholes, one of which is for professional analog recording equipment.
And since we are in a discussion about Macromedia copy protection, the circumvention section of the DMCA supercedes the arguments about what copyright does or does not allow.
Anyone care to bet how long its going to take before its broken? When will these people learn that investing time and money into such schemes is essentially like throwing money down the toilet?
netflix 5-at-a-time cost $30/month. With shipping and turn-around times, you can achieve an ideal throughput of 60 DVDs a month; realistically you can achieve about 45 a month. Cost of 100 pack of DVD+R's is about $50.
$30/45 + $50/100 = $1.17 per DVD + about 1.5 hours of your time a month
That's why you pirate.
posted anonymously to prevent the pirates.
It seems that the Macrovision encoding would greatly limit the number of new DVD rips shared on BitTorrent or other P2P networks. I assume that most of the DVD content on these networks is from individual users who rip DVDs they have access to and share them out. If you have to do all your ripping in real-time, only the more dedicated filesharers will bother. It just won't be as easy.
So I see this new idea as primarily an attack on filesharing, which may not actually be hurting the industry, but we all know how much it scares them.
Here in New York City, I see commercial DVD piracy on the streets every day. I pass three or four guys with DVDs spread out on the street selling for $5-10 each, and usually one guy walks by in the subway with discs. Every day. And a lot of these are titles that are just-released or about to be released in theatres. You know they're not legal. I've always wondered how these guys stay running because these street vendors probably don't have the knowledge or money to get access to the content themselves. I imagine there are guys out there printing and selling the whole product to the vendors at like $2 or $3 a disc. These guys are not going to be stopped by the new Macrovision protection, because they make a lot of money if they can just make a single master copy. And they don't even need a huge catalog, just the top 50 or so. The cases look remotely legitimate, but clearly not quite right.
I think the sale of pirated clone DVDs is a lot worse. It's for-profit and can also occur on a huge scale. But I guess these guys are easier to track down and sue.
They just set the evil bit.
Chip H.
> Macrovision claims that DVD copying results in $1 billion loss for studios out of $27.5 billion in sales. With piracy resulting in only 4% loss, why are the studios making such a big deal?
Does the author have ANY clue just how much a billion dollars is? I dunno about the casual slashdotter, but that's a shitload of money to me, and certainly worth spending 20 or 30 million on a protection mechanism to try to get it back.
What good is a DVD if I can't encode it to play on a laptop (without an internal DVD drive) or a handheld computer?
I love how they keep giving consumers less options on how to watch movies. At this point, I've almost completely given up buying any new DVD's or music. I'll just stick to webcast radio or go see a movie in the theature every once and awhile. It's just not worth $25 for a crippled movie disc.
I suggest you read the DMCA more carefully (assuming you've even read it in the first place).
Not only have I read it, I understand it better than you.
There are specific details about copying, copy-control, and circumvention.
I suggest YOU read them more carefully. That apply EQUALLY to digital and analog copyright. You said "Analog / digital DOES matter now that the DMCA is on the books" as I explained that is wrong. They apply EQUALLY to analog and digital. In case you are confused by that, there *are* analog encryption methods. Analog / digital does NOT matter.
I expect DMCA circumvention clauses to eventually be struck down in court as unconstitutional. Note that that law has been on the books over 7 years and circumvention crime has never once been upheld in court. But doesn't matter. With the DMCA circumvention law analog / digital does not matter, and without DMCA circumvention law analog / digital does not matter.
And since we are in a discussion about Macromedia copy protection, the circumvention section of the DMCA supercedes the arguments about what copyright does or does not allow
Wrong again. Macrovision does not qualify under the anti-circumvention clauses. Anti-circumvention anly applies to access controls. It does NOT apply to copy controls. It is perfectly legal to walk over to your local radioshack and pick up an image stabilizer for a few bucks and make fair use copies.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
What I like to do is rent TV shows DVDs, copy them to DVDR, and watch them when it's convenient. Since I don't have PVR anymore.. this will have to do now :) The thing is - I'm still only watching that TV show once, so I don't see how anyone is losing out here. Of course, I might want to loan those burnt discs out to a friend sometimes... even that is considered Fair Use in Canada IIRC.
.. to allow legitimate copying, but prohibit illegitimate copying? At the present time, there is no widely available slick solution to this problem, and until one is available this tension between the rights of producers and consumers will obviously continue to exist. You can count on the rights holders (studios) to always want to tilt the scales in favour of _their_ rights, without much concern for your Fair Use rights.
:)
Isn't DRM supposed to help out here
In the good old days, I had a DirecTV/TiVo setup (here in Canada, where it was considered a legally safe thing to have for a time). That was kick ass - but all good things must come to an end as you probably have heard.. The Canadian satellite TV providers (ExpressVu and StarChoice) offer PVR setups, but sadly they are ass, and aside from that, I just haven't been able to bring myself to buy Canadian TV. I need my HBOs... Until Canadian TV stops sucking (probably not anytime soon) I'll be watching TV shows on rented DVD only... which is not too bad actually.. except that I'm behind on the shows of course
the new ticket is incestuality, son
" Teach your child to read and give them books"
Yes. 4 year olds could sit and read...uh...Godel Esher and Bach. The little bastards are so ungrateful...they require constant care.
Which DVD copying software falls under the 3% not affected by your protection? Thanks in advance.
Yeah sure, go fragment them like I care. I don't rip anything nowadays. Everything comes in neat in a VIDEO_TS folder thru the modem. For the original ripper though, I bet he has a dedicated computer to do it, make it rip double the realtime like it matters.
Err, not really. All the capitalist economies which actually exist include things known as laws. A good portion of these exist to limit the means by which profit can be persued, and to address negative externalities (costs to uninvolved entities).
The ideal of market capitalism is not that you "should produce as good a product as possible for a given amount resources" but rather that you *have to* because otherwise someone else will produce a better product for the same amount of resources, and then kick your ass.
That's an ideal that's not always achieved in practice, but so's communism. The issue isn't about communism vs. capitalism, it's about ideal capitalism vs. the slightly thornier real thing.
97% of existing DVD copying software eh? If it works then I'll bet the popularity of the other 3% skyrockets.
DRMs are meant to stop legit users (the masses who bought a legit DVD/CD/whatever) from making copies. There are enough clueless people out there who would just buy another DVD, because they don't know how to make a backup, if their original one is no longer working. This is partly the goal of DRM.
The main goal is to force consumers to perpetually upgrade their disks, or formats, of the same content. Here's an example: If you owned legit VHS movies you bought in the 80s and 90s, you can't capture VHS signals through your ATI AIW cards because they have Macrovision in the cards and likely in the VHS movies. There are hacks for their drivers, if you know where to look, but DRM VHS might not work at all. However, non technical people tend to just give up when it won't work because it seems too complicated and time consuming. They'd rather just pay $20 or whatever for the same movie in a DVD format.
Now, DVD is not going away yet, but it will. The next generation of format will behave the same way as the VHS to DVD example. It makes perfect sense to milk 96% of the paying consumers than to prevent 4% of the people who won't pay. I don't believe their numbers, but it's just convenient to illustrate.
The more people buy into DRM, the more it'll spread. DRM doesn't hurt anyone but the clueless consumer, while benefiting the producers.
As an exercise, what other benefits does DRM play in distribution control?
I'm so glad I picked a DVD player that had a modified firmware available for it. It disabled region coding and analog Macrovision. But the beautiful thing was disabling the 'UOP' (user operations) register. This is the spot in the DVD player where a DVD can request disabling things like fast-forward, next chaper, menu, etc.
It feels amazingly good to be able to skip over all that crap with one touch of a button.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Specifically I was thinking you could not physically "burn disks." I'm a little fuzzy about when Laserdisks came out vs Beta and VHS players. I also just cannot imagine at what point the entertainment industry operated with any immunity from piracy, and what "recover ground" to might refer too.
... to keep people from circulating copied media. Considering how much the industry pays to implement these so-called protection methods, they're taking the 4% loss and adding however much it costs to "thwart 97% of existing DVD copying software"... And then someone will write new software, which will happen in no time flat, and poof, an investment in this protection method goes out the window.
I think that the money would be put to a much better purpose by taking the loss of actually allowing people to return opened media.
Media, whether it be VHS, CD, DVD, software, audio, or video, is one of the few products out there that you can't return if you don't like it. Too many pieces of software/music/video do not live up to their hype, which makes the buyer wary of purchasing anything that they can't return. A lot of people, after trying out a program/album/movie through whatever means, will go out to buy/keep a legit copy. However, most people aren't going to pick up a piece of media that they haven't tried out if they know they can't return it if they don't like it. When you make it impossible to return things, you force people to evaluate their potential investments through other means -- tape-swapping, file-sharing, whatever. If you make the means of that investigation more difficult and/or illegal, there is a backlash of opinion toward the media industry, and now the average joe will to out of their way not to spend money on media! In so many ways, the media industry is just shooting itself in the foot, here.
A lot of this could be avoided by just making it possible to return opened media. But, oh no, people might open the media, rip it, and then return the media for a full refund! So? There are enough copies out there of just about any media you could name circulated online that if someone really didn't want to pay for a piece of media in the first place, they wouldn't have to. Or, God forbid, they borrow a legit copy of something from work or from a friend, and then use/watch/listen to that.
What it boils down to is that people who are going to use illegitimate sources of media will do so whether you make it difficult/illegal or not. What the industry is doing right now is alienating their supporters through their business practices. Doesn't that account for more than a 4% loss?
I distribute software for a government agency. Because all costs are either handled by the government itself (internal distribution) or through a fund set up between the two governments (foreign sales), I generally don't have to deal with the cost of software. We develop it for these people we're giving it to, so development costs and production costs are essentially covered by our budget. That is, until we get the oddball sale that's not sponsered by any government, but is within our purview. One piece of software, we were told to estimate its value and report it. Thing is, the people asking us had no idea whether they were asking for the cost of development or the cost of duplicating the CD (I suspect the person in question was filling out a field on his forms that simply asked for a per-CD cost). At that, we weren't sure how to price the cost of development, as it had been a flat value when created, evenly distributed among the labs signed up under us. We had no way of gauging the price for a new requester. In the end, we explained the situation, said that it was likely the price of duplication and mailing they were needing, but gave them the other figure (which we wound up getting by dividing the total price of development by the number of people on ID for the software) and explained what it was, just in case. Last I heard, they'd submitted the average of the two numbers. Go figure.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
The difference is that tools are a circumvention device, but an explanation is not. The court has held that source code qualifies as a device, even though it is also speech, I am sorry to say.
Then what about an explanation that is valid in a restricted subset of English used to "explain" (wink wink nudge nudge) algorithms, which a computer can compile? It has precedent: back in the 1970s, there was a database query language called English.
If the engines are identical then the one that makes more power is less reliable. If the engine with higher power output is reinforced to regain reliability then it is no longer identical.
There are many folks that tune their cars with aftermarket parts to produce more power. They either buy stronger parts to take the additional stress or live with reduced reliability. If you read stories on forums dedicated to car tuning you will see many examples of people pushing their engines to far and experiencing failures.
Many companies produce versions of their engines that produce more power; since reduced reliability is not a viable option they use stronger parts to withstand the added stress. This changes the engine and increases cost, which in turn justifies the increase in price.
I can't be sure without examining the vehicles in question more closely but when it comes to mechanical engineering there is no such thing as a free lunch. There are other differences between these cars besides their price and HP. Even reduced reliability can be counted as a cost, since it results in more warantee claims against the manufacturer and reduced sales.
Well, it's $0.02 a MB now. And they allow lossless (FLAC etc.) encoding on some tracks. But their catalog has an unforgivable lack of 'Mindless Self Indulgence' at the moment, alas.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
So... the FLAC/MonkeyAudio/whatever files are $0.02/MB, or do you mean that files that are available in that format are $0.02/MB, regardless of the format they're in?
And where does the FAQ there say this? I'm not signed up, but I got the impression that it was all $0.02/MB.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca