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.

Comments

Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media!

[extra88]

The whole Betamax thing applies to analog formats, not digital, and the concept of "fair-use" isn't a right, but an exception to a section of copyright code.

Analog, digital, it doesn't matter, space-shifting is space-shifting. The law is clear, I can (privately) do what I like with the copy of a copyrighted work I purchased barring any additional restrictions I agreed to when I purchased it (EULA).

Call it an "exception" if you like but Fair Use is still a principle written into the law and supported by many court precedents.

Re:More returns/refunds?

[Maestro4k]

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?

• Most likely yes, but once that shrinkwrap has been opened, even an act of God probably won't get your money back. 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).

• Wal-mart actually isn't the bad guy on this one, the studios started refusing to credit Wal-mart for the returns unless they followed the above rules. Faced with eating the losses for the studio's moronic rules or implementing them what retailer is going to refuse? That's why you can't take a disc back that won't play in your player and get another movie. (And yes, they did this to all retailers at the same time, not just Wal-mart.)

  Basically this new and improved Macrovision will play in all DVD players, because if it doesn't your only option will be to buy a new one that will play it. From the studio's perspective I'm sure they think this is a fair solution.

Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media!

[ChibiOne]

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.

That may be in the US, Canada, Europe, Japan and Korea.
But you have no idea what the piracy problem is like in, for example, Latin America or Southeast Asia. An original DVD will cost you about 15 USD. Why pay that, whan you can rent it for 3 USD, you ask? Well, why pay 3 USD for a rent, when you can own a not-so-shabby quality copy of it for the same price? Consider that average minimum wage in, say, Mexico, is about 5 USD PER DAY.
Consider, now, that for a hit title, like Spider-Man 2, we are talking about thousands of [3-dollar] illegal copies sold, instead of thousands of [15-dollar] legitimate ones.

Not that I favor Macrovision, tho...

What? no...

[Tom7]

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.

Re:It might not be hard to do...

[Ironsides]

A bit by bit copy would be idistinguishable from the original. This is how a disc copy works. And this is what the Proffesional Pirates use. Many commercial CD/DVD burners offer this, but first detect to see if the original is CSS protected (and if so, refuses to copy it). Also, making a bit for bit copy requires you to have the new disk the same size as the old. Dual layer disks are still expensive as compared to single layer, but they are coming down in price.

The people who release these on the internet however, generally release them in a compressed form that requires decrypting the original and re-encoding it to some other format. (usually DivX).

Sadly, it is.

[WillerZ]

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