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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
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
This sig is false.
Software circumventing this new copy protection will be released, when, by tomorrow by 4PM?
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I'm sorry, I'm not that familiar with the US constitution. Which amendment is that?
What I'm trying to get at, who decides who should have what rights? Should we have the right to backup our DVDs? Or, if we forget to backup our DVDs and they break, copy the DVD of a friend if they happen to have a copy of the same movie? And if our copy was the last, are we entitled to a new copy of a different movie of the same studio? What about the freedom of movie producers to determine what product they sell?
Obviously, the RIAA and MPAA are saying that they should decide who has those rights (and the DMCA gets them quite a lot), and that they should have everything and their customers nothing. And their customers are screaming about that, and claiming that they should have everything and the RIAA and the MPAA nothing.
The truth, as always, is probably somewhere in the middle. We need to change the legal infrastructure to support the most effective market. Whether that means making copy protection obligatory or forbidden or neither is a question I'll gladly leave to the reader.
Discs that do not allow me to fast forward through FBI warnings, commercials, etc
Amen to that! I'm pretty lazy about this sort of thing and even I'm almost moved to action when I get "operation currently not permitted by disc." I mean, the nerve of a frickin' DVD to try telling me what I can and can't do. I'm surprised more people aren't pissed off about this.
Anyone else have any Thomas the Train DVDs. I swear it takes me about 10 minutes to start one of those stupid things.
Never underestimate the power of fiber.
Actually, I see a LOT of piracy amongst the casual DVD crowd. A girl here at work passed me a list the other day.. $5 each for all the "latest" DVD releases, plus a bunch of stuff I recognized as poor-rips (telesyncs?) from the theaters (and music CD's, too.. She said he'd borrow from the library and rip those). I tried not being an asshole, but informed her I didn't agree with the practice. She quit showing me the list, but I see her bring in stacks of DVDs for the other folks that don't care. At a laundromat I went to regularly, the attendent had a laptop setup with a firewire DVD-R and would burn movies for his "customers" while they did laundry for $5 each. And so on and so on. It surprised me to see it that blatant and widespread.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
You can sleep a little easier knowing that before they even manufacture the first disc with their anti-whatever scheme, a non-descript guy with glasses in his mom's basement somewhere will have crafted a patch that fully ignores it. Apparently it foils 97% of DVD-copying programs. So whoever made the remaining 3% has already done that
As to your question of who gets to choose our rights:
Congress
Courts
President
Who gets to put these clowns in that position of power: the voter.
What happens after these clowns are placed in office...well its sorta like MS' plug and pray... we plug em in, and we pray that they work for us.
I believe the courts ruled that making digital backups is legal for the consumer as long as they own a legit copy of the original (and keep it). So no copying the original dvd, and then selling (giving) the original dvd to someone while keeping the copy.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Actually, the 97% of software makers will just update their software. If it doesn't stop 100%, then within weeks it will stop 0%.
Now, the hitch would be if it stopped 97% because of hardware issues, like, you couldn't rip it in 97% of the DVD-ROM drives out there. That might be a problem. But it's hard to imagine a scheme that allows computer drives to read the data enough to play the movie but not enough to rip it.
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
Actually, I see a LOT of piracy amongst the casual DVD crowd. A girl here at work passed me a list the other day.. $5 each for all the "latest" DVD releases, plus a bunch of stuff I recognized as poor-rips (telesyncs?) from the theaters (and music CD's, too.. She said he'd borrow from the library and rip those).
At a laundromat I went to regularly, the attendent had a laptop setup with a firewire DVD-R and would burn movies for his "customers" while they did laundry for $5 each. And so on and so on.
The people that you listed are not "casual". They are blatant theives. They are not only ripping and burning DVDs they are distributing and selling them. Just because they aren't what YOU consider to be "geeks" that were at the heart of the DVD ripping scene in years passed doesn't mean that they are "casual users".
Please don't confuse these people with Joe Blow with the family or me and my personal DVD collection at home.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Couple of years ago there was a company that wanted to put Kiosks in Stores where people could burn their own Music CDs / DVDs.
Guess what the industry said no and that was that.
Now you have a guy in a Laundromat who is providing this service. Guess the people have spoken.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
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.
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...
Pull your head out of your ass.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
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.
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.
Congratulations, you just invented region coding! :)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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.
Not that I favour Macrovision, too, since they take away my well paid-for right to watch them movies.
I paid for it. I paid every single cent they asked for. Now I want to watch it, when I want to, where I want to, and on whatever device I chose to.
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.
People who earn 5 USD per day will not buy a 15 USD disc. Period. When 1000 illegal copies are sold, this does not mean 15000 USD lost revenues for Hollywood, since 9 out of 10 people would never have afforted the disc at 15 USD apiece!
This kind of math, also seen at the RIAA in their MP3 jihad, drives me nuts. When some teenager downloads 300 CDs worth of MP3s in a month, that does not mean the RIAA just lost 15000 USD. There is no bloody way that this teenager would have spent 15 grands for CDs.
This does not justify illegal copies. Not at all. This is about an accurate and honest assessment of lost revenue, instead of Propaganda.
--- The light at the end of the tunnel is probably a burning truck.
What's worse that often there is so much of it (laws) that it is virtually impossible to know what all the laws are. Take city by-laws for example. There are often so many of them that unless you want to spend your days studying them your are bound to break one due to ignorance. Not only that, in order to get a copy of them, often the cost is prohibative.
Here's what really bugs me about CCS. It's not that they encrypted it but that the media companies have placed artificial export controls onto the media, denying my right to purchase DVDs from other countries. This contravene's the WTO rules on free movement of goods. Ever try buying a Japanese anime from Japan to watch it? If you can't rip it, you'd literally have to buy a DVD player from Japan to watch it too (unless you can get a grey market multi-region player).
Making copies and selling them, OTOH, moves into the area that I (and I think most slashdotters) consider "wrong." Such a person is no longer a casual copier.
What's stupid is that DRM and related schemes tend to only affect the casual users. In the world that the MPAA is trying to create, your average 4x4 drivin' good ol' boy can't make a backup copy or skip the commercials, but a major piracy operation doesn't even notice. Anybody making money from piracy can afford the necessary equipment to make perfect copies, which are unaffected by almost all copy protection schemes (those which don't require a chip in your head).
[javac] 100 errors
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.
This particularly move though was done unilaterally to all retailers at once. It was done under the banner of stopping theft and piracy (those nasty crooks are stealing movies and bringing them back for refunds and/or they're taking them home, copying them and bringing them back). Even Wal-mart would have trouble fighting that, as then they could be made out as supportive of crooks.
You have one other element too, customer abuse, that did not help. Many people have been treating Wal-mart and other stores as free rental shops. They would buy a movie (on DVD or VHS) the day of release, take it home, watch it, come back the next day and claim it didn't work and get a refund. I'm quite sure other retailers experienced this as well. In fact this may have been an element as to why the studios started refusing to credit returns unless they were exchanged.
Your last argument shows a very vast lack of understanding on how retail handles returns though. Even through this new policy there still are legitimate returns where they swap because of a defective disc/tape. Wal-mart stores all have to handle tons of returns even under the current policy, the others wouldn't have added much overheard to costs since the whole processing procedure hasn't changed, there's just fewer to handle. They also still process hundreds of movies a week in each store that they find stolen with the cases left behind. They have more of those in a week than they ever did returns, overall this hasn't impacted their returns processing much at all. Certainly the impact's not been enough to make it worth the customer ire it's caused.
I'm not one to defend Wal-mart, they have more wrong with them than right (especially when it comes to how they treat their employees), but in this case the movie studios are the real culprits, and the blame needs to go to where it belongs.
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.
The way I read the article, it sounds like theyre essentially going to fragment the disc so it takes a long time to seek around the disk.. If this assumption is correct, it sounds like this will wear out drives faster, fuck up fast forwarding, and probably bork out some old players that give up when they have to work too hard. Also, if this is the case, no patch will fix it. Youll have to read the disc slow, and reburn it unfragmented.
The hong kong market will do this once, press a bagillion of the things at $.02 a piece and some schmuck on ebay will buy them for $5, and then sell them for $45 and tell you that theyre not bootlegged and just have chinese writing on the covers, and the mispellings on the case art/credits are just your eyes betraying you.
Basically the guy who just wants a copy to watch and wouldnt have bought it anyway because he's broke will just have to wait a little longer, the people that mass produce the copies will have to wait longer but then have a straightened out version than can pump out at the same speed they always did.. and meanwhile the people getting punished are the ones with older dvd player whose motors just burnt out and the people who like fast forwarding.
I don't see this changing anything, sure itll take you two hours to rip a movie, and a little time to clean it up maybe, but in the end, its no real problem to anyone who wants to make a copy.
Very few people are downloading Movies.
Downloaded movies are usually trash from beginning to end.
People are renting/borrowing and ripping.
I give any copy protection about 3 months before it's cracked. Sony's new encryption scheme used on "The Grudge" and a few other movies is already cracked.
Encryption doesn't guarantee a sale. Never has and never will! I wish they'd just give up and eat it as a loss leader.