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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
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.
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.
It'd be nice if they'd put in a low-cost replacement program for damaged DVDs, though.
Umm, no that should be the MINIMUM they should do if we are just licensing the pleasure of watching the movie from them. Then the media it is on is inconsequential. Otherwise if we're paying for the disc, then we get to do whatever we want with it. They need to choose which method they want to offer, not just take the best of both worlds.
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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.
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...
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.
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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.
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.