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

Keep your hands off my purchased media!

[garcia]

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.

More returns/refunds?

[yetdog]

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?

Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision

[arkanes]

Here's an intersting question. So piracy costs a bit less than 4% of annual income each year. What kind of royalties do you have to pay for a CSS license? And how much will Macrovision charge for licensing? Is the total more than 4% of sales (and thats assuming that the 1 billion in lost sales is legit, which is questionable).

An amusing aside is the Google ads at the bottom of that article.

Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision

[Maestro4k]

bviously 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?

• While I agree from a business owner's standpoint, going with a solution like Macrovision is an absurd way to "fix" the problem. The pirates who are reallly costing the studios money will find a way around this in no time flat and continue to produce and sell illegal copies. In the meantime, the studios will be paying Macrovision a fee to use their new copy protection stuff on every disk.

• Basically you'll now leave the corner store with one bottle missing from your 12 pack and 10% of the beer gone from the other 11 to cover the costs of the Macrovision stuff.

Rentals are money, too

[jfengel]

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.

Re:Rentals are money, too

[GuyZero]

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.)

You should read Blockbuster's annual report or NetFlix's. They have revenue sharing agreements with many (if not all for BB) major studios. They essentially get the DVDs for free but split the profit between themselves and the studio. How else could Blockbuster put (literally) hundreds of copies of new DVDs in each of its thousands of stores without tying up a huge amount of capital? Answer: they don't. The studios pony up the capital cost of the DVDs, BB throws in their distribution chain and presto, win-win.

I see stuff like this as a PR effort primarily aimed at the less technically-savvy. As long as the bulk of the market thinks piracy is impossible (or at least hard) then the studios have what they want. Mass defection, like what happened with MP3s, is what the studios want to avoid. Or at least delay.

What about a case like Disney...

[punxking]

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.

Re:If I can play it, I can copy it

[fuzzybunny]

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)

THANK YOU. I had exactly this attitude with a German EMI CD my girlfriend brought home from a concert. While ripping our collected piles of CDs so she could take them to work on her laptop and I could put them on my mp3 player, I noticed that these guys had some third-rate safedisc "protection" on it.

Alcohol 120% made pretty short shrift of it, but I wrote a (fairly civil) nastygram to the head of their copy protection program to the extent that I will (a) never buy another disc from them again, and (b) tell all my friends to do the same, especially the non-technical ones, because EMI Germany produces broken CDs which you may not be able to play on your new iPod.

There's an axiom out there to the extent that every pissed off customer means, through his/her network, between 7 and 14 additional lost customers. I received a very politely worded letter back, trying to explain and justify why they're doing this, the tone of which I appreciated, but the contents of which didn't change my mind.

I wrote my original mail because of a suggestion to do so which I found on a blog when searching for solutions to my problem, and have been offering the same suggestion to other people when I hear of a legitimate owner of some form of media being inconvenienced by copy protection. I have washed my hands of the affair, I have loads of good albums, and I don't really need anything from that particular vendor.

The outcome of this will be either that nothing changes, in which case neither I nor the vendor care, or that I've done my little bit to contribute to EMI Germany losing enough business to think again about treating potential customers like potential criminals. In this scenario, I have also not been inconvenienced, but have maybe helped others have an easier time of backing up their discs.

Your attitude is superb--I encourage anyone who objects to the idea of purchasing something and then being told what they can or cannot do with it , to just vote with your wallet--it's the most effective vote you have.