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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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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
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.
The 97%/3% non-working rip software to working rip software ratio will quickly become 97%/3%
Instantly, in fact.
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.
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).
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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.
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
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.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
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.
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.
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.