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Blu-Ray to Include New Copy Protection
Lord Haha writes "In an announcement (warning: links to a PDF) last night, the Blu-ray Disc Association, led by Sony, representing one of two competing high-definition DVD formats (the other being HD-DVD, led by Toshiba), stated it will simultaneously embrace digital watermarking, programmable cryptography, and a self-destruct code for Blu-ray disc players. Will this be the continuation of the trend into more and more restrictive DRM? Or something that will fade away like Betamax Tapes? Two articles on the topic can be found at Tom's Hardware and PC World."
High definition is not good enough increment in technological value to supplant present day DVD's with a crippled DRM technology.
HD-DVD will be stillborn.
People will take convenience and the facade of ownership over crippled technology any day. Just look at divx (not the Mpeg 4 technology - the rediculous pay for play disks that were stillborn).
-- Mean People Suck
What percent of Playstation owners do you think had mod chips? I can't imagine it's significantly greater than zero.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
If Blue Ray requires the device to be connected to the internet then that will spell the death of it before it even is sold anywhere. Same thing for HD-DVD. People will not want or be able to run internet connections to their tv area just to be able to play hidef dvd's. If people have to do anything more than plug it into the wall for power and plug the player into the tv and/or receiver then it won't sell.
>a self-destruct code for Blu-ray disc players
That's waaaay over the line.
Not gonna buy it.
You think I'd let a mistake by some techie or program destroy a few hundred bucks of my hard-earned money?
I'm tired of people treating me like a thief, when I never pirate ANYTHING!
I've got lots of CDs and DVDs I already bought in the 80s and 90s, and I can always just walk along the street and whistle (or daydream).
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
All these new systems will fail for one reason: Porn.
Porn producers are very realistic, and very saavy. Do you think people are going to buy "Buttbandits 23" if they know that every time they queue it up, some manufacturer is getting a record of it?? Even those without tinfoil hats know this is a bad idea...
My prediction is that the pornographers will use a version of the high-def discs WITHOUT the phone-home feature, or will stick to DVDs.
Pornography: Saving Western Civilization since 1826.
It's not what you know, or even who you know- It's how many people recognize your damn
"Besides, what's to prevent a hacker from filtering out this self-destruct code from the downstream content anyway?"
I'd be willing to bet a month's salary that they are going to use public-key cryptography with a bigass key to protect it. RSA2048 will keep anyone from screwing with it. Hard-code the SSL public key, and the only way you're going to launch a man-in-the-middle attack against it is by rewriting the key.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
Even worse: what about when hackers can start sending these self destruct packets themselves. Imagine how pissed you'd be when someone "destroys" your dvd player!
I'm pretty sure you forgot #4 freeloaders. Or the why should I pay for it when I can get it free crowd. (Also includes the "I'm entitled to it just because..." crowd.)
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
It'll be worse, the retailers will get in on it. They'll be getting all sorts of returns from people who don't have an Internet connection. Parents whose player doesn't work after little Johnny unbeknownst to them tried to play a disc his friend at school gave him. People whose player got "self-destructed" because somebody at a content provider mis-keyed a serial number. And people won't be happy about having to pay restocking or repair fees when they didn't do anything to break the player. A few consumer complaints later, Blu-Ray players will be anathema to retailers who can't afford to eat the cost of all those returns.
That is EXACTLY what I was thinking. This is just DiVX all over again.
And just like divx- when they decide the market is going to BluRay2, they just stop validating your disks and they become unplayable. (like divx became unplayable for those who forgot).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
After the bit about taking every thing we own "...I don't care, I'm still free, you can't take the sky from me..." It's not just a mater of Them taking away all our rights with media, a lot of it is that the general public has given up on entertaining themselves. It's time to look for alternative forms of entertainment. If we became a culture of book readers, that watched backyard scifi we downloaded off the Internet for a fee and learned to play our own musicale instruments then the big corporations could DRM the entire system and take away all our rights and it wouldn't mater a bit. We would still have the sky, we could still enjoy our selves without the big corporations.
We are the Borg...
If a person buys/rents a DVD and it works, they won't consider the technology crippled
Very True. But the natural progression of marketing this form of technology goes something like this:
1. Format established and publicized.
2. Manufacturers sign on to build the players and begin production. First players released are marketed but they are expensive.
3. Content providers slowly dribble in source content.
4. Ecstatic early adopters embrace the new wiz-bang nerd-porn technology. Willingly forking over their hard earned ca$h for the expensive technology to show off to all the other nerd-porn loving early adopters.
5. The word slowly spreads about how truly wonderful this new technology is and receives widespread adoption as the technology gets cheap enough for Joe 6-pack.
So what's wrong with this picture? No early adopters - no game. Miss that step and the technology is dead.
Why would early adopters reject this technology?
1. DRM - the subject of this article. 2. Pay for play. 3. HDTV obsolescence. 4. Pissed off about getting burned (again).
Keep in mind that this DRM is there to slip in a pay-for-play strategy long term. Taking control of the box with this specific DRM will allow this strategy to work. The industry (**AA) has come right out and stated this is their goal. They are trying to learn from their mistake with divx and time-lapse degradable DVD's.
But DRM is not the whole story, either. What else other than DRM do we need to kill this technology? The "analog hole." Every HDTV sold before digital interfaces (DVI-HDCP, HDMI-HDCP, broadcast flag, etc.) were invented are dead as well with this technology (both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will down-rez "analog" component connections to "DVD" quality). These HDTV's are equipped only with component (and some rare cases RGBHV) analog HD inputs.
Guess who the majority of the population that owns those early dinosaur HDTV's are? Early Adopters. This pisses them off and they will state it very loudly with their wallets. BUt they don't even have to be pissed off. Since they can't watch HDTV they simply can't make use of the technology without spending another $3000 (in addition to the $6000 they already spent 5 years ago) for a new HDTV.
Lets face it. This technology (for HDTV only - I'm sure computing/PS3/etc. will make good use of it) is stillborn. No early adopters will accept it as it is. But don't take my word for it. Go to http://www.avsforum.com/ and see what the early adopters are saying themselves.
P.S. there is another great technological failure that draws a lot of parallels here: DAT.
-- Mean People Suck