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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."
I take this to say "We concede all control over this device to the **AA."
Am I the only one that finds this disturbing? Isn't this a violation of fair use? Will the public buy a player with BD+ in it?
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
The life of hardware manufacturer is tough. You need enough DRM to convince copyright owners to develop/author for your platform yet it's DRM needs to be flawed enough so Joe Six-pack can easily circumvent it.
The former insures there's enough content on your platform to make it an enticing to a consumer. The latter makes your platform doubly as enticing because your customers don't have to spend an insane amount of money getting a large body of content for your platform; they'll just copy it.
The problem is that Sony just can't make the DRM flawed enough to capture public interest because their media division just wont stand for it. So once again, someone else will come along and give the public what they want: media that's easily copied.
Is there precident for this? Absolutely, Why did the Sony Playstation crush the N64? Because you can copy easily for the Playstation. Copying a cartridge is just too much hastle to be worth it. Even better it was trivial to chip a playstation so you could get loads of games for the price of a few CDs.
Rather than learning this lesson they ignored it. Before the IPod, Sony products were the market leaders in portable music. Sony could have got an Ipod like device to market first but the Sony record label were scared so it never happened: Apple did it instead. Far from being a match made in heaven, the symbiosis of Sony media and Sony technology is becoming increasingly schizophrenic and it is punishing them right where it hurts any company: their bottom line.
Simon.
The thing that always frosts me, is whenever The Industry talks about piracy they always bandy about numbers like (from TFA), three billion dollars per year in lost revenue. I would really love to see their methodology.
It seems to me that, people who are going to pirate content, probably come in three basic groups
Has anyone ever done a study on what percentage of users of pirated content, would have purchased that content, had it not been available outside the legitimate distribution channels?
Has that study been done, and The Industry discovered that it is such a tiny fraction as to make no difference?
Of course, I can see how large-scale commercial piracy really does hurt the distribution system. If a retailer buys three dozen copies of a title for sale as the genuine article, and those three dozen copies SELL as the genuine article at retail price, but were knocked off by a Chinese plant, then that represents a true loss of revenue. What percentage of the discs sold world-wide (I know this is a serious problem in Europe and the Orient) as legitimate are really pirated?
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
Eh. First off, according to the Tom's Hardware article, these players would have to be permanently connected to the internet. Where have I heard about something like that before... Perhaps from DivX, which required the players to be connected to a phone line to "phone home" every now and again... and I'm sure we all know how well that turned out.
Besides, what's to prevent a hacker from filtering out this self-destruct code from the downstream content anyway? I mean, it's not like this internet connection is protected or anything. If the content provider sends a packet to reflash the player, just don't let it get to the player. Have something in between to filter it out.
As usual, there are a bunch of fundamental flaws in DRM that will always keep coming back no matter what the content providers try to do. I see DVD Jon cracking this in a week after it's put out on the streets.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
The sun rises, the tides fall and rise, and it becomes cold in winter.
Seriously, you knew this was going to happen. The only surprising thing here is the "self-destruct code for Blu-ray disc players". And that isn't so much surprising as sad and hilarious.
I wonder if they'll be implementing the self-destruct code in the PS3. If they do, if you thought the class action lawsuit over the DRE'ing PS2s was bad, wait until the first moment that some kind of vulnerability-- like buffer overflow in Phantasy Star Online for the Gamecube-- is found in an internet-capable PS3 game. Then watch as everyone playing that game gets targeted by a little bit of wormy executable code that triggers the Blu-Ray destruction tripwire and kills the console permanently...
Having this new copy protection stuff should just seal the deal (great for studios, terrible for consumers). The fact that only one manufacturer is expected to ship a HD-DVD player this year (and for $1000) doesn't bode well. Early next year Sony will be shipping the PS3 which will not only play the blueray discs, but will also play PS1/2/3 games and DVDs. All for $500 (my guess at their "high price", but even at $700 it would be a bargain compared to $1000). There will be so many PS3 sales, it would be hard to beat that installed base even if HD-DVD was in the initial X-Box 360s (now we don't even know if that will happen).
The war is over. The only people who don't know it are the HD-DVD group.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I can't think of a single media playback device that did not enjoy a healthy kick in sales simply because it allowed a buyer to make/playback copies of original media... or from hacks which allowed the machine in question to do more than originally advertised.
Beta tapes and VHS recorders --"You mean I can go to the store, set one deck to playback on channel 3 and set the other to record channel 3, and I have a copy? Schmeet!"
Audio cassettes -- Same deal.
CD Burners -- Again, essentially the same deal.
Playstations -- I can play imported games and as a side benefit, play "backup" games? Where do I get one of these mod-chips? See: CD-Burner sales.
Dreamcast -- Homebrew games and backups? All I have to do is use a special boot-cd? I think I'll pick one up since they're so cheap. See: CD-Burner sales.
DVD Burners -- I can backup my important data plus burn movies and games? I want one!
XBOX -- Relatively shitty sales compared to the gold-standard Playstation2 'til the modders started to have fun with the internal hard drive. Drop some NES/SNES/Genesis emulators on there...
Sony PSP --Aside from the weak (IMHO) "I have one before you!" factor... probably the only thing driving sales... the ability to make it do things it didn't do out-of-the-box.
Anyone denying that the sale of almost every new format's success was riding on the possibly of pirating is damn near delusional. Maybe it isn't the deciding factor for every single person buying the widget, but it's definitely a sizable minority... if not majority.
Frankly, this time around, we're really faced with a stalemate between Hollywood and consumers. Sure, early adopters will buy whatever hits the market... but not in droves.
This time around, if the hardware makers don't follow the wishes of Hollywood, prices probably won't decline, volumes will remain flat, and Toshiba and Sony both will be faced with a format that's dead right out of the gates.
However, without laying the DRM on thick, Hollywood won't play ball with the next generation of video players. Catch-22.
It's silly not to attribute a sizable portion of the success of DVD to the cracking of CSS -- like it nor not.
Intel and AMD CPUs shipping this year are going to support easy virtualization. Those hardware companies are pouring money into VM software, and that VM software is free, so anyone and everyone will be able to run VMMs on their stock machines. One way to limit some of the damage of viruses/spyware is to make it a habit to run with multiple VMs. Even grandmothers should do this. (on top of security, VMs have a wide range of other benefits that make them hard to sideline)
On the other hand, DRM is becoming more popular. MS will have its Next-Generation Secure Computing Base that will try to have sections of memory that are very secure and protected. Grandmothers are going to want to play their DVD's inside a VM, and play her secure .WMA files, and...
Multiplayer games are often hacked, and hacks can ruin a multiplayer game. Microsoft's new NGSCB promises to have a secure authenticated path from the USB hub to the software. Hackers come out with things like fishing bots that multiplayer game authors would really like to prevent. Normal players would like to play hack-free games, within a VM.
Is there an inevitable train wreck here?