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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.
This disc (and player) will self destruct in 5 seconds.
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.
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
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...
There's no such thing as a "violation of fair use". "Fair Use" isn't a right guaranteed to you. It's a principle that exonerates you, under specific circumstances, from what would otherwise be a violation of someone else's copyright.
This is a serious issue that concerns all of us and shouldn't be joked about by dilettants.
If the HD-DVD decide to go down the same slipery road as the Blu-Ray and the content lobby I'll stick to good old inexpensive DVDs.
How many hours after the first commercial sale of one of these "registered" blu-ray burners will a hack be announced?
I'm putting a dollar on the "25 hour" square
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
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.
KIRK: Destruct sequence one. Code one, one-A.
SPOCK: Destruct sequence number two. Code one, one-A, two-B.
SCOTT: Destruct sequence number three. Code one-B, two-B, three.
KIRK: Begin thirty second countdown. Code zero, zero, zero, destruct, zero.
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.
The only way this scheme is coming into my house is if they give it to me, and I can change them for bandwidth usage.
If TV/Movies are that important to you, then GAFL.
Betamax may have been a failure, but Betacam SP was a big hit and is a defacto standard for professionals.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
>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
Could be neat for a promotional - "This Mission Impossible "Collector's Edition" Promotional Disc will self destruct in five seconds..."
Assumedly the means to destroy content is in case they think it was copied illegally. If that's the case, in reality, it'll most often destroy the discs of those doing nothing wrong. No matter how they try, they can't keep people from the raw data; it's essentially impossible. If it comes down to it, even if the video signal ends up analog straight out of the decryption chip, people can still tempest the chip to see what ops it's running.
People who are going to duplicate/rip the discs are going to do it *right*, not in a way that gets their disc destroyed. And once it's in a non-restricted format, it can flow freely across the net. I.e., it only needs to get ripped once.
Next to my desk we have an Ire Extinguisher. Our boss is really assertive, so we like the idea of having it.
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
each blu-ray disc (for dvds) had on it's file system a space reserved for a code block to be run by a VM on the player? This code would be loaded to decrypt the content, and you'd use a digtally signed (ala xbox) and TrusedComp platform (TCPM, ala the new x86 DRM) system to choose which CD's to load code from, and limit execution of code to just those disks. They could make players that will only play 'original' media; movies from outside their studio releases could play on it, so by definition anything else is piracy. Use this fact to completely stop the influx of burned CD ****from the analog hole*** (less quality on the conversion = different checksum = unable to hash out a code block that the player will accept (aka has to be signed with that hash in it)
This would set the stage for other manuvers on a strictly cryptographic basis. be forewarned - be forearmed.
jro / whereyou _at_ gmail.com
"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.
I'd love to see a virus that teaches the early adopters a lesson in consumer research!
George Takei: Let's take them out with us. Do you guys have a self destruct code? Like "Destruct Sequence one-A, two-B, three"--
(Bender's head explodes instantly.)
Bender: Thanks a lot, Takei! Now everybody knows!
Reminds me of the old Divx players that they tried to foist on us several years back, when DVD players were just starting to become popular. They had to be connected to a phone jack so they could phone home and let their masters know what you were up to. Ok, they didn't self-destruct, but the potential was there. I was elated to see that crappy technology flop. I remember a Circuit City sales guy trying to sell me one. He failed miserably when trying to explain how it was better for me to have discs that would expire and a player that would inform on me.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
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!
Okay, so these companies have a right to protect content that they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating.
However who is paying the price for all this hardware and copy protection. Permanent internet connections? Players that render themselves inoperable once a copyright violation has been detected? It might sound like a sweet deal to industry lawyers, but these machines and discs are going to be needlessly expensive and few people are going to buy into a technology that resembles a copyright minefield.
People like simple funcional things, like disks that you slot into a machine and watch movies on, not permanently internet-connected, big brother-esque machines that throw a fit and need to be repaired if you try and watch a naughty, naughty copied movie on. "Bad consumer, very baaad consumer!"
People (by which i mean the 95% of people who are happy with DVD and don't see a reason to upgrade to HD) won't buy into a new technology unless it is simple, reasonably cheap and offers a clear advantage the DVD player they bought a few years ago.
I, for one won't be buying a Blu-Ray machine. My money is on HD-DVD. A lower capacity disk yes, but probably cheaper, probably easier to make +R discs of (which is what I REALLY want them for) and probably better overall.
At the same time, I may end up downloading my HD movies from Apple through iTunes (or whatever) , which is the way things may well end up if these people don't get their s**t together.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
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.
The HD-DVD peoples published the specs on their DRM scheme months and months ago.
Meanwhile to counterpart Blu-Ray's "interesting" copy control features, at least as the standard stands, HD-DVD discs MUST CONTAIN DRM in order to be played in an HD-DVD player AT ALL. This is not like DVD, where CSS was an option which disc creators could choose to follow or not follow and you could just freely stick into a DVD player a DVD-R you burned. An HD-DVD drive is not allowed, by the current compliance rules, to play ANY HD-DVD disc which doesn't have a digital watermark granted directly by the central HD-DVD authority. Interestingly these watermarks include a "banned" list-- HD-DVDs keep an internal list of watermarks that have been "revoked", and every new HD-DVD printed will contain an up-to-date copy of that "revoked" list which the HD-DVD player must update every time you put in an HD-DVD. If the HD-DVD player sees a disc whose watermark has been placed on the "banned" list, it refuses to play it.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
where the non-protected version will be available for 1/10th the cost, and play all the Blu-Ray DVDs you want.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Good. I say we stop resisting this and let them have what they want. Let these companies create all kinds of complicated consumer-angering technology. Let people be forced into experiencing the entertainment they "buy" only how the providers want. Let the consumer be forced into restrictive pay-per-view models for movies they purchase. Make it impossible for me to let my mom borrow a DVD I "bought." Just let it all happen.
That will give the rest of the entertainment community the chance to create smaller, niche forms of entertainment, while hollywood continues its downward spiral of making worse mass appeal crap. Same for music, TV, etc.
_______
2B1ASK1
Just to answer the question (not to defend the stupidity of DRM systems) they'll encrypt the entire phone-home channel. The players are not going to even spin up the discs unless they're online to the mothership, and have an "approval to play" ticket in their hands. As an outsider without access to the contents of the encrypted stream, you won't be able to tell a good packet from one with the evil bit set. They might not even be "individual packet" based in that they could require a complete, continuous stream. A simplistic way to look at it would be to give them numbered packets, meaning don't process packet #38 until you've received and processed packet #37. Even if you killed off the "evil bit" packet (say you somehow knew that #37 was the self-destruct packet), the protocol would have your player re-requesting #37 before it would proceed to #38 to authorize your new BLU-RAY of "Star Wars Episode 10: Venegance of the Billionaires." And when #37 arrives it turns your machine into landfill.
This is going to take some tricky secure hardware to pull all this off. The guys who used to decrypt satellite TV used some pretty fancy equipment to read the firmware in the smart cards so they could reverse engineer the protocols. I expect these players are likely to be eggshell fragile, destroying themselves at the drop of a pin rather than let some hacker have his way with a logic probe. And that means Joe Sixpack is going to have a lot of dead players initially, meaning these things will get a crap reputation right out of the blocks. Viva DivX!
John
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?
- Users who don't have phone lines or Internet connections? (Yes, there are lots of them.)
- My Internet connection is down... Well, I can't surf the web, so I think I'll pop in a DVD, instead. ERROR - UNAUTHORIZED!
- Invasion of privacy - Please wait while your DVD player connects to Sony Headquarters to inform them that you're watching an illegal copy of Horse Humpers Volume 7.
- Warning stickers? WARNING: This device will stop working if an invalid disk is loaded. Yeah, that's good for sales.
- Headaches for retailers (dealing with returns/repairs of "self destructed" uints).
Not to mention that people just won't like the idea. And it's untrue to say that it won't matter, because the general public won't know the difference, because the first people who are going to buy next-generation DVD players are the tech-savvy crowd. And they won't buy this garbage. It sounds to me like the battle is over... They've showed their hand, and they've got nothing.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...
great.. so take a "bad" disc into your local eletronics shop and destroy ever demo player they have.. niiiiice. way to go sony!
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Say there's a new player technology that has to be connected to the internet at all times, and release a bunch of movies in that format. N people will care enough about the increased resolution to buy or rent them. Say you remove the internet restriction this making it easier and safer and more anonymous. M people will then go for it. M >> N. Will the difference make up for the reduction is losses via piracy? I don't think so.
Besides, it's inevitable that somebody will find a way to send bogus self-destruct codes to every player connected to the internet. Instant worst nightmare for Sony. Unless there's some secret back door to automatically un-destruct them... Viola, no more protection!
I have at least 6 DVD players in the house, of which 3 are actually connected to TVs, but they haven't been used in years, except to play music CDs (or load computer software). DVD players are becoming irrelivant due to PVRs, cable and satellite services. The DVD copying paranoia will just hasten its demise.
Oh well, what the hell...
(FTFA:)
So, on each protected DVD, they gonna include the code to decrypt it, code that WILL HAVE to be executable by all sorts of DVD players. In order to do so, obviously, it will have to be written in a higher-level language or some sort of for portability.
This will make writing a ripper a cinch, since all one will have to do is to write an emulator for that code...
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
"Apple has proven people are willing to accept DRM if it isn't noticable for most of the things people normally do."
True, but Apple has not really prohibited the copying of music, which is something that people normally do.
Are the movie studios willing to accept DRM that does let people make copies of their movies? Not according to this article they aren't. They want to lock it down so tight that consumers will squeak when they watch a movie. I don't think people are going to embrace something like that.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Apple has proven people are willing to accept DRM if it isn't noticable for most of the things people normally do.
Apple has sold a grand total of 25 million ipods world-wide, ten million of those in the U.S. While that seems like a lot, the ten million U.S. owners of ipods represents about 1 in 29 people. In comparison, there are 248 million television sets in the U.S., and around 125 million VCRs (despite what some slashdotters think about the VCR being 'dead technology). DVD player figures vary quite a bit depending on who's giving out the numbers, but the upper bound seems to be around 60 million (and growing, as VCR numbers decline).
Geeks tend to lose sight of the fact that their behavior is *not* typical of the population at large. Geeks tend to be obsessed with pieces of technology which simply don't interest Joe and Jane Doe. The ipod is clearly one of those pieces, as only 1 in 29 Americans actually owns one. So while Apple, the press, and the geek set here on Slashdot make a huge deal out of the ipod, market penetration is absolutely tiny in comparison to items which are actually ubiquitous (TVs, VCRs, computers, refrigerators, etc.).
The ipod is not, has never been, and appears that it will never be, a 'common' piece of household technology. It's a toy that appeals to less than 4% of the population. The vast majority of Americans do not own an ipod and never will; they simply don't give a shit about it.
On the other hand, the opposite is true of the TV, VCR, and DVD. Nearly every American household as a TV and a VCR or DVD, which means that Americans *do* give a damn about these items. The one recent attempt to impose DRM on TV-related entertainment - Divx - failed miserably. There's no reason to believe that a similar attempt will do any better.
The only thing that ipod sales have proven is that an extremely small subset of the American population - geeks and college students - are willing to accept DRM on the ipod. It can't logically be extended to any other device or form of entertainment. Although it's amusing to note that the people who complain most about DRM seem to be the most willing to put up with it when it comes to 'hip' new shinies.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
There's one difference (okay, two) this time around.
The minor difference is that the public is more in tune with DRM (thanks, Apple) and is more accepting of it. Remember how pop-ups/on screen advertising killed Prodigy, but are a mainstay of AOL other online services now?
The major difference is that, when Divx was tried, there was a competing, non-invasive DRM included on DVDs. I say non-invasive primarily because copying and swapping of content, either physical or over the internet, was not practical. This time the competing formats are both DRM-hamstrung. Both are lousy - there's no "good" version to crush them into oblivion.
That said, HD-DVD just might win out. Given the possibility of hardware failure on BR, regardless of the software lockout on HD-DVD, the hardware failure "stick" may be the deciding factor in a typical household purchase.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?