Disney Encrypting Screener DVDs to Prevent Piracy

Sascha J. writes "Disney is continuing their war against piracy. To their Oscar reviewers they now send out special encrypted DVDs, which can be played only on a DVD player of the "Cinea" series. From the article: "The DVD players are encoded with recipients' names, and screeners sent to those people are specifically encrypted so they can be seen only on those particular DVD players." Yet, Disney is alone on this. Sony and Universal Pictures said they won't follow that step."

Comments

How is this a solution?

[FauxReal]

So what keeps people from recording the output and distributing that?

Re:How is this a solution?

[Technician]

So what keeps people from recording the output and distributing that?

I presume the output from the beast contains your machine identity. A pirate copy would have a tracable name, address, phone number, etc. The studio would know which player and which disk was compromised. Think it as a personalized version of the movie with the screener brown dots. The dots would not just be print copy number. It would be everything that says arrest John Doe at 1212 Main street for making this pirate copy.

Missing something

[barcodez]

Somewhere in this system there must exist a "plain text" version of the video stream otherwise the video could not be displayed, I'm guessing this is between the DVD player and the TV, so all one would need to do is intercept this transmission and high quality copies can be made.

Better idea!

[Carraway]

I have a better idea. Instead of encrypting their DVDs, just mail them out along with a little note saying that the last guy to be caught pirating screeners died in police custody. I think pirates will get the hint.

Weak rings

[VincenzoRomano]

There can be a number of weak rings in the chain.
Somewhere into the DVD player the content gets unencrypted: there you can copy it with, at worst, some soldering skills.
Somewhere the content is completely clear text before being encrypted: someone working there could access and copy it.
Movie and music companies can loose more money because of product quality than piracy. And becuase of high investments in screener encryption!

My father was sent one of these

[Anonymous Cowpat]

as a reviewer for BAFTA about this time last year.
I'm not impressed.
Ours is actually connected with a composite video lead rather than scart and every few minutes black bands begin to appear across the picture, which I assume is some sort of an anti-copying measure but also somewhat ruins the film.
The machine was difficult to set up, requiring registration, which is a pain, especialyl when you have to call a call-centre which is only open during US West Coast office hours. (which isn't really anyone's fault). The biggest issue, however, is the fact that, to my knowledge, he hasn't actually recieved any films which need to be watched using it.
As an ordinary DVD player it's worse than the first one that we ever had - it takes a good 30 seconds to start up and then obeys all the 'do-not-skip' tags, which isn't too bad for screeners because they generally go straight to the film, but with ordinary DVDs it's a torturous wait every time you want to watch it, at least you could fast forward with VHS.

Basically, the machines are a pain for everyone and it was a really bad idea on the part of Disney.

Losing the menus is a plus point

[Rogerborg]

Remember, Disney led the charge on non-skippable trailers on DVDs. They are basically pure evil in Corporate form.

Re:Ah well

[The Snowman]

Disney realeases bad movies anyways.

Disney just wants to make a profit. They have their reputation from the old days to rest on, and now they pretty much get by on name recognition. They make (most) movies on the cheapest budget and target audiences such as young teenagers that don't know any better. These young men and women drag their parents along to the theaters and the DVD stores to spend money. Disney makes tons of cash, and everything works fine for them.

This is not always true, however. For being cliched and unoriginal (based off an amusement park ride and every other pirate movie), Pirates of the Carribean was, in my opinion, an excellent movie. Besides outstanding acting and directing, the one man responsible for it not sucking was Jerry Bruckheimer. As far as producing goes, that man has the Midas touch. While I think there are too many CSI shows and they get old, he still does a good job producing them. He did a good job on Pirates of the Carribean. I haven't checked, but I hope he produces the sequel too.

N+1 Algorithm

[Myria]

Watermarks are generally useless when considering the N+1 algorithm. If you suspect a watermark, get a second person to leak it. Do a binary comparison between the two. Wherever they differ, change those bytes to a value that is neither one nor the other. Get a third leaker. If any new locations show up, repeat and get a fourth leaker. Otherwise, you're done.

"N+1" refers to how you are defeating a cross-tagging system against N people by having N+1 collaborate. For simple per-person tagging, N=1, so you need 2 people to collaborate to remove the tag. The third person is only there to prove that there are no more tags.

There are two ways you can try to defeat this. One is to make N quite large, for example by putting tags that identify pairs of viewers, triples of viewers, etc. that would catch people collaborating.

The other way is to make the tag part of the encoding process, such that (almost) the whole disk changes for each viewer. The problem with this is that MPEG2 encoding takes many hours, and would have to be done for each viewer individually. Also, it would need to be sophisticated, as it would have to survive recompression. The pirates would be able to spot this, however, and do a frame-by-frame (+/- a few frames to thwart frame addition/deletion) comparison and randomize or average anything that changes.

Personally, if I were a recipient of such screeners *and* I wanted to pirate them, I would give the disk to someone and stage a break-in of my house.

Melissa