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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."
So what keeps people from recording the output and distributing that?
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Making movies almost imposible or very hard to view for reviewers it's the best marketing choice.
Yeah, take this as irony.
>Linux is not user-friendly.
It _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly.
pirated copies of bambie :(
Because Pirates just can't resist a 0-day release of Cinderella.
Just put a big, slightly visible watermark across the entire screen of the name of the guy you sent the DVD to. Like, just a 4% opaque "EBERT AND ROPER" diaganal across the screen. Then when it's turned to video, it'll either have to be blurred out, and thur ruin the film, or you've caught the guy whol let it out of his hands... How hard is it people!?
Here's a novel idea, instead of fannying about trying to stop people copying your films (which people always will), you join the 21st century and make your films distributed on an internet download site, with a reduction of $2 on the cinema price.
It's a barmy idea that Apple and Napster tried, but it might just work!
Nothing costs nothing
Reality test... am I dreaming?
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.
----
They don't think this measure will have any effect do they? Really? I have a MUCH better suggestion. Don't send them out. It is a win/win situation. No-one gives them bad reviews and they strike a blow against piracy! /cough/
Spend more time thinking about how to make a movie I want to buy, then make it a reasonable price...
I would believe they would make more profit if they used the money they use for developing copy protection for actually creating better content. These protections never work anyway..
..they send special gold-lined dvd players encrusted with diamonds.
Sometimes they even send a dvd movie to view.
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.
Is it me or does it seem that the more 'piracy' is fought, the crappier the content gets. I know correlation doesn't signify causation, but I can't help but wonder if this is also a new innovative feature to fight 'piracy?'
If so, congrats Disney. In which case from my own experience, it must be working. You don't pirate what you don't want.
This is really funny. Disney is basically saying that the academy is the biggest problem in the whole movie copying/pirating thing. Can this be seen as anything but a cheap shot at the Academy? Sure they're thwarting piracy. How easy is it to get your hands on one of these bad boys to begin with? If I put my mind to it I think I could figure out who one person is who would actually get one of these DVDs and that's because my brother taught the guy golf lessons a few years back. (I got to see Titanic on VHS when it was still in the theaters and I'm glad I didn't have to pay to see that steaming pile.) The odds of actually knowing who would have one of these and actually be able to get your hands on it is just about impossible. All I can figure is that there is either A. an extremely unlikely chance of stealing a delivery of a DVD and pirating it, or B. the people that are intended to receive them are considered by Disney to be entirely untrustworthy. Disney has to send them or risk not getting any awards, so instead they blow a load of money to make themselves look like a bunch of paranoid idiots. I think I'll go out on a limb and say that Disney isn't going to earn any more awards for future movies. I guess on the bright side Disney isn't really trying to win any awards for the movies they put out lately.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
i haven't read all of TFA, but i would assume that the deterrents also included some type of watermark of the recipient's name in the output stream, something that would stay there even with the digital-to-analog conversion and would be awfully difficult to remove.
So when disney finds these on the net, its a simple matter of decoding and looking up the watermark to find out who to nail...whereas before they had no idea who released it onto the net.
If they're going to this much length to protect their content, they should just get a bunch of armed security guards to personally deliver the DVD within a sealed DVD player chained to his arm. Train the security guard on how to plug the thing directly into a TV.
Task Mangler
You are wrong on this.
It is quite easy to include some "watermark" feature that will make the camcorder refuse to record the TV image, or make it tracable to the origin somehow.
Compare with fladbed scanners that refuse to scan money.
They should just forget about those pesky reviewers copying their films and simply send out the reviews of the movies to the papers.
Oh wait Columbia Pictures tried that... I wonder how Mr. Dave Manning is getting along!
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!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
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.
FGD 135
They love pirates of the carribean so much that they are making another. Somewhat of a double standard!!!
They are actually going to make a film about dvd pirates in the Carribean? With ships and 300-pound canons? I can just imagine the Sweedish Pirate Captain Anakata ordering "Klarp skepp!" AAARRGH!
Yes, I borrowed this from thepiratebay's legal page.
http://static.thepiratebay.org/lensmannen.jpg
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Logo removal has come a long way. If you track objects as they fall under the opaque area, you can find when they are opaque and when they are not. You can calculate what area of the screen is opaque and you can adjust for it. A quick Google search turned up LogoAway and DeLogo.
Watermarks are more of a problem. I don't think I'd let a screener DVD out my door without comparing it to another screener DVD for watermarks. The biggest problem is that you aren't supposed to know if a watermark is even there without knowing its design. That means you can't really ever be sure that there isn't watermarking unless you compare two sources.
Nothing, he's probably just naming off the next 5 or so hurricanes since they ran out of names this year.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Actually, the wonders of modern technology suggest a rather simpler solution. Digital watermarking of video streams is a fairly well-developed field, with several companies offering working products. The "invisible" watermark is some extra bits of "payload" added by some transformation of the images -- nothing which perceptibly degrades image quality -- and can be recovered again by some simple transformation of the data.
Algorithms exist which embed this information "visually", in the sense that it is distirbuted across the whole or much of the image, and it survives "classic" image processing such as resizing, lossy compression, and recolouration of the image (not to any degree, of course, but you'd be ruining the movie before you got rid of the watermark), rather than just being a few specific bits which can be deleted or edited. Some of these techniques are also intended to be tamper-proof, in the sense that without the watermark-creator's key it is very hard to know how to remove or alter the watermark.
Such a watermark would seem to be much better than a glaring visual signal, for tracking down the originator of a leaked copy. It wouldn't stop viewers enjoying their leaked copies, but the leaker could be held accountable.
An old and tired troll.
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
So, they can't deliver screenings on DVD securely any more without resorting to draconian measures. So what? Why can't they just go back to the days when you had a company rep with the film showing it in a private theatre to a collected audience. It was social, people could actually _talk_ to each other about it and they could have the rep answer viewers questions and no hope of the screeners geting duplicated bar shaky-hand-cam action. I would theorise that this is because they save a bit of cash by doing it via mail with a DVD instead. But they claim their losing millions due to the pirated pre-release getting out?! Do the math!
~Pev
I want to know what is economically gained by this? Screeners are sent to select people, and these select people are taking advantage of lack of supervision to leak their copies. Wouldn't it be much cheaper and simpler to fly them in and give them all the access they need to the films without giving them a copy rather than going through this massive infrastructure expense. Think about it... a few plane tickets once a year, or paying to produce limited number of cinea machines with virtually no economics of scale, paying royalties for the copy protection scheme, paying for administration regarding registrations, paying shipment, paying to have those dvd's specially processed, paying possible tech support for said machines, and still potentially (more like LIKELY) having material leaked? It just seems dumb. A lot of people are falling into this bounded thought trap that everything needs a high tech solution. My networking professor said it well, UPS is still has higher bandwidth for transferring large amounts of data than the internet does, and once you reach a certain threshold as far as a single file's size, it's just cheaper and faster to mail it, but i'll bet most netizens wouldn't think of that.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
then don't use it to play normal dvd's.
Yes, well done. That is exactly the point I was making. Perhaps you would benefit from a little less time watching DVDs and a little more working on your reading comprehension skills. Once you've got that licked, you could move on to more advanced subjects such as the use of capital letters and closing your mouth when you breathe.
The irony of Slashdot is that this will be modded "Flamebait" but you won't be modded "Idiot". Meanwhile, people will continue to speculate about why Slashdot is full of idiots.
I have worked in television for over 20 years and during part of that time worked in a facility that duplicated screeners.
I think everyone needs to realize that the production of these illegally pirated films from screeners is an inside job. Unless Disney wants to set up and maintain a secure duplication facility somewhere, staffed only by trusted individuals who are constantly monitored for theft, there will always be those who "make a few copies for their friends."
Disney isn't about to do this because Disney is in the filmmaking and entertainment business, not the mass duplication and standards-conversion business. And it is from those facilities that the content leaks out. Try as they might, unless they spend a whole lot of money that, on its face does not please their shareholders, they're pretty much stuck with these inside jobs.
As to the high-quality bootleg copies, that tends to be the result of running an "extra" master of the film transfer and is either an organized crime issue or "yet another inside job."
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Remember, Disney led the charge on non-skippable trailers on DVDs. They are basically pure evil in Corporate form.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I have just directed my first short film and it is now in post production. I plan to release it online next year for free, once it has completed the festival circuit.
However, that said, the concern I have is early, unfinished copies of the film getting out, or rushes, or other intermediate stuff that would diminish the enjoyment of the final product by being released early.
So I have an elegant an unobtrusive solution to track the few copies that people are working with as a matter of necessity:
My watermark is done per copy so it is unique, and involves changing three to four pixels only on one frame of the film in minor ways so they are not easily visible to the human eye when watching. Shift the colour of some pixels by only a couple of points, such that they are damn close to the real thing, but obvious if you know which frame to check and where, when blown up to 500% or so of original size.
Then simply keep a database of the "security dots" and where they are in each copy, eg:
45332 700 431 0 0 8
The above is frame 45332, X position 700, Y position 431, and the colour in RGB format. Three or four of those and a list of who has that copy, and I'm 100% able to figure out who leaked without degrading the picture in any visible way.
It isn't intrusive like CAP codes, and keeps everyone involved in working on the project from leaking copies as they know it can be traced back to them.
Why can't Hollywood studios do it the same way?
Visceral Psyche Films
Don't forget the recent trick - once in a while a scene is black&white instead of color.
Disney plans on encrypting their screener DVDs. Umm, last time I checked Disney didn't have anything good to pirate. Nothing remotely good has come out of them in years with the exception of distrubtion for Pixar and Ghili-Films.
To me this is like putting a dog turd in a wall safe.
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
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Actually, as someone who is familiar with this 'technology', you couldn't be more wrong.
Take the DVD, encode it to 80kbs (mpeg4 or whatever), back to vhs, back to 80kbs (divx or whatever), run a wipe and eliminate over 50% of the picture.
If you do that, forensically it can still be identified. Multiple images in EVERY frame. Potentially unique to every disc.
It is trackable back to the source.
And you got modded up to 3 ???? Wow. Did any of your comments come from facts? or did you just make it all up ?
Meatplow