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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.
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!?
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.
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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..
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Dude, they arn't talking about regular DVDs. They are talking about 'Screeners' These are DVDs of the movies that are nomiated for an Oscar. The members of the acadamy then watch them and vote. Most of the movies have NOT been released on DVD yet.
The trouble they have with these is that people leak them. When their movie is released on the internet 2 months before the DVD is available to buy it can really hurt them. So they have been playing with stuff like digital watermards and stuff JUST for the screeners.
Now I'm with most slashdotters when it comes to fair-use. I don't want my damn DVDs encrypted or copy protected. Not because I want to steal them but because I may want to back them up or put them on my computer. Anyway I'm with the studio's when it comes to the screeners. They have sent pre-release versions of thier product to a limited set of reviewers and they don't deserve to have their movies released prematurely onto the internets.
That's true, but it may also put the dampener on the groups if the individuals recieving the screeners are more reluctant to supply them/rips in case they do get fingered.
If a rip was easily tracable back to me if the group stuffed up stripping out the watermark (or just lied about intending to do it), I'd think long and hard about taking the risk.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Yeah! Lets make the oscars once every four years and only allow two crap movies to enter!! ;-)
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!