Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.
Yeah! Lets make the oscars once every four years and only allow two crap movies to enter!! ;-)