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Spielberg Bitten by DVD Encryption
diodesign writes "The Guardian newspaper has reported that 5000 DVD based preview copies of Spielberg's 'Munich' sent to reviewers in the UK can't be played due to the copy protection system involved. Human error at the laboratory where the DVDs were encrypted lead to the wrong region code being set, plus the reviewers use special players from Dolby that prevent the pirating of 'screeners'. An ironic twist in the on-going battle of DRM and media vs. consumers."
They don't have laws such as the DMCA making it a crime to sell region free players, you ca walk into Tescos (a supermarket chain) and buy a region free DVD player with your milk and other groceries.
They'll likely get new copies in a week or two and watch them without even having one thought of shaking their fists at the MPAA.
That's nice, however, according to TFA: "By tomorrow they have to nominate the films they think worthy of accolade, and Spielberg's Munich was expected to be among them..."
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
The DVDs can only (supposedly) be played on "the limited edition DVD players issued last year to Bafta members. Developed by Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby, the players permit their owners to view encrypted DVD screeners .... Munich screeners were encoded for region one, which allows them to be played in the US and Canada, rather than region two, which incorporates most of Europe".
Why on Earth they region-encoded them on top of the special encryption is a question Steve may well be asking.
One reviewer commented that they don't have the time to review and consider every candidate movie anyway. When he chooses which to look at, the ones that require him to set up a special player separate from his usual equipment, and that does not allow him to screen them on his laptop when traveling, will end up in the bottom of the pile, unscreened.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I don't think DMCA can mandate what can and can't be called a DVD player. The DVD consortium mandated that the players be divided up into regions so that the movies studios could prevent distribution outside of the intended market (don't ask my why). From what I remember reading, it has something to do with the algorithms used (which are proprietary); therefore, if you want to use the algorithm then you have to agree to have regions "enhancement" ""Feature"".
Just go buy a cheap Asian made player that agree to the ""Feature"" but are not really good, care, or in the business to make it hard to disable the region ""Feature"".
I don't see anyone saying he was responsible. The article just says he was "bitten" by it. I.e. it negatively affected him. They're singling him out because it's not some joe schmoe being affected by it, it's a famous director and that may have greater implications than if it had affected someone else.
The laws of probability forbid it!
Spielberg was 'bitten' by this not becuase he was responsible for the copy-protection but becuase his movie will now not be able to be reviewed by the critics in time to allow them to vote on it for their film awards. This means that his film will not have a chance of winning their film awards and looses any chance of the revenue boost that it would entail.
To moderators; Please at least RTFA before you mod and don't just moderate based upon authoritative sounding posts. :)
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Sorry, but the Barbie thing was *NOT* a quality control problem. Those Barbies didn't get *shipped* with G.I. Joe voice boxes; it was a prank by the ``Yes Men". They bought a bunch of Barbies and GI Joe dolls, swapped the voice boxes, and then put out a press release as the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO).
g anization
They subsequently went to various economic meetings posing as WTO representatives and proposed some evil, but very hillarious, options for improving globalization. There's a so-so documentary on them called ``The Yes Men".
The wikipedia site for the BLO is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbie_Liberation_Or
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
Correction: That was an intentional Yes Men prank and it happened in 1993 - more than a "few" years ago. You can read more here.
Every British Academy member I've spoken to, and to be fair, that's not a huge sample. More like 3. But every British Academy member I've spoken to has a normal multi-region player as well as their special screener player.
So the wrong region code wouldn't be an issue if the things didn't have the extra special "don't use their normal player" protection.
How often they can be bothered to hook up a different player to their setup to watch screeners is a guessing exercise left for the reader.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Nope; a screener is actually a DVD rip from one of these preview DVDs and are often considered the best quality. A camera snuck inside a threatre where the audio is taken from the Hearing Aid port on certain chairs is called a TeleSync and somebody sneaking a camera in there with a microphone is called something similar, although the exact name escapes me at the moment.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Cam = As it sounds - a handy-cam job by someone who manages to sneak a video camera into the theatre
TS (Telesync) = Shot from the projection booth with a decent camera taking the audio feed straight from the source.
VHS Screener = VHS Quality awards screener, usually with watermarking, B&W scenes or missing audio, getting less and less common these days
TC (Telecine) = Produced by digitally scanning a physical film print, again with an audio feed straight from the souce.
DVD Screener = DVD Quality awards screener. Same content as VHS screeners but much better quality
DVD Rip = Usually ripped from retail DVDs, sometimes from pre-release disks
DVD-R = Often an untouched copy of the retail DVD, sometimes they will have extra features removed to get the size down enough for a DVD5
HDTV = Ripped from a 720p or 1080i/p HDTV feed, usually pure TS (Transport Stream) format which can either be played back directly or encoded by the user as they see fit.
why are they even bothering to region code them?
Because they werent suppose to!The S-View system requires a fully authored standard DVD-Video project as input, with only a few restrictions:
1. Leave 200 MB free space on the disc (on Layer 0 of a dual layer title).
2. Do not enable CSS.
3. Do not set Region code.
4. Do not set parental levels.
5. Author the main feature as one continuous VTS, in MPEG 2.
6. Do not author angles.
7. Add a "Cinea Audio Track" as the last audio track for the title. "Cinea Audio Track" is a placeholder for watermarking data that the Cinea system generates. The content of this track is not important (the facility can use a track supplied by Cinea, or can generate their own). We can provide a Dolby Digital 128 kHz file (containing an audio test tone) 120 minutes in length, which is to be authored as the last audio under the entire feature.
http://www.cinea.com/fews.html
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
The reason is pretty simple, though equally it's pretty rubbish.
Movie studios sell the distribution rights for a film to multiple companies, including CD soundtrack producers, toy companies, and DVD distributors, giving each one limited rights in what they can do, including what parts of the world they can sell the finished product.
The DVD distribution company then decides on things like the price they'll sell it to wholesalers at, what extras to include, the packaging design, does all the retail hand-holding, local marketing (if it's a major film the studio will still play a part in all this), and is responsible for the DVD manufacture and shipping out to the wholesalers.
The theory goes that if there wasn't region encoding, the distribution companies wouldn't be willing to pay as much for their monopoly rights to distribute a film in a region, as everyone would buy the version with the extras and packaging they wanted at the cheapest price they could find wherever it came from in the world, rather than pay full retail price in their local country for the version their distributor has decided to produce.
Film reviewers often go to cinema screenings anyway. This article is about BAFTA members who aren't "reviewing" the film for the press, but deciding whether or not to vote it onto the nominations list for the awards. No-one loses out if they vote for something else except the people behind Munich.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Yes but mainly due to dvds being released by the stufios so soon after the theater run is over. Movies from earlier in the year are shipped for Christmas sales now and more than half the screeners we got were early retail packages complete with all the ads. The "traditional" screeners have annoying pop-up messages which kills the mood of most films. We still prefer to watch movies at the cinema so most of the screeners go unopened. Free crap is still crap.
Welcome to the EUCD: it's illegal to circumvent copyprotection mechanisms.
i !celexplus!prod!CELEXnumdoc&numdoc=32001L0029&lg=E N
Current DVDs with regioncodes and CSS might be exempt since they were no longer effective before ratification of the EUCD.
You might want to read (and your local implementation of it)
http://europa.eu.int/smartapi/cgi/sga_doc?smartap
CHAPTER III
PROTECTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES AND RIGHTS-MANAGEMENT INFORMATION
Article 6
Obligations as to technological measures
2. Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the manufacture, import, distribution, sale, rental, advertisement for sale or rental, or possession for commercial purposes of devices, products or components or the provision of services which:
(a) are promoted, advertised or marketed for the purpose of circumvention of, or
(b) have only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent, or
(c) are primarily designed, produced, adapted or performed for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of,
any effective technological measures.
3. For the purposes of this Directive, the expression "technological measures" means any technology, device or component that, in the normal course of its operation, is designed to prevent or restrict acts, in respect of works or other subject-matter, which are not authorised by the rightholder of any copyright or any right related to copyright as provided for by law or the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC. Technological measures shall be deemed "effective" where the use of a protected work or other subject-matter is controlled by the rightholders through application of an access control or protection process, such as encryption, scrambling or other transformation of the work or other subject-matter or a copy control mechanism, which achieves the protection objective.
Actually the original reason was because films tended to have staggered releases. A film print costs a LOT of money (low to mid-five figures per copy, once you factor in transportation expenses). Unless something is guaranteed to be a blockbuster, they tend to recycle prints as well as use the time and profits from the initial release to pay for and print additional copies for other staggered releases.
In some cases, DVDs come out in their first market while the movie is still in the theater in secondary markets. Region encoding was intended to prevent someone in Europe from buying a US DVD before the movie was released there.
No..
:-)
What did you expect?
According to this FAQ all S-VIEW encrypted DVDs are region-free. This means somebody somewhere dropped a major bollock.
IANAL...
The question still stands though, what is the basis for a law making region-free players (somewhat) illegal? A company choosing to use regions for business purposes is a far cry from a legitimate federal law.
The algorithms for doing pretty much anything with DVD's (encoding, decoding, copy protecting, manufacturing, etc.) are patented. Because they're patented, you can't make a legal DVD player without permission from the inventors. You also can't say your machine plays DVD's because you don't have a trademark license.
When you go to the inventors for a license, one of the things you sign off on in the contract is (presumably) that you will lock your player so it only plays discs for the appropriate region.
My guesses as to why region-free players are so common:
1. It's cheaper for the company to manufacture generic players that have the region code set in firmware.
2. The companies manufacturing the players do business in countries that could care less about U.S. IP laws.