Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.