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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."
Of course If I'd actually read the aritcle I'd have realised that the reveiwers had been given 'special' DVD players last year for viewing advance copies of movies. 'Special' as in 'Special Olympics' 'The problem, it appears, was partly down to teething troubles with 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", but prevent the creation of pirate copies. 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.'
The post has completely missed the significant point with this story. It's not so much that the dvds were unviewable, it's that because the reviewers couldn't see the film, the film itself is ineligible for the main official UK film awards.
..did it stop screeners of 'Munich' from appearing on trackers?
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
I had a friend who was an assistant to an Academy member. A few times he just gave him the stack of DVDs and VHS tapes and said "Let me know which ones are good."
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Why not just use either software for region free DVDs or a hacked region free firmware. Then use DVD decrypter like someone will do anyway?
I think the point is, these DVDs are going to non-technical people who receive hundreds and hundreds of DVDs (that work) from other competing studios. If the movie doesn't work, they move on... they have a fixed deadline to review everything and make their vote. There's no time to give special treatment to a studio that can't even get something as simple as region encoding correct.
And its not like they're taking these movies to their home computers and popping them in; to prevent piracy, these are special release DVDs which only play on the special DVD players -- "Developed by Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby, the players permit their owners to view encrypted DVD "screeners", but prevent the creation of pirate copies." If the DVD doesn't work, they have no other alternative.
So basically, they can't.. (1) it has a special encoding scheme that your household DVD decrypter isn't going to understand, (2) these aren't the type of people who would know how to crack it.
He did replace the guns with fucking walkee-talkees in the re-release of ET. Fuck him right in the ear for that. I decided to ignore his work form then on. Especially considering that today the police are MORE likely to be packing weapons then back in the 80's. Because of the terrorists, you know. Shit man...in 2005, ET would be in Abu Graihb awaiting a trial that will never come.
Blar.
But the preview DVD sent to the academy's members is unplayable on machines used in the UK. As a result the majority of Bafta's 5,000 voters will not have seen the film, due to be released in Britain on January 27, and can hardly be expected to recommend it for acclaim.
As has been known for years, academy members simply don't watch many of the movies they select. It's a huge farce. I'll bet that even though they didn't get the movie within a reasonable time, many vote for it anyway.
The Academy Awards are a grandiose pat on the back, given by the industry to itself. Why we care, I'm not sure.
Maybe they should just "encrypt" screeners by putting them on VHS. People won't want to pirate a VHS version...well they would, but it wouldn't spread nearly as fast as DVD versions.
I never really understood the whole region-lock thing anyway. It just seems to be 100% greed. I can understand them using CSS to encrypt the DVDs to prevent copying since that directly eats into their profits, but why should they care where you watch the DVD? If I want to buy anime directly from Japan why should I need a region-free DVD player to view it? Same goes for people in Europe buying the "American" version of a movie. Has region-locking ever been held up in court in the USA anyway? What law would they use to support it? It's not copy protection so the DMCA doesn't apply.
The deadline is comming up very soon for the reviewers. Tomorrow? Does this mean that if Munich is nominated, it's a scam, since no-one was able to watch it!?!
\couldn't get me to watch that piece of crap if you paid me.
\\slashdot needs for fark "slashies"
I have one of the Cinea Players (a member of my family is a Bafta member) - to even play normally non spazzed up DVDs on them you need to ring Dolby to activate the damn thing. If I remember, no movies that were sent as screeners last year actually used the Cinea player, so its been sitting in a box somewhere. A lot of the screeners used to be just single layer DVD-Rs, meaning that quite a few films spanned several discs. And they don't really stop the creation of pirate copies, given you can still just plug the video output of the thing into a capture device (although given a lot of the DVDs have serial numbers displayed pretty clearly, you really wouldn't want to).
It's amazing how often the popular press gets confused by the technical details.
And it's amazing how often Slashdot and its elitist readers do an even worse job. For example, in this case:
1) The bozo who submitted the article was the one who got the technical details confused. If you RTFA, they actually get it correct.
2) The Slashdot editors, not caring about accuracy, posted a summary which they saw as a button pusher and traffic gem. $$ trumps facts
3) You, the typical Slashdot reader, didn't read the RTFA, and posted a general rant about stupidity and included the mandatory karma whoring Wikipedia link
4) The mods, following the chain, gave your nice little culmination of ignorance a Score:5, Insightful
So to summarize, the press got the story and technology straight. It wasn't until it made it to Slashdot that the story was misunderstood and politicised at every level.
Interesting, ain't it?
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
My family happens to be very good friends with Jerry Bruckheimer, and he brings screeners over quite often. Never once has it required a special DVD player to play. Maybe he has a different copy than most of the academy members recieve, seeing as he's one of the major players in the industry. We watched The Producers on new years on our standard Sony DVD player at home.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
Million Dollar Baby didn't get a single one, even though it won tons of Acadamy Awards. Why? The precisely stated reason was that the distributor chose to not send Screener copies to the Bafta members and therefore it wasn't seen by them- not seen equates to NO nominations at least with the UK version of the Acadamy Awards.
It's going to hurt Spielberg very little in the long run, but it's still very annoying to him all the same- and it's over paranoia about "piracy"...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
(2) these aren't the type of people who would know how to crack it.
So where do all the illegal screener releases come from?
It's an anti-free-trade move.
You see, corporations love free trade when it's in their favor. Lower tariffs, move factories over seas and sell stuff domestically, that kind of thing.
On the other hand, if there's any way that they can HINDER free trade when it's in the customer's favor, they'll do it.
This is one of those cases.
The mess the mass media pimps are making of the intrigity of the content or even, in this case, of access to it in the first place, just shows the failure of mass media in an internet world.
Since WE, the now no longer passive consumers, control the means of production and reproduction of IP we are breaking up the hegemony of the oligopoly (we're 'sticking it to "the man"') and the powers that were are trying to interfere with our constitutionally protected right to property (in the 'States.)
In the process, they're stepping on their own dicks and making themselves look:
vicious (RIAA),
venal (MPAA),
greedy (podsafe music versus ASCAP/BMI and the reporting agencies) or
just stupid (FCC vs Howard Stern).
I think that we have always had control, in the truest Marxist sense of the word.
We just got conned into not exercising it by the distribution channels who were making a great deal of money off the scarcety of distribution.
They weren't interested in having more than one media 'outlet' (one TV station or newspaper per area) because that meant that they were creating scarcity.
Payola and rest of the scandals were an inevitable consequence and revealed the limits of power (essentially none,) which are exercised at every funnel or constriction point in a capitalist society.
Now with the internet the IP world is indeed flat and there are no local maxima to be exploited (unless you're Apple and thrive just selling the people what they want, you're Google and thrive just telling the people what they want or Wall*Mart and thrive just selling everything.)
Note how I did not include Microsoft or SonyBMG or most of the corporations in the western world.
You can't be nimble enough if you're trying to impose, or to cope with, the rules and regulations of closed systems. Hence, you're left behind.
(The real lesson of BetaMax versus VHS is that VHS was open while BetaMax was Sony's double edged sword with no haft. They were able to wield it long enough to slit their own throats.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
That is interesting, but your post is why I continue to read Slashdot nonetheless. The cycle continued and Slashdot self-corrected that culmination of ignorance, as evidenced by your post which was modded to Score:5, Interesting.
I bought a Philips DVD player from WalMart in California last month that I region-unlocked with the codes on the remote, so it's not just a UK/Europe phenomenon... it plays DIVX files, too.
*Still* negative function...
> The question still stands though, what is the basis for a law making region-free players
> (somewhat) illegal?
There doesn't have to be a logical reason for making something illegal. Alcohol was legal, then illegal, then legal. Most drugs are now illegal. It's illegal for Tescos (a UK supermarket) to buy Levi's jeans abroad (more cheaply than can be sourcd here) and sell them in the UK (they lost a big court case over that - it was treated as if they'd sold counterfeit clothing). As long as you're in a position of power you can make the laws.
As someone once said - "Politics* is the shadow cast on society by big business"
*(and therefore law, a consequence of politics/policy)
"Spielberg is a sellout but not as much as Lucas."
The term sell out amazes me to this day especially when applied to music and movies. In case you didn't know the very reason that about 99% of people that get involved in the movie biz is becuase they want to get rich and famous and you can't get rich and famous by making indies films. I only said indie because on average these people are considered to be "true to their art" and not sell outs. Now to get rich and famous you MUST make movies for the masses. Do you really think that Lucas made any of the Star Wars films strictly for fun or the art of storytelling and not to make a profit? Lucas is in my opinion a mastermind. Yes he has made crap but he has also made some of the best films of all time, strictly my opinion here. Back to the point to call someone a sellout just because thay made it big and then changed the product to try and stay big is ridiculous. Movies are big business and alot goes on that we never hear about. Decisions are made that are beyond even the creators control or even the producer sometimes to be sure the product sells. The bottom line here is according to most peoples definition evey successfull person in Hollywood is a sell out. Since I got way off topic here I'll sway back. I am glad that this happened to a major hollywood figure maybe it will make them think twice about how secure a dvd should be.
WTF?
However, its the movie companies fear of pirating that's holding this back so long.
The solution: Eliminate the fear of pirating. How: I don't know. The free distribution model is only a solution to the narrow minded people who think Karl Marx had a point - it clearly doesn't work. We see digital music distributed legally on the net, but that hasn't stopped piracy. What can?
Is there a solution? Is there a way for people to make money on the entertainment they produce, without fear of it being stolen all the time? The kiddies usual response is "If you made better movies I'd pay for them and wouldn't download them" which is so laughably ridiculous.
Personally, I think this will all end in jail terms. There is no technical way to stop a piracy, so governments will be lobbied more and more to put more and more pressure on the people who commit piracy, and on the wonderful technologies that are being abused to help distribute it. That's the only "solution" that I see, unless we, as a group of intelligent, technical minded people can find another way.
In a similar fashion, the airlines sell tickets at different prices. Typically, the price climbs as the flight date approaches. So you end up with people who bought tickets 3 months before the flight paying a lot less than the people who bought the ticket right before the flight. Mandating that all tickets be the same price would mean that the airlines could no longer guarantee that they filled the aircraft and that they'd have space right before the flight for emergency cases.
Finally, why should we impose this sort of bureaucratic burden on businesses merely because you want to pay less for DVD's and other stuff?