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."
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'?
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
> 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)