Studios OK Burning Movie Downloads

SirClicksalot writes "The DVD Copy Control Association has released a statement (pdf) announcing that it will make adaptations to the Content Scramble System (CSS) used to protect DVDs. The association, made up of Hollywood studios, consumer electronics and software companies, licenses CSS to the DVD industry to protect content. The changes will allow home users to legally burn purchased movie downloads to special CSS protected DVDs, compatible with existing DVD players."

Comments

If it works with existing DVD players...

[squiggleslash]

...then it probably involves some revision of the actual writable DVDs rather than CSS. The problem with burning a writable DVD at the moment with CSS encoding is that you have nowhere to store the keys. These are kept in a part of the DVD that has deliberately been unwritable on writable discs.

The articles I'm reading suggest the service will be limited to kiosks. This makes sense, as any consumer based DVD burner that can burn CSS discs will be ultimately possible to modify such that it can copy regular DVDs too.

Sadly encouraging, but....

[Utilitygeek]

While, sadly, it is encouraging that the MPAA is trying to find ways for end-users to have fair use of the media they purchase, I still have to wonder what sort of DRM and restrictions they will place in/on this new technology. Will I be able to burn multiple copies? Watch without burning? Or, if I misburn myself a coaster, am I simply SOL?

Re:"special" discs?

[Mr2001]

From the PDF (emphasis added):

Under rule changes now in the works, commercial vendors could create protected DVDs on kiosks and in small custom runs. Individual consumers could legally record a variety of selected content. Both would require special blank DVD discs that will use the Content Scramble System (CSS) for encryption and will be compatible with the millions of existing DVD players in the marketplace today.

This isn't just a software change. See, the whole reason CSS is effective (to any extent) is that DVD burners and blank DVD media are designed to prevent you from writing CSS keys to a disc. The media comes with the key area pre-burned with zeros (or physically embossed, for RW discs) and the burners refuse to write there anyway. Even with the expensive DVD-R for Authoring format, you can't burn a CSS protected disc today, AFAICT.

Re:Further evidence...

[Yvan256]

The RIAA's members continue to sell unencumbered media for the most part.

Because the CDDA specs were done a long time ago, when nobody thought that if would be economically viable to copy 600-700MB of data for a single 20$ music CD. When MP3 came out, it was too little too late to change the CDDA specs: they didn't want to break the billions of CD-audio players available world-wide.

I'll also add a comment to your "for the most part" argument: look at how often and in how many ways they've tried to put (sometimes artificial) barriers to CD-ripping. With the iPod and other MP3 players being so popular now, too many people stumble upon those limitations, the RIAA can't get away with it.

WRONG

[Anonymous Coward]

According to TFA, they're changing the CSS spec, not creating special discs. So you should be able to take the DRMed movie you legally downloaded, and burn it to a standard DVD. The only difference is that the DRM would not be "broken" to create the disc as Music DRM is when a CD is created.

YOU need to read TFA:
http://www.dvdcca.org/data/css/DVDCCArecordrlsFINA L.pdf
"Both would require special blank DVD discs that will use the Content Scramble System (CSS) for encryption and will be compatible with the millions of existing DVD players in the marketplace today."

If you had a clue about what you're talking about, you would know that CSS keys cannot be written existing DVD blank media, which is what makes CSS semi-effective in the first place. Otherwise, you wouldn't need to decrypt a DVD to copy it; you could just copy the whole encrypted disk, including keys, which would kinda defeat the entire purpose of CSS.

Re:Further evidence...

[MBGMorden]

CSS is an encryption standard, but for a player to *decrypt* that file it has to get the key off of the disc. That key is stored in an area that is not writeable on DVD-R's. So if you burn an encrypted DVD-R (or +R), it's just fine, except that your player doesn't know how to play it.

Popular DVD "ripping" tools that make the ISO's actually decrypt the content first so that you can burn it to another disc in an unencrypted format.