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Macrovision Wants Old DRM to Work Forever
Grv writes "Macrovision's best-known form of copy protection inserts noise into analog video signals to make it difficult to get a good copy of the DVD or VHS recording. A company named Sima has products that eliminate this noise when digitizing such video, as any good digitizer would do. Macrovision argues that this is a violation of the DMCA, and a court sided with them in June. Now the injunction is being reviewed, and several organizations are siding with Sima and Fair Use, including the American Library Association, the Consumer Electronics Association, the Home Recording Rights Coalition, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If it isn't overturned, this decision could make it illegal to develop products for making copies of commercial analog recordings."
This story selected and edited by LinuxWorld editor for the day Saied Pinto.
If these are analog signals, does the DMCA apply here? Is cleaning noise out of a signal considered "hacking" now?
"Wanna watch Erik The Viking?"
"Can't. It would be a violation of the law."
"What Law?"
"The one that prevents us from taking the old video tape I bought of it, which I can no longer watch on newer video devices due to built in DRM and I am prevented from recording onto a computer and removing the old DRM and writing to digital storage which the new digital video devices read."
"Man, obeying the law sucks!"
"No, creating laws which paint people into a corner and then hand them the brush suck."
Ultimately, the way DRM and DMCA is going, you will not have owned DVDs, CDs, LPs, 45s, etc. You will merely have rented them until the march of technology locks you out of enjoying the content any further.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I thought that the DMCA did that already. These products are knowingly removing DRM from an original tape. Regardless of how you feel, the DMCA specifically outlaws this. According to TFA, the problem is that the means by which the program strips DRM is through converting it to digital and by outlawing the program the judge could outlaw AD conversions.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
I am shocked that people still care about "rights" (sic) abuses on analogue material, the only reason you would be doing this is because you had bought a copy a long while ago and now want to be able to enjoy that copy on a system you have. Do they even make VHS? new piracy would be stupid from this angle. Besides cracking it in digital format is far easier...
They are just trying to screw you over again and again and again. Fortunately I don't live in a country with the DMCA or equivalent, but I sympathise, I hate getting screwed over by companies and the government when their working against the people.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I don't know how good it is at color corrections but it did a fine job of removing macrovision before my new DVD player came into the picture.
I for one endorse this product if you have the need.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I have nothing against the content producers making financial gain from their efforts. In fact, I work for a company that makes a considerable amount of money licensing code to third parties. I'm well aware of the situation that copyright creates, and I'm all for ownership of intellectual property.
That said, ownership is a two way street. I exchange my ownership of the code I produce for the salary my company pays me. I consider it a fair deal - I work a given number of hours in exchange for a one time payment. Once I've cashed the check (before, actually), I no longer own the code that I write. I have no problem with this arrangement. Whether my company sells one copy or a million makes no difference to me, because I've already been paid for the work I did. If the company can't sell my code, well, that's their loss, not mine. Or, if they are obscenely profitable, that's their gain. After all, they bought my code, and they own it. For them to make obscene profits does not impose any additional work burden on me.
However, the movie industry is actively opposed to intellectual property. When you buy a movie from them, they take your money, yet behave as if both the money and the movie are still theirs. You see, they don't believe in property. When you sell a piece of property, you give up any and all claim to the property. The movie industry's idea of a sale is more like an indefinite lease - you get to have a copy of the content for as long as it suits the studio. They feel that if they are not making enough money, they have the right to charge you time and again for the same material. (i.e. new movie on DVD instead of VHS, the "director's cut" version, etc...)
And you are supposed to like it. You pay for the DVD, but you don't own it:
Granted, I know there are ways around all of these, but they are not easy to come by, and require a technical aptitude beyond what the average user will possess. In effect, the studios are "Indian givers" - they aren't satisfied with either your money or the movie - they want them both.
Which, I think is one of the key reasons why I seldom buy movies anymore. It just doesn't seem right to give money to someone whose stated purpose is to explicitly rip off their customers, and goes to great length to defend the practice .
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
As far as I am aware, DMCA covers only digital media and encryption.
Wo what the hell has that got to do with VHS.
It's not digital, nor it contains encryption.
Basically this was sold as a way to prevent anyone from using two VCRs to copy a rented videotape. It (Macrovision) was placed on most commercial videos of Hollywood product from the mid-1980s to the present. Since the 'owner' of the video content had to pay a stiff license fee to Macrovision company, almost no porn tapes from that era had this nonsense added.
Macrovision is a burst of noise added to the vertical sync in the brief period after the current frame has ended and the next frame (a single 'photograph' or still image on the television set) begins. This burst of noise happened about once every ten to fifteen seconds. It caused the picture image to lose sync and 'roll' and/or 'tear up' for a short period of time until the vertical sync stabilization circuitry in the recording process
kicked in and made the picture stable.
This is how Macrovision was able to mess up the video copy without destroying the video integrity when watching the original commercial video tape. The sync stablizer circuitry only was active during the recording period, not during playback. But the video copy was polluted by tearing and rolling every ten seconds or so.
The way to defeat this pollution was/is to use an 1881 sync seperator IC, a track-and-hold circuit, a 4053-type analog 1-of-2 switch IC, and a timer on a microcontroller (or a 555 one-shot timer IC). Use the sync seperator to detect the beginning of the vertical sync pulse. At this time, sample the black video level using the track-and-hold. After sampling, switch the video signal to the recorder (for the content being copied) to the sampled black level for the period before the actual video image analog signal begins. Then switch the recording back to the analog video signal of the original. Your copy will be solid and without tearing and rolling.
Oh my goodness!?! Did I just break your fucking law by explaining this? Oh my, I am sooooooo sorry! Oh well, to quote Emil Faber, "Knowledge Is Good". That's from the first video that I thought was worth copying.
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No one here cares about rights. This is simply macrovision trying to survive. If:
1. Anyone can overcome macrovision protection,
2. It will be useless to even build it in anywhere.
4. No company will by the protection from macrovision.
5. Loss
Macrovision's best-known form of copy protection inserts noise into analog video signals to make it difficult to get a good copy of the DVD or VHS recording
Is that what they are trying to do. I never can tell, the window that pops up to tell me what DRM scheme is being bypassed flashes by WAY too quickly for me to catch it.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
This is just a drop in the bucket. I'm curios to see if I'll live to see it publicly recognized, that having a law, writing that ownership on an idea exists, is fundamentally wrong. The problem is so elemental that many people will have to die before this thruth comes forcefully to light, just like it was with communism.
With so much outsourcing for the actual work, with services so expensive, America more than anyone is dependent on the cash flow from copyright. To make matters worse, the society is based on greed and the only stopper to that is competition, twisted so much as it turned into distributed greed, helped to prosper by the law. Even if a spiritual revolution should come tommorow, and looking at who is the elected president there are no worries for that, the enterprise demons created by this society won't just dissapear without a fight. And that is natural.
A thick, well established and powerfull layer of people fight over your bodies as you stand and watch your politically correct shows day in and day out. How can this perfect 1984 society claim to honour freedom as it's founding fathers did, when freedom was lost a long time ago? How will you be able to kill the sick system that already exists when all you know is TV and TV dinners? How can you justify yourselves the fact that your copyright laws caused millions on this planet to die in horrible sufferings because medicine developments are stalled when you need dozens of patents to even start research on anything?
I'll humbly suggest the first step: Literally throw away your TV and start caring about each other. Stop buying crap, stop buying movies from Hollywood and start getting your music by going to concerts played by your local artists. Maybe then, your children will have a fighting chance and the rest of the world won't have to enter in the third war against a once great nation.
P.S: I appologies for my english. It should've been better by now.
if the mysterious "HQ" technology that suddenly started appearing on all the VCRs had anything to do with Macrovision or copy protection? I have always suspected this, as, by my recollection, HQ appeared around the time this copy protection arrived. All that whining about putting a special "tax" on blank tapes went away around the same time as well. It all makes me wonder if the "HQ" (that allegedly gave you a "20% better picture") wasn't actually the enabler for copy protection. This could help explain why TVs didn't have a problem with copy protected content, but VCRs did. I thought maybe someone in /. land might have some first hand knowledge about HQ and could shed some light on this.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Your company isn't paying you for just a single copy of your code - they are paying you to assign them the copyright, so they can make as many copies as they like.
It would certainly be possible for you to pay to media companies to assign the copyright to you, but it would cost a lot more then $15.
The fact that you got modded +5 insightful only illustrates how difficult it is to sort out intelectual property owernship issues. Almost all analogies made with cars or computers or whatever people tend to come up with don't work - this is a different beast and as a society we haven't figured out yet how to deal with the problem of something as essential as culture being a commercial product at the same time. Perhaps our culture isn't all it is drummed up to be?
I have a Humax Tivo with the DVD burner and front inputs for recording camcorders etc. I recently recorded an old VHS (via the front inputs) to transfer to DVD. The Humax lets me record to Tivo (on HDD) but it blocks me from burning it to dvd or transfering it to my computer via media option. Tivo lets me bend a little but not break Macrovision. It's the first time I have seen the "Copy Protected" symbol on my Tivo.
What Macrovision does is to mess up the automatic gain control (AGC) on the vcr. A tv also has an AGC but it reacts fast enough that the visible picture isn't affected. Old VCRs are either not affected or can easily be adjusted so they aren't. Any VCR made in the last fifteen years is pretty much tamper proof with regard to the AGC. Macrovision tricks the AGC by deliberately messing up the "black level" during the vertical sync period. It's not noise per se. As the parent points out it is easy to defeat. In fact, every decent video studio or tv station has equipment which, as part of its normal operation, removes macrovision from a video signal.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's not really that different from a book, the one exception being fair use of excerpts.
You pay for the book, but you don't own it:
When a new version comes out (like the English version of "A Clockwork Orange", a paperback, or an ebook) you have to buy it if you want it in the new format or with the extra material. If your book wears out, or you spill coffee on it and it become illegible, you have to buy a new copy.
The biggest difference is a book never becomes unusable due to technological obsolescence.
I don't think the MPAA has weighed in on the net neutrality debate yet. I fail to see your point. You seem to have lumped all the companies that you don't like into one big pile.
Have you completely ignored the astroturfing campaign, including TV ads, that attacked Net Neutrality in specious ways? Do you really believe the MPAA did not have anything to do with that?
... and then they built the supercollider.
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When Hollings (D-Disney) was proposing the SSSCA/CBDTPA, I wrote to Pres. Bush and asked him to work against it, and veto it. I spewed a lot of malarkey that I didn't believe, such as "Hollywood liberal elite", "Unnecessary regulation of business", etc...
Putting someone's own prejudices to work for you is sometimes all that you can do.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
They have a pretty ironic name for being so short-sighted.
The copyright clause in the Constitution allows Congress to enact laws to protect the work of authors only for limited periods of time.
Now, in the Mickey Mouse case, the court said that protection periods on the order of 100 years are OK, but the Court kinda hinted that it might not go along with this much further.
Anyway, the technique of leveraging DRM protections in via a copyright and then having them live forever is rather a slap in the face of the Constitutional limitation on the duration of copyrights.
Of course, Congress does have a weasel-way out: they might say, "oh, we allow DRM to exist forever as part of our powers over commerce among the states."
But in practical terms, DRM forever transforms what is supposed to be a copyright of limited duration into a copyright that lasts for all eternity. And that, is contrary to the purpose, a purpose actually stated in the US Constitution, to promote the arts and sciences, for copyright and patents.
See my note "The Rule Against Digital Perpetuities". It's short, so I'll just copy it here:
The Rule Against Digital Perpetuities
It seems to me that in the fight over copyright and digital rights management few have considered what happens in the distant future when the material being protected is no longer covered by copyright. That thought led me to propose the following rule and accompanying pledge.
The Rule Against Digital Perpuities:
No Digital Rights Management (DRM) limitation or anti-copying mechanism may endure longer than the original copyright in the protected work.
The Pledge:
I pledge to neither specify nor standardize nor implement any system that does not conform to the Rule Against Digital Perpetuities.
You can kill someone with a hammer; are they gonna make those illegal too now?
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Use less media. See fewer movies and NONE at the theater. Buy no new music, just buy used CD's.
Golly, you might not be cool, but you won't be a sucker, either. Fuck the media companies that want to ruin our intellectual property system.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
I bought one of (WARNING-POPUP) these http://members.fortunecity.com/videotransfer/# a number of years back for about $30. There are schematics available on the internet for equivalent devices built with half a dozen cheap IC's.
A better solution is to make a really really good digital copy. I thought the idea was that your TV could display the signal with macrovision noise added, but your VCR would lose sync and get all garbled because it was unable to make a good copy of the "noise". If you make as perfect a copy as you can, wouldn't you be able to play it back? It may still violate copyright, but you wouldn't be circumventing anything - the macrovision would be intact.
As classic video (magnetic) tape only lasts 10-20 years, you cannot expect anything on tape to still be around in 100 years. Without killing the macrovision, there will be no archives other than what might be on (real/reel) film.... Not that I expect congress to leave the dates alone.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Have you completely ignored the astroturfing campaign, including TV ads, that attacked Net Neutrality in specious ways? Do you really believe the MPAA did not have anything to do with that?
I think AT&T, Comcast, and the rest of the telcos are perfectly capable of hiring a PR firm and buying some TV time. Nothing about that implies the involvement of the MPAA.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This is another reason why I joined the US Pirate Party. The laws need to be reformed and the DMCA needs to be replaced with a more sensible, consumer friendly version. I'm simply sick of being told what I can and what I can't do with my legally purchased media, as long and I don't like that trying to make it into a rent style system.
We need to form together to help change these laws. I believe joining the Pirate Party may be a start to this. Boycotting also works effectively, but only if enough people do it. Raising awareness of these issues is also a very good thing to do as many people simply aren't aware that it happening until it is too late. Even just trying to talk to your representatives may help things as most of th time they aren't even aware of these types of issues or if they don't listen, then vote for someone else next time. If we can get enough people to realize what is really occuring, then change can happen.
My Phillips Matchline VCR from factory removes macrovision from my DVD player. The same DVD player into another VCR generates distorted macrovision colors etc. I wonder if the Phillips DVD Recorders also strip macrovision?
If overturned though it will be interesting. Does it not set a precedence that it could be illegal to create DRM that cannot be bypassed when the copyright has expired?
Dear Macrovision:
While you were busy making life hard for legitimate customers, I downloaded four movies that had been Macrovision-scrubbed for my convenience.
Sincerely,
Ha Ha Ha!
PS: Eat a dick.
I built macrovision defeating electronics way back when I was still a minor, as I'm now 30 that should put a date on how long ago macrovision was broken.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
After installing ATITool 0.24 or newer, four clicks is all that it takes to get rid of Macrovision.
Click "Settings", then choose "Miscalleaneous" tab and from there check "Remove Macrovision detection from analog input driver". Now you can use the card's analog inputs and outputs as you wish.
I disabled mine so long ago I don't remember if you'll have to reboot afterwards.
Does anyone know a similiar procedure for Nvidia cards?
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
>They want it illegal to copy, illegal to break content protection systems, even
>illegal to remove or bypass things like region encoding. They want market regulations.
Yes, lets regulate the work market as well. That way, they can't use manufacturing plants in one "market" to supply another market. They can't press their CDs, say, in Asia and sell them in Europe or USA, that work is region marked to Asia. Want to set up a call centre in India? Sure, but those people's work are area marked for India only, can't circumvent that and have people phoning from USA get help. And so on. SHould work great. After all, why should THEY be able to trade, ship and use workforce freely in the world when normal people and their customers are not!
>You pay for the book, but you don't own it:
Yes, you own the copy of the book.
The only restrictions on it is is use in various forms involving making it available for the public. Of course, you can't make NEW copies in several cases either. Ownership has nothing to do with copyright though. It applies equally regardless of if you would own the book or not. That is irellevant.
Illegal in the US, that is.
Trust me, I work for the government.