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New Copy Protection to Make Playing DVDs on a PC Difficult
The Cowardly Pirate writes "ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 blog is reporting that new copy-protection software for DVD publishers from a company called ProtectDisc not only makes it difficult to rip movies that you've purchased but also prevents discs from playing in a Windows PC at all. From the article: 'Protect DVD-Video is the brainchild of a company called ProtectDisc. Part of the copy-protection mechanism is a non-standard UDF (Universal Disc Format) file system which results in the IFO file on the DVD (this is the file responsible for storing information on chapters, subtitles and audio tracks) appearing to the PC as being zero bytes long.'"
She isn't going to know about that tool, or how to use it, and I'm about as sick and tired as I can be of setting up the workarounds for restrictions that shouldn't even exist.
Eventually only the hackers will be able to watch movies and play games on their computer.
Yeah, people who want to copy dvds professionally are smart. Legitimate users are not really. Everyone in between is better off using a pirated copy, because it is just better.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
If it's a non-standard format, then it isn't a DVD....
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
consumers don't like them. And do they really think I'm going to shell out money for an over-priced DVD that I can't even play on my PC?
I could add oh so much more... but I'll leave it at that.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Then, when the next blockbuster movie sell a grand total of four DVDs, maybe the movie and television studios will finally realize how much money this is costing them.
More likely they'll blame piracy.
Solution: Teach your daughter how to be a movie pirate or hacker. The industry gets what it deserves.
As soon as contract negotiations over royalty payments and distribution expenses come into play, I feel they lose their "artist" status and are "entertainers."
Artists to me are people that attempt to share a unique, creative and inspired vision through sound and vision (or the combination of the two.)
(Yes I realize 'art' is subjective, but I'm talkin strictly to the movie/music type here.)
When it comes to the **AA's and their international counterparts, all we get is rehashed, same old same old in order to service a businesses bottom line.
No sig for you!!
On anther rant, Linux machines won't be affected by this. Even if I bought one of these disks it would only stop me from using it on my work computer, not my laptop, not any of my homebrew computers or my Mac Mini.
So why does anyone care?
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
How dumb is this idea?
Your average Joe-computer-user will try it in his Windows PC using WMP and it won't work. So he returns it to Best Buy and (maybe) notes to himself to never to buy a DVD with the 'ProtectDisc' logo. Mark that as one lost and pissed customer.
Your average haxxor-d00d/bright-linux-guy/anyone-with-a-clue plays on on some other player that has been hacked up to deal with the non-standard UDF. It works fine.
Then his buddy, Joe, asks him for a copy since he had to return his 'defective' DVD. And while he's at it, he posts a torrent of it in case anyone else had the same problem.
So the studios end up pissing off and alienating their current customers who are unlikely to be pirating or copying the movie, while anyone who is already inclined to pirate/copy it still has the means and knowledge to do so (and now also has the motivation!). Really dumb.
Actually, yes, it did.
Suddenly we were provided with an easy to see visual clue that the enclosed disk may not be able to be used as we expect. This helped people avoid those disks that weren't compliant with the CD standard.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
"...new DVD protection that makes it impossible to play it at all"
Nah, the protection won't kick in until the main feature. You'll always be abe to see the trailers and commercials, no doubt.
Yes, but will there always be video output ports? You are, of course, speaking of the analog hole. Let's for the moment just assume that there is reasonably priced hardware that can capture an analog HD stream (which doen't happen to exist yet.) The problem we are seeing is that content providers are working on DRM that will ONLY play the movie when there is NO ANALOG port. Kinda like Vista won't play HD content unless you have a HDCP monitor.
The answer is of course that some Chinese manufacturer will sell a HDCP dongle that will strip HDCP. As for the keys, it will always be possible to bribe an employee at a legit manufacturer and get some keys. In fact, I would bet that someone will start a distributed.net style crack effort in any case.
bingo, hit the nail on the head. This is what they are doing now anyway, sony says "hm, why aren't people buying our music... PIRACY! release the RIAA lawyers!"... they never seem to see the "our products are shit, you can't use them how everyone would think you should be able to and we rootkit your computer"
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
> These DRM/anti-copy tactics are pointless, ineffective, and prevent the
> masses from doing the kind of cool shit they should be allowed to...but it's
> never going to stop the geeks - which gives us an avenue to showcase that
> smugness we all carry.
They are not very concerned about stopping the geeks. They are not numerous enough to matter. They want to stop the masses, and they are succeeding.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
They are not very concerned about stopping the geeks. They are not numerous enough to matter. They want to stop the masses, and they are succeeding.
Oh, I realise...and that's kind of my point. Mainly I find this kind of stuff really bad business behaviour by annoying your customers - but I must acknowledge that this pretty much guarantees that I (and we) will always have the cooler toys.
Running Windows^H^H^H^H^H^H^H OSX and Linux in the home. (I don't have time for Solitaire any more.)
This is mainly a little DVD-Video tidbit to explain how technically this works.
For the DVD-Video spec, the actual file system being used is irrelevant and is mainly used to "boot" the disc and discover where the very first data sector is located at on the DVD disc. From then on, at least in theory, all of the navigation to the rest of the DVD media is handled internally within the DVD-Video files themselves, including the MPEG data, as the navigation within the video data is handled with the use of special navigation packets.
So for a set-top box on your home television, the data scanners ignore the UTF file format and just march through the data according to the DVD-Video specs, not even aware that there might be a problem. Besides, these set-top boxes have just enough of a file system BIOS just to get to the "root" sector and not much more. Sometimes the "higher-end" ones will try to scan for MP3s or other kinds of media files, but that is a bonus and not required for playing the video data itself.
As for PCs, the operating systems are obviously designed to trust in the file system to believe that what the file system is telling you is also correct. Obviously you can mess with the order of the files and make something playable only on PCs and not set-top boxes, but usually you are more worried about the set-top ones rather than some hobbiest with some DVD playback software. The PC-based DVD-Video playback software is usually designed to trust in the file system and does the file requests through normal OS-related file requests rather than doing low-level sector navigation. This is a sign of good programming, not the lack thereof.
What is being done here is a very cheap hack that took the brains of a half-competent software engineering intern who knows just enough about the specs to get him/herself into some serious trouble and doesn't know the basics of trying to stick with known standards. Or to understand the need for redundant systems to try and protect data through multiple means of accessing the information. As has been pointed out, by doing this the file system is essentially corrupted, so normal OS file system requests will not be able to retrieve the data, unless you are accessing information on the DVD drive via individual sector requests instead (that would be the "hack" to break this "encryption" system). BTW, the "file size" of the IFO files is also recorded in the IFO file format itself as well, so "recreating" the IFO files is trivial in this situation if you can access the individual sectors.
I certainly hope that this idiot who designed this system didn't get a patent on the subject. I will go down right now as somebody to contact if you want to break the patent to testify that this is not a patentable idea in the first place. And as has been pointed out by others, this is clearly in violation of the DVD-Video standards and as such you can't claim compatability to DVD-Video by using this system. This is not a copy protection scheme but rather a corruption of the file system, as has been pointed out, and taking on a percieved weakness in the organization of the DVD-Video format.
If any of these companies were smart about DRM when they're designing these systems, they could simply invoke some sort of hardware DRM. Like spinning the discs the other way so that they can't be read by computers. Data clockwise, Movies/music anti-clockwise.
I don't see how they can think that they can keep static information locked up easily if it can be read by every somputer.
I (and we) will always have the cooler toys.
... and the stuff that we geeks ought to be doing in the absence of DRM, we'll never do at all.
We always would have had the cooler toys. People who are interested in learning about computers, will always be able to do more with them; this doesn't change whether the computer is a drum-memory beast or the latest bazillion-transistor Intel powerhouse.
What DRM means is that the stuff that we geeks will be doing on our computers, is the stuff that the masses should be able to do
When I think of all the time that really brilliant people like DVD Jon have spent breaking DRM, it doesn't seem like some great technical achievement -- it's just a lot of effort and time that could have gone to actual development of new features, but which had to instead be spent just making something simple work the way it should have.
DRM is like the ultimate broken-window fallacy. In fixing it you feel like you're accomplishing something, but really you're just treading water.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It used to be, back in the 80's, that you had to be careful about putting disks from people you didn't know into your computer because you might get a virus...now in the 21st century, pirates and anonymous downloads on the internet are more reliable and less risky than sticking a CD or DVD from a well known company into your computer...
There's some kind of rule regarding security policy which states that if security is so tight as to be an obstacle to normal work, legitimate users will attempt to circumvent the security measures just so they can do their work at a reasonable level of efficiency (ie. without undue irritation). I think that rule applies to media security as well. Right now, media security measures are still largely invisible and legitimate use does "just work" for the most part. But what will happen if that changes? If the security measures become so draconian as to impede legitimate use, it's extremely likely that legitimate users who had never considered pirating will begin to look for ways to circumvent the system just to continue using the product in a convenient manner. Basically, I think it's quite likely that if media security measures get much tighter then the media companies will effectively create a consumer base of "pirates" as a simple reaction to the inconvenience the new security measures present. And once a person becomes used to the convenience presented by circumvention, it will be difficult to convince them to play by the rules again, even if future security measures are relaxed.
Nah, users won't have any problems playing the pirated copies they download.
I can't wait for this. Now I can rent a DVD, watch it, then return it and complain that it won't play on my computer, and get my money back...
Again, the pirated copy has more functionality and actually will play on any sufficiently powerful computer, while the legitimately purchased copy is hobbled. They're actually driving people to piracy who originally didn't plan to go that route.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
You're missing the fact that SlySoft is not an American company and has no nexus in the US. As is oft pointed out here on /. - there's more to the world than the US.
The chain of unlawfulness is solid up until the point that the decryption is created or used by an enduser for any specifically exempted purpose, including fair use. I don't hink Antigua gives a rats ass about the US wrt the DMCA, and I doubt that the US government is going to do anything about it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If watching a DVD is a crime then only criminals will watch DVDs.
Unfortunately the *AAs could not care less if you watch/listen to their products. All they care about is that you *buy* their product.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Yes - now you are a criminal and can be processed as such.
Anything which borks the hardware is going to make practically all of the exsiting SO players useless. Also, since most of the inexpensive players rely on standard DVD drives to keep cost down, it would make the new players far more expensive (being custom and incopmpatible with PC DVDs). Next, we'd need a PC compatible anti-DVD drive so that we could write home movies and content to SO playable dvds, and the whole charade starts over again.
I don't see how that can avoid being read by a computer with the proper drivers and software and yet stay compatible with the vast installed base of DVD players. Note: I have had a DVD-R, burned by a FOAF which would not play in any PC DVD player I owned, and I tried at least 7 different drives. It would play find in all three SO dvd players I tried. It reportedly was readable in the drive that burned it, but that PC was out of commission (don't know the problem). I don't know what was screwed up, but I hope the studios don't ever get thier hands on it*.
*I suspect it was just some odd bit errors or bad tracks that messed with the FS - maybe not unlike the topic system. I did not try to read it with Linux, as I did not have a machine that had it loaded at the time.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I normally take the side of DRM in these discussions, I sell games online for my own 1 man company, so I have a vested interest (and urgent rent-paying need) to combat piracy and make sure that the content provider gets paid for his/her hard work.
But this is a step WAY too far for DRM.
I often watch DVDs on my laptop, its a great feature, and its totally insane to prevent me as a consumer from doing this, with DVDs I have BOUGHT.
We now are in a situation where:
95% of content providers treat their customers ok
5% of content providers act like jackasses, install rootkits and starforce, sue dead people and schoolkids,add unskippable bits to DVDs,and pull stunts like this.
95% of consumers act perfectly reasonably, pay a fair price for a legal product, and dont download pirated content
5% of consumers act like jackasses, pirating everything on principle, uploading hacked copies, and seeding torrents of movies that they enjoy, without a penny going to the providers of that content. Some even start a political party to try and legitmise such activities.
The extremists at both ends are really fucking up the whole digital entertainment industry for the rest of us. This sucks big time. And anyone 'involved' in the issue enough to lobby about it, is firmly in one of those 5% groups. The chances of reasonable compromsie gets further away each day.
I've decided that the best thing I can do is to try and reign in both sides before we end up with something really bad happening.
message to hardcore pirates : "You are acting like idiots. grow up"
message to sony, MPAA,RIAA et al : "You are acting like idiots, grow up"
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
There are side-effects to these content "protection" schemes. Here's one, for your pleasure:
I bought a MacBook Pro recently. It's a great machine except for one thing: The DVD drive isn't region free. What nonsense, my $3000 machine is less functional than any $30 DVD player.
My solution is: I don't buy DVDs anymore. The absolute best movies I'll watch in the cinema, for the rest there's BitTorrent. I'm thinking about putting my DVD collection up on eBay.
So where, I wonder, is the gain for the movie industry? I fail to see any, unless their goal is not getting their movies watched anymore (which I just think might be true, given the crap they produce).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The entertainment industry needs to realise it's the entertainment industry. I don't need to have anything to do with it, and if it makes life unpleasant, I won't.
Oh well. I guess I'll have to keep getting my movies from Torrent sites.
Maybe, if many people complain, the rental stores' managers will be the ones complaining that those DVDs are defective, and will demand the studios to send them good merchandise or their money back!
Circumcision is child abuse.
In my case, I already require AnyDVD anyway, as my MCE PC send infos to my TV in a set 1080i resolution and DVDs do not want to be sent over 480p. So, I used AnyDVD to strip macrovision from the signal and... voila.
Those protections are moronic and only get in the way of legitimate users. People that know what they are doing (tech educated, hackers...) will be able to find an appropriate tool in minutes. This "protection" would probably not even stop a ripper program...
Yes, because it is crass and unseemly when hardworking artists try and look out for their own interests, pay for a decent roof over their family's head, food on the table, have medical and dental costs, perhaps, gasp, a bit of money put aside for when they're older or incapacitated or just want to take some time off from the daly grind.
No, it's all the tired 'n trite MTV bullshit of "we're only in it for the music" crap when any artist will tell you that while they do it for the love of their art they have lives and bills and obligations and aspirations beyond a life flogging their wares every night.
Furthermore there is more to art & performance then a guitar and drum kit and a whiny skinny 20-something pretending to be world weary. There is orchestra and dance and theater and film and sculpture, and those involve specialized venues and contracts and grants and workshops and all the rest, they're not just "Hey let's get the scooby gang in the van and do a 12 city roadtrip! We'll pay for it out of T-shirt sales, screw the recording rights!".
No, some art is not going to be out on the road every night, some art is ephemerial or specialized. But hey, if you think that pulling the revenue from recordings out from under artists is ok then go right ahead. Of course it means that it'll be that much more difficult to mount stage productions, bring in performers from other cultures, pay the lighting bill at the local venue but then apparently the penultimate art form is the indie rocker, right?
Oh, and lastly, being entertaining is not demeaning. Yes, it not every artist's goal, but many an artist does want to reach their audience through entertainment and to disdain such as merely populist and somehow lesser is nothing more then a profoundly ignorant (pathetic, really) attempt at snobbishness. Obscurity doesn't define a great artist, nor does notoriety, nor does public adulation, great art is the only criteria. And that includes great entertainment.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
"working under the banner of a giant ... with a contract that says "You must produce x amount of work over y period of time.""
In those days it was called "patronage" http://www.mos.org/leonardo/bio.html and *LOTS* of people widely considered to be great "artists" took that route.
Did it mean that not every single work they produced was a "great work of art"? Sure, but nobody hits it out of the part every time they swing unless they're a dilletante who only takes one or two swings.
They aren't trying to invent some technical masterpiece, but rather to make money off of the idiots at the studios who think this will actually protect their content. They are laughing all the way to the bank either way.
Apparently reading for comprehension isn't some folks strong point, so I'll spell it out: "the band" does not define all art.
Wow. Take a moment. Absorb that.
That pop/rock/rap music artists (and yes, that includes your favorite soi disant "indie artist") are getting a raw deal does not justify screwing over all musical artists.
Big big big clue stick: There are other forms of art then "the band".
Even musical art.
Most towns of any size are home to a number of non-rock-act artists. We call them classical musicians, jazz musicians, studio musicians, folk musicians, choral singers, barbershop quartets, harpists, pianists, chanteuses, etc. And those are just in music, there are legions more in other performing arts, including ones with audio recordings (ever hear of a showtune? An opera? A bell performance?)
Some of these folks, and the organizations that they work through, depend on recording royalties. For some no recording royalties would likely mean shutting down.
For a concrete example that was the subject at dinner tonight let's take the world famous Boston Pops. They're made up of Boston-area musicians, including some from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, performing when the BSO isn't in season. They perform for hire, they perform in ticketed performances, they also perform free concerts. Much of their funding comes from, you guessed it, a large recording catalogue. Yes, all of those copies of "The Boston Pops Sing Your Holiday Favorites, Yet Again" add up, and give them a reliable revenue stream to build from.
Guess what? Some of us like their music. The Boston Pops do try lots of interesting things. Sometimes it is gimmicky, sometimes it is inspired. The same is true for classic and popular classical groups in many, many cities & towns. They are contributing mightily to the musical culture and just because they're not performing in grotty clubs to an audience terrified their musical heros-du-jure have somehow 'sold out', become less 'real', less 'street' (or whatever today's legitimacy criteria are) doesn't make them any less worthy of support.
(Oh hey, my house sytem just popped up the Boston Gay Men's Chorus performing Howard Arlen - great voices, great performance, fantastic material! Gonna argue that is any less art then Nirvana?)
This is true for many acts. They can't tour all the time, indeed their touring may be impossible or economically improbable but they can make great recordings and get them out there, use those funds to stage further performances, and continue the cycle.
For these folks the cliche pop/rock/rap-act-narcissistic answer of "tour" doesn't work. All it says is that the advocate for such has a tragically limited understanding of art and music and is unable, or unwilling, to see beyond their justifications.
So next time, before parroting again how musical artists et al are getting a raw deal, stop for a moment and consider that the artists you are referring to don't necessarily represent the entirety of musical arts. And so when actively or tacitly supporting minor acts of "fighting the man" consider that you may well be also hurting other musical artists, ones who have worked just as hard and just as long in their fields, and with their own families and rents and medical bills to pay.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Or they'll start putting a small sticker on it that says "Not PC Compatible"