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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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.''
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.