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The First HD DVD Movie Hits BitTorrent
Ars Technica reports that the first HD DVD movie has made its way onto BitTorrent, showing that current DRM efforts to prevent illegal sharing of copyrighted content are still futile and fighting an uphill battle. From the article: "The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB."
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me
At 20GB this alone will limit pirates as having even 100 of these movies will take up about 2TB of space.
I have a great idea. Just don't sell the product, or release it for distribution of any kind. I guarantee there won't be any piracy, but you'll have a hard time making money!
Everyone complained about piracy when tape decks came out, but everyone knows in retrospect that the bootleg tapes, even the good quality ones (which could easily be as good as the one you bought) were actually helping bands get noticed. This is all about just controlling the supply line so that only studio-backed projects can get money. They want the ability to sh*t can a movie by not distributing it, and vice versa, to make money from only the ones they are investing in.
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Not cool. Joss needs the money so he can make more cool stuff. Go buy the DVD.
'nuff said.
Of course, this will just make them work harder to fix up the faults in the encryption software/hardware before they really start to mass-produce players / discs, so releasing a pirated movie this early will just make further piracy that little bit harder.
:)
:)
However, I really don't understand why the RIAA/MPAA bother at all - There are just to many people out there who find it _fun_ to spend their time cracking things simply because they can, and it is a great challenge to take on. It's not the money, it's not the legality, it's probably not even the fact that they want to rip the movie onto their hard-drive. It's the fact that when the RIAA says "You can't do this", their first thought is "Just watch me". No-one can compete with that, not even multi-billion dollar companies. And I love that fact
Also.. 20gb?! Somehow I enjoy the thought of piracy a lot less when everything I save in not buying movies, I spend in buying hard-drives / bandwidth!
Will program for karma.
The article says there is a battle between the pirates and the content providers and imply the pirates are winning.
I am not sure that is the case. I have not been interested in a format that has no provision for backup or ability to shift to other players -- like linux laptops. I have no interest in a disk that won't look as good as a DVD if I play it in my 1 year old non-HDMI HDTV.
If HDDVD disks can now be reliably ripped, I am interested.
I'll buy a set top player and a computer drive sooner.
I'll pester Blockbuster to start renting the disks.
If Muslix64 et al. are blocked, I am back to no interest.
> At 20GB this alone will limit pirates as having even 100 of these movies will take up about 2TB of space.
I'm sure people made the same observation when DVDs first became available a decade ago. 4.7 or 9GB over dialup or even early cable modems stored onto hard drives barely able to hold a single disc was not a threat to DVD sales either. But bandwidth and storage keep on improving while a media standard like DVD or HD-DVD remains constant for years. The reality is that if an HD movie is fixed at ~20GB the cost to move/store that will soon drop to managable costs.
With the copy restrictions removed it is an absolute certainly that they WILL be copied. For now just to prove it is possible, to stick it to the man and to prove 313t3 5k177z but eventually it will be as commonplace as Divx;) CD-R copies are now.
Democrat delenda est
...but I bet the MPAA is watching the peer list on this torrent very, very carefully.
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OK. So what are you saying? Piracy is OK because it help the artist? Or it's OK because we should hate big business? And do you REALLY want people to be unemployed, or content to stop being created? I'm failing to see how your rationalization is a good thing in the general sense regardless of one's personal feelings towards the RIAA/MPAA/Steam/Text Book Publishers/SlashBaddie of the week?
Several posts gasped at the 20GB file size... Come on, its HD. The discs themselves are 30-50GB, what the hell did you expect the ripped torrent file size to be? You want the file size to be small, relatively, then go pirate the non-HD version!
Think back about 5, or even 10, years. Could you have imagined downloading 3-4 Gigs just for a movie? Or a game?
When the CD came into existance, it was not thought that copy protection could ever be necessary, people did hardly have the space on their HD to store those 650 Megs on. Today, a CD is not even a deterrent to downloading it, storing is even less a problem.
Give it a year, and you will probably not even think twice about transfering 20 Gigs just to check out the movie (and deleting it immediately afterwards when you notice that it is indeed copyrighted material, of course).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That takes care of software players for HDDVD and there will definitely be no software players for Blu-Ray.
Naive view, at best.
Though a strange turn on our normal bashing, think about this from Microsoft's POV... They sold their souls to the MPAA by including DRM from the kernel on up. If the MPAA then backstabs Microsoft by not letting Windows machines play HD content...
I think it would run something like, "In response to overwhelming consumer outcry, we've decided to strip all DRM (except WGA, of course) from Vista. We sincerely apologize to our users, and hope you'll forgive us for erronously trusting the content industry."
Microsoft doesn't give a damn about us, but it doesn't care about Hollywood, either. It only plays nicely with the MPAA so long as the MPAA provides the ball.
May take a while to find them all :)
http://www.guster.net : Mmmmm fresh Guster.
Case closed. Give it up, MPAA, your days are numbered. Just like Windows, soon you won't be needed anymore.
Ah, because "Serenity" (since that's the movie in quesiton) would have been just as good if made collaboratively by a bunch of volunteers with little or no budget and no expectation of making enough money to pay back good acting, writing, animation, and other talent? Who do you think the MPAA is, anyway? It's a trade association populated by the companies that moviemakers, actors, writers, tech people and all the rest choose to work for. People compete to work for these companies, and to make projects that will be well received and which will reward the risks taken.
You may have no use for the trade association these creative people support, but you'd better also have no use for films as good as Serenity. No money, no Serenity. You don't "win" anything by ripping off the very people that you're hoping will scrape together the money, talent, and time to make another movie you'll like.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You can squish it down to 5-6GB and it still looks fantastic to most people. They are releasing it this Huge as simply a statement to the world that....
"HD-DVD and Blu Ray protection is 100% useless and here is our proof!" You really do not need it to be that big to see it looking fantastic on a 42"-50" LCD or plasma. Larger such as many 150" or larger home theatres will look not as good as the compression starts to show through.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Buy shares in hard drive companies, concentrating on the ones that are projecting 2TB+ drives in the near future.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Why would people download this when there are already 1080i rips (of Serenity and others) going out onto the net? Is there something on this *20GiB* DVD that's not on the standard DVD?
Why is it so huge? A 720p rip of a typical movie is only about 4.5GiB
From the writeup:
Well, I just happen to know:
Does this mean that all of those Sensormatic tags, all of those cameras, and so on are "futile?" Not hardly. You wouldn't make such a ridiculous statement because you know that retail anti-theft mechanisms are meant to be a deterrent. Nobody -- least of which the retail industry -- expects these measures to prevent 100% of retail theft.
And so it goes with DRM. If we pretend that the content industry expects it to prevent 100% of piracy, then yes -- we can have a jolly laugh at their expense. Why then, "futile" does sound like a good word, and after this little warm-up straw man exercise, we're ready to hit Burning Man. But it's intellectually dishonest.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
To expound on my point, if it were only the keys themselves that were provided, then you could make an argument that this about "Fair Use", "avoidng Hollywood's lockin to make you rebuy, rebuy, rebuy", blah blah blah. Because then you'd need to buy the disc yourself and use the BackupHDDVD program to rip the movie to a non-DRM'ed file. But the fact that not only are the keys being provided, but the movies themselves over bittorrent means that anyone can get the non-DRM'ed rips whether they legally bought the disc or not, therefore this is about piracy, not fair use.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000