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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
No direct link to the torrent? What kind of submission is that?
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.
stuff |
alt.binaries.hddvd?
Case closed. Give it up, MPAA, your days are numbered. Just like Windows, soon you won't be needed anymore.
Using GNU/Linux -- Windows-free zone!
The First HD DVD Movie Hits BitTorrent
News at 11:00.
On Bit Torrent at 11:05.
Have you read my journal today?
I might download it.
Which, I'm perfectly legal to do as I'm using direct FTP so the sharing is done by the uploading side.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
"It's so big they'll never have enough storage space!" ... !" -- Fill in whatever.
"It's so big they'll never have enough bandwidth!"
"It's so big they'll never have enough
These are no serious impediments. Pirates routinely download 5GB (and 9GB) DVDs all the time and they don't have problem with that. Their ISPs don't suddenly cap them. They don't suddenly find their quality of life has depreciated because they can't download enough porn.
It doesn't happen like that.
ISPs increase bandwidth. Hard drives get bigger. Writable media gets larger. Compression gets more advanced.
It's no big deal.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I'll be in my bunk...
At these file sizes, I, for one, do not aim to misbehave.
] D
I was skeptical when I saw the first article about HDDVDBackup, but there's definitely a posted title key on the Doom9 forum to correspond with this release. I guess the other 2 keys they posted should be released soon as well. The only way to truly implement volume encryption that can't be beaten is to avoid the software player altogether, as the title key needs to be in memory, if only briefly. The posts on the Doom9 forum claim that this is the way that title keys are extracted, and I'm inclined to believe them.
:)
Good job beating the DRM MAFIAA again! Information truly was meant to be free
mandelbr0t
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
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.
I wonder if this is going to cause downward pressure on HD DVD player prices as people can now just use their computer to play the films? I wonder if the HD-DVD player makes will have a monetary claim against the hackers who are responsible as such.
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.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Right. BitTorrent isn't a dump truck. You have to send it through the tubes.
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
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!
...you really can't stop the signal. :-)
--Ford Prefect
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.
They have gone to enormous trouble to find your little friend... and found her they have. Do you all know what it is you're carrying?
Better get used to watching Serenity over and over because you're not likely to see any more movies released with PowerDVD keys. That takes care of software players for HDDVD and there will definitely be no software players for Blu-Ray.
There already are BluRay software players. Both PowerDVD and WinDVD have versions that support BluRay. Guess that's what happens when you talk off the top of your head with no facts or research to back things up.
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.
But why bother downloading the HD-DVD version only to downrez it and view on a 15" monitor? At that point, you're better off just downloading (or, *gasp*, buying) the DVD version.
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.
Actually, fair use is not Constitutionally guaranteed. It comes from the common law, and the first codification of it was in the Copyright Act of 1976. Additionally, it's an affirmative defense, not a right. I only point this out because, if Slashdotters want it to be a right instead of a defense against criminal or civil penalties, they should lobby for it instead of assuming it is already a right.
I'd really like to see you get modded down because you're spreading falsehoods, not being insightful.
The rip on Pirate Bay is off an HDTV signal. This copy is directly off an HD-DVD and likely includes the interactive menus and all of the other content off the disk packaged in a single file.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
...fair use was a gradually evolved (e.g. court-developed) common law doctrine that was only codified in US law in 1976.
The right to make backups applies specifically to computer software and evolved contemporaneously.
The closest you have as to a right to space-shift is the 1999 judgement in the Rio case that "such copying is a paradigmatic noncommercial personal use." Again, I don't disagree that it should be allowed, but it's not exactly a constitutional right.
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
DRM Engineering team: $1.2 million.
Marketing for release of first movie: $3 million
Having some wiseass kid from Sweden post a torrent of your movie the day before the commercial release: Priceless.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I know it's redundant, but... Seeing as to how my university caps all users' total bandwidth (combined upstream & downstream) to 5GB per any 7 consecutive days, this would take over 4 weeks to download if I did not share at all. I say over 4 weeks because I still require some bandwidth for my typical habits like listening to distant radio stations and downloading software updates. Now, if I were to download this on bittorrent, it would take at least 6 weeks if I'm a jerk, 9 weeks if I'm nice and get my ratio back up to 1. At this rate, I'd rather just buy the damn disc than wait 2+ months. Then again, the only HDTV I have is at my family's home, and I'm too poor to buy the 360's HD-DVD player, and I'm also not sure that my computer can handle outputting something at that high of a resolution without losing frames. Anywho, I suppose I should buy a DVIHDMI cable sometime before this summer so I can play Pro Evo on the new TV, but that would also require a new video card.... New video card or a month's rent, hrmm.....
So while I fully appreciate your comment, the MPAA doesn't appear to serve as the voice of the creative community, unless you're counting the creative accounting practices that some people say are typical of MPAA members
The point is that without smoothly getting movies into distribution, the movies won't make nearly as much money. The people making the movies have zero interest, in most cases, in actually dealing with theatre chains, HBO, Apple, NetFlix, etc... they want to make movies. The people who provide them with big hunks of probably-going-to-be-lost cash to make the films in the first place only do so because they understand (and have relationships with) the distribution end of the cycle. Of course there are smaller production people who put together self-financed indy films that succeed... but those are rare, and the people that make them are usually very quick to get right on with bigger-budget work that's financed, again, by the sales side of the industry.
You're right that the MPAA isn't a guild of camera operators, or a society of screenwriters. But the people who derive their livings from the making of movies that only make money through sales/distribution by entities that ARE the MPAA's members... they all know that if the studios and all of the other components can't make up for their usual losses with the occasional financial success, then no one in that entier food chain has a job. Writers, accountants, actors, lighting techs, wireframe animators - none of them. MPAA isn't their "voice" per se, but the parts of the business that actually collect the cash that pays all of these people are part of the MPAA - just like the other sub-professions have their own associations.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Slashdot: An even slower news source then wikipedia.
The HD_DVD rip was released on saturday.
The HD_DVD article on wikipedia was updated sunday or monday with the information.
18:26 Jan 16 2007 - I (and hundreds of others) finish downloading the rip.
18:55 Jan 16 2007 - Slashdot finally catches on.
"proof", when you finally get it:
97a2cd952c4e6cd4baebb4da08fbcbfb FEATURE_1.EVO
Serenity's a great movie, but sadly incompatable with my display. Now the problem has been rectified! Thanks, internet.
He probably forgot. But we shouldn't forget that the URSS was the greatest ally of Germany from way before the war, by reaming Germany, and for a great part of the war itself, when Hitler and Stalin delimited the countries and borders each would control.
Stalin only turned Hitler's worst enemy when Hitler betrayed him by violating the Ribbentrop-Molotov non-aggression pact and invading URSS-owned territories and then Russia itself. Weren't for this and Stalin wouldn't have opposed him in the slightest.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
There was talent involved with the production of Serenity?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The Chronicles of Riddick, Batman Begins, and Pitch Black.
So in fact, the MPAA adds no more to the creative or distribution process than, say, Wal-Mart.
Uh huh. It's called "an economy." The guy that changes the oil in the car that a set lighting technician drives to work doesn't directly "add to the creative process" either. Nor does the person who grows the food that tech eats. But you don't get well-made, expensive, technically fantastic work without an economy of specialists. If you really think that the lighting technician should be equally concerned with (or would be any good at) raising the money needed to keep a staff of several hundred people working, fed, insured, and in a studio with paid electric bills and working equipment, then you are wildly, spectacularly out of touch. Out of curiosity, what do you do for a living? Do you do everything that goes towards the production of what it is that pays your way through life? Or do you specialize, so that you can be better and more efficient at things at which you excel?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.