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A Chip on DVDs Could Prevent Theft
Dieppe writes "A simple chip added to a DVD disk could prevent retail theft. According to the AP article at MSNBC, the chip would be activated at the register to make a previously dark area of the DVD clear, and therefore readable. Could this help to stem the tide of the approximate $400 million dollars in losses from brick and mortar stores? Game console DVDs could also be protected this way too. Could this help to bring the prices down on DVD games and movies?"
It's not theft! It's copyright infring... oh wait.
Sounds like a sharpie might be useful...
Could this help to bring down the prices????? You HAVE to be kidding. That really is funny.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As long as I can still back up my DVD's to my HDD and then view them off my own burned DVD's, I don't care what they do!
You try keeping your daughter from destroying those Disney DVD's that are only released once a few decades!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
It won't help, people will just find a way to do the activation themselves at home. Just like they have with all the electronic security measures. What's for damn sure is that even if it worked (it won't) it won't do anything to lower prices. They've already got us hooked like junkies at the prices they're charging and there's no way they'll lower them until demand drops off.
The Farewell Tour II
$10 bucks say they try to find a way to add copy protection into the chip as well.
"Could this help to bring the prices down on DVD games and movies?"
No, but it could raise the profit margin.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Bottom line is, apparently on Slashdot you can substitute "could" with "won't" and you get to read the actual material we're handed. Cut down the pointless speculation guys, it's lame.
So not only will there be motivation to steal DVDs, but also the activator as well. Bravo.
Article should read At home, using a cheap Chinese device, the chip is activated and sends an electrical pulse through the coating, turning it clear and making the disc playable.
China thanks you for creating another black market for it to thrive in.
Wouldn't it just be easier to download the movie instead of risking getting caught shoplifting? =p
No, people that steal wouldn't buy if they couldn't steal. The price of the dvd themselves + the burning is very cheap and the theft is really only worth the physical amount. People that steal likely aren't going to be buying if they couldn't steal. If they can't steal physically they will turn to downloading or getting a blockbuster membership and turn to ripping/burning. If anything, this added ability will just make the checkout lines in Best Buy take longer. Oh, it will also increase the production costs and the machine that will 'validate' the dvd will likely INCREASE the cost. I'm not an endorser of people stealing, but I doubt this would have anything but a negative effect. Hell, if the 'validation' fails 1 outta 100 times the whole system will likely collapse and it will just be a huge waste of money.
Retail theft of entertainment products, including video games, accounts for as much as $400 million in annual losses, according to the Entertainment Merchants Association.
I just love those numbers. I'm much more concerned about the estimated $120 million in lost productivity resulting from time spent dealing with broken shoelaces, and the estimated $275 million in annual losses to people who are shortchanged by hot dog vendors.
How about a moratorium on all numbers that were pulled out of a PR guy's ass?
Three Squirrels
Well, there is a great idea in here somewhere. "A chip smaller than the head of a pin is placed onto a DVD along with a thin coating that blocks a DVD player from reading critical information on the disc. At the register, the chip is activated and sends an electrical pulse through the coating, turning it clear and making the disc playable." Wow.
How long do you think it will take for these "DVD Decryption" devices, as it were, to hit the black market and for plans to be readily available on the internet?
How about, a security device hidden on the DVD itself that will ALWAYS make the security device go off (electrical tape be damned) unless it's rung up at the register first? That would sound like a useful application to me. Come on... people will stop stealing just because they can't watch it? The basic principle of stealing/hacking/whatever is first and foremost "do it to see if you can" right? I can't imagine the inordinate amount of people who will laugh their asses off after stealing this worthless media content, if for no other reason just to piss off Wal*Mart or whoever. It's fun sticking it to the proverbial man.
Another point, how many of you have bought a DVD or other related product, and gotten the hidden security device on it deactivated at the register, just to have to door alarm beep at you and you have to pull out your receipt to verify your purchase? How many people are going to make it out the door and to their homes, to discover their DVD wasn't REALLY activated at the register, before they figure out it's a bad idea? You think Wal*Mart is going to believe you when you come back in and say "Yes I bought this, no it wasn't activated for some reason" ? NO NO NO NO NO.
There ARE some useful applications for this technology, oh yes, there are; however, I really think this one is quirky. Come on Corporate America.
I sell out to The Man every day.
it should lower the markup on the DVD's because they don't need to recoup their (real world physical) losses due to theft.
Isn't that what the record industry said when CD's came out?
"The price will come down."
Then, they changed it to, "Well, you're getting better quality. That's why CD's are so expensive."
than putting an empty case on the shelf, and having the shop assistant put the DVD in the case/exchange it for a full case at the register? Is that too difficult for stores to do?
If you all Google Slashdot, will it Slashdot Google?
Make it even more inconvenient to buy legitimate copies. That'll sure encourage people to buy them instead of resorting to piracy.
I am sure that they can invent something that can be installed on a million cash registers in the United States but will be impossible to procure by any other means. Why didn't anyone else think of this earlier?
Judging by how often the door alarm goes off, a chip being activated or deactivated at the register has a HIGH RATE OF FAILURE.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
That anecdote is false.
That's like TicketBastard lowering their labor and distribution costs by allowing you to print tickets at home on your own printer, instead of having them mailed. But it costs the consumer *more* to print their own ticket at home (isn't it like $3 extra???) and mailing, which should cost them more, is no extra charge. What a racket.
Well, if more retailers examined the footage closely, they would find that it's mostly the same kids stealing and a lot of them know people at the counter. In turn, people at the counter steal and encourage their friends to stop by and get the stuff they need. So retailers continue to pay shit wages to their workers, raise prices (like Borders) and workers continue to steal because they feel "justified". Until Netflix and bittorrent came along, the only people who lost were the consumers. Now it doesn't really matter. Anyone with a half a brain can netflix and copy dvds; it's sure a lot cheaper than driving to the mall.
I suspect most loss is due to teenage or twentysomething clerks taking them out the back door. If you have a corrupt clerk with friends as partners, he or she is just as capable of activating the chip for a stack of discs before letting friends walk out, too.
Get off my launchpad!
Bottom line: No, not at all.
The people who shoplift are not your target market anyway, have no disposable income, probably are insignificant outside high crime area/high volume retail.
It will cost money to develop the chip which will be passed on to consumers, and boosting the amount of money spent pressing each disk. Shops that do not buy the hardware to detect the chips will be losing money because the same volume of theft will occur but the real value of the otherwise worthless CD has been increased by the chip. The idea that money is actually being lost is an illusion created by the record companies who use flashy printing and threats to assign a huge price to what is really very cheap to produce per unit. There is a constant cost they incurred to make the album and then a continual advertising cost and pressing cost. The pressing cost is extremely low compared to the advertising cost but it is presented as being high. By charging outlets for theft they give outlets a reason to buy antitheft hardware. However the only thing the chips will really be useful for is DRM since once you have the chip on the disc the next step is to add a tag reader into all drives. It is another way to break the spec.
The actual complex machines that *play* CDs have dropped down to now you can get a new small one portable for like $9.99 or something, it certainly didn't double or triple in price. Shoot, portable video DVD players are like 50 bucks now.
Nope, plastic disks with digital bits on them are being sold at tremendous cartel inflated hyper-gouging prices. And everyone and their cousin leroy knows that, hence why so little respect for the MAFIAA dons and their last century business models. The music and movie industries could make a lot more money and just elimnate all the DRM customer annoyances by just being realistic on prices, two bucks for a music CD, 3 bucks for a video DVD. Make them be impulse item priced, and people would by and large not even bother with downloading any more, and if they had continually dropped prices as tech advances allowed them, they could have about stopped so called "piracy" before it even got real popular. People by and large just hate to be price gouged, they lose all respect for the other side and act accordingly. The industry should look at lower per unit gross, but over all higher net by really upping volume of sales by DROPPING PRICES RADICALLY.
The doofuses who make the final pricing decisions on entertainment cartel distributed CDs and DVDs are mostly multi zillionaires who live in extremely expensive areas of the country and to them 20 bucks is chump change, nothing, like a quarter in your pocket or something, they *think* it's a cheap price, because they have no practical frame of reference compared to most people. Median US *household* income is 46 thousand bucks, it isn't $460,000 or one million 460,000 or ten million 460,000, which is what those media dons make, some huge a$$ lotta money. They have *no* practical frame of reference on pricing. They just can't relate. That's the main thing they just don't grok, which causes all the problems, and why they bribe off congress and whatnot to legislate in their business model. They just don't get it why their sales are dropping. And it's just plain stupid, they could probably make a lot more money just by being a little more realistic on retail pricing and going for a big push on volume sales.
Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't it be in the retailers best interest to reduce shoplifting, and not Hollywoods? I mean, once a retailer purchases their product from a producer, its in their best interest to sell all purchased units, and when items get stolen, retailers have to jack up the price to make up for the loss. either way, Hollywood gets their money and the retail is the one SOL.
That means the distributors are
A: looking for excuses that their movies just plain suck and people aren't buying them as much and are looking for means to jack up product prices, and just plain full of shit
B: Genuinely concerned about their business partners the retailers and want to get into new markets (as the article described)
Or am I missing something? I'm not exactly on the front line of retail marketing.
Real question is: will it be a part of the next gen DRM?
I mean, rhetoric about cutting down losses and all, well, it's good and fine. But here you have something that prevents a disc from being played, unless the correct key is sent to a chip. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky? Because I'm sure that someone at Sony just did. And if (ad absurdum) they didn't, then MS just did, in its quest to convince the MPAA and RIAA to make its own protection schemes the new entertainment centre standard.
I mean, it's a no brainer. Make the disc revert to opaque after a while, and have to be re-activated. So every time it has to be played in an authorized player.
As a bonus, it's got all the potential in the world to implement some other nasty roadblocks to fair use. E.g.,
- region coding. No more just messing with the firmware to make other region DVDs play, the chips for different regions can be physically tuned to different frequencies.
- killing the second-hand market for good. E.g., make the chip also contain a small flash area, just enough to hold the player's own key. The first time it's played, it stores the player's ID there, and subsequently refuses to activate on anything else. (Extra bonus: now you also need need to buy a new DVD each time you buy a new player.)
- limits on how often you can play the DVD. Pretty trivial: the chip also contains a counter, and when that limit is reached, it can no longer be activated. In the video market it actually has actually a legitimate use: mail-order rentals where you don't actually have to bring it back. But imagine the fun when your next Windows version has such a chip, to stop all those pirates from installing one copy of Windows on 20 machines. (And incidentally also stop anyone from reinstalling it more than once or twice after their hard drive failed, or they got pwned by a virus, or whatever.)
Etc.
And unlike just encryption, some of these can be a much bigger pain in the rear to defeat.
E.g., a counter on the chip can physically and irreversibly blow a tiny fuse for each time it's played. When it's out of fuses, that's it. There is no decryption key you can post on Digg or print on a t-shirt, that will bypass a physically destroyed circuit.
E.g., the chip doesn't need to be reprogrammable from outside in any form or shape. So there's no way to just crack its firmware to make it stay transparent. In fact, at that size and given that you want the absolute minimum power consumption, it doesn't need a firmware at all. It can simply be hard-wired.
Downside, there are physical ways to attack it, such as replacing the chip or marinating the disc in some chemical that neutralizes the dye. Both are a far bigger pain in the arse for Jack Sixpack than just downloading a cracked driver or firmware. I don't see Jack drilling holes and inserting micro-chips that gladly. Plus, it requires buying something tangible, such as a replacement chip, which is easier to trace and prosecute than an offshore warez site.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I can guarantee that the first time I experienced getting home and popping in a DVD that had not been activated would be the last time I buy a DVD from a brick and mortar store. Possibly the last time I bought a DVD, period.
I'm an honest person - I don't steal. I'm tired of being treated like a criminal, tired of being inconvenienced because some people are criminals, tired of the assumption being that I'm guilty. I'm tired of that fucking alarm going off when I walk out of a store and everyone looking at me like I'm a thief because the security tag wasn't deactivated. I'm tired of security guards at stores thinking they have a right to look through my bags. I'm tired of ruining my nails and cutting my fingers thanks to clamshell packaging.
Wanna know how to reduce theft, increase sales and all without making people feel like scumbags? Change your fucking business model to one that addresses the needs consumers actually have. The fact that your store security is for shit is *NOT* *MY* *PROBLEM*. Will Best Buy give me a new stereo if someone breaks into my home and steals mine? No. So why should I pay when they get robbed?
Here's an idea: Have machines at stores that hold spindles and spindles of DVDs and CDs. Have the customer swipe their credit card at the machine and select the movie they want, and then a pre-made DVD (for a "hot" new release) can be spit out, or, if it's something that's a little more obscure/rarely needed, it can be burnt on the spot. Don't have or want to use a credit card? No problem - just take a voucher from a display, go to the check-out line, pay with cash and the clerk can activate the code on the voucher - then the machine will give you what you want when you scan your ticket in.
This would even let there be less packaging and waste. If someone wanted a special collector's edition with all the goodies, keep those in a secure spot and get them when needed.
For small electronics, why not have vending machines like they do for iPods and cellphones now? It annoys me that I have to waste time getting a clerk to open up a cabinet just to get some $30 item I want - and it's a waste of their time, too.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
This idea has already been tried. Although it did not involve a chip on the disk, DIVX (the original movie rental scheme from Circuit City, not the codec) did allow all of the features of the "business model" you have listed. Studios loved the idea. Consumers did not. The whole system went up in smoke after about a year. In order for a new business model to be successful, it has to be accepted by customers. As far as I know, DIVX has yet to be cracked.