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Ghostbusters Is First Film Released On USB Key
arcticstoat writes "Are you the USB keymaster? You could be soon if you pick up PNY's new 2GB USB flashdrive, which comes pre-loaded with Ghostbusters. A spokesperson for PNY explained that it comes with a form of DRM that prevents you from copying the movie. 'They have DRM protection,' explained the spokesperson, 'so customers can download the movie onto their laptop or PC if they wish, but they have to have the USB drive plugged in to watch the movie, as the DRM is locked in the USB drive.' The music industry has been playing around with USB flash drives for a few years now, but it hasn't been a massive success yet; will USB movies fare any better?"
Agreed. There is no chance this DRM will work. My question is what are they afraid of? Ghostbusters has been on the pirate bay since at least 2005. I'm sure it was on Limewire and Kazaa before that. If they are testing to see if this DRM will work, they already know the answer. It works OK for the non-technical folk, and has no chance in hell for the people who would actually want to buy a movie on USB stick (if it didn't have DRM, at least). This just seems like one of the most useless ideas Hollywood has had.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
I've actually had USB drives survive the washer-and-dryer bit. Not that I'd recommend it, but it's not necessarily fatal.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Considering the DRM, how is it better than a regular DVD?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
They're more interested in proving the principle of the thing than protecting this particular film. If it gets ripped, Hollywood isn't going to be as upset as they would be if, say, Quantum of Solace were ripped. If it doesn't get ripped, well, distributing Return of the Revenge of Batman in 2012 on a 32Gb SD card isn't going to seem so crazy.
The idea of tying digital copies to a particular storage device isn't new, and several parties have been trying to persuade Hollywood that this idea works for a while. HD DVD supported something called CPRM, where each writable disk could have embedded upon it, in an unwritable part of the disk, a key that copies could be tied to. The idea was that you'd (or a kiosk would) be able to download and burn to a disk an official, authorized, copy of a movie, that would be just as uncopyable as a regular AACS-controlled disk. This was an extension of attempts by the DVD Forum to make CPRM work with regular DVDs for some years, which looks set to be a part of the next revision of the DVD standard. You can imagine how attractive this is to studios who do not want to put hundreds of thousands of copies of low-interest content in stores around the world.
Likewise, the "SD" in "SD card" is about a similar system, and initially that was the major difference between SD cards and MMC cards, though the two standards have grown apart since in other ways.
Whether this is good or bad depends on your point of view to a certain extent, but what is clear is that Hollywood isn't planning on abandoning DRM any time soon. As a result, they're not going to adopt any form of writable media to store digital copies unless it has some kind of DRM system built-in. This is a step towards that goal.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Well, I'm guessing they're just wanting to see what people will do. For that purpose, an already widely "pirated" film would be ideal.
The model of distributing the film on a USB key that serves as a DRM dongle is very curious. From a consumer point of view, this looks a lot like the way DVDs are supposed to work: the material is tied to the delivery vehicle. But -- you can also copy the movie to your hard disk, although it is still tied to the key. So, it's kind of an answer to iTunes, where you have a master key to your entire collection.
The USB format allows you to do kinds of cryptographic protections you couldn't do in a DVD. If the system requires Vista style DRM protections in the OS, then cracking the protection would be considerably harder as long as you can't just copy the file onto a hard disk. Allowing the user to copy the file to disk makes this a very interesting test. Clearly, this means that crackers will be able to put the entire DRM protocol under a microscope.
Maybe this is even what is intended.
There are a number of possible outcomes, all of which are interesting to a company that is evaluating a technology:
(1) The play from USB option is proven insecure.
(2) The play from disk option is proven insecure.
(3) One of [1,2], but not both.
(4) Both of [1,2], but sufficiently inconvenient to deter casual infringers.
etc.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
DRM, in this case, is a choice between DRM'd content and no content at all. I'd rather have DRM'd content than none.
I, on the other hand, would rather do with none than with DRM.
I made that choice when the DVDs supplanted videotape and didn't buy DVD movies - or buy or rent any movies at all - until after CSS was cracked and the movie industry gave up on their attempts to stuff that genie back into the bottle. No blu-ray players for me, either. Stopped buying CDs, too, when they started experimenting with the early computer-speaker-blowing "copy protection" that corrupted the data and depended on the error correction on players to recover the music (and thus corrupted it when you got real errors from a dirty disk) and never really got back into purchasing new music after that.
Never actually MADE a backup copy. And never downloaded a "pirated" song or movie, either. I just don't buy encumbered stuff.
Instead I found other ways to amuse myself. (For instance: The amazing number and variety of animals outside the place on the high desert put on a continuous show that's quite entertaining - especially when I flush the well and create a puddle that draws them in from miles around. And there's lots of amusement on the net that is not "pirated" copyrighted content.)
Interestingly, I don't really miss the corporate "content". Either the quality took a nosedive around that time or the product stopped matching my (quite broad) tastes. (Though from what I hear of some local bands it's more the former than the latter.)
We all make our choices.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way