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?"

Comments

Re:countdown

[WK2]

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.

Re:One positive

[FlyByPC]

I've actually had USB drives survive the washer-and-dryer bit. Not that I'd recommend it, but it's not necessarily fatal.

Re:countdown

[squiggleslash]

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.