BD+ Successfully Resealed

IamTheRealMike writes "A month on from the story that BD+ had been completely broken, it appears a new generation of BD+ programs has re-secured the system. A SlySoft developer now estimates February 2009 until support is available. There's a list of unrippable movies on the SlySoft forums; currently there are 16. Meanwhile, one of the open source VM developers seems to have given up on direct emulation attacks, and is now attempting to break the RSA algorithm itself. Back in March SlySoft confidently proclaimed BD+ was finished and said the worst case scenario was 3 months' work: apparently they underestimated the BD+ developers."

Comments

Getting Old

[Thyamine]

I can tell I must be getting old when one of my first responses is 'Cmon, just go buy the movie already'.

Re:Getting Old

[Darkness404]

The problem isn't that people aren't buying the movie, its because when I buy the movie I can't convert it to use on several devices. For example, say I have 3 desktops and one has a Blu-Ray drive. I don't want to spend ~$400 on Blu-Ray drives for the other 2 of my desktops so it makes more sense to rip the movie, stream it across the network or put it on a high-capacity external hard drive and read it from there.

Re:Getting Old

[Retric]

I thought the BR DRM prevented you from streaming the movies in full quality over the network from an external drive. If it works then there is a fairly major hole in there DRM system.

Re:Getting Old

[unlametheweak]

I would presume that most people who buy a movie would be more interested in watching it than cracking it. That said, they would also prefer the options of making backups and storing it on hard disks, or whatever devices they may choose without having to worry about DRM issues.

Re:Getting Old

[schon]

That's the entire point - I *want* to buy the movie, but I won't until it plays on my hardware.

I have hardware that is capable of playing HD content, but the content providers are erecting artifical barriers to prevent me from doing it. Once the stupid DRM is cracked, I'll buy it.

Re:Getting Old

[earthforce_1]

The problem is I can't watch the damned thing under Linux, until BD+ is forever broken.

Re:Getting Old

[aliquis]

And he never said why he needed to be able to play it on all desktops either...

Sure, breaking it makes sense for all bluray-devices which aren't players, whichever those are ..

Re:Getting Old

[kkwst2]

The player runs a type of virtual machine, but the actual code is contained on the disc itself. This code executes on the VM running on the player and authenticates the player/environment before it will allow the disk to play.

I'm not completely familiar with the crack of BD+, but I think they didn't complete crack the algorithm, just found a work around. Apparently they were able to change the coding slightly such that it breaks the work-around while still running in players.

Re:Getting Old

[maxume]

If you don't have any plans to play it back on a 5 foot screen that you sit 8 feet (maybe even closer...) from, it makes the most sense to buy the DVD.

Re:Getting Old

[Lumpy]

I do buy the movie already. but putting in a Disc is so arcane it's not funny. I have a high end media server system that will play HD very well. I want that movie on my system so I can pick the film and watch it WITHOUT all the useless crap and menu garbage.

So I BREAK and rip every disc.

Re:Getting Old

[Elder Lane Hour]

You know what's really getting old? DRM, and it's not getting old gracefully. DRM doesn't work. It never did work, it probably never will work. Maybe it's about time that big movie execs started thinking along the lines of satisfying customers, rather than forcing them to bend over with every purchase. Fuck Bluray. They obviously don't want our money.

Re:Getting Old

[BorgDrone]

Why do I have to buy movies again if I already own the DVD ? What is it exactly that I'm buying when I purchase a DVD or CD ?

Do I pay for a license for the movie/album/etc. meaning I can get a replacement copy for just the production costs of the disc if it breaks or a new format is introduced ? Or am I buying a physical object that I'm free to do with as I please ?

Re:Getting Old

[Wowsers]

Surely this quest by programmers / crackers (call them what you will) is not about buying the movie or getting it "for free" on torrents. It's about breaking the discs to break the (apparently legal) movie / music cartels, breaking enforced regionalised disc sales, and breaking enforced device viewing so you can view the content you paid for on any device.

With VHS analogue tape, the only thing setting you back was the PAL/NTSC/SECAM conversion problem, but a VHS tape could be played anywhere in the world. Now in the digital age, you can't do that with the latest standards. This is about competition, and competition the media providers don't like.

Re:Getting Old

[RalphSleigh]

From my understanding the crack was to emulate the VM to the point it could run existing programs, these new disks come with a more complex program their emulated VM can't handle.

Re:Getting Old

[Anonymous Coward]

I own about 300 movies on DVD, and a number of TV series on DVD. I've probably purchased about half of them, and the other half were given as gifts. Several of these were replacements for VHS tapes of movies. Every one of them is ripped to DVD and stored in h.264 on a large network drive. That means that I can watch it on my TV using my HTPC, or on my laptop wherever I am in the house, or on my desktop in my office while I'm doing something else. I can stream it to work if it's a slow day, and when we're on vacation, we don't have to plan on what we may want to watch and bring a lot of extra clutter. When I'm at home and watching a movie, searching through the list on the HTPC is much more convenient than looking through a bookshelf, and it also means that I don't have to keep all of my DVDs physically accessible. More space in the house, less clutter, and less obvious temptation for thieves.

I hadn't yet made the jump to Blu-ray because of the DRM. I want the same convenience that I have now, and with DRM, I can't get it. My record shows that I'm pretty willing to spend money on my media, and even replace movies I already own with higher-quality versions. All I want is to be able to exercise what I consider to be my fair use rights over the copies of the movies I've purchased.

Technology is progressing at an amazing rate. It's supposed to make our lives easier and more convenient. Everyone should be able to have a box of movies which lets them watch their media wherever they want. It's really fantastic. But for me, it won't be based upon Blu-ray.

Re:Getting Old

[johnsonav]

DRM doesn't work. It never did work, it probably never will work.

I'm pretty sure this story is about how DRM does work. It keeps people from copying the movie in full HD resolution, without getting in the way of 90% of consumers, and stays within the bounds of the law. That's pretty much the definition of successful DRM, from the industry's perspective. Until there is a crack available, BD+ is the current and best example of working DRM.

You know what would change the movie company attitudes about DRM? Massive public outrage, something that just hasn't happened yet for movies (for games, on the other hand, it has, somewhat). Most people never run up against the limitations imposed by DRM. I think we have to wait until people become more accustomed to the potential of ubiquitous media sharing before they care widely about movie DRM.

Re:Getting Old

[BrentH]

The part that NO ONE BR+ decoder allows you to do that, stream it contents.

Re:Getting Old

[datapharmer]

because it is a real f*^kin pain in the ass to get up and walk clear across the house to change discs. That's why. It makes way more sense to have them stored in a central location on mass storage where any of them can be streamed on demand to any other location in the house... Or, how about this scenario: oops, I dropped it and it scratched. What now, you want me to buy another blu-ray/DVD/flying-saucer-drm-machine? Why can't I use the "license" from this one?

Re:Getting Old

[westlake]

I can tell I must be getting old when one of my first responses is 'Cmon, just go buy the movie already'.

And it's sweet revenge that the "unbreakable" titles are the must-haves for the Geek. Titles like Firefly and Futurama.

Re:Getting Old

[Dun Malg]

why the fuck would he buy a reader he knows won't work in his machine? That's a stupid fucking question, even if it was rhetorical.

Re:Getting Old

[swillden]

And do you even have a bluray reader in your Linux machine? If not get a dedicated player and stop making excuses.

Nice solution. I really want to drag yet another piece of hardware with me while traveling.

A dedicated player has another problem, even when I'm at home: My younger kids tend to destroy optical disks. A video server has been a great solution for DVDs, and until it will work for Blu-Ray, I have no interest in buying Blu-Ray movies for them.

Yet another issue is that I like watching movies on my laptop screen, in bed. Can't do that until Blu-Ray is broken. My kids often watch movies on their computers, too, which also run Linux. Can't do that until Blu-Ray is broken.

The bottom line is that while some people -- maybe even most -- have no problem with the studios' idea of how we should watch movies, it doesn't work for others.

I don't pirate anything. Every movie and every song in my house was legitimately purchased, but EVERYTHING is ripped and the original optical disks are rarely used. When I can watch Blu-Ray content the way I want to watch it, then I'll buy it. Until then, I'll stick with DVD.

Re:Getting Old

[Duradin]

So netflix streams in BR quality now?

Damn, I wish I had the connection speed to support that. Or that the stuff that's on BR (ie new stuff) was streamable. Or that'd I'd have a constant wireless connection for all my portable devices.

Re:Getting Old

[Animaether]

Your reply is exactly why Thyamine is 'getting old'.

Rewind to the 80's, if you will. There were no DVD players - you'd be lucky to have a CD player - and certainly no computers that would be playing back high quality video (exceptions aside, I know the Archimedes did some pretty nice things, but I wouldn't quite call it 'high quality'.).

So if you had 2 TVs in the house - say, 1 in the living room and 1 in the bedroom - and 1 VCR (let's not ponder where). So you buy a VHS (or beta or Video2000.. 'tis the 80's, after all), get home, and then curse the heavens that The Corporate Man is keeping you down by not allowing you to magically play back that same video on both TVs, just for the pathetic excuse they bring forth that you would need a 2nd VCR? .. probably not. You'd just eventually get another VCR.

If you purchased a CD, would you kick up a shitstorm about not being able to play that back on your walkman? .. probably not. You'd just get your tapedeck and record the CD straight to tape.

Fast forward to 'now'.. instead of you saying "well, I guess I'll just get a blu-ray drive for that machine as well" or "I guess I'll just have to record the video with a capture card / my computer's video-out"... you realize it's well past the 90's, everything is digital, and by jove that means you have the right to duplicate and format shift the media's content as you damn well please, and screw the corporations for making this difficult for you.

I'm not saying that that is a wrong stance on things... but the change to digital has changed how we all view these things as well. The old ways (getting a second drive, or recording to a different media - yes, you may get quality loss) still work, but now we resist due to the changed mindset that came with going digital.

Re:Getting Old

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I'm not buying a Bluray movie until I can rip them. Why? (1) I want to play in a player which will skip region coding and UOP crap. (2) I want to play them on any device, and a frequently rip DVDs and move them around at the moment.

Am I a dirty "pirate"? No. In fact I've only ever made an unauthorized copy of one movie, and that was because the movie is unavaiable through any other means. (Great film by the way ...)

I have stacks and stacks of purchased DVDs at home.

Rich.

Re:Getting Old

[mweather]

I can easily tell the difference between 480p and 1080p on my 15" laptop. If you can't, you need glasses.

Re:Getting Old

[mrops]

I can tell I must still be young when one of my first responses is 'Cmon, just go download the movie already'.

Re:Getting Old

[mabhatter654]

The part where you have 19 MegaBYTES per second of bandwidth...(full 1080p stream from disc) that's higher than 100Mb (100M bits/ 8 bit.byte ~ 12MB) can push.

Even with Gig, you couldn't run many other machines or they'd shut you down unless you had good switches (not consumer junk). They don't let you stream the display, so you'd have to stream the file, from physical media, to the PC, to the network fast enough to keep up with playback.

good luck with that.

Re:Getting Old

[TheFlamingoKing]

The Digital Copy versions on these discs are often DRM laced Windows Media files, or iPod formatted. My preferred format is neither.

If I can't use it on my devices in a way I want, then I don't own it. How hard is that to understand?

Re:Getting Old

[Cylix]

You're argument assumes that the only purpose in circumventing the protection is to use it to commit copyright infringement.

Personally, I would like to be able to use my Mythbox to play HD content. Fairly similar to how I can play DVDs.

Unfortunately it does appear I'm going to have to sacrifice some device to free up an input for a stand alone player.

Re:Getting Old

[prisoner-of-enigma]

What is it exactly that I'm buying when I purchase a DVD or CD ?

In the case of a DVD, you're buying the right to watch the movie in standard definition when playing off the physical disc. Legally, you have no right to copy the disc, rip it, or duplicate its content in any way.

Why should you pay for a Blu-ray movie when you already own a DVD? Perhaps you think high-def remastering is done for free by beneficial elves? Or how about Blu-ray menu programming, which I assure you is no cake walk?

The price of a DVD, Blu-ray, or even a CD is not just the price of the content recorded or stamped on it. It's also the price of everyone who mastered the disc, the facility that stamped it, the art department that designed the disc and jacket label, the shipping, the warehousing...and a small profit for the retailer who sold it to you so they can keep people employed and the lights on (or the website up as the case may be).

The problem with a crusade against "Big Media" is it's going to hurt a lot more people than just the big boy fat cats people loathe so much. There are plenty of working stiffs out there who don't make millions of dollars a year. For that matter, I'm sure there's a sizable geek presence throughout the industry maintaining the production networks, storage, and compute clusters. Care to see them unemployed? It could just as easily be you.

Re:Getting Old

[thejynxed]

Actually, quite a few people are starting to run up against the ugly DRM wall.

Ergo the people pissed off @ MS and Apple because their purchases don't work on their Sansa or Creative player.

Also, it's more than common to hear of trouble with Blu-Ray as well. It really is a superior format, but it's also totally crippled to the point that various legit Blu-Ray discs refuse to play on the various players from major manufacturers.

It's quite silly that your disc will play on a Sony player but totally fail on one from Samsung or Panasonic for example.

But yes, the people are starting to wake up to the fact that they just spent X amount of $$$ on their media and can't play it due to DRM. And they are starting to get ticked off.

Google has an absurd amount of search results if you care to do a bit of research.

I wonder how long it will be before they ban the return of HD media like they have with video games (you know, because part of the way they crack the DRM is using data from the discs to retrieve keys)...

Re:Getting Old

[mabhatter654]

the whole point of Blu-Ray is that it is REQUIRED to be connected for licensing updates just like this. Older players will automatically update themselves when newer discs are put in either from the internet or from the disc. This is exactly how the system is designed to work. Along with stopping new discs from being cracked, it keeps Players from being cracked as well if they want to watch new movies they have to stay up to date.

Re:Getting Old

[schon]

The part where you have 19 MegaBYTES per second of bandwidth...(full 1080p stream from disc)

No.

Besides the fact that a stream's bandwidth is *never* defined in bytes per second (because 'byte' in the context of a stream isn't well-defined - ie. does it include error correction bits, transmission overhead, etc.), the bluray association itself says that BD-ROM video streams are 54Mbps.

Re:Getting Old

[Ucklak]

Since when is 'piracy' removing DRM for personal use?

Am I a pirate because I rip my DVDs for portability so that my children can't break the original DVD?
Am I a pirate becuase I ripped Transformers and removed all the adult crap to where it's just a movie of transforming giant robots for my kids to watch?

I paid for my copies. I have a legal right to do whatever I want to the media as long as it doesn't leave my home.

Re:Getting Old

[IamTheRealMike]

BD+ isn't an algorithm so there's no global crack unless the designers made a serious mistake in their implementation. A movie protected by BD+ is partly damaged ... elements of the video stream are deliberately corrupted, making it unwatchable. The BD+ program runs and checks out the environment it's in. If it's happy it spits out a patch table, which tells the player how to repair the movie. Note that the patch table can alter the movie in arbitrary ways - theoretically, things could change depending on what player you use. This allows the developers to discover which player is leaking video.

Early BluRay discs weren't protected by BD+ at all, and the first titles that were barely used the features BD+ provides. They existed only to detect a buggy software player but otherwise didn't do much. This was deliberate - the BD+ people are playing a long game, and don't want to play all their cards at once. The idea is to reveal their tricks slowly, such that it takes a few months to unravel each time. Because most sales of the movies are soon after they come out, it doesn't matter if a 6-12 month old program is broken.

In theory every title could have a unique BD+ program that takes time to crack, but that's pretty expensive, so they seem to come in waves. Probably there are only a few people in the world who know how to write BD+ programs and then their work is used on lots of discs.

The first round in this game was easy - the BD+ titles simply relied on obscurity to protect them. If they ran at all, they spat out the patch table. After SlySoft and later the doom9 guys figured out how BD+ worked, there were confident predictions that the system was broken, but of course that was never the case. The second round is the one we're on now and it's apparently quite the smackdown ... nobody knows what they've done, but making the new programs think they're in a licensed player is tough.

FWIW I don't buy nor download BluRay movies, I just find BD+ a fascinating battle of wits. I'm sure there'll be a lot of back and forth over the lifetime of the system.

Re:Getting Old

[IamTheRealMike]

Or until somebody writes and sells a licensed BluRay player for Linux. Y'know ... like any other platform.

Re:Getting Old

[Evanisincontrol]

And do you even have a bluray reader in your Linux machine? If not get a dedicated player and stop making excuses.

What wonderfully snarky answer would you have said if his answer was, "Yes, I do have a bluray reader in my machine."?

Re:Getting Old

[Dare nMc]

without getting in the way of 90% of consumers

so only 10% of customers pissed off, and a equal number staying clear altogether would be success? We all know it will be cracked, We just don't know what kind of HW well need to do that.

It doesn't take 10% complaints, more like 1% for me to stay clear of a faulty product.

a google search for BD+ gives me this

"The Samsung BDP-1200 and LG BH100 cannot play the discs at all while the Samsung BDP-1000 give error messages and playback "stutter".

The discs do work with other players, including the PS3, although some have reported lengthy load times of up to 2 minutes. "

Re:Getting Old

[forgoil]

They really do not get it, which is sad. No amount of trickery is going to stop anyone from getting the movie off the internet, be it FTP, BT, or whatever. Fair prices, good products and what do you know, people might actually buy their products. DRM will not solve a single problem for anyone but those who produces the DRM software, and to be honest, screw them!

Re:Getting Old

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you spent all your post attacking him but made zero attempt to make his idea work.

Background: When you ask for an evaluation of your property, you get a total, broken down into two parts: the value of the land (how much you'd get if your house disappeared) and the value of the house.

They could price DVD, Blu-ray and CDs in the same way: split it into 2 (or even 3) parts:

(1) price of the content,
(2) price of the mastering,
(3) price of manufacturing/distribution.

If you want to replace a broken DVD with a new DVD, you'd pay (3).
If you want to replace a DVD with a Blu-ray, you'd pay (2) + (3).

Re:Getting Old

[Xugumad]

They won't play for me.

No, seriously, for some reason my HDCP-enabled graphics card won't talk HDCP to my HDCP-enabled monitor (yes I'm running Vista in this case). I figured I could either spend the rest of my life hacking at the mess, or grab AnyDVD HD and not worry about it any more.

So... yeah, I'll buy them when they work with my hardware.

Well, actually I won't, because so far 90% of the Blu-Ray disks I buy aren't worth the premium. Instead, I'll probably just buy the DVD for cheap in 6 months time and try to remember why I ever cared.

Re:Getting Old

[Tubal-Cain]

You didn't purchase a movie. You purchased a license to watch that movie using that disk. What you're doing is against the terms of the license which is why DRM now enforces the license you purchase.

Really? I don't remember seeing a license agreement, and the FBI warning simply says:

Licensed for private home exhibition only. Any public performance, copying, or other use is strictly prohibited.

My ISOs certainly aren't public.

Re:Getting Old

[vidarh]

Well, for my part this means I'll hold of even longer before buying any BluRay discs. I refuse to start using it until I'm guaranteed that I can rip all the disks I get onto my fileserver so I can store the disks away. So congratulations to the movie studios on losing lots of sales from people like me. Given the low adoption of BluRay so far, they can't afford to push away people who are usually early adopters.

Re:Getting Old

[m.ducharme]

Where was the license agreement that he agreed to, when he purchased the movie player, and the disc? You actually have to "sign" an agreement to purchase a license, hence the click-through agreements on software (that are questionable anyway, as you have to make the agreement before you purchase the license, but that's another question).

When you buy a DVD and/or player (and presumably the same is true for Blu-Ray, never bought one) nobody asks you to sign an agreement, the dvd player doesn't make you click through an EULA before you can watch the disc. As far as I can tell, no licensing contract exists. The only contract that exists is the one made when money was exchanged for a good, which is a transfer of ownership. If that's the only contract, then the buyer owns the dvd and player, and can do what he damn well pleases with it.

Re:Getting Old

[vidarh]

Copyright law trumps the license texts - they can't take away rights they don't have the right to take away under the law. If they could stop this with lawsuits they would - so far they're not been a single case where consumers have been prevented from doing what GP suggests, because the studios know they don't stand a chance in hell of enforcing terms that stop people from that kind of use.

DRM is trying to enforce terms that are not legally enforceable because they are unreasonable.

Re:Getting Old

[TheGratefulNet]

MANY of us already bought into the centralized notion of 'media servers'.

this flies directly in the fact of 'feed the damned physical media in, one by one'.

I WILL NOT TOLERATE THAT (yelling intended).

neither will most of my peers.

BD can go fuck itself; until its fully and finally cracked they BD product sellers wont' see a dime from me.

the very notion that there is running code to 'work against the user in an arms race' is sickening to me. by definition each disc contains malware. and you are, currently, FORCED to run that malware.

sheesh. no thanks, sony. go fuck yourself.

Re:Getting Old

[Ihmhi]

No, you're not. According to the DMCA however, you're still a criminal. Isn't it wonderful?

Re:Getting Old

[Tikkun]

Since when is 'piracy' removing DRM for personal use?

If it were up to the movie studios, you'd be a pirate for not paying for content each time you consume it.

Re:Getting Old

[yamiyasha]

If I remember right the Analog hole got sealed with Blu-Ray, so Yea, the Company's forced us to change our thinking.

Re:Getting Old

[vidarh]

The discs do work with other players, including the PS3, although some have reported lengthy load times of up to 2 minutes. "

*shudder*. I get agitated when I have to wait to get through 10 second animations before my DVD menus show up. I'd break the player if I had to wait 2 minutes.

Re:Getting Old

[simcop2387]

If you purchased a CD, would you kick up a shitstorm about not being able to play that back on your walkman? .. probably not. You'd just get your tapedeck and record the CD straight to tape.

except you just said you'd do exactly what he wants to do back in the 80's!

Re:Getting Old

[Belial6]

And worse yet, the ads say 'Own X Movie'. They don't say 'Own a license to watch X movie from a disk'. They advertise the PURCHASE of the movie. The store has a big sign that says SALE. If the movie studios are only licensing you to watch that movie using the disk, they are committing massive fraud, and should have to pay the price for that.

Re:Getting Old

[zippthorne]

I wonder if you could send the media companies a bill for the time spent watching he previews and condescending crap, since they don't let you buy a more expensive version without that advertising:

They're making money off of your time, so shouldn't you be compensated for that? TV has ads, but that's how you pay for it: you pay with your time.

Re:Getting Old

[Free the Cowards]

You didn't purchase a movie. You purchased a license to watch that movie using that disk.

Wrong.

If you think you're right, then prove it. Produce the text of the license.

Re:Getting Old

[dgatwood]

Okay, I'll feed the troll. Copyright law recognizes your right to make an unlimited number of copies for format shifting purposes, and does not recognize any inherent right of the copyright owner to prevent you from making copies for interoperability purposes.

Therefore, the answer to the question of how many copies I need is this: one backup in the original format, plus one in a format optimized for each device I own or will ever own in my lifetime. Anything less than that is a copout.

Re:Getting Old

[Free the Cowards]

You mean you can't point a camera at your TV and record the movie? Wow. How'd they manage to pull that off?

Re:Getting Old

[Free the Cowards]

BD+ isn't an algorithm so there's no global crack unless the designers made a serious mistake in their implementation.

I don't buy it. A global crack would merely look so much like a real player that the BD+ program couldn't tell the difference. It seems that this is tricky to do, but at least in theory there's nothing that says it can't be done.

Re:Getting Old

[profplump]

Maybe because I'm not at home while it happens -- I have a laptop without a BR drive.

Maybe because I don't want to switch disks. I own hundreds of DVDs, and it would be nice to browse them from the remote, rather than by hand.

But I probably shouldn't answer at all -- you're just looking for excuses to troll.

Re:Getting Old

[jlarocco]

The only reason I have to rip a DVD is the terrible quality of a cheap DVD drive. It does not slow down while playing a DVD movie like more expensive DVD drives do. I have two options: crack the DVD protection and rip it, or write a limited rights executable (or a service) C program for windows to slow down the drive temporarily. Guess which option most people select.

Or you can spend $25 and buy a drive that doesn't suck. I'm guessing most people choose that.

Re:Getting Old

[Free the Cowards]

You're buying a physical object. You aren't buying a license, and you don't have any kind of license. (For the obvious proof of this, try to find the text of the license. You can't, because there isn't one.)

Now it just so happens that the content on that physical object is protected by copyright. Copyright law places various restrictions on what you can do with that content.

Under old-style copyright law it is illegal to make copies of that content beyond the bounds of fair use. So no ripping the DVD to other DVDs and selling them on the street corner. On the other hand making a backup copy for yourself is fine. Making a copy for your friend, that gets a little fuzzy, but probably not fine. (Fair use is not very well defined.)

However that content is scrambled as a copy-protection measure and the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass that scrambling. So if you use any ripper then you're breaking the law. (Unless you have a rare unscrambled DVD, in which case it's fine, so long as you stay within the bounds of traditional copyright.) However it is legal to, say, point a camera at your screen and make a copy that way. But what you do with that copy had better stay within the bounds of copyright law.

In short, you're not paying for a license, but you're not free to do what you please with the physical object you're buying either.

Re:Getting Old

[profplump]

Fair use lets me make copies of any copyrighted work to which I have legitimate access, regardless of the license, at least in certain circumstances. Personal use on alternate media is one of those circumstances.

The only legal violation is removing DRM, which isn't a copyright issue but a problem with the DMCA, and one that many people have asked to be made an official exemption.

Re:Getting Old

[funkatron]

Why do I have to buy movies again if I already own the DVD ? What is it exactly that I'm buying when I purchase a DVD or CD ?

Fuck all.

Regards

The MPAA

Re:Getting Old

[earthforce_1]

why the fuck would he buy a reader he knows won't work in his machine? That's a stupid fucking question, even if it was rhetorical.

Exactly. I am buying or probably building a new desktop machine and was considering a Blu-Ray capable drive when it looked like there was an open source fix, hence hope of seeing Blu-Ray support for open source players. Instead, I will stick with a tried and true DVD. Until this is fixed, Blu-Ray is useless to me. The solution of "buy a stand alone player" and switch cables around on my monitor makes as much sense as installing a MS-Vista partition just so I can watch movies.

Re:Getting Old

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuses? I have an old PC running Ubuntu I use as a media center. It has all my music and rips of all my DVDs. The cds & dvds themselves are in a crate and put away.The whole set up takes up about 2 shoeboxes worth of space in my living room, and with my projector it makes for a pretty sweet set up.

With blu-ray I couldn't have this set up:

1. I couldn't back up my movies to a hard drive.
2. I couldn't compress the movies I liked, but didn't necessarily care for the extras or super high quality.
3. It would take way too much processing power
4. I couldn't play it on a Linux machine.
5. I couldn't play it back on my projector without degraded quality (hdcp)

Blu-Ray is defective by design, as dvd was before it. It should be cracked. Thats not an excuse, these are real limitations to reasonable use. People like me are a market, not a court case. In theory I can upgrade my drives, cpu, projector, and graphics card to handle blu ray, but why would I if i cant enjoy watching a movie when i want without having the look for the disc and hope its not scratched?

Re:Getting Old

[AceofSpades19]

Its impossible for DRM to work as long as the customer can still watch the video. DRM is basically me sending an encrypted text file to you, then sending you the key and then trying to prevent you from seeing the contents of the text file, its a flawed concept. Sure, it might work for a little while, but sooner or later it will be broken.

Re:Getting Old

[marcansoft]

The problem here is that apparently there's public key crypto stuff in the way. This means that you can "easily" make your emulator emulate a certain player with a certain keyset, but it'll get revoked. Theoretically, they can use the patch table to make the leaked video identify the player that produced it.

Re:Getting Old

[0xygen]

My understanding is that the only license is usually the implicit license granted under copyright law. You purchased an object which contains copyright content. By purchasing said object, you were granted a license by the copyright holder to view the copyrighted content within, exactly the same as a book, for example. Copyright laws then grants you "fair use" of the copyrighted content, in cases where fair applies as described by the law and also grants you a right to make a sole backup copy of the protected content. So I think you purchased both? IANAL, so correct me if I'm wrong?

Re:Getting Old

[TheRaven64]

And if he is right, then I think the ASA would like to hear about it, considering all of the DVD adverts that have 'Yours to own on DVD for only...' in their text.

Re:Getting Old

[mr_matticus]

You're buying a physical object. You aren't buying a license, and you don't have any kind of license. (For the obvious proof of this, try to find the text of the license. You can't, because there isn't one.)

You're buying both, and your critical error is that a license has text. It does not. A license is not a document or an otherwise tangible thing. It is a grant of rights stemming from the owner of those rights to a user. Lack of text has no bearing on whether a license exists.

Second, the Copyright Act clearly spells out exactly what rights you do receive upon purchase: ownership of the medium, but zero ownership of the work (s. 202). You have no right to reproduce the work contained on the medium (s. 106), except as specifically permitted (i.e. licensed) by the Copyright Act (ss. 107-22), or as otherwise licensed to you by explicit grant or agreement (e.g. an SLA).

Making a copy for your friend, that gets a little fuzzy, but probably not fine. (Fair use is not very well defined.)

Absolutely not fine. There's nothing fuzzy about that. The AHRA permits the making of mix tapes and CDs for personal sharing with friends. You're allowed to let friends borrow your copy. You are not allowed to make a complete copy and then distribute that copy. Fair use doesn't enter into it at all, since all four fair use factors weigh solidly against it. As to the bounds of fair use, definition is rarely the problem. Fair use is the transformative incorporation of a portion of a work in a new work for a valid artistic or informative purpose. Fair use is not personal use. Personal use is a "fair" (in the colloquial sense) use, but it is not Fair Use.

but you're not free to do what you please with the physical object you're buying either.

Nonsense. You can do all of the things you can do with any other bit of plastic you own. But the bit of plastic isn't the valuable part, so it doesn't matter much. There's nothing you would want to do with the physical object that would be meaningful, though. "Ripping the DVD" isn't interacting with the physical object, it's extracting the copyrighted work contained therein, which you technically have no express right to do.

However, as a matter of personal, private use, you have a reasonable right to rip your own collection, provided that you do not make simultaneous use of the copy and do not, under any circumstances, share by distribution any of those copies, and that all digital copies are destroyed when ownership of the disc is lost, and that you can at all times prove lawful possession of a legal copy for every digital title in your possession. Staying within those limitations means that you will not be successfully sued; even deviating from them, as many do, makes it improbable that you'll make it to anyone's radar screen. Start a massive distribution network with hundreds or thousands of infringing works and trouble starts, as it rightly should.

US copyright law protects economic rights--that is the utilitarian incentive system. Don't interfere in or with the market and you're okay.

Re:Getting Old

[blueg3]

There is a global crack (theoretically). BD+ is just software supplied on the disk that runs on your hardware and enables proper interpretation of the data on the disk. There is nothing, theoretically, preventing you from completely emulating a valid BD+ runtime environment or otherwise obtaining the information necessary to properly interpret the data from the supplied software. It's very difficult, since they in essence controlling a component of your hardware by selling Blu-Ray readers containing a proprietary runtime, the behavior of which is not disclosed to you.

Re:Getting Old

[TheRaven64]

curse the heavens that The Corporate Man is keeping you down by not allowing you to magically play back that same video on both TVs, just for the pathetic excuse they bring forth that you would need a 2nd VCR? .. probably not. You'd just eventually get another VCR.

My family didn't have 2 TVs in the '80s, but several people I knew were in this situation and solved it by running the SCART signal to one TV and a long coax cable to the TV in the other room (I think - possibly the other way around). Some of them even got relays for their remote controls so they could watch it in both rooms.

Re:Getting Old

[Free the Cowards]

There's no such thing as an implicit license granted under copyright law. Where does this idea come from? It simply has no similarity with reality.

When you purchase an object which contains copyrighted content, you purchased that object. Full stop, end of story. No license is involved.

You don't need a license to use an object which contains copyrighted content. That's why there is no license in the picture. Not implicit, not explicit. You can do anything you want with that object and with that content so long as it is not forbidden by copyright. You can burn it. You can watch it 50 times in a row while eating hot dogs. You can make seven different copies, one for each day of the week. You can shift it to a different format so you can watch it elsewhere.

What you cannot do is distribute copies on a large scale or carry out a public performance of this content. Unless the copyright holder gives you permission, of course. But all the rest is simply permitted by default, because it's not forbidden. No licenses in sight.

Re:Getting Old

[Free the Cowards]

You're buying both, and your critical error is that a license has text. It does not. A license is not a document or an otherwise tangible thing. It is a grant of rights stemming from the owner of those rights to a user. Lack of text has no bearing on whether a license exists.

Second, the Copyright Act clearly spells out exactly what rights you do receive upon purchase: ownership of the medium, but zero ownership of the work (s. 202). You have no right to reproduce the work contained on the medium (s. 106), except as specifically permitted (i.e. licensed) by the Copyright Act (ss. 107-22), or as otherwise licensed to you by explicit grant or agreement (e.g. an SLA).

So where is the license? As far as I can see, all you get is some restrictions, and what you're allowed to do falls out implicitly as the inverse of those restrictions. Still no license in sight. You say a license is a grant of right. What rights are being granted? You simply own a physical object, and can do with it as you wish, as long as you obey the restrictions set forth in the law. This is not a license, any more than the fact that I'm not allowed to stab people with a kitchen knife means that it came with a license.

Re:Getting Old

[TheRaven64]

I'm pretty sure this story is about how DRM does work.

It's certainly worked for me. I have had absolutely no issues with BD DRM at all. The widespread coverage it got meant I was able to easily avoid these problems by not buying a BD player or any disks.

It keeps people from copying the movie in full HD resolution, without getting in the way of 90% of consumers, and stays within the bounds of the law.

If not playing on all (legal) players and 2-minute load times are count as 'not getting in the way' then you and I have different definitions of the term. Or perhaps you mean the 90% of consumers who have avoided BD - in that case, yes, it certainly doesn't get in our way: we're happy with DVD while we wait for HD DRM-free H.264 downloads.

Re:Getting Old

[TheRaven64]

Hell, some of us don't even want a home media server. A film has to be pretty exceptional for me to want to watch it more than twice - certainly more than once a year or two. I'd rather just pay for a subscription to a service which let me download any new or old movie and watch it for a fixed monthly cost. I have no desire to pay for a home server to store every film and TV show I've ever watched and may want to rewatch again in the future.

Re:Getting Old

[Repossessed]

How much did a VCR cost? I can't imagine justifying that with what a low end DVD players costs today.

Re:Getting Old

[lordofthechia]

Ditto. I was looking forward to adding a Blu-ray drive to my myth setup and buying tons of movies this christmas, but really there's no point now. It was already a pain (with having to rip the movie to the HDD first), without having to worry about some movies not working outright.

Guess I'll stick to my old DVDs a bit longer! Good one Sony!

Re:Getting Old

[Anonymous Coward]

Rewind to the 1780s, if you will. There were no CD players, or tape players, or LP players, or even phonographs. So if you wanted to listen to music on demand, you'd have to hire musicians to play it, or maybe have a little sing-song with your friends and family.

If you hired a string quartet, would you kick up a shitstorm about not being able to get them to come back and play an encore whenever you wanted? ...probably not. You'd just hum the tune to yourself instead, or maybe buy another harpsichord.

Okay, I think you can fill the rest in for yourself. My point, insofar as I have one? Technology does advance, and the whole reason why we bother to encourage technology to advance is that it makes our lives better. So it is not only reasonable for us to expect to be able to stream video around our houses -- that expectation is exactly the right attitude to have. Our distant ancestors didn't put all that effort into evolving opposable thumbs and bipedal posture just to have us slouch back in our sofas and let corporations stifle innovation to protect their business models.

Re:Getting Old

[Volvogga]

The only reason I have to rip a DVD is the terrible quality of a cheap DVD drive. It does not slow down while playing a DVD movie like more expensive DVD drives do. I have two options: crack the DVD protection and rip it, or write a limited rights executable (or a service) C program for windows to slow down the drive temporarily. Guess which option most people select.

Or you can spend $25 and buy a drive that doesn't suck. I'm guessing most people choose that.

Or walk away from playing the dvd on the computer all together after seeing the $45 price tag for NerdX (take your pick) Computer Service to install it on top of the $25.

That situation kinda depends on your definition of *most people*. I would say most people don't know that it's possible to rip a DVD... or what rip means, for that matter.

*shrugs*

Re:Getting Old

[MoFoQ]

it's definitely not about buy the movie or not.

When the fastest Blu-ray player takes over 40 seconds to boot up (PS3 and others take over a minute) and some movies force previews and other crap onto you (this is after the player boots up)....one of the main purposes to "rip" is to bypass all these headaches.
(some of it will also be to set up a HTPC system that stores all...much like what Kaleidescape (Wiki) does for DVDs)
(my own player takes the amount of time that it takes for me to go to the bathroom and back...but I guess I can't really complain too much as I got the damn thing for free....o well)

anyways...I was under the impression that a PS3 can still rip blu-ray titles with easy (with any cell3 linux distro and a simple dd command)

Re:Getting Old

[blind biker]

I hope visual impairment is not considered a character weakness around here.

By the way: not all problems with eyesight can be corrected with glasses.

Re:Getting Old

[GravityStar]

I agree on not buying anything Blu-Ray until it is broken. But you know, with stories on slashdot like this, I wonder why I should buy anything that has any DRM at all. Doesn't matter if it is successful or not. Because, with this update mechanism of Blu-Ray, once broken, it may re-seal itself. You'll never be sure.

That is not how I want my media. I don't want to play some inane game with the publisher where I try to get the content from some black box and he tries to close it again.

I'm starting to lean more and more to: maybe I'll just never buy anything on Blu-Ray.

Re:Getting Old

[osu-neko]

By this time next year, "portability" will have become a piss-poor excuse excuse for piracy.

However, "rights management" will still be a piss-poor euphemism for denying consumers their rights.

Re:Getting Old

[Renraku]

Well, someone has to make the first step.

Buy the movie, then return it to the store demanding a refund because the product did not provide what the store advertised. If they don't take it back, I'd file a lawsuit for false advertising against both the store and the movie company. Since this has been going on for 10+ years now, I'd ask for several million. Since they've been rattling off this bullshit for so long and using whichever side fits best for their current situation..for example..if you own the license you should be able to rip it and play it on other devices, right? Wrong. But you also aren't allowed to show it at a public exhibition, even though you have the physical copy.

So they're trying to tell you that you bought the physical copy AND a license that restricts its usage. So you don't own the data on the DVD, the movie companies do. However, they restrict your rights to watch said data down to the devices that can physically support it, and have the disc physically present.

If other companies did this, you wouldn't be allowed to run your Goodyear sport tires in winter, but instead would have to buy Goodyear winter tires. You'd have to replace both every year, as the company would only supply one-time-use lugnuts that you couldn't buy anywhere else. Failure to do so would result in your tires flying off the side of your car.

Re:Getting Old

[Renraku]

You do NOT have a legal right to do that.

You bought the license that dictates what you can and can not do with the physical copy.

Of course the companies are willing to use whichever version of the story you look at to best fit their needs at the time. Like if you tried to rip the movie to play on other devices..sorry..forbidden by license..you're only buying the license! But when you see the commercials, it says you OWN the movie, and at the store they SELL you the movie.

Your best bet is to ignore the rules and don't openly pirate them. If they call you out on it, take it to court.

Re:Getting Old

[syousef]

Am I a pirate because I rip my DVDs for portability so that my children can't break the original DVD?
Am I a pirate becuase I ripped Transformers and removed all the adult crap to where it's just a movie of transforming giant robots for my kids to watch?

Did you have to circumvent anti-copying mesures such as the encryption on the DVD? If so as far as the law is concerned (and certainly as far as the movie studios and distributors are concerned) you are a filthy pirate. Now is this right? I'd argue not, but the law is a different matter and the law is clear.

Re:Getting Old

[mr_matticus]

To address your misunderstanding, we'll go in reverse.

You simply own a physical object, and can do with it as you wish, as long as you obey the restrictions set forth in the law. This is not a license,

Absolutely correct. You own a physical object. Ownership of a physical object does not confer any rights to anything but that physical object. You do not own any rights to the copyrighted work embedded in it.

You say a license is a grant of right. What rights are being granted?

The right of access to the copyrighted work--the second part of a copy (s. 101). The rights being granted comprise a set of rights collectively known as "use", which does not include the rights of ownership of the copyright, reproduction, distribution, derivation, public performance, and public display.

As far as I can see, all you get is some restrictions, and what you're allowed to do falls out implicitly as the inverse of those restrictions. Still no license in sight.

That's a license. What more are you expecting? "You can do what you want, except", "You can do these specific things", and "You can do these specific things, cannot do these specific things, and we can arrive at an agreement to do anything else" are all valid constructions.

So where is the license?

Right there in the Copyright Act, and in any other grants or agreements you make with the owner. Statutory license is a beautiful thing. The Copyright Act is a default, and you can build from there to modify it, subject to specific unwaivable limitations that cannot appear in a license agreement.

Re:Getting Old

[russotto]

Second, the Copyright Act clearly spells out exactly what rights you do receive upon purchase: ownership of the medium, but zero ownership of the work (s. 202). You have no right to reproduce the work contained on the medium (s. 106), except as specifically permitted (i.e. licensed) by the Copyright Act (ss. 107-22), or as otherwise licensed to you by explicit grant or agreement (e.g. an SLA).

Wrong, as usual.

First: The Copyright Act does not refer to ownership of the work, nor of the medium. It refers to ownership of the _copyright_ in the work, and ownership of a copy of the work.

Second: Not all permission is a license. Permission granted by law is typically NOT a license (except in the case of compulsory license), hence the common phrase "permitted by law or license".

Fair use is the transformative incorporation of a portion of a work in a new work for a valid artistic or informative purpose. Fair use is not personal use. Personal use is a "fair" (in the colloquial sense) use, but it is not Fair Use.

Again wrong. Some personal use IS fair use (e.g. ripping songs to your MP3 player). Other personal use (such as simply watching the movie) is simply not an exclusive right of the coyright owner. Fair use is not limited to transformative uses, nor to artistic or informative purposes, though such uses are more likely to be judged "fair".

Most of the rest of your nonsense is so far from what the law actually is that that there's no point in attempting to refute it point by point.

Re:Getting Old

[failedlogic]

I have a similarly large collection of music. I've stopped buying movies - unless its the odd boxed set of a TV show I really like (I also don't have cable). The problem I have with movies is that as soon as you turn it on you end up wasting 2 or 3 minutes (or more) of your time until you can 'play' the movie. You have to watch the dumbass FBI/Interpol warning screen. Already know that. Then you have to watch trailers of substandard movies. If you buy the movie 2 years after release, the trailers are still there. Yes, ripping will get rid of it all. But that's not the point. In some movies you can't skip over these parts unless you either have a DVD player that will let you, or you use a computer. Ripping 5 movies or more is a bit time consuming. Isn't an FBI warning good enough on the front cover or on the disc itself? Why should I waster 30 seconds of my times seeing this stupid thing over and over?

It seems strange to me why people buy movies at first release. Isn't it better to rent? A new release movie is say on average $29.99. As the movie gets 'older' the price never goes up at retail - unless its a boxed collectors item. Usually you can find bins of DVDs which were well over $25 the previous year on sale brand new for under $10. Compare to music CDs. On initial release, the CD is usually around $9 to $12. Wether on-line or retail, if you buy the CD a year later its well over $15 or $20 - assuming you can find it on the shelves or iTunes (which is generally the case after 2 years).

Re:Getting Old

[TheGratefulNet]

how about music?

my home server stores music (flac and mp3) as well as movies, data files, install-kits, tarballs and so on.

so, while its ALREADY THERE and fast and large (raid5 with a few TB of disk) - why NOT store movies?

movies are a cache for me, anyway; they stay until something else pushes them out. closer I get to 'df' of 100% the more I push old stuff out. works just fine.

Re:Getting Old

[Toonol]

Your 15" laptop that you sit (15 x 8 / 5) 24" away from? You're actually agreeing with the parent post.

Re:Getting Old

[TheRaven64]

Music is different - I listen to the same tracks tens, if not hundreds, of times. It is also a lot smaller - several days of music is equivalent to only a few hours of film at even DVD quality. My entire music collection is small enough that I can replicate it on pretty much every device I might want to play it on, so aside from syncing I don't have a need for a central server.

Re:Getting Old

[mr_matticus]

Wrong, as usual.

No, as usual.

The Copyright Act does not refer to ownership of the work, nor of the medium. It refers to ownership of the _copyright_ in the work, and ownership of a copy of the work.

Talking about ownership in the copyright tends to lead to lay confusion, since ownership of a copy does confer a copyright interest. The "work" is the subject of copyright. Moreover, had you actually paid attention to the reference, it quite clearly refutes your claim that the Copyright Act does not refer to the medium.

Shall we:
"Ownership of a copyright, or of any of the exclusive rights under a copyright, is distinct from ownership of any material object in which the work is embodied."

This is not simply a copy. Ownership in the medium (the material object) is distinct from ownership of any of the exclusive rights (which may be conferred in a copy), and is in turn also distinct from the ownership of the copyright itself. Copyright and exclusive rights (partial copyright interests) are collectively the intellectual work. This is what I do.

Second: Not all permission is a license. Permission granted by law is typically NOT a license (except in the case of compulsory license), hence the common phrase "permitted by law or license".

All permission is indeed a license. A license is a promise not to sue. Entry into a shop involves a license--despite being granted by law. The common phrase you refer to does not speak to the line of division, and without getting into the metaphysics of law too deeply, the act of license is distinct from the manifestation of license. Problems tend to arise when people such as yourself conflate the two.

Compulsory license is a form of statutory license, but not the only form. Many statutory licenses are not compulsory.

Some personal use IS fair use (e.g. ripping songs to your MP3 player)

Again, you demonstrate a lack of appreciation for the development of copyright law in this country. Because the US lacks an explicit personal use exemption, the fair use doctrine has been overextended in some cases to cover certain personal use aspects. This is an idiosyncrasy of happenstance and not an accurate systemic appraisal, much like the industrial design omission.

Fair use is not limited to transformative uses, nor to artistic or informative purposes, though such uses are more likely to be judged "fair".

If you can point to a non-transformative, non-artistic, and non-informative fair use with an impact on the market that was still approved, I'd love to see it.

Re:Getting Old

[xlsior]

More to consider in this area: if your physical media gets scratched up and becomes unplayable, I've never heard of a studio/distributor offering a way to replace the bad physical disc for a new one at a trivial cost -- you just lose the ability to play your 'licensed' media on the bad disc.

That by itself seems to point that the studios consider the disc itself to be the product, and instead of you purchasing a license to play its contents.

Re:Getting Old

[DarkOx]

I don't think that does work. Some of the older DRM schemes on media like DVD-RAM use a special code on the disk that is not accesable via the ide/sata/scsi interface and must be recoved from a special register on the drive. Later this became availibles as an ioctl command when compters got fast enough to play video. I suspect higher-end proffessional stuff support such an access method before I saw it in consumer equipment. I don;t have a BD drive so I don't know but I would guess there is something like that in place so that you can't just do play back from an ISO image.

In anycase most "network" access is not going to let you send special commands to the drive. Some custom interface like network-block device (nbd) might make it possible but you aint doin it out of the box on your average Windows PC; not sure if anything is able to decrypt yet in the Opensource relm. Since I don't have a BD drive I have not looked.

Re:Getting Old

[r_jensen11]

A dedicated player has another problem, even when I'm at home: My younger kids tend to destroy optical disks. A video server has been a great solution for DVDs, and until it will work for Blu-Ray, I have no interest in buying Blu-Ray movies for them.

Then just don't let them handle the discs. Tell them they are off-limits, and that if they want to watch a movie, they should come to you.

Back when vinyl was the storage media for music, it was the exact same thing- except that vinyl is much more fragile than a strong plastic disc.

Re:Getting Old

[Surt]

He certainly did not agree to any such licensing (i've heard of no outlet that offers such a contract), and the UCC has pretty strict requirements around point of sale, so he owns that copy of the movie. He can do whatever he wants with it provided it doesn't violate something like the DMCA.

Re:Getting Old

[Surt]

Please go read the dmca. It does not put any such restrictions on him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act

Re:Getting Old

[Surt]

He did not buy any such license, he bought the physical copy. The distributors would like people to believe that, but it simple isn't true.

Please read the UCC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code

Re:Getting Old

[sjames]

Of course, the back pages of any vaguely electronic related magazine were full of 'video image stabilizers' that could defeat macrovision because people who had 2 tape decks DID complain about tapes rigged to screw with copying.

Meanwhile, the MPAA moaned about how the VCR would destroy Hollywood in just a few short years (they do seem to be doing decently well these days for being dead and all).

People WOULD have complained if the CDs had some way to defeat making that copy to tape for the walkman.

Of course, in the '70s nobody complained about not having digital music because they didn't really know what digital was. So what? We have it now. In the middle ages nobody complained about not being able to get electricity because they'd never heard of it. So?

Personally, I must be getting old because I find I don't give a crap about getting movies on BluRay at all. DVD works fine for me. If/when I get a Blu-ray drive at all, it will be for data.

Re:Getting Old

[hobbit]

I doubt it works, because how would the player differentiate between information being streamed from a Blu-Ray disc and information being streamed from a rip of a Blu-Ray disc?

Re:Getting Old

[Ucklak]

It's not necessarily 'shielding' them from the adult crap. It's crappy content to begin with and content they lose interest in.
What you don't want is you kid repeating "shit shit shit" in school.

I did the same with Spider-man 3 by removing all dancing sequences and unnecessary love arcs that wasn't spider-man pounding Goblin 2, snadman, or Venom.

Did the same for Indy Jones for Temple of Doom and Raiders.
Temple of Doom they like because they identify with Short Round and they like the bugs. There's about 15 minutes I cut out.
Raiders has about 20 minutes cut out too but they're bored with it.

The question I have is why is Indy Jones marketed to the under 8 crowd when the content isn't appropriate for it?

Re:Getting Old

[LackThereof]

Your numbers are wrong, Bluray is never more than 54Mbps.

In any case, after you transcode to h.264 at a reasonable bitrate, which you're going to want to do anyway to avoid using 30 gigs of hard drive space per movie, even obsolete network equipment can handle it just fine.

Re:Getting Old

[Nulifier]

Parts of the uses of this aren't even for ripping movies.

I have had several movies that I have wanted to play on my computer (off of the disc, no ripping) because I have a larger screen that is if higher quality.

However, when I tried to play them I got a message about how I did not pass the copy protection requirements. Slysoft's software was through them in no time at all and allowed me to watch my legally obtained videos on my legal dvd player.

Re:Getting Old

[pacinpm]

Am I a pirate becuase I ripped Transformers and removed all the adult crap to where it's just a movie of transforming giant robots for my kids to watch?

Damn, where is the adult crap in Transformers? I horribly missed it.

Re:Getting Old

[LackThereof]

So you buy a VHS (or beta or Video2000.. 'tis the 80's, after all), get home, and then curse the heavens that The Corporate Man is keeping you down by not allowing you to magically play back that same video on both TVs, just for the pathetic excuse they bring forth that you would need a 2nd VCR? .. probably not. You'd just eventually get another VCR.

Actually, back in those days, it would be trivial to split the video signal coming out of the VCR and run cables across the house to the second TV(or lazier/cheaper yet, use the RF output for 1 tv, and the composite output for the second TV). I know many people who did just this to avoid buying a second VCR, back when they were still expensive enough for it to matter. The major difficulty was that you couldn't control the VCR from the other room, but the FBI warning and previews gave you plenty of time to press play and walk across the house, get some popcorn, etc.

Now, with modern consumer electronics, it is equally trivially possible to copy your entire movie library onto some networked storage, and play them back from a device anywhere on the network, thus only needing 1 Bluray drive for the house. The only thing in the way are the artificial limitations imposed by DRM.

I guess my point is that how we view these things has not truly changed. There is no "changed mindset that came with going digital"; what can be trivially done with inexpensive consumer electronics is all that has changed.

Re:Getting Old

[hobbit]

Both of those goals are hard to meet since (1) the necessary number of units sold would be extreme because it would only be one specific manufacturer's problem (consumers would be clueless and only say: "this disc works fine in Joe's player but not in my fucking Craptech player").

Yes, but as long as someone -- one person -- knows why it doesn't work, there's a class action lawsuit in the making.

(2) it must be extremely difficult to reverse-engineer a player so perfectly considering how e.g. current C64 emulators and others still have some problems matching the real thing - even though there are specs available. Players on the other hand, have been designed to be as hard as possible to reverse-engineer.

Part of that has to do with the amazing tricks C64 programmers used to use to push the maximum performance out of their machines. Given the complexity of the BD+ system, it's likely that most implementations of it are in software. All it takes is for one of those implementations to be leaked, and you've got a VM indistinguishable from the real thing, and if future discs block it, you've got a class action lawsuit as described above.

Re:Getting Old

[Free the Cowards]

Sounds to me like this is just a battle of semantics at this point. You're calling the implicit rights granted by copyright law a "license", and I'm calling the lack of an explicit piece of paper from the copyright holder "not a license". Same thing in the end. The fundamental fact is that your rights are based on the physical copy you have, there is no right to obtain a second copy "at cost" if your first one gets destroyed, but the law still restricts what you can do with the copy you have.

Good enough?

Re:Getting Old

[Al Dimond]

Yeah, it's a little better than the old days. It sure would be nice, though, if when technology improved we actually got to enjoy the benefits. Otherwise we might as well use the old stuff, which is simpler, cheaper, and easier to hack on.

Re:Getting Old

[russotto]

Talking about ownership in the copyright tends to lead to lay confusion, since ownership of a copy does confer a copyright interest.

Given that 17 USC 202 -- the very section you cited -- says that transfer of ownership of a copy does not confer a copyright interest, that's an extraordinary claim.

Copyright and exclusive rights (partial copyright interests) are collectively the intellectual work.

Odd, then, that the language of Title 17 treats the work and the copyright in the work as separate things.

This is what I do.

If so, I feel sorry for your clients.

All permission is indeed a license. A license is a promise not to sue.

A license is certainly distinct from a promise not to sue.

Again, you demonstrate a lack of appreciation for the development of copyright law in this country. Because the US lacks an explicit personal use exemption, the fair use doctrine has been overextended in some cases to cover certain personal use aspects.

Whether you think it has been "overextended" or not, it has been so extended.

If you can point to a non-transformative, non-artistic, and non-informative fair use with an impact on the market that was still approved, I'd love to see it.

Ah, no moving the goalposts. You said that fair use had to be transformative AND that it had to be incorporation of a portion of a work into a new work AND that it had to be for artistic or informative purposes. None of these is true, as in the time-shifting and space-shifting cases. There's also the case of "reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy" (mentioned by the Copyright Office in its discussion of fair use). That use is non-transformative and does not involve creation of a new work.

Re:Getting Old

[hobbit]

Yes, but it will be a class action lawsuit against the manufacturer.

Why so? Again, all it takes is one person to know the truth of why the player no longer plays the discs.

Re:Getting Old

[arkhan_jg]

There's no such thing as an implicit licence for copyright.

There is however the doctrine of first sale, which *does* apply to the sale of copyrighted works.

Specifically, once a contract for the sale of a copy of a copyrighted work is complete (here's some money for that book/DVD/photo - thank you, sale complete), no further restrictions to the use of that work can be applied by the copyright holder, other than those that apply through copyright law itself - i.e. no public performances or making your own copies (depending upon jurisdiction, some places let you make infinite copies for personal use, some, like the UK, allow for none except for those needed to use the work itself)

They tried shrinkwrap licences with books, back in the day. Publishers put extra limits on what you could do with the book, such as preventing your reselling it after you'd bought it. Doctrine of first sale killed that in court. The contract terms are up front, written down and agreed to prior to the sale, or they're completely unenforceable. Literally, the copyright holder only gets to require extra terms against the first sale of the work, up front and before the sale. After that, assuming no such actual contract exists, any further sales of the same copy are governed only by copyright itself. Thus the second-hand market is a fundamental right of copyrighted goods purchasers, which is why I get really peeved at software companies whining about lost sales and trying to kill it. It's a fundamental safety margin and customer balance of copyright.

Notice how you have to agree to the contract for mobile phones, cable TV or MMO's before you start, and before you exchange money? Well, that applies to the sale of copyrighted works too. Implied licences and post-sale click-wrap licences are just a massive con. Did you sign a contract at the till, last you bought a DVD or book?

The one exception I know of is US UCITA-signing states, with regards post-sale click-wrap licences for software. There is an extra law there to make those binding, even after the sale.
Corporate to corporate contracts are also obviously a different beast.

Re:Getting Old

[jtn]

I shouldn't feed the troll, but..

Who said they wanted to download the movie via BitTorrent and watch it without paying? I think every comment in this thread consists of consumers who want to watch a PURCHASED movie in the media format of their choosing. Strawmen sure are easy to knock down, aren't they?

Re:Getting Old

[mr_matticus]

Given that 17 USC 202 -- the very section you cited -- says that transfer of ownership of a copy does not confer a copyright interest, that's an extraordinary claim.

No, it says that transfer of a material object does not. A material object is not itself a copy.

Odd, then, that the language of Title 17 treats the work and the copyright in the work as separate things.

It's not odd. The work is an intellectual product of its creator. The copyright is the property in that creation. Just as legal "ownership of land" is really "ownership in the legal property coterminous with that land", legal ownership of a work is ownership in the legal property coterminous with that work.

If so, I feel sorry for your clients.

They certainly don't.

A license is certainly distinct from a promise not to sue.

No it isn't. A legally binding promise not to sue is a license at its most fundamental. This is really elementary stuff.

Whether you think it has been "overextended" or not, it has been so extended.

This does not make personal use fair use. An idiosyncratic extension of a personal use right into the doctrine does not incorporate the two. It is entirely possible for a particular act to be both personal use and fair use, but personal use is not fair use, and further extension has been repeatedly and consistently rejected, both by the Copyright Office and by the courts.

Ah, no moving the goalposts. You said that fair use had to be transformative AND that it had to be incorporation of a portion of a work into a new work AND that it had to be for artistic or informative purposes.

No. If you'll recall, I said that fair use is "the transformative incorporation of a portion of a work in a new work for a valid artistic or informative purpose". At no point does that suggest a threshold level for any particular factor in consideration, nor does it suggest or deny the presence of exceptions. As the factors for fair use are a balancing test, varying levels of each spill over to require varying levels of the others. Again, if you can assert a use that is not sufficiently compelling in any of those factors, I'd like to see it. Further, if you'd like to proffer an alternative sentence that captures the salient factors in 20 words or less, I'd be happy to point out the myriad conceptual problems with your general overview.

There's also the case of "reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy" (mentioned by the Copyright Office in its discussion of fair use)

An informative purpose.

Come now.

Re:Getting Old

[arkhan_jg]

Equally, the corporations didn't put in restrictions to stop us making copies. Oh, wait, they did. Sony tried to stop betamax players having record buttons. They lost, and making your own tapes of TV shows (timeshifting) became a new fair use right.

Well, it's 1984 all over again, and the media companies are trying their damndest to stop us using our own property in our own houses as we wish. They lost using copyright law. It's perfectly legal to transcode your films to hard-disk under copyright law, so they went and got a new law, the DMCA, to make it illegal to even talk about breaking the crappy locks on the products they sold us.

He's not complaining about the convenience, or the digital nature of it. He's complaining that the media companies are deliberately putting new technical and legal restrictions to take away the rights we've had for 20 years, and make him use his own discs in the limited time and method of THEIR choosing. And we shouldn't let the tight-fisted bastards get away with it.

Re:Getting Old

[mr_matticus]

You're calling the implicit rights granted by copyright law a "license", and I'm calling the lack of an explicit piece of paper from the copyright holder "not a license". Same thing in the end.

No. A lack of a piece of paper is not evidence of the lack of license. A piece of paper is the memorialization of a license, license agreement, or other contract. Just as the lack of a signed form is not evidence of the lack of a contract, lack of a form is not evidence of a lack of license.

Illustrated another way, there are two ways to acquire rights in something you do not currently possess: (1) transfer of ownership and (2) transfer of license. There is no other way.

You can be assigned ownership by the operation of purely statutory law (e.g. intestate succession, adverse possession). You can be assigned license by the operation of purely statutory law (e.g. permission to enter public spaces, purchasing a copy). You can also be assigned ownership/license by simple grant (e.g. a will, donation). You can also be assigned ownership/license by contract (e.g. a sales contract, license agreement).

there is no right to obtain a second copy "at cost" if your first one gets destroyed

A non sequitur. There is never any such guaranteed right. As with anything you take possession of, you are responsible for it. If it is destroyed, and there is no provision for replacement/insurance/discount, and you simply have to repurchase it. Whether this is because of the value of the physical components or the value of its intellectual components does not matter.

The value of a copy, like any other object, is the sum of its physical parts and the value of its intellectual property. If the copy is destroyed, you must repurchase the entirety. If only the material object is destroyed, then you may replace that material object without falling afoul of the law.

Re:Getting Old

[herbertchapman]

I really don't understand the need to protect movies too severely - in the UK DVD's get to Asda (AKA Walmart) at around 5 UK Pounds (approx 10 USD - or was last Summer !) in a few months. So what's the point in spending hours downloading it and then burning it and cracking the protection etc etc. - Most people only watch Movies once anyway. Considering on line dvd rental companies charge around 10 UK pounds for unlimited rentals it seems a waste of time ripping them off - unlike music which is listened to again and again irrespective of how old it is. Having spent Summer in the US I'd also say that illegal music downloads in the UK would virtually cease if prices for CDs were comparable with the US

Re:Getting Old

[LoRdTAW]

If you purchased a CD, would you kick up a shitstorm about not being able to play that back on your walkman? .. probably not. You'd just get your tape deck and record the CD straight to tape.

What? That was the bloody point! We had the freedom to format shift back then too. It just took longer. How many here used a CD player and tape deck to make mix tapes for yourself and friends? That was what I did in high school in the 90's before CD burners were affordable. Everyone had a walkman for that exact reason. One of your friends would say "Dude I just got this new CD!" You then borrow it and what did you do? That's right make a copy to tape. And if you only liked certain songs you only recorded those songs or did a tape to tape copy later. Yea it wasn't digital quality but it worked well enough for everyone. Hell Even my mother and father made tapes from their CD's for their cars.

As for VHS, those tapes were indestructible when compared to DVD's. People with children will know that. My friend lost four DVD's and a CD to his 1.5 year old who likes shiny things. VHS tapes were like a tank.

In my house we had Cable, a VCR and a roof antenna hooked to the TV in our living room. The VCR and cable box were all hooked to the TV via coax. I used a 3 way splitter and ran a line to the kitchen TV and my parents bedroom. Using a few switch boxes we could pipe the Cable, antenna or VCR to any of the 3 TV's. It worked perfectly as my mother could watch PBS in the kitchen and we could watch the VCR in the living room while cable was on in the bed room. Or we could watch any of the two on all three TV's if we wanted. It wasn't convenient as you had to go into the living room to work the cable box and VCR but it worked perfectly. I had my own VCR and Cable box.

Re:Getting Old

[kelnos]

A "byte" is defined as a collection of 8 bits. Full stop. Any obsolete hardware that doesn't follow that definition can safely be ignored for the purposes of a discussion about the current state-of-the-art video disc format.

Re:Getting Old

[kelnos]

You can make seven different copies, one for each day of the week. You can shift it to a different format so you can watch it elsewhere.

This may have been true before the DMCA, but it's not anymore. If the manufacturer "protects" the content with a "device" (in this case, DRM) used to restrict or disallow copying, it is illegal to defeat that protection, even just for personal use.

I think it's retarded too, but, unless I'm mistaken (corrections welcome, please!), that's the law (in the US, at least).

Re:Getting Old

[Golddess]

I was actually thinking "when'd they release the Direct-To-Brain conversion kit, and where can I get mine installed?"

Re:Getting Old

[Bio)-(azard]

When you purchase an object which contains copyrighted content, you purchased that object. Full stop, end of story. No license is involved.

Tell that to Microsoft or Blizzard. I am fairly certain they would disagree with you. If you tried to make the argument that you're not 'installing' the movie/music, they would counter that with, "You are copying it into the buffer of the playback device. Now send me a check please".

Not that I condone this interpretation of the law, however, I think this is reality.

Re:Getting Old

[m.ducharme]

Well, yes. Sadly, not everywhere.

Re:Getting Old

[knewter]

The copyright owner owns the bits / ideas and can prevent them from being *copied* but not read, thought about, or discussed.

This is the meat of the whole problem. The copyright owner can no longer prevent those bits from being copied. It's a rule of the network, and at this point it's like REALLY WISHING that gravity worked in reverse. Cat's out of the bag, copying happens all the time, and MUST for us to watch content digitally.

Anyway, that's life. BTW I purchase "Compact Discs" all the time that don't play in my car stereo because they don't conform the the Red Book Audio standard (and, therefore, are not "Compact Discs" and such sale is fraud.) When that happens, it never takes longer than a fifteen second glance on the network to find the content I purchased, burn it on a Compact Disc that adheres to said standard, and listen to it in my car.

Re:Getting Old

[Idiomatick]

There was that part when the guy and girl are sitting together before he was about to go off and be a hero, and there was a sunset.... and they.... wait they didnt kiss even then? WTF that movie was terrible. I am envious of the cg guys though, looked like fun toys to design

Re:Getting Old

[knewter]

Are you arguing that DeCSS is in fact not in violation of the DMCA? Didn't the fed. disagree with you? Isn't that required to rip the DVD and make his composite videos?

Re:Getting Old

[knewter]

I have a useless bluray player in my linux machine at work, as I just bought a cheapo deal on woot and it came with a bluray player. I need to give it to a friend that uses windows and watches movies, but the drive DOES work as a DVD burner, so meh.

Anyway, this stuff DOES cost people like me money needlessly (like it or not, I DID pay for hardware I can't use)

Re:Getting Old

[knewter]

"Ripping the DVD" isn't interacting with the physical object, it's extracting the copyrighted work contained therein, which you technically have no express right to do.

Poppycock. Ripping a DVD is exactly interacting with a physical object. That physical object embodies a number, when pinged with a laser appropriately. That number, when decoded, yields a copyrighted work.

All of that was a physical process, aside from the act of division (which had damned well not become illegal, regardless of how idiotic legislators can be made to be). My problem is not with copyright (to a point...I believe it has been extended too far, but that's another argument). My problem is that it becomes increasingly legal for copyright holders to break my stuff and keep secrets from me, and it becomes increasingly illegal for me to tell people various numbers.

Ultimately, though, I care little for the law; the state is my enemy.

Re:Getting Old

[Chaos Incarnate]

The right to make your own copies is not explicit in Title 17 that I've ever found. It's generally considered to fall under the aegis of fair use, but not actually codified in US law as far as I can tell.

Re:Getting Old

[mdmkolbe]

You are not granted a licence. The author is granted exlusivity on certain rights (see 17 USC 106). These rights are the right to copy, to make derivative works, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, and digital audio transmission.

These are rights exclusive to the author. If someone other than the other does them, they have committed copyright infringement. But you can do anything else you want with them. You have the right to read, burn, soak, get laminated, use as toiletpaper, or do anything else you want to a copy of a copyrighted work.

Now the act of using a computer program usually involves making a copy of that computer program which is one of the rights reserved to the author. But 17 USC 117 grants a special exception. Under that section it is not an infringement to make a copy of a computer program if that copy is essential to using the computer program. This means you don't need any sort of license in order to install a program. You just need to own a legal copy (and since a copy is defined in 17 USC 101 to be the physical artifact not some abstraction of the data, owning a CD means owning a copy of the work on the CD.)

(Given the above EULA's on off the shelf software shouldn't be enforceable since the only "consideration" they give you is the right to install the software, which is a right you already have. Without a "consideration" there is no contract. Without a contract, they can't claim breach of contract and they can't claim copyright infringement either because of 17 USC 117. I never can figure out why they think EULA's are legal. (EULA's on online services and network installs are completely different since those don't trigger 17 USC 117, and thus they should be enforceable.))

Of course IANAL and TINLA.

Re:Getting Old

[mr_matticus]

Ripping a DVD is exactly interacting with a physical object.

Not in any appreciable sense--you're not after the parts and pieces, you're after the intangible expression embodied in it. Your interest has nothing to do with the object, in other words.

Taken to pedantic extremism, anything is problematic--photons emitted by your cat down the street would be trespassing on Mr. Jones' property. Thoughts are the product of the electrical impulses of the brain and thus physical. Speech, as a propagation of a mechanical process producing measurable, physical shock waves in a medium, becomes tangible.

My problem is that it becomes increasingly legal for copyright holders to break my stuff and keep secrets from me

A problem in search of harm, really, since it's their stuff you're trying to get. They're just increasingly disinclined to give as much as they did in the past, having, in their view, suffered for it. They're entitled to the secrets, as you're entitled to yours when you produce something.

becomes increasingly illegal for me to tell people various numbers

A bold reductionist argument that has relatively little to do with reality. There is no meaningful expression blocked by those "various numbers". Perhaps more to the point, it is simply impossible for anyone to be in a position to store and recite all of the "numbers" and have someone receive them and comprehend. 'Increasingly' also implies a vector not borne out by historical example. It is not as though you had an expressive purpose to the mechanized reproduction.

Re:Getting Old

[Free the Cowards]

Illustrated another way, there are two ways to acquire rights in something you do not currently possess: (1) transfer of ownership and (2) transfer of license. There is no other way.

And? You acquire rights to a copy of a particular piece of media via transfer of ownership. You own that copy and can use it within the limits of the law. You don't own the copyright which means that you face various restrictions, but you still own that copy.

A non sequitur.

It is not a non sequitur. The post I originally responded to asked, "Do I pay for a license for the movie/album/etc. meaning I can get a replacement copy for just the production costs of the disc if it breaks or a new format is introduced ?"

Re:Getting Old

[Free the Cowards]

You're right, but that only applies to work with DRM. For non-DRM work the standard stuff still applies even with the DMCA.

Re:Getting Old

[Free the Cowards]

A software EULA is something that's on top of the standard transaction. It is possible, and 100% legal, to buy software without any kind of EULA. Microsoft, Blizzard, and others include an EULA because they wish to restrict your rights further than what the law provides for. They don't have to do it to make the transaction legal, as should be clear from the lack of an EULA in every music CD and movie DVD.

Re:Getting Old

[Free the Cowards]

The same is true of format shifting and timeshifting too. Just because it's not codified in the law doesn't mean it's not there. The law provides for fair use, the courts have decided that this is what fair use means, and here we are.

Re:Getting Old

[mr_matticus]

And? You acquire rights to a copy of a particular piece of media via transfer of ownership.

No. You acquire rights to a material object via transfer of ownership. You acquire rights to the work via transfer of license. You have no ownership in the work itself or the copyright.

You own that copy and can use it within the limits of the law.

Yes, because ownership of a copy is ownership of the physical medium and permission to use (license) of the set of non-exclusive rights in the work.

It is not a non sequitur. The post I originally responded to asked, "Do I pay for a license for the movie/album/etc. meaning I can get a replacement copy for just the production costs of the disc if it breaks or a new format is introduced ?"

Again, the two are not exclusive of one another. Paying for a license does not imply a replacement copy. You are accepting the premise of the question and arguing that it is not a license because you don't get a replacement and there is no text document. Neither of these evince a license or a lack thereof.

Re:Getting Old

[Surt]

The DMCA may be relevant to the author of DeCSS, if the author is a US citizen, or ever visits the US. Use of DeCSS for the purpose of exercising your rights to make backup copies and to space or time shift your media, is not.

Re:Getting Old

[hairyfeet]

Or he can spend $50 on DVDidle Pro and watch movies from any region while having the movie loaded into RAM so the drive hardly spins at all.

Re:Getting Old

[Rayban]

They've been secretly stealing all the cameras. Go ahead and check - I bet yours is missing. Bastards got mine last week.

Re:Getting Old

[spazdor]

Latency, maybe.

Re:Getting Old

[spazdor]

Isn't that precisely why Blizzard and Microsoft products go the extra mile and make you click 'agree' to a EULA before they'll run?

Re:Getting Old

[spazdor]

Thank you for zeroing in on this incredibly important sentence.

In the digital age, "reading", "thinking about" and "discussing" are effectively acts of copying.

Re:Getting Old

[bondsbw]

Nowadays, I don't think the question is about right attitudes vs. wrong. Now it is, "We believe that it is wrong, what are we going to do about it?"

Or, put another way, what's going to stop these corporations from protecting their business models? If the consumer wants to be on the winning end, consumers are going to have to give these companies reason to adjust. It's worked like that since ancient times. The main difference is that today's companies are global and require global consumer influence.

Re:Getting Old

[jamei]

I'm pretty sure this story is about how DRM does work. It keeps people from copying the movie in full HD resolution, without getting in the way of 90% of consumers.

Analysis of Video Disc Market, December 2008:

5% Bluray owners: Pissed off at DRM
2% HDDVD early adopters: Pissed off at DRM
1% Linux users: Pissed off at BD+ DRM
2% Slashdot readers: Pissed off at all DRM
50% DVD owners: DRM cracked, happy
40% piratebay downloaders: no DRM, happy

Re:Getting Old

[russotto]

No, it says that transfer of a material object does not. A material object is not itself a copy.

I sure hope you are lying about doing this stuff for a living.

From 17 USC 101

"Copies" are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term "copies" includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed.

And from 17 USC 202

Transfer of ownership of any material object, including the copy or phonorecord in which the work is first fixed, does not of itself convey any rights in the copyrighted work embodied in the object;

A copy is a material object; transfer of a copy (including the very first copy) does not transfer copyright. All very basic stuff.

No. If you'll recall, I said that fair use is "the transformative incorporation of a portion of a work in a new work for a valid artistic or informative purpose". At no point does that suggest a threshold level for any particular factor in consideration, nor does it suggest or deny the presence of exceptions.

While it fails to suggest a threshold level, it does at least assert the presence of certain factors. Factor 1: Transformative. Factor 2: Incorporation in a new work. Factor 3: Only a portion of the work copied. Factor 4: Purpose is artistic or informative. Since, in fact, there are fair uses which have none of those factors, and fair uses which have only some of those factors, your claim is refuted. Time shifting and space shifting have been held to be fair use (and I know you don't like that, but they have); those uses have none of those factors. The example given by the copyright office of repairing a damaged work lacks the first two of your factors.

And while I might not be able to do better in 20 words, that's no excuse for an essentially wrong 20 words. There's no penalty for using more.

Re:Getting Old

[Free the Cowards]

No. You acquire rights to a material object via transfer of ownership. You acquire rights to the work via transfer of license. You have no ownership in the work itself or the copyright.

But I have no rights beyond what simple possession allows.

Again, the two are not exclusive of one another. Paying for a license does not imply a replacement copy. You are accepting the premise of the question and arguing that it is not a license because you don't get a replacement and there is no text document. Neither of these evince a license or a lack thereof.

That's not really correct. Yes, I'm arguing that there's no document. But I never said that there is no license because you don't get a replacement. Obviously it would be trivial to have a license which does not allow for replacement.

Anyway, my point is that your position and mine appear to be equivalent. I hold that there is no license, you hold that there's some kind of "default" license implied in the law. Same end result, and whether this ephemeral license actually exists doesn't seem very important.

Re:Getting Old

[sapphire wyvern]

Yeah, but when you're talking about a data stream over a network, does a measurement of bytes per second refer to payload only, or total number of possible bit transitions divided by eight?

Consider that the overhead/payload ratio is going to vary based on high-level protocol, even when the physical & data link layers are identical (eg HTTP vs FTP).

That's why communications links are generally rated in bits per second rather than bytes per second.

Re:Getting Old

[virmaior]

what parent is forgetting about grandparent is that grandpa is obsessed with "free" and would not dare to allow a binary onto his system that he did not get from svn and compile.

Re:Getting Old

[wvmarle]

When you buy a DVD and/or player (and presumably the same is true for Blu-Ray, never bought one) nobody asks you to sign an agreement, the dvd player doesn't make you click through an EULA before you can watch the disc. As far as I can tell, no licensing contract exists. The only contract that exists is the one made when money was exchanged for a good, which is a transfer of ownership. If that's the only contract, then the buyer owns the dvd and player, and can do what he damn well pleases with it.

There are many other products that have limitations to their use after you buy it, even though you do not sign a contract for that.

For example, your car. You are limited to certain roads/areas to drive it, limited in speed, sometimes even in direction. Some places you are allowed to drive by but not stop.

Or the house you own, even when the mortgage is over there are limitations on it's use. Maybe you are not allowed to run certain businesses their (brothels being an easy example), and more of those limitations. You can not just start expanding it for example, that you will have to apply for.

So no I don't think there is the need for an explicit licence agreement to be signed when you buy the DVD to make the restrictions valid. Unless you want special liberties (e.g. republishing, showing it to an open audience, etc) in which you will have to open special negotiations with the copyright holder.

Re:Getting Old

[m.ducharme]

There are many other products that have limitations to their use after you buy it, even though you do not sign a contract for that.

For example, your car. You are limited to certain roads/areas to drive it, limited in speed, sometimes even in direction. Some places you are allowed to drive by but not stop.

These are limitations imposed by local laws, customs, and physics, but not by an agreement with the manufacturer of the car.

Or the house you own, even when the mortgage is over there are limitations on it's use. Maybe you are not allowed to run certain businesses their (brothels being an easy example), and more of those limitations. You can not just start expanding it for example, that you will have to apply for.

Again, these are not limitations placed on you by the seller of the house, but other branches of the law. You still own your house, even if you can't run a brothel in it. You can sell it, take it down, build a replica of it somewhere else.

So no I don't think there is the need for an explicit licence agreement to be signed when you buy the DVD to make the restrictions valid. Unless you want special liberties (e.g. republishing, showing it to an open audience, etc) in which you will have to open special negotiations with the copyright holder.

Well, no. If you don't have a license with the seller, then the seller cannot limit what you do with it; it's yours. There may be other laws governing the use (criminal laws preventing piracy, public viewings, etc) but these have nothing to do with the original seller.

The parent to my post was arguing that a buyer of DVD's is limited by license, which is patently false. No license applies.

So, though public viewings may be illegal, there is no law saying you can't resell the copy you own for example. You can show the movie to as many people as you want, in your own home. This wouldn't be true for licensed software, or presumably for licensed DVDs, if they existed.

The key distinction here is this: with a license, you have a contract with the rights-holder, that grants you privileges for a price. The contract is usually conditional; those rights can be taken away from you later, if you violate a term of the agreement.

A sale is a contract where the whole contract is done at the time of the purchase. The seller can't revoke the sale later.

Criminal or regulatory law (which is what you're talking about) is a "contract" between a government and the members of society being governed. If you break this contract (copying a DVD for example), the original seller doesn't necessarily have any direct recourse against you. The movie company doesn't generally get compensated when a commercial pirate gets busted (unless, of course, his lobbyist has purchased the necessary laws to enable that).

The movie distributor could sue you for damages, but they can't come and take the movie that you bought away from you, it's yours. They can't stop you from playing it. It's yours. For keeps. This is the difference between a sale of a good and a licensing scheme.

Re:Getting Old

[swillden]

Then just don't let them handle the discs. Tell them they are off-limits, and that if they want to watch a movie, they should come to you.

Far easier said than done. Not that it couldn't be achieved, but I have more important battles to fight.

Actually, I should mention that this aspect is almost irrelevant these days. My kids are old enough now to handle disks carefully, and they're beyond the stage where they watch a movie dozens (hundreds?) of times. However, a few years ago when I set the jukebox up, it saved a lot of DVDs.

Re:Getting Old

[Ironica]

There are many other products that have limitations to their use after you buy it, even though you do not sign a contract for that.

For example, your car. You are limited to certain roads/areas to drive it, limited in speed, sometimes even in direction. Some places you are allowed to drive by but not stop.

Or the house you own, even when the mortgage is over there are limitations on it's use. Maybe you are not allowed to run certain businesses their (brothels being an easy example), and more of those limitations. You can not just start expanding it for example, that you will have to apply for.

So no I don't think there is the need for an explicit licence agreement to be signed when you buy the DVD to make the restrictions valid. Unless you want special liberties (e.g. republishing, showing it to an open audience, etc) in which you will have to open special negotiations with the copyright holder.

The restrictions on how you may use your car or your house are laws duly enacted for the public good. The restrictions on how you may use your Blu-Ray movie are contracts between you and the publisher, which are subject to certain laws. The laws that exist are to protect either buyers (fair use doctrine) or sellers (the rest of copyright). None of those laws exist for the public good.

If someone drives their car 100 miles an hour down my sidewalk, that threatens my own safety. If someone next door to me rips a million hours of movies, that doesn't threaten my safety one bit. It also doesn't even threaten the profits of the movie studios, *unless* the person then copies the ripped movies and distributes them.

Bad comparison. Try again.

Re:Getting Old

[Ironica]

Then just don't let them handle the discs. Tell them they are off-limits, and that if they want to watch a movie, they should come to you.

Do you *have* kids? ;-) Telling them it's off-limits is only useful insofar as you can make something ACTUALLY off-limits. His system makes it possible for the physical disks to be inaccessible, without imposing to much barrier to use of content, which is pretty much ideal. I can see why he wouldn't want to give that up, and instead have to chase his kids around their own home telling them "do not touch!"

That all being said, my four-year-old has yet to scratch a PS2 game or DVD. He usually demands we change the disks for him, however.

Re:Getting Old

[mr_matticus]

I sure hope you are lying about doing this stuff for a living. From 17 USC 101

Please refer to the canons of statutory construction. 202 refers to the material object, and not to the copy, for a very specific reason: the attempted conflation you present. Ownership of the material object does not confer any rights in the work. Ownership of the copy does confer rights in the work, because the copy is the material object as well as the granted usage rights.

It is indeed basic stuff, and you haven't got it. The statement that ownership of a copy does not confer rights would be nonsensical and directly contradictory.

Since, in fact, there are fair uses which have none of those factors

Again, I press you for an example.

The Betamax decision is, as legal scholars have pointed out for nearly 30 years, correct in outcome but faulty in reasoning. It went under fair use, and is the only such exception, only because there was no other place to put it at the time. The concept of "personal" use had not yet developed, and because the prima facie infringement case had been made, the only avenue of precedent was the fair use doctrine. It has not been extended since, nor has any fair use case made an argument to set aside the above four factor test. This is further borne out in the copyright laws of other legal systems, which do recognize a personal use doctrine and accordingly are more permissive.

This glaring omission must be corrected if actual personal use rights are ever to become codified in the United States. It does not fit under 107, which is strained to find a constitutional basis for use clearly outside the operative zone for the doctrine. This, to borrow a term from Nimmer, is not sustainable. Fair use is not personal use, and it cannot be shoehorned in with any semblance of congruence or adequacy. Instead, we must press for a personal use exemption to correct these problems and bring US law in line with the rest of the world.

space shifting have been held to be fair use

Actually, if you refer to the language of the cases in which it has been upheld (a minority, it's worth noting), you see that the operative language is "noncommercial personal use". In nearly all cases where space shifting has been proposed as a 107 fair use, it has been rejected, and duly so.

Re:Getting Old

[mr_matticus]

But I have no rights beyond what simple possession allows.

Simple possession confers no rights to the work. That's the entire problem.

Same end result, and whether this ephemeral license actually exists doesn't seem very important.

On the contrary, it's a critical distinction. You have absolutely no rights in the work if there is no license, either statutory or actual. Acquiring possession of the object expressly excludes any right of any kind in the work. Simple possession of, say, a DVD, is worth about $1 for the disc and packaging. The owner must transfer rights to you in order for you to have any. Those usage rights, your interest in the work, are what accounts for the other $14 or so of the DVD.

The manufacturer of the DVD can give you ownership of the DVD, but can't give you any interest of any kind in a copyrighted work. For that, you need authorization from the copyright owner. That authorization may be provided various ways, and once you get to that point, you're right that the effect is the same regardless of what one calls the function of statutory authorization.

Re:Getting Old

[Chirs]

I generally watch movies on an 8-foot screen that I sit 11 feet from....

Re:Getting Old

[shutdown -p now]

Legally, you have no right to copy the disc, rip it, or duplicate its content in any way.

It depends on where one lives and what is the backup for. I don't know about you, but I sure do have the right to duplicate the content of that disc to my heart's content, so long as it's for backup purposes. I also have the right to rip that disc into any format I may need so that other video players I have (software or hardware) can play it.

Re:Getting Old

[kelnos]

When talking about video streams, both bps and Bps refer to the same thing -- the amount of payload data taken up by a second of video (or audio, or both, depending on what you're measuring).

At least that's how I always understood it.

I don't see how network layer (for example) is any different. A 10Mbps ethernet switch is able to transmit 1.25MB of data per second (theoretical max, of course). In either case (referring to it as 10Mbps or 1.25MBps), you're still talking about physical layer data rate. In fact, when talking about that link, it's pretty much impossible to give an absolute max data rate that only includes payload without defining a bit more. Do you want to consider the payload of the ethernet frame as what you care about? Or how about just the payload of the TCP packet that's in an IP packet that's in the ethernet frame? (And if you're talking about TCP, what's your MTU?)

So I don't see how your Bps/bps distinction matters. With either measure, you're still talking about the same amount of data (multiplied by or divided by 8). Without defining more about the rate, it's irrelevant what kind of overhead/payload distinction is in effect.

Re:Getting Old

[V!NCENT]

Ofcourse you purchase the movie you moron. When you put the disc in the player it shows you the movie, and not a piece of paper saying: "Hello John Doe. Thank you for putchasing a piece of legal paper!"

The difference here is that you HAVE purchased the movie, but DID NOT purchase the copyright.

You have been with your nose in proprietary shitland for too fscking long

Re:Getting Old

[zmollusc]

Oooh, I think i rented a vhs vcr for about £10 a month as i couldn't afford the £600 or so to purchase outright. I did buy a black and white 14inch TV for £50 brand new around the same time.

Re:Getting Old

[shaitand]

The DMCA explicitly excludes circumvention for the purpose of fair use.

Re:Getting Old

[CarpetShark]

No, that's an octet. Byte does not mean what you think it means.

Re:Getting Old

[Twanfox]

Actually, I would say that restrictions on how you use your car are defined when you get your license to drive on public roads (and that's what your license is, a license to drive on public roads). By getting your license, you agree to those restrictions for the safety of all. However, this doesn't stop anyone from recklessly using their car on private land, e.g. racing at 100+ mph on a drag strip or playing bumper cars on a farm.

Re:Getting Old

[spiko-carpediem]

If you had extremely good eyesight, memory and calculation power, you could read what's written on a disc you own. But you're not allowed to read it if it's not approved by the censor. That sounds like a defective disc to me.

Re:Getting Old

[swillden]

Far easier said than done. Not that it couldn't be achieved, but I have more important battles to fight.

Damn straight. Teaching discipline to your kids should rightfully be way down on the list of things to do.

There are more important areas for discipline. Things that matter. If you think you can apply discipline to every part of their lives, then you're either an iron-fisted authoritarian or (more likely) have never been a parent.

Re:Getting Old

[donaldm]

If you look at many of the DVD's you get from most video stores most are badly scratched and sometimes unplayable. This says a lot about some people. BD is difficult but not impossible to scratch although fingermarks can make playback problematic however a quick wipe with a damp cloth fixes that.

This is not to say BD does not have problems it does. There was a case of a bad batch of BD movies that had "spots" all over them which made the movie difficult if not impossible to play. The end result, all people who had the issue returned them for a full refund or replacement.

Re:Getting Old

[0xygen]

Read paragraph two of the following...
http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/license.html

License does not mean "a pile of text", it is a abstract concept which grants or takes away one or more rights in an agreement with the holder of the rights.

If you have no license to a work, you are infringing copyright. If you have an explicit license which was legally agreed at purchase.

If you have don't have an explicit license, you have been given an implicit license to the copyrighted work, assuming whoever you bought it from has the right to offer you that.

Re:Getting Old

[LanMan04]

Yeah, but when you're talking about a data stream over a network, does a measurement of bytes per second refer to payload only, or total number of possible bit transitions divided by eight?
Consider that the overhead/payload ratio is going to vary based on high-level protocol, even when the physical & data link layers are identical (eg HTTP vs FTP).
That's why communications links are generally rated in bits per second rather than bytes per second.

You could say exactly the same thing about bits per second. Does that include headers/CRC/overhead, or is it just data? Mbps/8 = MBps, so long as you keep your definitions the same.

Re:Getting Old

[squiggleslash]

Oh, wait, they did. Sony tried to stop betamax players having record buttons

You got that one backwards, but your confusion is understandable. Back in the early eighties, Sony was one of the good guys.

No, I'm serious! Stop laughing! They really were. They weren't evil, and they defended themselves in court in a ruling on copyright law that's considered one of the most significant step forwards for fair use. The studios sued Sony for making Betamax recorders. Sony celebrated by buying a studio, the purchase of which resulted in Sony's eventual move to the dark side.

Re:Getting Old

[squiggleslash]

Blu-ray doesn't support Managed Copy properly, largely due to it adopting it fairly late in the game, resulting in a mix of discs that support it, and a mix of discs that do, making it impossible for manufacturers to advertise features that rely upon the feature being supported by all discs. The result is that no manufacturer is going to bother, and the studios - somewhat ironically considering it was their intransigence that caused the delays making it part of the standard - are having to offer so-called "digital copies" on discs instead.

HD DVD did support the feature from the beginning, but HD DVD is dead. Arguably HD DVD is dead because they supported features like MMC and rejected features like region encoding and mandatory encryption, resulting in less honest studios like Fox refusing to have anything to do with it.

Fuck 'em.

Re:Getting Old

[Sloppy]

I can tell I must be getting old when one of my first responses is 'Cmon, just go buy the movie already'.

I guess so, if "old" is a synonym for "technologically uninformed."

Anyone who thinks this is a reason to buy movies, has it completely backwards. Cracking the playback-prevention is a reason to buy, and failure to crack the playback-prevention is a reason to pirate.

The movie studios have just given a giant "fuck you" to everyone who started to buy Bluray discs in the last few weeks, thinking that they would be able to play them.

This development means that Bluray still isn't on the market yet. If you want high-definition movies, pirates remain the only reliable source.

Re:Getting Old

[HTH NE1]

The DMCA explicitly excludes circumvention for the purpose of fair use.

But has a blanket prohibition on the distribution of the tools necessary to circumvent the protection necessary to exercise fair use. That's where the real teeth are in the law.

And also where the loophole is: if you can create your own tools, you're free to circumvent the protections for your own fair use. You just can't share your tools or the tools created by anyone else. I.e. DVD Jon can exercise his fair use rights with impunity.

Has the MPAA filed a restraining order against DVD Jon personally to bar him from acquiring any encrypted DVDs by any means yet?

Re:Getting Old

[squiggleslash]

Use of DeCSS...

...requires possession of a copy, which is illegal under the DMCA.

for the purpose of exercising your rights to make backup copies and to space or time shift your media, is not.

You don't have those rights.

Fair use is a defense, not a right. It only applies to copyright infringement. You can use it as a defense against a charge of copyright infringement, but you can't use it against any other charges against you. The DMCA introduces a new tier of offenses that are not copyright infringement, and, no, fair use is not a defense for those offenses.

Sorry.

The only reason 90% of geeks who use VLC as a DVD player aren't in trouble is because it'd be too much of a PITA to prosecute them with virtually no positive comeback for the studios.

Re:Getting Old

[Cramer]

In the hundreds. If you go back far enough, they were over 1000$ for a while. VTPs (video tape players) were cheaper because they didn't record -- despite being 99% identical to those that could. (the industry didn't want you to be able to record anything. It's the same sad song they've been singing since the vinyl days.)

Re:Getting Old

[Cramer]

Funny. I built my own "stabilizer" using junk recovered from various broken TVs, radios, etc. I used a slow opamp, so it killed the color burst as well, but for $0 it worked just fine. I rigged another VCR to be immune to the BS (disabled it's AGC circuits.) And my Go dual deck VCR doesn't care at all about macrovision -- it'll duplicate any tape at about 4x normal speed, macrovision and all.

Re:Getting Old

[Cramer]

Now, with modern consumer electronics, it is equally trivially possible to copy your entire movie library...

Not exactly. The digital outputs are "protected" to prevent just such copying. The analog outputs are not in HD. The component HD outputs take expensive equipment to capture, and the DRM can prohibit analog HD output entirely. (it's coming along, but still not cheap or readily available.)

Re:Getting Old

[Cramer]

Have you ever tried doing that? The results are not worth the time and effort.

Re:Getting Old

[spitzak]

I did in fact defeat some DRM back in the age you are talking about.

We had cable and wanted to watch it on the TV in the kitchen as well as the one in the living room. The cable company solution was to buy a second cable connection.

I bought a switch box from Radio Shack (it had three rotating knobs on the front to send any of several inputs to any of three outputs). I also got some coax and ran it across the basement ceiling to connect the living room to the kitchen.

Then I had to defeat the "DRM" that the cable company provided. This was in the form of a special connection with a long sleeve over the coax screw-on connector on the cable coming from outside. After much fiddling I managed to undo it with needle nosed pliers from the cable box.

I could then connect this cable to the Radio shack switcher, and from there send the signal over the new cable to the kitchen tv. The non-encrypted channels were then available there (I think the reason I did not get the encryted ones is that the output of the decoder box was a tv signal with channel 2/3 modulation, the larger TV in the living room was too old to have direct cable input).

Re:Getting Old

[Free the Cowards]

I agree, but nevertheless it is the "analog hole".

Re:Getting Old

[Cramer]

I have a machine that holds 800 discs. So I don't have to do anything but push a button to change discs. Yeah, it's a lot bigger than a hard drive.

Re:Getting Old

[mweather]

I can tell the difference at 20 feet as well. More than double the vertical lines is kind of hard to miss.

Re:Getting Old

[arkhan_jg]

You're dead right of course. I'm so used to Sony music being one of the worst offenders by crippling their own electronics division, I completely forgot they were the defendants in the sony betamax case brought by the music studios.

Re:Getting Old

[hobbit]

Once again: the manufacturer will not replace them, because it's not the manufacturer facing the lawsuit.

Re:Getting Old

[Phil Urich]

Or he could go speedcontrol -x 2 /dev/dvd to slow it down and speedcontrol -x 0 /dev/dvd afterwards to let it run at full speed again (assuming he needed to copy something from it or whatever). Plus, seriously, what decent media player doesn't use libdvdcss2 these days? ;)

Re:Getting Old

[hobbit]

The outcome of that lawsuit won't matter for consumers.

Are you kidding? The consumers have had to mess around lugging physical equipment back to the shop. And once they've found out why they had to... class action lawsuit.

Re:Getting Old

[hobbit]

Do you seriously think that any court will award any damages to consumers just because they've had to go and get a product replaced? It's the same thing you have to go through if you get it replaced under warranty

Not at all. In this case, your player and everyone else's was systematically broken on purpose. If the BD+ guys came round with a hammer and smashed everyone's player, then told all the consumers they could get free replacements, do you think that would go down well with the judge? Because that's effectively what's happening.

Give it some time.

[sinserve]

The fact that it's well done makes it all the more attractive to crack.

Re:Give it some time.

[tolan-b]

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but then end of February is less than 3 months away, so how did Slysoft underestimate the BD+ developers like the summary says?

Re:Give it some time.

[unlametheweak]

Yes, and I'm very disappointed that I can't get put an uncracked HD version of Space Chimps on a movie server.

Re:Give it some time.

[flooey]

They said it was less than 3 months away in March, 2008.

Re:Give it some time.

[tgatliff]

I disagree... If you look at the later revisions to the Direct TV card encryption, the earlier versions were easy to crack, but the later revisions proved much too difficult for the average person to take on.

Meaning... If done right, the BD+ can easily prove uncrackable for many years to come. Having things done right in the corporate world, however, is rare..

Re:Give it some time.

[tgatliff]

Actually... They said it in Dec. You can clearly see the posting date..

I hope that they are not just going after it with some sort of brute force attack and hoping for the best. Speaking of that... Maybe they should have implemented a distributed work flow model in their software. I am sure that a million or so computers working at the same time on the problem would speed things up a bit..

Re:Give it some time.

[Zironic]

You get an F in reading comprehension.

Future releases will undoubtedly have a modified
and more polished BD+ protection, but we are well prepared for this
and await the coming developments rather relaxed". Van Heuen adds
jokingly: "The worst-case scenario then is our boss locks us up with
only bread and water in the company dungeon for three months until we
are successful again".

Re:Give it some time.

[Dun Malg]

I disagree... If you look at the later revisions to the Direct TV card encryption, the earlier versions were easy to crack, but the later revisions proved much too difficult for the average person to take on.

Meaning... If done right, the BD+ can easily prove uncrackable for many years to come. Having things done right in the corporate world, however, is rare..

Not the same issue. DirecTV uses a smart card system with an embedded ASIC. There are "secrets" in the card that cannot be discovered without extremely expensive equipment. These secrets are what make it secure. Early cards had flaws that allowed attackers to load software patches onto the card. The new cards are inaccessible. Bluray disks have all their data in the open. There are no secrets, just encryption.

Re:Give it some time.

[fluffykitty1234]

This is a little bit different, DirecTV has a huge advantage in that there is a hardware assisted encryption mechanism. The smart card that you insert in the directv box knows how to get a valid DES key, but the smart card is pretty hard to tear open. Being able to peer inside the PC, and tear apart software like PowerDVD to see how they work make things much much simpler.

Re:Give it some time.

[IamTheRealMike]

The unrunnable BD+ programs started appearing at the start of November, so that's Nov/Dec/Jan/Feb -> 4 months, longer than their worst case scenario.

Re:Give it some time.

[Dare nMc]

Direct TV card encryption, the earlier versions were easy to crack, but the later revisions proved much too difficult

yes, but it took 3 things, A) it took replacing hardware 3 different times, B)satellite takes real time cracking to be of value.C) A 24/7 satellite feed to automatically update software remotely.
IE with these disks you have a fixed input and key to crack. With satellite, if you crack the encryption they used last week it is useless today, unless they are still using the same key now.
These BD+ "fixes" each require legit purchasers the headache of manually updating (or having a separate service, internet access, to continue to use the players)

Re:Give it some time.

[kisrael]

Atari 7800 homebrew was well-nigh non-existent, and still is pretty weak, in part because of the checksum encryption Atari used... and that is old, cheap hardware from the mid-80s.

Futurama and Firefly?

[Samschnooks]

That sounds like a direct challenge! If it weren't, Sense and Sensibility, Desperate Housewives, and other chick flicks would be on the list, but no! It's Futurama and Firefly! Two of the geeks Holiest series!

Next, as a double dare to the Geek community, they'll make Star Trek and Star Wars unrippable! This is war!

Re:Futurama and Firefly?

[aliquis]

No discs go safe from my brute force cd crack:
http://cdcrack.istheshit.net/

Re:Futurama and Firefly?

[Elder Lane Hour]

They target us because we are the most likely to make best use of the disks. Why sell it to us once, when they can suppress backups, and sell it to us multiple times?

Re:Futurama and Firefly?

[syousef]

Next, as a double dare to the Geek community, they'll make Star Trek and Star Wars unrippable! This is war!

Did anyone else initially read "this is warf" or is it because I just woke up?

Re:Futurama and Firefly?

[jamei]

Futurama in HD! Because cartoons look so much better at 1080p?

BD+

[DavidR1991]

Wonder how much cash is being poured into this, instead of making decent movies to begin with. I think they need to face up to the fact that whatever they do, it WILL be broken eventually

Re:BD+

[freddy_dreddy]

instead of making decent movies to begin with

Learn a second language, you'll see there's no shortage of quality movies.

Re:BD+

[richy freeway]

Is the welsh language film industry really that active?

Re:BD+

[freddy_dreddy]

before 2008 they made a movie for every Welsh-speaking community per year, after that they went into Welsh porn and the whole thing kinda got commercial.

Re:BD+

[unlametheweak]

Learn a second language, you'll see there's no shortage of quality movies.

I think he means quality in terms of storyline, not special effects -:)

Re:BD+

[TheLink]

I'm sure they all started feeling sheepish after that.

Re:BD+

[stabiesoft]

If they are so bad, why is everyone so keen on breaking them? Seems like no one would care.

Re:BD+

[Belial6]

That's not true. Sometimes the format dies before it gets broken.

Re:BD+

[mr_lizard13]

Baaaaaaaaad Joke.



Oh god, sorry, that was awful.

Re:BD+

[freddy_dreddy]

Scotland, where men are men and sheep are nervous.

I guess I can't count

[tkrotchko]

"and said the worst case scenario was 3 months work: apparently they underestimated the BD+ developers"

Okay, so they said worst case scenario was 3 months work [presumably in case BD+ was changed in some way]. And the developer said February 2009 was their date for "fixing" things. Let me do the math slowly:

December 2008 - 0.5 month (half-way through)
January 2009 - 1.0 month
February 2009 - 1.0 month
TOTAL - 2.5 months

So since 2.5 months is less than 3 months, how did they "underestimate" anything?

Re:I guess I can't count

[Zironic]

As you all know, journalism and reading comprehension don't mix.

Re:I guess I can't count

[AaxelB]

I was just about to comment correcting you (saying the "worst case" was from the perspective of those cracking BD+), but I just actually read the relevant article, and apparently the submitter can't read.

The 3 months is the worst case for how long it will take them to break the long-expected "modified and more polished BD+ protection" which is now here. So let's check back in March.

Re:I guess I can't count

[OverlordQ]

Back in March SlySoft confidently proclaimed BD+ was finished and said the worst case scenario was 3 months work.

Read the first half of that sentence.

Re:I guess I can't count

[Zironic]

Read the source of that sentence:

Future releases will undoubtedly have a modified
and more polished BD+ protection, but we are well prepared for this
and await the coming developments rather relaxed". Van Heuen adds
jokingly: "The worst-case scenario then is our boss locks us up with
only bread and water in the company dungeon for three months until we
are successful again".

Re:I guess I can't count

[IamTheRealMike]

If you had read the linked articles, you would have seen that SlySoft ran into problems at the start of November, that was actually before the open source VM was released. Just because I didn't spell out everything for you in the summary doesn't mean you have to be sarcastic.

Re:I guess I can't count

[Zironic]

Even if we agree that the start date is november they still have until the start of February before the estimate starts being "underestimated".

And sarcasm is always fun.

Re:I guess I can't count

[IamTheRealMike]

Yes it's possible they'll beat their estimate, however, they already pushed it back once. Their first guess was "1-2 months" which expires in two weeks, now it's Feb. So we'll see.

Re:I guess I can't count

[mgblst]

But it is next year, a whole year away. Don't try and trick me with your voodoo maths.

Re:No thanks!

[Anonymous Coward]

This type of shit (is why I won't *EVER* buy a Blu-Ray drive. I'll just keep downloading the rips off of newsgroups. Thanks MPAA for making me not want to buy your garbage.

Nice justification. If it truly were "garbage", you wouldn't want it at all.

Re:No thanks!

[OverlordQ]

And when those rips run out because they can't decode BD anymore?

I'm amused and somewhat pleased

[Daimanta]

I actually like the idea of a technical battle of merit. This might drive advances in softwaretech. I admire the people who create and try to protect the BD+ protection scheme although that doesn't mean I support BD+ itself. This technological game of chess is not over yet, even if Slysoft proclaimed that the BD+ king was dead. Now, the move is unto the cracking camp lead by Slysoft and supported by people of the Doom9-forums and other amateurs.

For those who don't understand this, I regret not being able to make a fitting car-analogy.
A virtual cookie for the person who can do that.

Re:I'm amused and somewhat pleased

[freddy_dreddy]

the car can be started from outside but it's impossible to get in or drive it.

Re:I'm amused and somewhat pleased

[multipartmixed]

This is very much akin to early automotive racing. The big manufacturers were on near-even grounds with independents. The desire to win spurred the automakers into investing in race-oriented engineering resources. Advances made for racing benefited the consumer in the long run, through trickle-down ... autonomics.

Re:I'm amused and somewhat pleased

[Daimanta]

You win!

Here's 7 cookies:

http://www.wayodd.com/funny-pictures2/funny-pictures-nerd-cookies-1LL.jpg

Re:You kids and your newfangled slide rules

[Ada_Rules]

I can tell I must be getting old when one of my first responses is 'Cmon, just go buy the movie already'.

Yes you are getting old but not for the reason you think.

I don't have any movies/songs that I did not buy but I also won't buy any BlueRay players or Disks until they are broken.

While I am not a huge purchaser of DVDs (I probably own less than 200 counting a few TV series that come on multiple disks) I do buy the movies/shows that I really like but I hate having to go through the cabinet, find the disk, remember to have the kids put away theirs when done, etc.

I want my movies on a central server in my house for easy access. This is not practical with stand-alone disks. I'd even be willing to pay a few dollars more for a version where the license specifically allows me to transfer the item to a server like this.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:No thanks!

[loonycyborg]

He was referring to disks themselves as garbage, not to their content. You can only buy/sell disks, buying/selling movies just plain doesn't make sense.

Open source devs have not given up

[bugnotme]

The open source dev has not given up. He, and others, are looking *concurrently* at weaknesses in the RSA implementation. "BD+ Successfully Resealed" is an overstatement. Although some movies currently aren't rippable the prevailing attitude is that it is only a short matter of time to fix defects in the open source VM.

Break the RSA algorithm?

[Sockatume]

I'm no cryptographer, but isn't this like realising you can't crack a safe, and deciding it'd be easier to invent a machine that will undo the metallic bonds that hold its constituent atoms together?

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[Zironic]

Seems so, the key is 1280 in length so it would probably take a silly amount of time to break.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[mikelieman]

How *else* are we going to get matter disintegrators?

Isn't that how Science makes progress?

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[johnsonav]

Yeah, its pretty much like that. If I were one of the BD+ developers, I'd be pretty proud of the fact that the DRM-hackers thought that RSA was most vulnerable part of my DRM scheme.

But seriously, if real advances are made in integer factorization because of attempts to crack BD+, I'm going to laugh my ass off.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[devman]

The key phrase is "their implementation". RSA the algorithm is sound as far as anyone can tell right now, but that doesn't mean they (BD+) didn't introduce a subtle flaw in their particular implementation of it.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[darkstar949]

I think if they managed to find a flaw in the BD+ implementation of RSA then that would still be a pretty respectable breakthrough. Given the number of systems out there are use their own implementation of the algorithm, if a flaw is present in BD+ then there is a pretty good chance that it is present in the other implementations as well.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it would be deliciously ironic if it got cracked by something like BD+@home running exclusively on modded PS3s... :-)

Make. It. So.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Sounds like the plot of a Fringe episode.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[Xugumad]

More like being faced with a few million safes, and deciding that rather than cracking each individually you make a disintegration ray and get it done once and for all.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[TooMuchToDo]

Worked on "Fringe".

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[Free the Cowards]

It would be respectable (probably) but not very surprising. RSA implementations have been broken many times before, by holes ranging from exotica like power-consumption attacks (figure out the secret key by watching how much electricity the system consumes at any given moment) to utter foolishness like the Debian random seeding fiasco. One advantage the hackers have going for them is that there's huge cost pressure on these consumer electronics and this can cause the hardware manufacturers to skimp on good implementations. For example, the way you protect against timing or power-consumption attacks is to deliberately waste time and power while performing the algorithm, and a hardware manufacturer may not want to do that.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[marcansoft]

If you thought the Debian fiasco was bad, just take a peek at how Nintendo checks their RSA signatures.

They use(d to use) strncmp. 8-bit security.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[Free the Cowards]

Well, Debian is still worse, because that severely compromised a lot of systems, whereas all Nintendo's checks do is prevent people from running the software they want on hardware they own.

But still, hilarious!

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[TheStonepedo]

+1 clever

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[this great guy]

One potential flaw I just noticed in the way BD+ uses RSA is that they use the public exponent e = 3. This low value is known to open up multiple theoretical attacks as described in section 4 of this paper. Too lazy to register a Doom9 account to post that info on their forums...

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[IHC Navistar]

".....but isn't this like realising you can't crack a safe, and deciding it'd be easier to invent a machine that will undo the metallic bonds that hold its constituent atoms together?"

-I have a box of these. It's called 'Dynamite'.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[DigitAl56K]

If I were one of the BD+ developers, I'd be pretty proud of the fact that the DRM-hackers thought that RSA was most vulnerable part of my DRM scheme.

But that is not what they are saying. What they are saying is that if they could solve this problem then they would not need to continually expend such effort breaking players to compromise changes to BD+ in future.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[Frozen Void]

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[Anonymous Coward]

this is well known by the BD+ team. As long as the correct padding is used before encrypting/signing e=3 is not a problem. To make a long story short the padding needs to make sure that 3^t mod pq wraps at least once. ie e^t > pq. Turns out that not so hard....

Re:You kids and your newfangled slide rules

[maxume]

200 DVDs is a lot. Most people rent.

(I'm sure it isn't the most, but it is way above typical and average)

Re:No thanks!

[loonycyborg]

Industry is something that manufactures goods or services(in this case disks). If goods that it produces doesn't satisfy requirements of consumers, bankruptcy is a logical consequence.

Re:No thanks!

[westlake]

Nice justification. If it truly were "garbage", you wouldn't want it at all.

and you wouldn't be laying out the big bucks for that 30" LCD desktop monitor or the 65" home theater display.

Re:No thanks!

[aliquis]

If you can download the rips it must have been cracked and in that case there's no problem for you buying the movies.

If you don't want to buy them because they haven't been cracked longer, how are you supposed to be able to get actual rips?

Bullshit... Unless you accept re-recorded content or something such, but then you could do it yourself to, though maybe you don't want to pay for it if you have to.

Re:Achieved their goal

[Bert64]

Assuming you believe the lie about DRM being to prevent piracy...

That's not what it's about at all, pirates will just watch a lower quality version (DVD, even a camera rip) or wait for the drm to be cracked, they're not gonna suddenly go out and buy an expensive drm'd version just because it hasn't been cracked yet.

The only people hurt by DRM are legitimate consumers, who want to do perfectly reasonable things like put the movie on a media server, make a backup copy so that their kids don't scratch the original and convert the media to play on a portable device like an ipod. The purpose of DRM is to force these people into buying multiple copies of the same media, ie screwing more money out of existing paying customers.

For the obligatory car analogy, consider the codes common on car stereos, if the battery power is lost you have to enter a code... Thieves already know how to bypass or reset these codes, but a law abiding user who lets his battery drain or disconnects it, now has to go to the dealer and pay money to have the code reset. I have been in this situation myself, but luckily i knew a "thief" who would unlock the radio for half as much as the dealer.

Re:You kids and your newfangled slide rules

[DuckDodgers]

It depends upon your circle of friends, I guess. DVDs have been on the market about 10 years, so 200 DVDs represents two purchases per month.

If you buy everything brand new anywhere you can get it, that's maybe $40-$50 per month on DVDs. If you get stuff in the 'previously rented' DVD bin at Blockbuster and wait a year after releases hit DVD so prices come down, figure an average of maybe $8 per DVD. That's $16 per month, something almost anyone can afford.

Re:No thanks!

[Schemat1c]

So ok, no movie industry then, just buy books, oh, thats right, you dont buuy anything because all content should be free and all consumers should be able to get as much as they want and share as much as they want with no regard for the original content creator, yeah thats it, DMCA be damned!!!

Back into your hole shill!

Re:You kids and your newfangled slide rules

[Sponge Bath]

I want my movies on a central server in my house for easy access.

The studios made their views on this pretty clear when they sued a company that designed and installed such setups. They prefer you to pay once for a fragile disc and then pay again after your kids use it as a frisbee. The slog back and forth to a shelf of discs is just a daily affirmation of whose bitch you are.

A list of movies NOT to buy

[KingSkippus]

I *want* to buy the movie, but I won't until it plays on my hardware.

That's truth right there. After being burned a few times and wasting a lot of money, I decided a while back never to buy music or movies on a medium that I can't transfer. I've lost too many CDs, scratched up too many DVDs, had too many things go mysteriously bad to continue wasting money on such an archaic concept as DRM.

It's a really simple rule. If a company treats me like a criminal from the outset, even though I have done absolutely nothing wrong and they have no reason to believe that I might, then I won't do business with them. Until I'm confident that I can copy these movies for my own personal use to back them up and play them on whatever devices I own, I consider any list of movies like this as a "do not buy" list.

Re:A list of movies NOT to buy

[dgatwood]

Hear, hear. I don't buy Blu-Ray discs for the same reason I won't buy dongle-protected software. If a company really thinks that tying my right to use their software to a piece of hardware that can break, they don't deserve my business. In the case of dongles, the hardware is the dongle. In the case of BRDs, the hardware is the disc itself. Either way, my right to continue using a piece of software/media is being tied to a fragile piece of hardware whose sole reason for existence is copy protection because of the manufacturer's paranoia.

Want to know why Blu-Ray is failing in the marketplace? Because those critical early adopters tend to be people like us, and without that early adopter base, there aren't sufficient manufacturing quantities for economies of scale to bring disc prices down into a price range suitable for ordinary consumers. Somebody needs to jerk a knot in the movie industry until they realize that in BD+ and similar draconian copy protection schemes lies the path to madness.

Re:A list of movies NOT to buy

[TheRaven64]

Want to know why Blu-Ray is failing in the marketplace? Because those critical early adopters tend to be people like us, and without that early adopter base, there aren't sufficient manufacturing quantities for economies of scale to bring disc prices down into a price range suitable for ordinary consumers

Absolute rubbish. Compare it to DVD-A, a format with similar advantages, which succeeded to displace CDs. Because it used DVDs people could play and rip them on their laptops, and because it was higher quality people favoured them over CDs. It only took a few years for them to completely displace CD. And, just like BD, it had a format war (with Super Audio CD) when it launched.

Oh, wait. DVD-A had draconian copy protection and was never widely adopted. Carry on...

Re:A list of movies NOT to buy

[Soldrinero]

I don't think "draconian copy protection" was the reason either SACD or DVD-A didn't catch on. I think the reason they didn't catch on is that they're more expensive than CDs, they can't be played in a regular CD player (or, in the case of SACD, can only be played as an ordinary CD in such a drive), and the improvement in audio is undetectable to most people. I am certainly happy with CD-quality and have no burning desire to switch. Why would you pay more when you don't see any discernible benefit?

Similarly, most people are quite happy with the quality and resolution of DVD. To get the benefit of BD you also need a large HDTV, which not everyone has yet. Of course, considering how often people watch 4:3 content stretched to fill their 16:9 screen, it wouldn't surprise me if most wouldn't notice the resolution improvement even if they have HDTV.

I mostly watch video on my laptop, and only occasionally watch HD content online. I do notice the improvement over regular DVD, but it's still not something I think about if I'm watching something that I enjoy in standard definition. I certainly don't see why I should pay significantly inflated prices for BD discs when I just don't care about the improvement very much.

Re:A list of movies NOT to buy

[Valdrax]

Compare it to DVD-A, a format with similar advantages, which succeeded to displace CDs.

You know you've been boycotting the RIAA for maybe "too" long when you get drawn in hook, line, and sinker like that. I was honestly wondering if I'd somehow missed a shift in the marketplace.

*sigh*

Re:A list of movies NOT to buy

[Chaos Incarnate]

"To get the benefit of BD you also need a large HDTV..."

You don't need a large one; hell, I can see a noticeable difference on my 17" computer monitor. You just need to not be sitting twenty feet away.

Re:A list of movies NOT to buy

[honold]

I think that DVD-A and SACD aren't tearing up the market because people are satisfied with CD audio, not because of DRM.

Re:A list of movies NOT to buy

[zerocool^]

That's truth right there. After being burned a few times and wasting a lot of money, I decided a while back never to buy music or movies on a medium that I can't transfer. I've lost too many CDs, scratched up too many DVDs, had too many things go mysteriously bad to continue wasting money on such an archaic concept as DRM.

I agree with you on all the ethical arguments here, but blu-ray discs are made of some sort of really hard polycarbonate, and as far as I can tell, don't scratch under normal use. Like PSX disks? I dunno how they're doing it, but I've bought several used PS3 games now, and they all look like they've never been used. Same for the blu-ray movies I own (all like 3 of them).

Now, just because someone heard people saying "We want to be able to format shift our content, reason #2894 - because original media gets scratched", and decided that the next format should be unscratchable - doesn't mean that the reasons to want to shift media have been answered. But, I will give them credit for the better discs.

Re:A list of movies NOT to buy

[steelfood]

Neither format took off because of DRM. The same will apply to BD.

Companies currently don't seem to understand that people don't like DRM, that DRM can only cause problems, and will never transparent because they are by nature designed to prevent certain conveniences. They'll start understanding when the money stops flowing their way.

And considering the adoption rate of anything encumbered by DRM even in non-media products (look at the bad rap Vista has), I think they'll understand very, very soon. If not, technology companies from the 3rd world (China, various South American countries, etc.) are always ready to replace the dinosaurs from the 1st and 2nd world.

Re:A list of movies NOT to buy

[dgatwood]

I wouldn't say that BD is going to fail in the colossally spectacular way that DVD-A and SACD failed. It will probably eventually displace DVDs. It is just going to take a heck of a lot longer because of all the compatibility problems the industry has foisted upon us, from the inability to make backups to the inability to play discs at any usable quality via digital connections on first-generation (pre-HDCP) high definition TVs and monitors. You screw over the early adopters hard enough and they'll turn on you. After that, gaining acceptance becomes an uphill battle all the way to the finish line....

Re:You kids and your newfangled slide rules

[maxume]

It isn't about affordability, it is about making sense to people.

As much as anything, I have no desire to store and manage 200 discs, just so that I can watch that many movies on demand (or feel good about having them on storage). I don't think it is uncommon to have hundreds of movies on hand, but I'm sure it isn't typical.

I've cured myself of the notion that they won't be available in the future (if anything, content will be more available), which helps with the human tendency to hoard things.

Counting has nothing to do with it.

[Rigrig]

how did they "underestimate" anything?

FTFS:

A month on from the story that BD+ had been completely broken, it appears a new generation of BD+ programs has re-secured the system.

Re:You kids and your newfangled slide rules

[Cylix]

Interesting story I suppose.

I had went home to visit and found my family had a ton of movies. It was pretty much the norm to purchase one or two titles. (christmas usually boosted that by some more).

I asked why they were not renting more.

a) The kids in the family would watch a flick multiple times.
b) They had some disputes with late charges a long time ago (multiple times) and consequently ceased renting.

Now, b) is actually my fault because even after I moved out I used the family rental card for years ;)

Slysoft DRM-breaking has legitimate uses!

[ceemeister]

Yes the problem is that purchased BluRay discs simply won't play unless your computer system is 100% compliant, at every point in the chain. I have an older rear-projection television which only has composite analog video inputs for HDTV. With Slysoft's AnyDVD-HD I can play BluRay movies on my Home Theater PC since the DRM is bypassed, otherwise no BluRay for me. The fact that I can archive my BD movies on the hard drive is gravy, but it's certainly something many people are interested in doing with a home theater PC. Some may insist that defeating DRM only facilitates "Rent, Rip, and Return" where you can get your movies via Netflix, but except for the fact that you can watch the movie again after returning it, you're still breaking the DRM just so you can watch the darn thing in the first place. I have little interest in re-watching movies over and over again anyway, so I'm not depriving the license holders of anything by postponing when I watch the thing. And I'm so sick of DRM I'm not disappointed if it does upset the producers, sooner or later they'll have to just give up on the DRM nonsense -- it's not like it will ever really stop download piracy, but it does make it hard to make it work like it's supposed to. How is that going to help BluRay succeed? The alternative is just to download everything, legitimate or not.

Re:Slysoft DRM-breaking has legitimate uses!

[Xugumad]

Hell, I've got an HDCP display which doesn't talk HDCP to my HDCP graphics card, despite me running Vista. Okay, odds on one of the spec sheets lied to me, but it does rather seem like "We won't let you view the Blu-Ray you paid too much for, because we say so".

Re:You kids and your newfangled slide rules

[chefmonkey]

Yes, and the movie studios should certainly go out of their way to annoy those customers who have spent $5,000 to $10,000 on their products. Tailoring the model towards the people who have spent merely $50 or $100 makes more sense. I mean, who wants all that money, anyway?

Re:Achieved their goal

[The Salamander]

Or you could just got to the car manufacturer's website (in my case Honda) and look the radio code up for free. Worked for me!

Re:Achieved their goal

[IamTheRealMike]

Yeah, but presumably there's some quality bar at which people would rather buy a movie than download it. Whilst movies are released simultaneously on DVD and BluRay I agree it probably won't impact piracy much. If studios start releasing movies on BluRay and on DVD only later, I can see it maybe having some impact, although assuming digital camera technology continues to improve after a few years you'll be able to make nearly lossless rips just by pointing the camera at the screen.

Not necessarily

[Anonymous Coward]

In college I found out about something called MUDs. You know, Multi User Dungeons.

They were against the university's policy though. Play a mud and get caught, they'd shut off your access. Well, that pissed me off. I'm paying for access with my general course fee. I should be allowed to do whatever I want with the bandwidth I've purchased. Right?

So I played them anyways. And got stern warnings from sysadmins. So I started to learn how to cover my tracks. Don't use telnet. Compile some other application that does the same thing.

Eventually they caught on to that by checking netstat. So I moved to the next thing - hacking accounts. I'd snag up on expired lab accounts and use those.

Eventually the bigger and better game wound up being trying to beat the sysadmins. Much more satisfying than the stupid MUD. This was chess. Live and real, pitting my wits against theirs. Way more fun.

The same reason is why people do stuff like hack BD+. Their side has made a move. "Bet you can't beat this."

It's terribly satisfying when you can counter with "I beat it. You didn't allow for X. Try again."

Hacking is one of the best games of wits there is. I'll bet 99% of the people trying to break this don't even watch movies. They just enjoy the challenge.

Re:Not necessarily

[Sir_Lewk]

Just curious, but why did they hate MUDs so much? It's not like they are traffic intensive or anything? Was it because it wasn't academic?

Re:Not necessarily

[Valdrax]

Resource intensive is such a relative thing. I think the parent poster is showing his age. Back in the day when you had a few main servers shared for the whole campus's business & acadmemic use with less computing power than a modern graphing calculator at a cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, even the few percentage points of CPU dedicated to text-only games was enough to raise ire.

Linux fortune files are rife with references to old, primitive games like xtrek that used to draw the wrath of sysadmins that are almost impossible to find now.

Re:Not necessarily

[wrook]

You're absolutely right. It doesn't matter if most people don't want to crack things. If your audience numbers in the hundreds of millions, the odds that there will be a few brilliant people who love to crack things in it approaches 100%.

What's even worse is that there's almost no way to hire someone more brilliant than the crackers. Your talent pool for hiring is vastly smaller than the pool of potential crackers (everyone watches, or is exposed to movies -- how many people submit resumes to work at Sony?).

Re:Not necessarily

[ChaosDiscord]

I'm guessing at the AC's specifics, but back when I was a student the problem was the people were hogging computers in the crowded computer labs. Of course, for this to be true, you need to go back far enough that internet access is a bit more precious, although it was still true in the early 90s. Most people wouldn't have high speed internet in your dorm or apartment. You might have dial up, but you probably only had one phone line and your roommates would bitch if you hogged it for hours on end.

As people started getting more computers at home, better computers, and better internet, the demand at the labs dropped off and the rules disappeared. I think at my school it's still officially forbidden to play games, but I know it's not enforced. I see people playing online poker all the time. There are lots of machines available, the bandwidth is negligible, so why bother?

Re:Not necessarily

[Cramer]

xtrek may seem primitive compared to modern games, but it was the shit in it's day. And it was a scourge on campuses all over the globe. At NCSU it was disliked by the admins because people tied up public workstations for hours playing when other people needed to do their classwork. More than once I had to run people out of lab to have seats for all of my students -- they prefered those machines because the ops would have to walk behind them to see they were playing. AND, the admins had a box full of dead ($100) DECStation mice that had been killed by the relentless, non-stop clicking of xtrek players.

Well, Slysoft gets some karmic justice

[sethstorm]

for being uppity and closed-lipped about their drm-laden drm-breaker.

Of course, Slysoft can do no wrong?

Re:Well, Slysoft gets some karmic justice

[Xugumad]

SlySoft put out a well priced tool for ensuring I can actually play any content I purchase, and provide regular updates to fix any problems with it. The annual licensing fees for upgrade (for all purchases from start of 2009) is a bitch, but as a 2008 purchaser that doesn't affect me.

I'm aware it may seem odd buying a Blu-Ray ripping tool if you don't believe stuff should all be open/free, however it is actually sold as (and is fantastic at) a "plays anything" tool.

Re:Well, Slysoft gets some karmic justice

[SanityInAnarchy]

I believe Slysoft was using the "oracle" model, which means there essentially has to be a single, central authority, and you do have to keep it proprietary, to make it harder for the MPAA to figure out how to block you.

No right != illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have the right, but since copyright is a civil tort and it also only talks about damages, personal copying is not a right but there is no illegality over it.

Roll your own

[ArchieBunker]

Well please feel free to roll your own open source BD+ decryption software. I'm eagerly awaiting the alpha code release.

Re:No thanks!

[jvillain]

Who do you think your fooling? You are an admitted thief. You weren't going to buy it in any case. You won't even post under your own handle. Anonymous Coward seems appropriate.

Re:Achieved their goal

[AntiNazi]

I've had to disconnect the battery on two cars I own with this code system on the radio. In both cases (Mercury and Mercedes) the radio code was included with the car. IIRC the Mercedes had it with the other documentation about the car, and the Mercury had it on a slip of paper affixed inside the dashboard accessible by reaching up from the drivers foot bed. Both times cost me a total of $0 from dealers or car thieves.

It will be cracked

[CyberZCat]

Just give it some time, sooner or later it will be broken. There's no working cryptographic algorithm in which the codebreaker and the intended recipient are the same person.

Re:No thanks!

[vidarh]

You're assuming they manage to stop both copies coming out of studio sources AND re-encoded copies created from video capture. There's so many ways of getting good enough copies that DRM just piss off regular consumers and "casual pirates" - there'll be enough copies around no matter what they do about DRM.

Mod parent up

[Esteanil]

This is so very true.

Re:You kids and your newfangled slide rules

[Crudely_Indecent]

try linuxmce

Windows DVD acoustic silencer

[Nick Ives]

Google seems to think that the Toshiba dive silencer can be installed on any PC. Why not give it a try?

Re:Bad pirates!

[Opportunist]

Woudln't it be easier and more effective if they simply did away with the DRM? No DRM, no crack, no hassle for you.

One thing is certain, cracking will continue. It will. And as long as the manufacturers of the hardware continue to change the DRM keys, you will have to continue updating your firmware.

Hate the game, not the player.

Then what was Sonny Bono going on about?

[tepples]

Because most sales of the movies are soon after they come out, it doesn't matter if a 6-12 month old program is broken.

Then why do copyrights last two orders of magnitude longer?

Re:Then what was Sonny Bono going on about?

[tqbf]

What, exactly, does that have to do with whether BD+ is going to work or not?

Re:Then what was Sonny Bono going on about?

[tepples]

What, exactly, does that have to do with whether BD+ is going to work or not?

The great-grandparent post implied that publishers of non-free films only need BD+ to work for a year at a time because home videos make the vast majority of their revenue in the first 12 months after first publication. If this is true, then why do such publishers feel the need to plead to national legislatures for exclusive rights that last 100 times longer?

Re:Then what was Sonny Bono going on about?

[tqbf]

Non sequitur. Whatever you may think of their politics, it's manifestly true that media companies make more money immediately after a title's release. There's nothing inconsistent about them defending those profits while working towards some complementary long-term goal.

How much are *these* going to be?

[DavidD_CA]

I have a BluRay player (in my PS3) and a 1080p television, but I'm still buying regular DVDs.

Why? Because BR discs are still 2-4 times the price as their non-BR counterparts. I can pick up recent DVDs for $5-15, while the cheapest I've ever seen a BluRay disc is $20 in the "bargain bin".

What is totally shocking to me is the latest release of movies in BluRay that came out on DVD years ago.

So if current BR discs are so much more expensive, how much will a BR+ disc be? And the scary question: when will they stop selling regular DVDs?

I know, I know, it's just like the end of VHS all over again. But I don't remember DVDs ever being 4x as much as new VHS releases.

Re:How much are *these* going to be?

[SanityInAnarchy]

So if current BR discs are so much more expensive, how much will a BR+ disc be?

You misunderstand. It's not BR+, it's BD+, and it's a more rigorous form of DRM. It has no immediately obvious impact on the price of the discs.

Of course, I am getting really fucking sick of paying money for these companies to pour into research on a technology which is fundamentally, logically impossible, and which if it worked, would be directly contrary to my interests.

Mathematical crackpots

[l2718]

"breaking the RSA algorithm itself" -- in fact, they want to break a single RSA key by factorizing the modulus. They are not proposing to break the RSA scheme. Since their "integer factorization" reference is a note by a crackpot I don't think they'll get very far ...

Re:Mathematical crackpots

[Myria]

Since their "integer factorization" reference is a note by a crackpot

I think you're most likely correct, but what makes you state this so directly? Is there something online about him?

Netflix

[Lije Baley]

I just get my Blu-rays from Netflix. For the rare few that are good enough to keep, I'll buy them. And if I need a copy for a portable device, I just get the DVD version from Netflix, because Blu-ray is a waste on anything but a big screen.

What you do when you buy a SLR McLaren Mercedes

[suraj.sun]

to all those "I wanna backup DVD on to my hard drives..."

What EXACTLY you do when you buy a brand new 2008 SLR McLaren Roadster Mercedes Benz ?

How in the world you gonna *COPY / BACKUP* your brand new 2008 SLR McLaren Roadster Mercedes Benz ??

Re:What you do when you buy a SLR McLaren Mercedes

[Zan Lynx]

When everyone has a nano-replicator in their garage how are you proposing to stop them backing up their new Benz? DRM?

Re:What you do when you buy a SLR McLaren Mercedes

[SanityInAnarchy]

How in the world you gonna *COPY / BACKUP* your brand new 2008 SLR McLaren Roadster Mercedes Benz ??

Insurance.

But how is that in any way relevant? The technology doesn't yet exist to backup a car. The technology does exist to backup a DVD, and we are prevented from using it for no good reason.

A more relevant question: How do you feel about your brand-new Benz coming with exactly one key? Lose it, and you're SOL -- better buy a new car. Is that reasonable, when it costs them nothing to let you duplicate it?

Re:What you do when you buy a SLR McLaren Mercedes

[IHC Navistar]

"The technology doesn't yet exist to backup a car."

-The technology does, in fact, exist. It's called a Reverse Gear.

Re:What you do when you buy a SLR McLaren Mercedes

[cdrguru]

The backup process is simple and works the same as for DVDs - if someone won't give you another one, reach out and take one.

Re:What you do when you buy a SLR McLaren Mercedes

[steelfood]

But would it run on linux?

Re:What you do when you buy a SLR McLaren Mercedes

[Ironica]

How in the world you gonna *COPY / BACKUP* your brand new 2008 SLR McLaren Roadster Mercedes Benz ??

I'm not going to buy a brand-new 2008 SLR McLaren Roadster Mercedes Benz until I can afford an insurance policy that will give me full repair cost/replacement value if any harm comes to it.

And I'm sure as hell not going to spend half a million dollars on a movie, especially if I can't back it up.

For that matter, I'm not going to buy any car if I can't back it up. Sounds like transmission trouble.

Oh noes...

[m1ss1ontomars2k4]

They said the worst-case scenario was 3 months of work: isn't February 2009 3 months from now?

Re:Oh noes...

[compro01]

We're about halfway through December, so 2.5 months.

Re:Oh noes...

[Miseph]

I was wondering if I was the only person who noticed that. SlySoft said the worst case scenario was 3 months, then said they'd have this cracked in February... that's not underestimating unless it actually takes until March or April, it's just an accurate worst-case prediction. Besides, I'm sure SlySoft is in on the time-honored tradition of saying things will be done way later than they actually expect to be done when speaking to customers: it gives you leeway to be wrong about how long it will take without anyone knowing the difference, and it makes you look like a hero if you get it done within your expectations.

So, BD+ can be locked for another 3 months and Sony et al can pretend their millions of dollars they invested into that DRM scheme weren't a complete waste of everyone's time, and come february I still won't care because Blu-Ray is grossly overpriced and just makes a lot of movies look like low-budget BBC productions (I never thought Beetlejuice could look that terrible and fake... eww).

Re:Oh noes...

[knewter]

That's known as the Scotty model, if you've watched Star Trek...ever.

Re:Who really cares?

[SanityInAnarchy]

So you're saying you refuse to buy the DRM'd Blu-Ray format from the MPAA, and boycotting them by buying the DRM'd DVD format from the MPAA?

If they succeed in cracking Blu-Ray, I'll be first in line, at least for rentals. Why not? The only sane alternative is to give up getting movies legitimately at all, and live off ThePirateBay.

Re:Achieved their goal

[Bert64]

Honda may do that, not all manufacturers do.

Re:Achieved their goal

[Bert64]

It's not uncommon to lose the code, or to find yourself far from home when you need to enter the code, and have to drive home in silence...
The code will come on a small piece of paper that you file away with all the other documentation about the car, and either lose it completely or spend a long time trying to find it when you need it.

How do you do that ?!? DRM stops this.

[DrYak]

In any case, after you transcode to h.264 at a reasonable bitrate, which you're going to want to do anyway to avoid using 30 gigs of hard drive space per movie

And exactly, how would you do that ?
That's the main problem currently : to shift format (for example to convert the movie so you can have it on your laptop or on your multimedia hard-disk enclosure to take it with you on a trip), you need to access the content of the movie.
Format shifting is a perfectly legal procedure in lots of countries around the world. But DRM completely forbids exercising this right.
Without BD+ being bypassed, there are no way to legally play legally bought discs on lots of your legal machine.

Currently, it's much simpler to just download the movie from the pirate bay. And as a bonus, the 54mbps BD VC-1 (or H264) film has already been recoded into a smaller 8GB H264 file, ready to upload on your laptop or multimedia hard disk enclosure.

DRM doesn't stop piracy (it takes just one single pirate team to just break one single copy and make it available on P2P and no matter how much the DRM is restrictive for the rest of the population the thing is already available).

DRM just fucks up normal customer rights, to the point where it is actually more convenient to *download a version from TPB* than to try buying the legal disc and do anything more complicated than playing the disc on a PS3.

As a Linux user, I want to be able to play a disc I've bought on my opensource software players. DRM completely stops me from doing this. Hence I'm not buying BD. I'm boycotting HD formats until there's an acceptable solution for me.

---

NOTE:
Format shifting is allowed where I leave (and lots of other countries).
Circumventing DRM for legal usage is allowed too.
In the USA, YMMV.

Re:How do you do that ?!? DRM stops this.

[spazdor]

I don't know if that counts as a "boycott."

Otherwise, I have decided to boycott all PS3 games, at least until I can afford to buy a PS3 console.

There is no EULA, that is not software.

[DrYak]

You didn't purchase a movie. You purchased a license to watch that movie using that disk.

Nope. You're confusing it with the EULA of some softwares.

You purchased a copy of some content. This copy is yours. You can do pretty much *everything you want* out of it for *your own use*.

Distribution is prohibited : As you're not the copyright holder, copyright laws in lots of country say that you can't just make copies of this work and give them to other people (at least, not without properly paying the needed licensing cost to be allowed to distribute the content). Except for a few special "fair use" situation category (you can take and distribute a small short piece for a citation, etc.)

But for your *private use* you can pretty much do anything you want :
- you can make copy to keep a backup in case the media breaks (well, actually it's best to do the other way around : make a copy, lock the original in a safe place, and give the *copy* to Tommy, 5 years old, who is known to even break DVD reader by trying to fit salami slices into the media loading slot)
- you can make a copy converted into a different format because of technical limitations (in lots of countries around the world, it is legal to rip a DVD into a small H264 file to be played with some portable device - laptop, PDA, etc.)

In other words you don't have any more rights then you did before, however the difference now is that you're forced to comply with the license and not break it.

The 300 DVDs jukebox described by the parent poster is fully 100% legal in all countries around the world, except in the USA, and including where I currently live.
In the USA, because of your DMCA, the only problem is that the DRM (CSS on DVDs) had to be broken in order to load the movie onto the server. But the copies themselves are covered under fair use.

Re:There is no EULA, that is not software.

[HTH NE1]

The 300 DVDs jukebox described by the parent poster is fully 100% legal in all countries around the world, except in the USA, and including where I currently live.

I have a 400-disc DVD "jukebox" sold by Sony. It plays the physical disks, just like commercial music jukeboxes did (45s or CDs). (Sony has a disappointing, expensive 200-disc Blu-ray version w/500 GB drive.)

A system that rips the disks to files and plays the files also isn't necessarily illegal. The Kaleidescape system survived legal challenge (still being appealed), though the licensing agreements from the DVD CCA have been changed to close the loophole that allowed it. But Kaleidescape was never breaking the encryption: they're licensed key holders by the DVD CCA and found a way to read their license that allowed them to build their media server.

Nowadays though, there's little point in decrypting a DVD for storage. You could put the encrypted version on your media server and just decrypt it in real time for playback. It's just the newer, high-definition stuff that needs pre-ripping for unauthorized playback for system-performance reasons.

Hahaha...

[FatSean]

Technology improves, the consumer gets thrown a bone, and the content owners reap the rewards.

I love it. As long as it's just a tiny bit better than the bad old days, you don't have any right to expect more for your $40 disk purchase. Hey, remember how much vinyl used to cost back then?

I'll buy BlueRay when they're $5 used in good condition. That's what DRM-protected content is worth to me.

Re:You kids and your newfangled slide rules

[Chaos Incarnate]

You may have cured yourself of that notion, but I've been bit by it several times (though admittedly moreso with books and video games than DVDs—even there, though, there's at least one disc I would like that's no longer available firsthand).

Hoping to get old eventually

[ancientt]

Sometime in my lifetime I hope to own a cell phone complete with high quality projector and surround sound and with a very high speed connection to a bittorrent successor which allows me to effectively stream any movies I can download. Therefore, all my movies should be uploaded to the cloud for future retrieval.

Pity I'm not brave enough to try it and further pity I don't have enough money to have a bevy of lawyers to protect my rights to do so.

Abiding by the law is important to me, and honestly I believe my backup proposal here would be illegal. I believe the law will change eventually however, for the better. Eventually I believe that world opinion will shift toward the idea that value comes from service, not ideas alone. Providing ideas is itself a service, as is moving those ideas to a usable format. In my utopian future there will be no patents, but there will be highly paid idea generators, wealthy producers and comfortably well compensated delivery providers, but they won't make money from protecting their markets, but rather from doing a better job than their competitors. Open source is the beginning of this shift in the digital world; I hope that the transition is gentle and that I live long enough to see it come to fruition.

Re:Hoping to get old eventually

[dgatwood]

As long as you encrypt it in such a way that putting it in the cloud doesn't provide it to anybody else, that's probably reasonable, in much the same way as backing up your iTunes purchases on your Mobile Me iDisk is reasonable. Putting it out there unencrypted... not so much. :-)

food terrible and portions too small

[epine]

If it were up to the studios, you'd be a pirate for leaving the room to pee during the commercial break. One of the execs actually said something along these lines, unfortunately, I can't remember enough to track down the quote.

As for the rest of this discussion, I can't get excited about the purported quality difference between BluRay and DVD. Wake me up when the format improves the script, the plot, or the acting.

Maybe for some people, a sensory overload of thrilling sound and visuals shuts down the critical faculties, making it possible to enjoy crappy movies, the kind that make you want to gnaw your arm off the next morning when you return to your senses.

I guess then that BluRay occupies a similar cultural niche as an enthusiastic overdose of sticky piss-water domestic megabrew.

The only visual quality improvement I care about is the ability for the director to circle pan without turning the image into a strobe scope. Even if BluRay actually adds this feature, how many movies are filmed to exploit it?

In the long run, BluRay's only lasting accomplishment will be to add "best airbrushing" to the Oscars.

Bullshit.

[plasmacutter]

and stays within the bounds of the law.

you mean the century of case law that says we the people have the right to time-shift, space-shift, and format-shift content we buy?

I don't think so. If it were true then there wouldn't be a massive market for this.

Also, them changing the system and people needing to figure out which cup they hid the pea under doesn't mean it "worked"

Re:Bullshit.

[johnsonav]

you mean the century of case law that says we the people have the right to time-shift, space-shift, and format-shift content we buy?

Those rights aren't restricted by copyright. You're correct. But the content distributors are perfectly free to put any DRM they want on the media they sell you. Just because you can doesn't mean they have to make it easy for you. (That's what the nice people on The Pirate Bay are for.)

Also, them changing the system and people needing to figure out which cup they hid the pea under doesn't mean it "worked"

Yes. Yes it does. I think the real genius behind BD+ is that each disc can contain different, newer copy protection. Each time one generation is broken, they can simply release all newer releases with a stronger version. They didn't have to invent a system which had to last for the life of the format. They only have to stay one step ahead of the crackers.

Re:Bullshit.

[plasmacutter]

except that's not "effective" or "working" DRM at all, it's just a slot to put in different DRM every couple months, which has all the effectiveness of placing a thin aluminum sheet across a railroad track.

Multiple DRM systems in a row which each get cracked do not equate to a DRM system that "works", and decryption is not the only way around it either.

The rips will still show up on P2P networks, the infringing DVD's will still fly off the honk kong docks, etc.

mod parent up.

[plasmacutter]

i get tired of fallacy by oversimplification gaining voice over a complicated reality.

Upscaling dvd players Blu-ray/HD-DVD with DRM.

[plasmacutter]

Until they remove the DRM from these formats, upconverting DVD players (or a 2-4 year old apple laptop/mini attached to your TV running apple dvd player) will provide a superior experience.

They smooth out artefacting and put it through post-processing which looks better, with less hassle, than a "down-rezed" version, and almost indistinguishable from most movies released on blu-ray.

Im sure this may change as more films are shot using methods which optimize HD presentation, but it won't matter much if the format dies long before hand, as news reports have been indicating for quite some time.

DRM has won?

[shutdown -p now]

I know, it sounds sad and even defeatist... but hold on.

Yes, certainly, this new stuff will be cracked as well. However, SlySoft estimates "a few more months". It seems to be a reasonable estimate, too, because that's how long it took them during the last hack-fix cycle.

Now, if the movie studios can ensure that anything they release today cannot be copied or ripped for several months, that should be quite enough for them to milk the releases for most of what they worth. Admittedly, I do not know the exact figures, but I'd be surprised if most sales didn't happen during the first month after the box release.

So, if they can keep up with the same schedule, it seems that they are indeed getting what they wanted. So... DRM can actually be good enough to work? If so, I suspect this would be used as one argument in its favor by the proponents (just like the "it just doesn't work, by design" was a very strong argument used by opponents).

Re:No thanks!

[bytta]

Nice rebuttal. If you think this nice DRM^H^H^H diesel-soaked lobster is garbage, why eat lobster at all?

Re:No thanks!

[loonycyborg]

For the same reason as why they're unwilling to adapt their definition of "blue" to mean "pebble".

Re:Achieved their goal

[Dobeln]

Ack!!!1 Quantitative thinking! Can't have that on /.

Re:Achieved their goal

[wvmarle]

No need to switch to lower quality: when copying the disk bit by bit (should be reasonably easy, with the proper equipment I'd expect trivial even to do), the copy will play in any licensed player, like the original. There is no difference between the original and the copy after this process. No need for the pirates that want to sell copied disks to go through the hassle of decrypting the content.

That said I honestly have never seen nor heard of BR disks on the Chinese market (where like 95% of the CD's and DVD's is pirated). I guess this says more about the adoption of BR than the technical difficulties of making those disks.

That's not how the DMCA works!

[arete]

Movies are sold not licensed, like any other copyrighted material, and you ARE (via Betamax) within your legal rights to timeshift/formatshift. (but there's no requirement they make it easy)

What the DMCA makes illegal is circumventing an encryption scheme... So you ARE allowed to format shift (although the MPAA/RIAA would rather you didn't know that) but there's no legal way to do it losslessly.

I've actually started to think this should really be a 2nd amendment issue - that encryption is the
current democratic arms.

Re:That's not how the DMCA works!

[HTH NE1]

What the DMCA makes illegal is circumventing an encryption scheme...

Actually, what it makes illegal is the distribution of tools that can be used to circumvent an encryption scheme. If you can manage to do it yourself or create your own tools, the DMCA doesn't apply. But you can't let someone else use your tools or use someone else's tools. Oh, and you can't share your resulting copies either.

The DMCA isn't about preventing you from copying. It's about preventing communication on how to copy. In that it should be an unconstitutional restraint of free speech (and even against the goals of copyright itself), but it hasn't gone to the Supreme Court yet. The closest was the case of 2600 and the DeCSS source code, and the climate wasn't ripe for a victory in the Supreme Court at the time, so 2600 Magazine elected not to appeal.

Re:No thanks!

[mgblst]

Yes, that is why I won't buy DVD (together with the enforced warning messages).

It helps that there hasn't been much good out lately.

Re:Archimedes ?

[Henk Poley]

Troll? What? It's just a technical question. Just like I would want to see a working Xerox Alto, I might want see an "Archimedes" when it is anything special.

DRM Removal necessary for play

[letsgetsilly]

I purchased a Blu-Ray player for my new HTPC which has built in hardware decoding and an AMD 5000+ x2 processor, more than enough power to play and decode bluray...or so I thought. After struggling through a slightly "skippy" planet earth to a completely unwatchable Casino, I installed Slysoft's AnyDVD HD demo, and everything worked flawlessly. It shouldn't be this hard to just watch a movie that I legitimately own (or in this case, rented from netflix)

Unconstituional

[bill_mcgonigle]

Read that again.. DMCA causes copyright to be extended to infinity.

Yeah, where's lawsuit to toss this out as unconstitutional?

I did the exact same thing!

[Phil Urich]

He's right.

When I was in high school the password for new accounts on the computer system (yes we actually had an IBM network in the library) was a persons birthday. The funny thing was, they had LED signs in the hallways that would show messages and the time. One of the messages was "Happy Birthday ". Hah. I had endless accounts, and it was also kind of fun send messages to people in the library as someone else, or store pornographic .gif files in someone elses account.

Err, not the storing of pornographic .gifs, but my school had a scheme which allowed me to pull from the "happy birthday, so-and-so!" part of the daily announcements. I went to a big school, too, so there were often around a half-dozen names in the morning announcements to cull from; I'd just walk up to a lab computer with a copy in my hand.

Funny thing is, I had to do this to use the computers, since some error with me setting my password too long or some such thing when I changed it from the default one (I never figured out quite what) ended up locking me out of my account (it was Novell Netware, I'm not that old) and the school's computer tech by this point already despised me. As such, I took it as my personal responsibility to use as many random accounts as possible and to cause as many harmless-but-mystifying computer problems for the guy as possible, and he'd keep trying to figure out for sure if it was me and how I was doing this :) (looking back on it, I'm surprised he didn't catch on, since he was easily suspicious enough of me).

Years later when my sister entered high school and also ended up locked out of the system after trying to change her default password, I started to figure maybe it wasn't the password itself or the wrath of the tech, it might have been the software itself; both her and I have last names which are rather long and involve non-alphanumeric characters (my user name ain't my real name, in other words) and her school used the same Novell setup as mine did. Which made it doubly useful that the security was so lax, since then that means that without lax security it would have been impossible for her or I to continue using the computers.

My younger sister found a similar loophole in her own school's instance. Apparently it was pretty funny when she'd go to a computer lab with a friend to work on a class project, since if they were paying attention they'd go "...hey wait, the login you just used couldn't have been yours, wtf?" My sister had learned well :)