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Post-Hacked DVD: Where to Go?
Bolero writes "Wired News has an article on the future of DVD after the CSS hack. It is an interesting read, and focuses on why the crackers (who Wired describes as Linux users) did what they did. " So, I'm sure you all have opinions - what's going to happen now?
VHS tapes have *no* copy protection
Not true. VHS tapes can (and do) have Macrovision copy protection, which prevents casual copying from one VHS machine to another.
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This is a big pet peeve of mine. I never saw anyone misspell "lose" as "loose" until I started reading Slashdot.
My brother is a Beta fan, and he's noted that Macrovision is keyed to the way VHS works (VHS and Beta encode video differently). Apparently, older VHS machines [roughly 1978-1985, though a few newer machines can do it] are immune to Macrovision as well.
If you're in the market for a Beta deck, Sony does still make them, but there's only one model available (at least, if you don't want to drop at least 4 figures on professional Betacam gear, which many TV stations and production houses use) and it's kinda bare-bones (I think it has Super Beta and hi-fi capability though). You may also want to check out the auction sites like eBay; older Beta and VHS gear sell there all the time. A few stores also still stock L-750 Beta tapes (in Manassas, Target is the place to find them, but of course, your mileage may vary).
-lee
with the advent of this dvd-cracking©ing software, the possibilities for hacking the format are immense. i'm betting that in the next few days/weeks/months ahead, we'll see unscrupulous hackers engineering programs/methods to take .vod files and converting them to more generic formats (i.e. .mpeg files), creating methods to thin out hacked .vods to reduce file sizes for easier transfer over the net, and so on. like cd .wav files converted to .mp3 files, expect dvd .vod's to take over the role of the .vcd .
Specifically, the part which makes code-cracking illegal?
There's a lot of language in there about how the bill does NOT reduce fair-use rights, and the penalties section talks only about code-cracking for "commercial advantage or private financial gain"
Has anyone seen good discussions an all of this?
I wonder if this news is going to hurt the sales of DVD players this Christmas. It has been looking like this was the year that DVD players would break through into the mass market. With prices in the $200-$300 range a lot of new customers entered the market segment.
If I was thinking about buying a DVD player I would worry that it was going to be made obsolete by DVD 2. I would put off making the purchase until this issue had been cleared up.
If I made DVD players I'd be freaking out right now. The home electronics industry is counting on DVD player sales to push new TV sales. Right now the whole segment is pretty flat and DVD players are the bright spot.
If the consumer electronics manufactures want to salvage sales in the last quarter of this year, they need to make firm commitments to consumers that their new purchases will continue to work for years to come without troublesome upgrades, and that new movies will continue to be available.
Could be. If you're right, though, Georgie-boy needs to take a look at what happened with DVD sales of 'Titanic.' Hundreds of thousands of copies, rotting on the shelf, because nobody cares, because (a) they already bought the VHS version; or (b) they lost interest in the movie after being forced to wait an extra year for a DVD release.
Contrast sales of the 'Titanic' DVD with that of 'The Matrix', and you'll conclude that making DVD owners wait 7 years for a Star Wars release is probably the worst idea since DIVX.
The truth which the various media industries (music, film, games, etc) must someday come to face is that piracy is inevitable. It's not that they can't invest millions of dollars in ever superior security technology, but simply that hackers and crackers will relish the challenge.
When they realize this truth, they will have a choice: Either they can ignore the market presented by computer users and the Internet, that very market which is coming to the center of the economy, and lose billions of dollars in return for the paltry millions they save from piracy, or they can continue to exploit this market with the understanding that piracy will be with us forever.
This is not to say the media industries will stop fighting piracy, whether it be by investing in technology or investing in lobbyists. Ironically, absolute freedom, the very thing which gives the Internet life as a community and a large driving factor in its growth, is the one thing these companies cannot tolerate.
Of course hardware will be cracked eventually, but it's much much harder. Markus Kuhn did some fun stuff on that at Cambridge, and people working on smart cards have headaches about it. But it looks a lot more tenable than a software solution which is just going to get cracked again in no time.
Best socket those chips, since it's going to get cracked sooner or later anyway.
DVD has been broken because it became a high profile target - a large number of people wanted to break the DVD security system [including people running Linux who want an Open Source player].
A few weeks ago I watched a program on car security, and the statement on that which caught my attention was that no car was invulnerable, but better security took longer to defeat.
A lot of crypto algorithms that were previously though to be invulnerable are falling due to either the advance of technology or new methods of breaking such algorithms.
I believe even if a new encryption method is introduced, the scrutiny will be so intense that it will be cracked within a couple of years.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Some people believe that it is due to the US restriction that the DVD key was only 40 bits long! Your point is doubly made.
Keep the price of blank media artificially high- say around $25...give a pecentage to the "stop DVD piracy fund" ( to be pissed away, for sure ) Now it's not worth pirating if I can buy the real thing for a few bucks more or less.. with a nice case and liner notes... 3C What d he do? --Sultress Something with lipstick. You don t want to know more than that. --aiglos
"One more thing - many authors (and publishers) hate libraries"
Those who hate libraries absolutely deserve to be ripped off.
DeCSS and mp3 are just steps in the evolution of media. The existant distribution organizations don't fear piracy, they fear obsolecence. Mp3 puts the power of distribution in the hands of the artist, should they choose to exercise it, and can remove Columbia/Sony and Time/Warner from the gravy train of artistic exploitation. Open production and independent distribution of movies, the ability to create inexpensive physical media formats attacks the studios' stranglehold on production, threatens their ability to prostitute those artists who create. They should fear digital media, for it is through these various channels that their exploitative, manipulative relationship with their customers will be overthrown by artists who strive for a more individualistic, human connection with their audience. Musicians and actors don't perform for money only; they perform because they can, they enjoy the act. And their audiences enjoy rewarding them for it. And all these advancements enable, once society has matured enough to accept it, is more efficient exchange between these two groups.
for all your dvd subtitling and pirating needs, checkout www.fansubs.net/dvd its meant for people to burn DVDs and subtitle the burns themselves, but useful site regardless.
The market segment that'd gain most from pirating DVDs would be parents of small children. Little kids will play a movie to destruction. If parents were able to swap movies back and forth for easy pirating (or just for backup copies) it'd be a big gain. One saving grace for the movie industry is that folks with small children are fairly law abiding. Also, kids that can't read will select tapes based on packaging and graphics and home brew pirate tapes don't hold up well here.
Hmmm... With two Panasonic 4-head VCRs (I don't have the model # handy) I am able to connect them together using _both_ the COAX *AND* RCA I/Os and dub Disney movies with no problem. Great quality. I did this for a film class, so my conscience is mostly clear, but it worked like a charm. Just FYI
Your totally missing the point. I'm saying that if they had provided a way to play movies on DVD we wouldn't have put so much energy into trying to crack it. Sure someday it probably would have happen. But it provided a motivation.
Either way, I still like the movies. Yeah, even Phantom Menace. Yes, I do. If you don't, bite me.
Okay. *CHOMP*
One of my favorite comments a while back regarding tape sales was something to the effect of "Look at how many cassettes are being sold today... You can't tell me they're all being used for dictation." Unfortunately I can't attribute the initiator of that quote, but I think it's funny as hell when people start talking about how CD-R and DVD-R will ruinsales of copyrighted goods. Also, who is to say that someone might come up with a bit-by-bit copying of a DVD. Where's their encryption then?
Any system that depends on 'tamper-resistant software' running in an unprotected machine is vulnerable, no matter how hard you protect the key. The system was doomed, only waiting for the enterprising individual to break it, and then the Real people saved this individual all the trouble. I think it was fairly considerate.
But wait, there's more....I question whether their business model allows for good security at all. A real secure system might introduce too much extra cost.
-tpr
A few more of these cases, and the recording industry is going to get all those legislators they own to pass some laws allowing them to use strong encryption.
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Does this mean that I can mirror Slashdot, but without those pesky ads?
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Of course you can. It's pretty easy to do. A number of people already do it using internet junk buster, which in essence mirrors slashdot locally without the ads.
Could you then redistribute it to the world? Easily. There's no way short of physical force they can stop you. (calling in lawyers counts as threat of physical force, since after the lawyers come the cops). If you find a way to accomplish this anonymously, slashdot can't do anything.
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IP isn't forfeited in theory or in actuality just because someone has a copy of it. I can hold a Coke can in my hand, but I could be sued if I made my own Coke
can. I can copy a DVD and distribute it to my friends, but I could be sued (or put in jail) for theft of intellectual property.
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Of course, if you had a replicator, you could make a coke clone, exactly like coke, and market it as something else entirely. When chemical analyzers get sufficiently good, this might actually happen. Imagine if you will that walmart soda tasted _exactly_ like coke, instead of like the crappy generic soda it is. Would you pay the extra 500% premium for generic coke? (last time i checked walmart soda was 10c vs coke at 50c).
Intellectual property is going to become very very difficult to protect for the kind of financial gain the property owners currently expect. Realistically, they need to find better ways of generating income (live performance) if they want to survive. They are certainly welcome to try, it's just going to be hard, and they'd be better off focusing their attention on other opportunities.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Wow, you are young. Ok sonny, sit right down and you'll hear a tale of how we were one supreme court justice away from not having VCRs at all.
Universal sued Sony (inventors of the Betamax) because they thought that the ability for people to record movies off of broadcast television would violate their copyrights. By one vote, the supreme court held that even though such illegal acitivities were possible, the machines themselves could not be outlawed because they had legal uses as well. (Hope they'll take the same stance on encryption software when the time comes!)
So with legal video copying machines out there, there was a lot of concern over piracy. But the solution was not a technical one. Even though Macrovision copy-protection was and still is widely used, it is easy enough to defeat. You can buy "stabilizer" devices for $20 today, and even way back them you could buy kits or plans to build it yourself. No big deal. What brought piracy under control was the fact that they dropped the price of a movie on video tape from an average of $70-$100 down to $10-$20. Because at that price point, it's not worth it for most regular folks to pirate a movie instead of just buying it. Plus the fact that - surprise,surprise - most people don't want to break the law. Of course there are exceptions, but they are exceptions. (!) And now, in hindsight, Universal's case appears insane. The industry they were afraid would be destroyed by home video is now bigger than ever, because of home video.
As has been said often in this forum, copy machines didn't destroy print publishing. Audio tape and CD-R didn't destroy the record industry. Video tape didn't destroy the movie industry. And neither will copyable DVDs.
This whole hullaballoo is simply the product of big company suits who are so short-sightedly greedy that they've turned into paranoids with their heads up their asses.
I don't think the movie studios are worried that you'll copy your friend's DVD instead of buying a legal copy. I don't even think they care that much if you put the entire movie up on your ftp site, unlike the RIAA.
What they are worried about, however, are the factories in Asia that now have the ability to produce millions of identical copies of big-budget DVDs. This will definitely make a dent in the DVD business... In a few months, a lot of DVD mail-order joints will probably be full of pirated merchandise. It's the exact same product, only cheaper... who could resist?
I'm really worried about this. While I wholeheartedly support efforts to reverse-engineer proprietary technology, I think maybe we should take a break from cracking DVDs for a moment, and instead try to come up with a way for the movie industry to regain their control over DVDs... because if they don't have control, they're just not going to make them.
MSK
Will Real or Xing be financially responsible for damaged "due to lost revenue from piracy"?
That would be interesting to see the DVD people go after them.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
it would have happened anyway. The fact that CSS is cruddy would not have been changed by linux players for DVD being available.
The difference, though, is that CSS would have been cracked later and for different purposes. Meaning the people cracking css would have done it for the purpose of doing illegal things, not for the purpose of using dvd players they paid money for in a linux environment. Meaning that the hackers in question would not have been able to take the moral high ground, and the companies would have actually been able to complain about illegal acts without sounding hypocritical and stupid. The companies just hurt themselves.
On the other hand, let's think about this a little more. Linux hackers are likely to be promoters of freedom of information, not people making illegal copies. If linux dvd had been available, would the dvd hackers have been someone like MoRE, a small group of brilliant hackers doing it for glory and freedom of information who come out looking like heroes? More likely it would have been a group of people in the pay of a DVD piracy syndicate in a third world country. Such people would not have been likely to even let the outside world know they'd broken CSS encryption-- they'd have just pirated DVDs without anyone knowing what was happening. (it's possible this has already happened!..but not very likely)
On the third hand, what's the likelyhood they could have gotten away with a linux dvd player that wasn't open source and free in every sense of the word? If a free player existed, how difficult could it have possibly been to turn it into a vehicle for software piracy?
Lets face it-- copy protection is a joke. All it does, and all it will ever do is hurt or annoy or otherwise limit people who want to use the software for purposes that ought to be OK.
OK now can we go back to "css" being html style sheets?
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
As much as I am a fan of fair use, it has already been eroded by the latest revisions to the copyright act which make it illegal (in the US) to defeat encryption of digital data. Since the fair use concept was enshrined in Copyright Law to begin with, it can be changed by a simple act of Congress.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
And not being forced to watch that FBI warning screen for FUCKING 30 SECONDS w/o being able to skip over it.
I hope mpegtv makes a commercial DVD player for Linux. I bought mtv to use with some pirated mpeg movies; it would clear my conscience if I could use it to watch DVD's that I have bought. I just want to use Linux... IS THAT SO WRONG??
1. A print of the movie was smuggled out of a theatre.
2. The print was used to create a laser disc verion of the movie.
3. Thousands of pirate tapes were created from this pirated laser disk version, and sold the way pirate goods normally are.
The point? The block stopped you from copying the tape but not the hard core pirates. Hmm, as to getting around the block, I assume there are ways to do it (as there are for Nintendo games, eg z64 copy machine for Nintendo 64 games .) I don't know how but if you check the Internet you may find one (with the disclamer "for personal use only in making backup copies of legally obtained tapes," sort of like the way loaded dice always have the disclamer "for amusement purposes only." : )
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Restricting technology because some pirates might use it is just plain silly.
>Is there a way to crack it no matter what encryption they use?
Yep, In order to play the content it needs to be changed from cyphertext to plaintext (plainmedia?). Your computer needs the decryption key to do this, which it stores in physical memory durring the decryption process. Sure you can encode the key when its stored in a binary but as soon as you start playback on your computer you can read the contents of memory with a debugger (one example). Sure you have to dig through alot of information but if you really want whats there its just a matter of taking the time to sort through it all.
-lib
Hopefully someone will release DVD software. On the cracking the encryption issue; I doubt the movie industry will be able to protect movies from piracy. First software was pirated, Then music, now movies? Any encryption scheme they can come up with will be eventually be broken, they can just make it difficult for the "average joe" to do it... But someone will release software that allows the average joe to do it.
From the article:
And if there's one thing about Linux users, they're do-ers, not whiners.
Incorrect. Linux users are whiners as well as do-ers.
Dvd is allready a dead technology. How many years until everybody has a digital tv? Digital tv's being 1200x1600 a DVD cannot hold enough data for a whole movie. Plus the decrypt method for DVD's is really poor, thus making it slow. Laserdisk has a better quality in side by side viewing. Not that you would notice the difference if you never watched Laser disk.
1200x1600 is the bits for 1 frame full screen digital.
30 is the frames per second
60 is to convert to minutes
90 is approx movie length. 1 1/2hrs. this is an approximation. brought to you by the Department of redundency dept.
(((1200*1600)*30)*60)*90 = 311040000000 bits and that just video.
First, as I'm sure your aware, Lucas has embraced DVD whereas Spielberg (last time I checked) had not. Spielberg may have no choice at this point. Second, Lucas has stated many times that they want to release all the Star Wars movies at once (basically 2005) in a boxed set with all the goodies on them. I really doubt the ability to copy them will have any effect on Lucas' decision.
BTW, I stood in line with some people for 2-3 days. We had a good time. It was a lot of fun and I plan on doing it for Ep II and III. I didn't dress up, but I plan to for the next ones.
Do you we know they were linux users or are we now facing the old stereotyping... and all hackers now are *obviously* linux users...
This space for sale
The EEs in the big companies are going to create DVD-2, utilizing a 1024 bit encryption standard incompatible with existing DVD players and impossible to crack. The problem is that our college crackers are breaking things that engineers create but they aren't creating anything themselves. The only way to solve the intellectual property wars is to create a new format to begin with instead of breaking into what other engineers create.
What a crock of shit! "its not their fault for breaking the law, they weren't given another option". What bullshit! The OEM's are in no circumstances required to provide ANYONE with ANYTHING. If they choose not to support Linux that does not give you the right to break the law.
I personally think that this could damage the companies profits in the long run,but WTH Im a consumer so... CRACK on CRACKERS!! Wha HOOO!!!
It strikes me that
1) DVD was intended as computer media from the start, rendering it pretty much completely insecurable. (Software - or more specifically, software-based DVD players - can be cracked. Even if the folks that did it first hadn't gotten lucky, even if the encryption didn't suck, it would have happened eventually.)
2) The developers of the DVD medium and the copyright holders of the DVD movies knew this.
3) The developers and copyright holders decided to use a really lame 40-bit-key encryption system that would get in everyone's way without protecting anything. A system that would have been laughed at in 1970.
So, now, the copyright holders can claim that a pirate not only broke copyright laws, but that said pirate must have engaged in questionably legal reverse-engineering activity to make the copy possible. If the DeCSS system is patented, the studios can claim patent infringement.
It's just one little thing the big-dollar copyright holders are doing to assemble a group of very special laws to protect their wallets.
If the industry had simply given the linux community a way to play DVDs all of this may have been avoided. The movie industry has only theirself to blame, and punishing their consumers for it is not the way to go.
a few possibilities:
1] Recall Everything - Not very likely considering the sales that are already out and stuff. It would be really bad and very expensive for the companies. They would recall everything, redo the encoding and resell?
2] DVD-II -screw everything and start with a new Encoding Standard, make everyone get new DVD Players. Then its Class Action Lawsuit Oh-Rama!
3] New Addon Chip and New Series of DVDs --> Probably in my opinion the most likley option, give everyone who has a DVD an upgrade chip and it in new encoding schemes and encode the new DVDs to such new scheme. So that all new DVDs will need the new chip/scheme therefore not work with the old ones.
Note: 1st useful intelligent Post!!!!!
-- Note: These Comments are Generated by ME! Not You! ME!
Absolutly Right... If lucas is so much of a tight ass about his movie than the hell with him. I personally saw it 4 times and I am not a typical "star wars" fanatic. So I figure lucas has at least $12 of my money already. The other issue with this whole DVD copying thing is the same with software... Personally if I use a piece of software that I deem to be an everyday application (VMware) you purchase it. The same holds true with DVD... You make the choice to pay for the movie because you like it and the developer or producer deserves the money for making such a great product. For that reason the DVD industry shouldn't do anything to stop the DVD burning... It not efficient... and most people 99.9% will pay for the darn thing anyway. And about the bootlegs of Episode 1 lucas is pissed about... If he would just release the damn thing on DVD he would have $25 more of my money... bootleg or not... So basically, George Lucas needs to make the next to episodes, die, and goto hell.
According to the article, all software DVD players except Xing has their key encrypted in software. Even if the key is encrypted during compile time, won't it be decrypted during run time? Can somebody please explain this tit-bit for me?
TQ.
Hasdi
Well a small scanning electron microscope, and watching the bus may suffice, plus some heavy number crunching. If in silicon, you need a hardware jock to do this. But you get to see the unprotected keys going over the bus on in registers, just like any old smartcard. Well, thats the theory anyway. The average joe, no. But Hong Kong knows the markets potential, and will de-engineer H/W if need be. And they will substitute their own key, so their local market is not compromised (read ok to sell to tourists), as this region scheme may actually assist piracy. Abolishing the region scheme, now , would be a smart move.
The whole thing reminds me of the horrible copy protection schemes for games back in the day. The code wheels, disks with a bad sector, etc. All it does is annoy the paying customers, the pirates broke thru all that shit and disabled it. Same thing here.
I really think copy protection is self-defeating. DVD players have Macrovision copy protection (which the disk can turn on or not), which unfortunately causes small but definitely noticeable blue streaks to appear on the left side of the screen. This annoyed me (a paying customer) to no end, so I bought a device that defeats Macrovision.
I probably wouldn't have bothered if it weren't for the blue streaks. I wasn't really that interested in copying tapes, but hey, now that I bought that device.. heh.
In my case and in others, the "copy protection" serves no real purpose other than to degrade the quality of the product. The harder they try to protect something, the harder people are going to try to defeat that protection.
Would that really be a bad thing? I mean, I paid my $5 CDN to go see it in theatres, and honestly it wasn't worth that much to see it on the big screen, so why pay $25 (or more) CDN to see it on a TV or my computer?
Come on, don't be so limited...
With a brain scanner of some kind, they could do pay-per-thought; if you think about the comedy you watched last week and get a good chuckle out of it, that will be $5.00, please.
Pick your favorite big American corporation (movie studio, software publisher, etc.) that whines about how many millions or billions of dollars they "lose" due to piracy. Get their annual stockholders report. Recall that Securities and Exchange Commission rules REQUIRE (I'll repeat because this is critically important, REQUIRE) publically held companies to FULLY DISCLOSE ALL PROFITS AND LOSSES to their shareholders. Hmmmm. Lessee, gross sales, employee salaries, R&D, supplies, insurance, yada, yada, yada... Nope! Not a single lost dollar attributed to piracy! Thus it can be securely concluded with absolute and undisputable certainty that piracy doesn't hurt companies at all. Zero. Zip. Zilch.
For what it is worth, the regional/anti copy coding on a playstation game is just some data written to a part of the original CD that CD burners cannot write. (I'm not sure, possibly it cannot be read in a conventional rom drive either, doesn't matter anyway) Well, most burners can't, some can, with suitable mods, but they are few and far between, mostly old SCSI devices with altered firmware, I've never personally seen one. Anyway, all the 'hidden' track holds is, IIRC, a single ascii charachter indicating region, which may or may not be repeated, either way, it doesn't matter much. If the playstation gets this charachter, and it matches it's region, it is a happy bunny, and will play your game. If not, it sits there catatonic. Now, for some reason best known to Sony, this 'authentication' data is clocked along it's own serial line. A line that does nothing else. If the device at the end of the line gets the right data clocked to it, it is happy. Think about that for a moment. Not very clever, Sony. So, your $15 mod chip is an absolute bottom of the line Microchip PIC, (12C508 or 12C509 for those technically inclined) which uses one input to pull the serial line low on one side of j-random buffer, and an output line to clock out all the possible correct country codes, regardless of what comes in. They can be internally clocked against the PIC's oscilator, or externally by the Playstation. The playstation's authentication mechanism is then so fooled, it will try to play belly button fluff if you give it the chance. Thoroughly lobotomised. I know all this because I managed to lash up a PIC to do this for my flatmates little brother. It is a doddle if you have a PIC programmer and a couple of spare pics lying about. As regards the commercial modchips, they are just what I described with nice clean code and the chip identification scrubbed off. The PICs themselves cost about $1 in small quantities, and take about a squillisecond to blow. A nice little earner, I'd say! Mark you, why anyone would want to play a playstation game in the first place is beyond me. :) Dermot Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than open your mouth and prove it. C. M. Conner.
Audio CDs have no crypto and no region scheme. Industry is getting by just fine. Imagine that!
The movie industry will continue to release DVD's. Why? For the same reason that they continued to release VHS tapes after people found they could hook up two VCR's together and make copies of the movie. Just because DVD can now be copied doesn't make it a less valid method of distribution. People still buy VHS tapes, and CD music, and playstation games, and what else has copy protection been skipped on?? People will continue to buy DVD movies. This changes nothing.
Absolutly Right... If lucas is so much of a tight ass about his movie than the hell with him. I personally saw it 4 times and I am not a typical "star wars" fanatic. So I figure lucas has at least $12 of my money already. The other issue with this whole DVD copying thing is the same with software... Personally if I use a piece of software that I deem to be an everyday application (VMware) you purchase it. The same holds true with DVD... You make the choice to pay for the movie because you like it and the developer or producer deserves the money for making such a great product. For that reason the DVD industry shouldn't do anything to stop the DVD burning... It not efficient... and most people 99.9% will pay for the darn thing anyway. And about the bootlegs of Episode 1 lucas is pissed about... If he would just release the damn thing on DVD he would have $25 more of my money... bootleg or not... So basically, George Lucas needs to make the next two episodes, die, and goto hell.
You forgot to add the obligatory: "Tastes like chicken!"
Has it occured to people that you do not need to decrypt the data to copy it? A pirate can copy the entire encrypted bit stream as-is. The breaking of the encryption has no implications for DVD piracy whatsoever
What it does allow for though, is conversion from DVD format to any other format. But if you wanted to do this, there is nothing to stop you pumping the output of a hardware DVD player into a video input card.
The whole concept of trying to protect digital movies against piracy was ill-conceived to begin with. Fundamentally, anything that can be read digitally can be copied verbatim, and anything that is output unencrypted to RF can be recorded without encryption from the RF output.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I do not believe region coding is the issue. That part of the DVD world was 'cracked' long ago by such utils as Remote Selector -- and on top of that their are companies that will take your component DVD player and replace the firmware with a chip that does the same as well as to disable Macrovision to allow copying to VHS tapes or whatever media.
-dave zoji@please.dont.spam.me.at.unif.com
A bunch of ex-Divx engineers and I are laughing our butts off now. Everyone in the industry knew that CSS as lousy security and that sooner or later someone would take the time to break it. Divx had real security which was and still is unbroken. Now that CSS is meaningless, the studio's just may decide to withhold their valuable digital content until much later that VHS day-and-date release. If that happens, DVD will become the laserdisc of the 90's (or maybe 00's). I think all you hate mongering Divx bashers need to bow toward Richmond and pray to the deceased spirit of Divx that the studios don't withhold content because of poor security.
Oh yeah genius... just what the world needs more packaging. You must be a MBA.
Huh? What makes you think that there aren't any of those in other countries????? Shesh....
OK, so we've got a nice new format, but now all of a sudden it's insecure. So now people are afraid that people won't put out DVDs? What's the alternative? The oh-so-secure VHS? The now-defunct LD? VHS has been the standard of choice among most movie buyers for years, and most VHS tapes have no security whatsoever. Has this stopped the industry from releasing VHS tapes? I just don't understand all the concern with dvd and security. Everything becomes insecure eventually, if this hadn't been cracked through what was basically luck now, the fairly weak encryption probably still would've been cracked later. There will always be a market for the real thing, despite pirated material, just like there's still a market for cds right now despite mp3s. And I still think we're a *bit* off from the point where people are going to routinely download 9gig dvds off the net. Sure, people can convert them to other formats, but doesn't that defeat the point of having a dvd in the first place?
In closing, I don't see how this changes *anything* in reality. Piracy has always existed. If this slows industry acceptance, it'd just be completely silly. Fortunately, I don't think that's going to happen...I think we're past the point where DVD's gonna be so easily killed. Let's hope, anyway.
hot foreign sheep.
You got to consider
A) currencies, US$20 is a lot outside usa so a $20 movie can be double + taxes
B) some movies are $30 or $40USD
C) to pay for say, 12 movies is 12 * 20 which is not cheep, so why pay when you can get $300 worth for free.
I can't believe this conversation is so US centric... DVDs are ONLY cheap in US or UK. They cost over 100 bucks in malaysia and only the wealthy get them. The thing about the music and movie and software industry is they consistently refuse to come up with "Asian editions" like they do with books. Because of this, Win95 costs about 500 bucks, so does Office, etc. That's why piracy is so rampant in Asia. Fortunately, I use Linux :)
andrew
I assume there is a huge witch hunt going on amongst those with big dollars at stake here.
Given that the crypto was only 40 bit, it was inevitable it would be cracked. Sooner rather than later. Why was it 40 bit. I assume this is due to the US government's export laws which are designed to ensure that the NSA can spy on whomever they please.
These laws are costing American companies a lot of money!
The other lesson from this is the lameness of almost all commercial security software. Security by obscurity does not work.
It's absolutely possible to make a disk without the region codes - they are a side product of the encryption. Simply don't encrypt the movie, and it will play wherever. I know some people may not like this solution, but the encryption is, and always will be, a joke anyway.
The wired article mentions that they are considering upgrading the encryption format on DVD's to make them more secure. I think this is completely pointless. All it will do is create a short window of time before the encryption is cracked again. In order to make the decryption fast enough for playback in real time, you are, by definition, making it crackable in an equally reasonable amount of time. This is especially true because of the constantly increasing speed of computers.
Think of it this way - for satellite communications, we commonly use frequencies around the 20Ghz range. Based on the continuous miniturization of chips, and improvement of semiconductors, we should be able to lock a microprocessor to these types of frequencies. It may take 10 or 20 years to get to that point (if this society doesn't self destruct by then) but we should eventually have computers that are this insanely fast.
My point is, that you can't make a player that is fast enough to decrypt something in real time, and make that same data very hard to crack. So it's really just a pointless race of changing standards way too often just to protect the greed of the people producing movies.
I say - just leave it the way it is. And maybe even make the later released foreign versions completely unencrypted. I know the IP "owners" may not be fond of this, but they are fighting a pointless battle.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
Also, I suppose, they have to get the movies by forgin censors/ratings people, which may require re-editing the flick. This would mean that they cant reuse the stock though...
Incedently, movies sometimes are not "done" until realy, realy, close to the premier date. Star Wars was in post production 72 hours before it was in theates. It takes a long time to copy film.
This is not entirely true, for at least two reasons:
Commercial Piracy is dealt with by diferent means, you can target either the pirate or at least some distributor with lawsuits. This makes sense since you can target few people and can expect that taking one out has some effect.
With consumers burning/distributing copies the problem is, that if every consumer makes (on the average) two copies (or at least more than one) copies spread exponentially. The other problem is, that if you expect about ten copies per sold DVD reaching someone who would have bought it otherwise your income from that cds is reduced by a factor of ten.
Exponential distribution won't work if each copy is a little worse than the previous one. But generally the industry wants to make it hard to make copies, so noone bothers and only a percentage of sold media gets copied. So the thing the industry really doesn't want is Joe normal putting their DVD in his computer, running DeCSS over it and handing the copy to his friend in a matter of minutes.
For now the impact of the decryption program is small only because the resulting huge amount of data still makes copying hard. (I think this is also one reason why nearly every game on the PC market is bloated with films etc. so you need at least 3 CDs for it"). But with storage densities becoming ever higher this might not hold long.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
If you want to kill practical computing for average users, this is a good way to do it. Ditto if you want to kill the music or film industries. Publishing is safe as long as people still like paper due to the non-trivial effort and cost to duplicate that, but it'd be stuffed as well as soon as e-books became widely accepted.
:) - sell the results. You can argue with my taste in films and music, but the point stands with other examples.
:) Go for it, try. Go and produce me a competitive spreadsheet, probably one of the dullest tasks out there for a programmer. Yes, I know there's a project out there happily cloning Excel, but that hits the nail on the head - they're doing this because they want a free-speech Excel, not because they want a spreadsheet. So, you've lost your speadsheet, which is widely accepted as the killer app for moving PCs into offices.
Why did George Lucas and Fox put down quite so much money and effort on producing the Star Wars films? Because they knew they could sell them. Why did Vertigo and Mettalica put so much time, effort and money into recording Load? Because they could sell it. And why did AT&T fund Bell Labs - specifically Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan in their development of Unix and C? Because they could - well, could then
People, IP is good. Without IP anything becomes reproduceable and (in the case of the information market) entirely impossible to make money from, sue to the imbalance between R&D and manufacturing costs being the reverse of the norm elsewhere. You're using a PC? OK, you wouldn't have it. Lotus wouldn't have been able to develop 1-2-3, because that nice man down the street would have just copied the disks and undercut them. Microsoft wouldn't have been able to produce Windows - whether that's a bad thing or not depends on your perspective, but it encouraged a lot of people to buy PCs.
Now, let's imagine what would have happened without either of these products. Someone else would have developed a spreadsheet for the PC in all probability, but as powerful as 1-2-3 entirely for love? Unlikely. How about GPL development, someone's going to cry in all probability
Then take Windows. Much as I dislike it, too, clueless wonder newbies who fold 5.25in disks to fit them in their new 3.5in drives like it. It's simpler to use than Linux for the vast majority of users. It's also a cohesive standard, which the Linux GUI market could sorely do with. Now, remove it. How many home PCs do you have? Really not all that many. So, the price goes through the roof and the performance through the floor as there's no real reason for any of the companies to push the boat out on making faster products for less. After all, there's so few sales that you just can't support the massive R&D needed to support the current effort. Moore's Law? That's as much market pressures as technological advancement.
I'm not a supporter of the FSF's aims myself, but I can understand the viewpoint of others who are. But we need IP if any business is going to be based around information and, if it's not, then we can watch everything go back to 'for the love of it' hobbyists, which I for one don't want to see. I mean, how are the software companies supposed to survive, support revenues? Do you really want a world where software companies have a financial incentive to make their products unstable and difficult to use? The only reason RedHat and others can survive off this at the moment is that their development costs are vastly lower than for comparable developers and their support rather more necessary due to the average user's unfamiliarity with the product. If Microsoft tried to survive on such a business mdoel it'd be chaos and software quality would go through the floor.
IP on information is good. Without it, we'd be a lot poorer.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Actually, a lot of public libraries have been carrying a limited selection of VHS movies for years, as well as some music.
The text of the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" _specifically_ states that it does NOT infringe on fair use. Which is interesting, since this obviously doesn't jive with the "encryption hacking is criminal activity" part of the act...
:/
One for the courts, I suppose.
Personally, I think if they implement another security system, they will probably patent it and then sue everyone in sight who implements the algorithm.
I am sure in the very near future, movies will be just as easily downloadable as mp3's are. We will be able to 'rip' them from DVD's and compress them to a smaller size. I'm sure there will be a new media format that will make even DVD capacity look pitiful. But then again, look at the size of regular audio CD files compared to the size of an mp3. If someone were to create a new compression method for mpeg-2 files along with a "MovieAmp" proggie, heck, I'd probably spend years archiving every movie ever made. Then again, if you think about it, probably some of the best things in life are probably never seen by the general public. Maybe it already has been created?
There is one drawback with any anti-piracy scheme: if it is possible to view a DVD (or head a CD), it is equally possible to record it (to a VHS tape, or a computer hard drive, or whatever). No copy-protection scheme for movies or music will be able to change that.
Of course, the "digital quality" duplicates will be better, but despite the encryption people use, eventually someone will break it.
Currently, recordable DVDs don't play back in regular DVD players anyway, so what's the big deal?
While I still think giving all the credit to "linux users" for this hack is a bit of a stretch, having major hardware, software and closed codec vendors believe just that might not be a bad thing. eg: "Damn we better release something so these linux bastards can use or they'll just reverse engineer it and the we'll _really_ be screwed."
There is another reason for the regional lockouts. The big movie companies have exclusive rights deals with distribution companies for distributing their films in a given country. Since these distributors have a monopoly in their own region, they can charge whatever they want to.
IF someone were to independently (and perfectly legally)import movies from another region (perhaps one where the retail prices are lower) they would cut into the distributors profits.
This is exactly the same as the way video games, cars and many other things are sold world wide.
The manufacturers put a lot of energy into preserving their official distribution channels by persuing these "grey market" importers. I had a friend in Australia who used to sell privately imported video games at much lower prices than Sega sold them for. Sega eventually shut him down by threatening to sue. He may well have had a case, but once again he didn't have the funds to push the issue and lost out to the corporates.
Regional lockouts don't just stop piracy, they protect the distributor's monopolies and are therefore a bad thing (IMHO).
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
If you are using Betamax, Video 2000 or
8 mm video tapes, Macrovison is ineffective,
because exploits a flaw in vhs' recording method.
And then you could buy/build a sync restorer,
a get away prom macrovision stuff (as a side
effect you get better copies when the source
tape is non perfect)
I don't know about everyone but I'm pretty much a movie buff. I got my DVD-ROM as soon as creative labs released their first version. I love it. I have also invested a large amount of money into a dolby digital stereo system to go along... I have a friend who thinks they these bootleg VCD movies are great. He's got shelves of them... Maybe a movie you really didn't want to buy in the first place. But I'm sure that most, including me, will just by the damn movie. The real DVD compared to the bootleg VCD rips aren't even close to the same. Let's use the Matrix for example. I bought it for $12 online. Got the full Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, perfect video quality, and all the extras. Or I could waist hours downloading the movie from the net and putting in on a CD. I think the $12 is a better decision. Until you can make a complete rip of a DVD I don't see this being much of a problem. Anyone else think differently?
The problem is that they hav not learned the lesson from the DAT experience. In the case of DAT, a simple copy bit made the use of it cumbersome and definitively unsuitable for home users. The professional DAT recorders among having variuous sampling rates, sample widths and high quality analog i/o, are not blocked by the copy bit. Maybe because a 39 cm/s open reel recorder has a good quality anyway.
And the DAT cousin (aka DDS) for data storage has
some limited success but is incompatible with audio format for technical reason (ie: if you use the DATA/DAT format you have to deal with TOC and some other things anc can't mt/tar so easily AFAIK).
Laserdisc is analog an not copy protected (was born before the audio CD) but has the same success of Betamax (except Pioneer's karaoke machine use
Laserdisc). Make a modification on DVD's firmware,
so old DVD will be obsolete, make a device suitable only for video reproduction, wait to computer manufacturer to switch to a similar format suitable for data incomatible with video DVD, et voila, you have another Laserdisc...
Then use the Computer DVD to stream satellite
MPEG video into it...
You did forget a few things when writing this. First most DVD's are around (4-7) GB, not including the the trailers and other extra stuff. While this is smaller than 9 GB, it still is too much to download. But this 4-7 GB can be reduced in quality and re-encoded to the tune of 1-1.5 GB. While the quality is not as good (about 1/2), it's about VHS quality. Now this size it is reasonable to be downloaded especially with cable and DSL technology.
DVD piracy is already becoming an issue on the internet, pirated DVD rips can already be downloaded. However it's not a very big issue for a few reasons.
1) Not very convient. The process of DVD ripping, takes about 1 day on an average computer. Then it would also probably take an average person (with cable/dsl or other fast connection) at least 8 hours to download.
2) Watching movies on computer isnt the same as on TV. Yes I know you can use a TV-out card, but either way it's still not the same, it's not as easy as just putting in a DVD and hitting play.
There will be 2 things that will lead to an explosion of DVD piracy. First a fairly cheap ($300 or so) DVD writer that can write DVD's that can be played on a regular home DVD player. The media would also have to be fairly large (~5GB a side), but more importatly be cheap. Paying $20 per blank DVD, is not cost effective when buying a DVD costs $15-25. The price for the media would have to fall to around $5-7.
After this has happened you will see more piracy with people renting/borrowing DVD's and copying them. But you still won't see too many full DVD's downloaded on the net (still too big). The second thing that will cause wide spread movie piracy (ala mp3), is the next big increase in bandwidth. Once this happens DVD's will be able to be downloaded and burned, in a way that is cost effective and not too time consuming.
But even this won't hurt movie profits that much, the average user will still go out and buy a movie vs burning one themselves.
I should also point out that DVD encrypion being broken has little to do with any increase in piracy. The method that is used to rip most DVD's doesn't decrypt the DVD in this fashion. What it does in intercept the data somewhere between the DVD drive and the monitor, and then re-encodes this data.
When one designs a crypto system it should be designed with renewability (sic) built in. So, if the first set of keys gets broken somehow then the entire keyset gets renewed and off it runs. DirectTV has this capability (via sending out new smartcards). Divx had this capability which was never exersized because no one ever came close to breaking it; although they tried.
This is called Macrovision.
Any such analog copy protection on VHS tapes can be eliminated for sure with a device known as a 'time base corrector'. Look into it, you can buy them used for about $500 in the low-end professional video market.
Although by himself he's probably not a dangerous pirate, he most certanly is one.
:-) )
If he's copying his friend's DVDs, so he doesn't have to buy them himself, he's actually SAVING money illegaly. - And that is practically the same as EARNING money illeagly. (A penny saved...
> Get smart: 1) add Linux support (we are willing to accept binary part of the encryption software
> part only. your product is then safe.. and we all are happy.)
I have an Alpha Linux machine. Are you going to compile your binary only software for it? How about for my UltraSparc?
No? I guess I'm not willing to accept 'binary only' then.
There is a huge misunderstanding here. You don't need DeCSS to copy DVDs to VCDs. In fact, DeCSS does nothing to help in this process. There is currently no way to directly transform the VOB files to a VCD-compliant mpeg1 stream. It seems that the ripping process relies on caprturing the unecrypted stream as it goes to the screen and separating the video and audio streams. It takes about a day on fast machine. Then, you need to multiplex them back together to a VCD-compliant mpeg1 stream and burn it to a CDR. Of course, not that DeCSS is available I am sure better programs that directly access the DVD data will come out very quickly.
I'm not too sure if you could "burn" DVDs (either DVD-Rs or DVD-RAMs) to be read by any DVD Player. Of course you could probably write a decrypted movie onto a DVD, so that anyone with a DVD-ROM drive and appropriate DVD player software (capable of playing single files) would be able to watch it, but it won't play in the common under-your-TV player, would it? The real threat to the movie companies, IMHO, is that people would virtually duplicate movies (with boxes, booklets etc.) and resell them. And as long as you can't easily make copies that won't play on _any_ DVD player, nobody will. The occasional computer enthusiast who copies a movie for another friend does not really threaten the revenues of the movie companies. And I don't think that DVD-RAM media are readable by the common DVD-ROM drive anyway... -- There is no spoon...
There is no spoon.
It's pretty cool.. :)
Why do theatres continue to use this very strange format? Surely there must be a cheaper, more reliable digital solution.
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
If it's because you're using a bardware DVD decoder that works by superimposing the decoded video onto your actual video card's output (like the Creative dxr2), it's because it was never on your screen to begin with :)
There is of course, the possibility that Divx is uncracked because no one tried - no one liked it enough to bother.
It's also possible that it's been done, but rendered irrelevant and obscure by the death of the format.
Well, the movie industry deserves this and it should teach them a lesson.
:)
Think about it as far as a movie renting thought goes... (i'll just talk about vhs, altho dvd should be similar)
A movie costs about 3 bux to rent and on a rought estimate it'll probably be rented at least 20 times in its lifetime. So that makes 60 dollars for the rental store. which means to turn a profit, a movie must cost them 50 bux or less to buy (it'd be more than it'd cost a normal person cuz of licensing). Where as it costs a normal consumer 20 dollars to buy the vhs. Lets say most of the people renting it are one time.. so that its actually 20 different people renting. If movie makers made VHS recordings cost only about 5 dollars i think most ppl would buy instead of rent. So what's 20 people times 5 dollars? 100 dollars where the movie company would have made 50 or 60 (whatever, less than 100)
So if movie companies would sell them cheap where they're sorta accessable and not overly priced, both movie company and consumer would win. They're stupid, hopefully they'll learn
I have no idea who you had to pay to get moderated so highly, but you seem to be posting about a topic on which you have no knowledge.
Just because you don't own many movies or buy pirated ones does not erase the fact that movie studios and the record industry lose what amounts to millions if not billions of dollars a year to black markets all over the world.
Another thing, even if there are a lot of pirates out there, are people going to buy some movie from a stranger with a DVD-R disc?
Have you ever been to Chicago or New York or any other big city? I'm guessing not because it isn't hard to find bootleg copies of all kinds of movies. And yes, people are willing to buy just about anything from a stranger as long as the price beats what you'd pay in the stores. Some bootlegs are so bad they were shot from a seat in the theater using a hand held video camera while the guy shooting eats popcorn and talks to his friends. And that is just in the good old U.S.A. Throw in Mexico, South America, Europe, Russia, and the pacific rim and you're talking about mega-bucks.
Also, some people actually have a conscience(I know those corporate types probably don't
What are you, Amish?
I mean really, has movie piracy been a big deal before?
Short answer, YES, and imagine how much easier computers and broadband will make it, then put yourself in the shoes of any Hollywood movie studio exec. The future isn't looking too bright to them.
Actually, it's quite on-topic, since most DVDs are also encoded with Macrovision so you can't even make an analog copy by plugging your player's video output into your VCR.
I got an older Beta unit that does this quite nicely. I hear you can still buy them in Europe, and they ignore macrovision as well...Anyone confirm/refute this? (BTW the picture is much nicer, even on the slower speed, and it prevents my buddies from stealing my dubbed pornos:))
Normally, I wouldn't be picky about typos, but you put the sneer quotes around the wrong word. They should be around "journalist"....
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
If someone "grab" a copy of a DVD, copy it into his/her hard disk, big deal! If this person start converting it into VCD format and sell it - then sue him/her! Who is doing the pirvating - the gangsters! Why? There are lots of money to make and there is a big freaking market. Then why doesnt DVD importers and the industry not making money? They do make a lot, just short of what they expect - they price their products too high! Simple supply and demand. Let me tell you this - there are pirvated DVD out on the street right now, it can be done and has been done and factories been busted by the police - not VCD but DVD as well. Even if you get a DVD player (hardware) they are ways to by-pass the encryption and/or the Zone locking mechanism through simple hardware modifications anyway. It is just like overpricing cigarettes and start a campign to catch cigarettes smugglers, then say something like this is for the concern of your health! So freaking lame! Pirvacy is wrong but dont blame the black market if you can't do marketing! Your failure in delivery the products created the black market all by yourself. An average person wont be interested in copying DVD and sharing with everybody, why waste time? These silly zone locking code prevent me from getting good movies in another country like Japan. Will someone import them? May be. Even if I get a Japanese DVD player they wont sell it to a foreigner- DVD player is not in the same situation as a camera. So everybody stuck? No, just hack the machine. You cant stop people from changing their tyres if you cant deliver a good car. So you think I use Linux because I want something for free? Yeah right, I wont use MS products even if it was free!!! Everything costs you (opportunity cost) one way or the other.
Here in Switzerland, practically all the DVD players on sale here do regions 1 & 2. Many are region free. Only suckers would buy a region 2 only device. (Pity that these suckers will be the Joe Average consumer who will be upset that they cannot play the region 1 DVDs that are also routinely on sale over here (with a warning sticker attached)).
I've just bought a DVD set-top box and am very happy with it. Finally I can start buying movies at US prices now that the *real* regional lockout of NTSC/PAL is effectively over.
Regards, Ralph.
They didn't steal that story from reuters, or anything...
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
As for films, can you really see anyone being able to produce films on the scale of the Star Wars series, T2, Twelve Monkeys... for almost no financial reward? No way. I don't pretend that budget and quality are directly proportional, but I certainly appreciate the immersive qualities of well made modern drama.
Note I'm not arguing in favour of software patents - as far as I'm concerned, the idea of patenting the concept of a spreadsheet would be entirely ludicrous, as with many patents that are unfortunately issued today. Patents have a place, but software is rarely it.
Er, no. Software patents may allow sloppy implementations to go unchallenged - if someone were able to patent the spreadsheet, for example - but software IP does not. Software IP stops me from putting my Battlezone CD in my CD-ROM and a £1 CD-R disc in my CD-RW, copying one to the other and selling the copy, thus allowing me to deprive an artist (yes, I regard software, entertainment especially, as a work of art) of the reward they've earned. Removing IP from software would lead to exactly that scenario, instantly.
Which is my argument not yours, surely? I'm saying that software deserves reward and that IP (only very rarely patent) is the way to protect that reward. Whereas you're arguing for the removal of IP rights, making reward improbable at best. Perhaps you are confusing IP with patents?
I wouldn't dispute that Microsoft's anticompetitive behaviour has distorted the market unhealthily (ditto Apple with their claim on the IP of an idea they borrowed from Xerox who'd developed it from other systems anyway...) but you're missing the point by a mile here. Microsoft are merely the example that has succeeded. Remove IP from the equation and what you end up with is no-one able to afford to develop anything even remotely like Windows - which, much as I dislike it personally, was a big help to getting proper computers into the home. So, we'd perhaps have GNOME/KDE (assuming either had been developed in the first place wihich is a trifle unlikely without Windows as a target or the extra users and developers it brought into the market) and the mess they're currently in. Quite nice, but as good for the average user as Windows? No way. Nowhere near easy enough to use.
Again, you confuse IP (copyright) with patents. Two very different issues. Remove IP and they simply can't afford to develop the best software as R&D costs money so if they can't recoup that by sales as anyone can sell the fruit of their labours without giving them a penny - the result of removing IP. That situation would be horrible, to put it bluntly.
With a large number of software patents, I agree wholeheartedly. But that wasn't what we were talking about.
I don't dispute that, but they wouldn't have to complete this nontrivial task, they'd just be able to duplicate Word CDs and sell them themselves. This would cut prices due to the extra competition, but would send quality through the floor as there'd be no money for MS (and others) to develop the next version with, so we'd be stuck with insignificant, piecemeal upgrades whenever they happened to find a few coins around.
NO. IP only restricts the right of competition in sales, which is entirely justifiable. Patents may restrict competition in development, but it depends on the patent concerned. Under certain conditions, a patent is entirely justifiable, even for software. If something's the product of years of research, that research costs money. Is the product something fundamentally new? If so, then they should be able to protect the results of their investment. Otherwise, you end up with others being able to ride on the back of their investment for free, therefore undercutting them and removing the incentive to research. Do I think all patents are justifiable? No, some are patently ludicrous and should never have been granted. But some are entirely legitimate.
This wasn't the issue, though. The issue was IP, copyright. Remove copyright with software and the media and, due to the non-trivial development costs but entirely trivial manufacturing and distribution costs, the business goes under and the world is poorer in many ways as no-one can afford to do the work they were doing.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
The whole DVD Piracy issue is a bit of a misnomer. No one is currently pirating DVDs movies yes DVDs no. Unless the industry is concerned about people physically copying movies and distriubting them (which I'm sure they are, but not to the same extend as there are concerned with the internet piracy)
The should should concenrate their efforts on reducing the general movie piracy (and seeing how movies come out on EFNET before or during their theatre runs I would start by cleaning their own internal leeks) and let DVD develop as a spec. I'm been waiting for the new DVD recorders to come out so I can back-up stuff on a 4.xxG format but now I'm sure that will be delayed.
There should really worry about the 95% of the market that isn't pirating movies and how they are annoying their core market of users instead of making everyone suffer for the actions of the illegal minority. (That, unfortunately, sounds a lot like the NRA's agrument against gun control... thankfull DVDs don't heart people... unless you have to watch the Titanic over and over again..)
Your comments reminded me of Eben Moglen's excellent essay Anarchism Triumphant. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it.
Sad, but true. Musicians make the best $$$ touring. They get screwed on record sales because:
- Their royalty percentage is typically very low. If you are signing your first record contract, they will take great advantage of your naivete.
- The cost of recoding the songs in the studio, mastering it, etc are extracted from the artists' portion of the royalties. The artists may never see any record sales royalties.
I know several people in the industry (not major big time players) who have been screwed in a similar fashion. Perhaps the best known example is the Goo-Goo Dolls. The hit song "Name" was all over the airwaves for a year. The rest of the "Boy Named Goo" CD had other hits too. The disc was selling like hot cakes. The band was touring and having a great time. When they got home to Buffalo, NY after their tour they recieved their royalty statement in the mail. After the record company subtracted the cost of recording and producing the CD (and whatever other costs of marketing/production they decided to subtract from the artists' small percentage of the royalties), the Dolls owed a few hundred grand! They had to go on tour again to raise money for lawyers to fight that absurdity. Believe me, we don't need record companies in their present form. Great music will come to the surface because people want to listen to it. And here in 1999 (not 1964), we have the infrastructure to rapidly distribute and promote artists without traditional record companies. The record companies are just marketing companies that exist to leech off of artists. With an MP3.com model, the artists gets 50% of royalites and pays none of MP3.com's costs. A 16 track digital studio with quality effects (e.g. Roland VS-1680, I love mine) can be had for $2500. Add a few good microphones, and you have a studio more than good enough. With these tools, the artists has much more control and much less need for traditional record companies. The film industry will reform next, probably with the iMac version 10, when anyone who cares to learn can do the technicals. Then it all comes down to the vision, which is the important thing. BWP anyone? The big budget studios will still have their place, but soon the field will be open to more competition.Software IP stops me from putting my Battlezone CD in my CD-ROM and a £1 CD-R disc in my CD-RW, copying
I guess this is where we have a semantic misunderstanding. Are you sure you are not talking about copyright? A Steven King novel is not patented, but it is still protected from someone just xeroxing millions of copies and selling it themselves. Isn't that copyright, not patent/IP. The author of a novel can't prevent anyone from writing a similar novel with the same premise, but he can prevent unauthorized verbatim duplication.
Microsoft Windows .... Remove IP from the equation and what you end up with is no-one able to afford to develop anything even remotely like Windows - which, much as I dislike it personally, was a big help to getting proper computers into the home.
I just can't see how your argument leads to the conclusion that nobody would be able to afford to develop good software once the fear of being sued out of business is removed. If anything, there will be less money spent on litigation and more for development. Note that I am not arguing for the illegal duplication and distribution of another persons' software, only for the freedom to develop my own version. Just because there is more competition, the market doesn't just disappear. Someone is going to sell an OS with a GUI (Mac/Windows/Amiga, or other). Others will be developing free OS's with GUI (Linux/GNOME/KDE). Others will be selling and supporting the free stuff (RedHat, etc.). And so on. The only time we need to bring lawyers into the equation is when someone is making perfect unauthorized copies (not clean room reimplementations) of someone else's product and selling them.
Again, you confuse IP (copyright) with patents. Two very different issues.
Actually, the term IP does not have a precise legal definition. In common usage around here, and on slashdot, the term IP has been attached to patents, copyrights, trademarks and every other legal mechanism that can be used to protect yourself and intimidate others. I agree with RMS that its probably better to avoid that term. I will start avoiding it today.
Perhaps in the UK, the term IP is a legal equivalent of copyright, and that's why we seem to be having some miscommunication.
From what I understand, the message m is encrypted with a disk-specific encyption key, so the data on the disk is E(m). there are 400 40 bit D(), such that D(E(m)) = m. However, D() is encypted again 400 times, one for each vendor, for v(D()). Each player then applies a Vd, so that Vd(v(D())) = D(), and Vd(v(D(E(m)))) = m. each player is supposed to encrypt Vd() to a e(Vd()) to prevent reverse-engeneering, at which somepoint a 3rd decryption key is applied, and Vd2(e(Vd())) = Vd(). So when you hit 'play' the overall result is V2d(e(Vd(v(D(E(m)))))) = m, and you see the movie. Where Xing screwed up is they skipped the last step, for whatever reason, and left Vd() unaltered in the software, so that Xing plays it as Vd(v(D(E(m)))) = m. and from understanding how that one key worked, they were able to guess 120 or so other Vd()'s and the whole damn thing comes falling down. Sucks being Real Networks right about now, as most everyone in the DVD bussiness is about ready to kill them.
Vote Technocratic! Government by killer robots!
I will personally hold down any engineer who works on a wardware-crippling project and cut his (or her) fucking eyeballs out! That aside, you can probably gather my opinion on crippleware.
I think that the market in general doesn't like crippleware very much when it comes to hardware. Remember the outrage when people discovered that you could plug an 80487 into a motherboard without the 80486 and have a 486 dx? Remember the outrage when the movie industry tried to release tapes that self destructed after a certain number of plays (i knew a guy working in one of the video stores that was a beta-tester before the idea was dropped (because nobody would buy them)). Remember how older IDE CDROM drives ripped fine, and then after various smoke-filled-room style discussions, the newer ones started needing software like paranoia to defeat a cripple-feature...
I see a couple problems with this whole situation. Firstly, the movie intustry is trying to muscle the marketplace. They are saying "Our product is worth this: YOu will buy it". That's not how a free market should or will work... Pirating movies, CD's, etc... is a big pain in the ass. Most people don't do it at the current prices ($15 for a CD of music or a VHS cassette of video). I tend not even to do that when i have a CD burner and video toaster and the worx, because it's a pain, and i want to support the stuff i buy... The thing that pisses me off is that these companies are trying to push the market around...
It's like Intel wanting to cripple the celeron to make it not compatable with SMP setups... It's a company trying to scheme a way to charge more by reducing value not adding it.... Normally, you'd have somebody with a product and they'd improve it, and charge more for the improved version. This is the opposite, they have a product, they cripple it, and then if you wanted the old one, you have to pay more.
/rant
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Too much data? Now with writable DVDs. Not with the 75 gig hard disk IBM just announced. At this rate we'll have terabyte drives in a few years. Storage technology will overwhelm this problem in short order.
No they are not. And Linux users are in no circumstances required to reboot if they can do otherwise.
If they choose not to support Linux that does not give you the right to break the law.
Reverse-engineering a program just to get it working under another enviroment is legal in most countries. The point is to protect the buyer of a product against the vendor which obviously has a monopoly about changes&behavior of his program. If CSS was patented you'd have a point, but if it is not the case and as long as the code was not copied, then it is legal.
Indeed. The simple fact of the matter is that a consumer has the legal right (under US law) to create a backup copy of a recording that he has legitimately purchased. Interfering with this process through mandated "antipiracy" features is a cheat and a fraud.
The bottom line is the same as it is for crypto, guns, or photocopiers: prosecutions of illegal acts committed using the tools are legitimate; blanket restrictions on the tools are not.
Aren't pirates a really useful excuse to make sure that people in general don't end up getting the technology they need to produce their own art, music and FILMS without depending entirely on the entertainment industries for anything of that nature?
The simple facts are: 1)Only a few idiots and 3133+ hacquer d00dz (but I repeat myself...) would spend hours copying a $19.95 DVD movie onto a $29.95 DVD blank with home equipment, 2)The real piracy problem is from knockoff factories in see-no-evil jurisdictions, which use the same mass-production equipment as the legitimate publishers, and 3)The people charged with protecting the legitimate IP interests of the studios know facts (1) and (2).
So, yes, you may be on to something with your theory about Hollywood's hidden agenda.
One of the masters pegged it -- in the very first story he sold, no less:
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Keep media prices high. If the media prices don't drop enough for the larger 4.7 GB (or even 2.6 GB) media, a widespread copying "problem" will not materialize, or will materialize late enough to put in place a more secure "DVD-II" sucessor. Copying is highly unlikely if media is $25/disk, and still pretty rare if the media is over $10/disk. At $5/disk and below is where copying starts to run rampant.
;-)
One might ask, "How could content producers ensure that media costs stay high?" The answer is, like before, to try to coerce DVD device/media manufacturers via a contract to do so. Such a contract would tack on a "royalty" payment to each piece of media. The device/media manufacturers would sign such a contract to keep the DVD market from collapsing or fragmenting under the threat of the content producers halting publishing on DVDs. Something like the CD-R royalty on media, but without the fatal flaw of an exception clause for data-oriented media.
That would prevent 4.6GB DVD from taking off as a data storage medium, painful for device manufacturers, but not necessarily the worst scenario, which would be a total withdrawl of current future video content on DVD. And the content producers might throw the device manufacturers a bone- you can let 2.6 GB media and writers get cheap, but "high-quality" 4.7 and 9.4 GB media must be tarriffed until a DVD-II scenario can be devised (say, with SDMI watermarking).
Perhaps I'm paranoid, but this scenario seems like a likely short term fix to expect from the DVD powers-that-be, if they can pull it off. And they then rush their SDMI watermarking efforts to market as fast as possible.
With any luck SDMI will be rushed enough that they screw that one up too, right?
--LinuxParanoid
http://www.wired.com/news/reuters/0,1349,32317,00. html
You haven't blatantly stolen that story yet, what's the deal?
DVD on Linux was discussed on Slashdot before.
Umn... the reason is because the actual FILM used in the US theatres gets sent overseas for their release. The actual film stock is rather expansive... and anything that can increase the money that these grubby studio execs can get their hands on is a Good Thing(tm), right?
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
IIRC, the DVD itself is not recorded with macrovision per se, because the DVD represents the moving in MPEG-2 format, not as an NTSC video signal. The DVD player's decoding circuitry adds the Macrovision modifcations as it generates an NTSC signal.
With improvements in video projection technology (eg extremely high definition), digital video and increased bandwidth, release of films to theatres on filmstock is going to be obsolete in a few years anyway. The trend to smaller theatres helps, since a smaller screen means less energy output required for the projector (which makes it easier/cheaper to build, etc.)
New (or retrofitted) theatres will have some sort of high-end digital video projection system and the films will be distributed either by a server and high bandwidth feed (possibly a dedicated satellite link) or high capacity digital medium (multiple DVDs?), saving money on the film stock, film duplication process, and shipping costs of those reels.
This also allows for wider simultaneous release, although possible censorship/language/etc issues in other countries may still mean delays in international release.
Movie theatres won't go away, but movies won't be "films" for much longer.
-- Alastair
I saw some sort of device in a Radio Shack catalogue that is said to circumvent this sort of nasty protection (which, BTW, I've noticed makes for really lousy legitimate playback). Has anyone had any experience with such devices?
This becomes especially easy if they ever release a Linux player. Imitating an Xserver and /dev/dsp is actually not all that hard, several programs already function by pretending to be normal Xservers (VNC, 3Dwm, Xvfb). All you need to do is intercept all the digital writes. Hack Xvfb or VNC for the video, use NBD for the audio, and you have it.
On the off chance that "they" decide to switch to DVD-2, I would hope that they would fix some things about DVD at the same time, such as boosting the resolution up to HDTV levels. Today's DVD is nowhere near HDTV resolution.
...that I can pick up from blockbuster's used VHS bin for $9 --Fantasia? StartWars? ET? Please...
Can you imagine the backlash if every DVD player sold was recalled for a firmware upgrade to resecure the format?
The movie industry needs to learn from the experience of the RIAA--you can't stop copying, and you are losing revenues if you hold titles from DVD release. Both the music recording industy and Hollywood had record profits last year...stop the anti-copying madness (and I don't even own a DVD player!)
---
As well, porno's are indeed the movies you watch over and over and over and over again.
There's at least one other genre with that characteristic: children's titles. Every seen a three-year-old watch his (or her) favorite movie? For the hundredth time?
Get me a big bowl of popcorn and a ringside seat for the subsequent meeting between their tax lawyers and the IRS.... ;-)
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I'm not sure if it is possible to make a playble video DVD without regional encoding,
Simple answer: There is a bit field, a one in the riht position means that it is playable in that region.....
Of course the most common values are 0xff (playable everywhere) and the powers of two (playable in just one region).
Roger.
RIGHT! Sorry.. I forgot.. yeah.. it's the decoder that MUST, by the terms of the license, encode output with Macrovision.
So, I'm curious. Do you think they'll learn from this.
If you don't support Linux, there are people who will help to get it for themselves. Then you get things like this. I bet if SOMEBODY had just released a Software DVD player for linux (even a commercial one, binary only) this wouldn't have happened! Hell, I'd STILL pay my $50 to watch a fully enabled DVD under Linux (using Menus and subpictures and everything). Open source would be NICE, but in the end I just want it to work.
Too bad we're going to go to some 2048-bit key now for DVD^2. And I doubt Xing will make the same mistake twice, so somebody will have to brute-force it. I'd help. Run dvddes instead of rc5des? Sure.
-- I'm omnipotent, I just don't care.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
I've made my point.
I really do not think this is a big deal to the industry at all.
So a handfull of geeks are going to be pirating DVD's and not paying for them. This is nothing new.
We can do that with CDs now. We have been able to do it with VHS for years and years, and we could do it with audio tapes since the beginning. Despite this, they still sell! Most people ar not going to take the time and energy to get it for free. The industry is going to be just fine.
However, being able to decode and then re-encode the DVD will enable the removal of such region coding and macrovision flags FROM THE DISCS THEMSELVES, without modification of the player.
DivX. Nuff said.
The main problem here is not with the technology, its with the mindset that any kind of security can actually be put in place for any persistent software content. It doesnt matter if the average Joe can do it or not, if one person can do it anywhere, illegal copies will be made. The main problem with DVD is that the copies are perfect, making them difficult to distinguish from an original. With this type of problem, effort has to be put into law enforcement, and I dont mean throwing those that hack the encryption in jail, I mean putting those that willfully distribute copyrighted material for a profit in jail.
Frank W. Miller
It's my prediction that mass DVD pirate proliferation won't happen for several years if ever. Think about it, mp3s have gotten popular only in the past year. Before the mp3 boom most people had no idea what they were. What brought about the mp3 proliferation was high bandwidth home connections and portable mp3 players.
Diamond's case against the RIAA was probably one of the most important factors in the wide spread use of mp3s. Before the case became a major item on the news most people had never heard of mp3s. What do mp3s have to do with DVD? Well for a long time (until the Rio came out) you could only listen to mp3s on your computer which is by nature pretty stationary and in many cases doesn't have much of a sound system. A CD with a bunch of mp3 files was useless in anything but a computer. Then came the portable mp3 players and now mp3 players as home stereo components. They have made the format popular for distributing music. Copies of DVD movies face similar obstacles. As of now they can only be played on your computer and take up massive amounts of space on them, your set-top DVD player will not play a DVD disk without it being encrypted since it assumes it's a pirated copy, and lastly anyone who builds a machine to play copied DVDs will have several companies breathing down their back (ones with real legal claims as opposed to the RIAA against Diamond). Even though people can copy the hell out of DVDs now it will be a very long time before it becomes as easy and convienient as copying a CD to mp3.
High bandwidth is the second limiting factor after convienience. Even with cable and DSL access it would take several hours to download an entire DVD movie. Even after the download it takes up massive amounts of space on your hard drive. Sure you can go down to Best Buy and pick up a 22GB hard drive but even that can only hold so many movies. So to keep your drive empty for all your mp3 albums you need to fork over a few hundred bucks for a DVD writer. You soon find that buying the blank DVD disks costs you as much as it would to just buy the DVDs themselves. This will keep 99% of people from downloading and burning DVD movies for their personal collections.
Afterall what good is a disk that won't work in a DVD player at your friend's house, takes 10+ hours of work to make, and costs you 25$ or more.
I truely hope that DVD manufacturers pay attention to this kind of argument before they issue a recall on all DVD players and issue firmware updates that keep DVD drives from reading movie disks. For some people their computer is their DVD player. A drive costs under 70$ and a decoder card costs about the same (they can even plug it into their TV). Not being able to play movies would piss off way too many people. Any attempt to replace the encryption on DVD will cost a whole lot more money than they would ever lose from a handful of people pirating their movies. I don't want to hear about Divx either, if it had been popular it would have eventualy got itself cracked. Some people tried and failed because they gave up before they finished. Any encryption can be cracked with enough time and skill. If HDTV people have their way, DVDs and such will be obsolete anyways. Who wants to pay 25$ for a DVD when they can watch a movie with true widescreen resolution of 1920x1080 from a movie on demand service. No disks or hard drive space required, just a HDTV and receiver.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Which would you rather buy? A disc that you can only play on certain players and you couldn't make a copy of to a tape to take to your friend's house who doesn't have a DVD player? Or would you rather have one that you can play on ANY dvd player, anywhere in the world?
My humans' VCR toasted itself last month.
The cost for a nice new VCR vs. a DVD was close. Not equal, but close. Left on their own, they would have bought the DVD player.
I decided to get them to buy a cheapo VCR, mostly because of Slashdot's coverage of the Tivo device, which I want more than a sexy VCR or a DVD.
Big thanks to Rob and Robin (and Hemos the Hamster).
Meow.
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
Can they get tax breaks for actions they take to curb those losses?
The simple truth is that movies and CD are usually sold and rented cheaply enough that it doesn't make a lot of sense to pirate them. I can see a few people with some sort of collecting fetish pirating a bunch of DVDs because they have to "own a copy" of a lot of movies, we're talking about a very small minority though.
Blank CDs cost about a dollar a piece and blank DVDs cost a bit more. Plus you have to read the music off the CD on to a drive and the write it back and hope nothing goes wrong in the process. By the time the whole process is done with, I'd rather just pay the $15 for the CD or the $1-$3 and rent the movie instead of giving up an hour of my life and $1, plus I get the lyrics and pictures and stuff that come with it. Why isn't the industry attacking the problem that way? Make better packaging and include more art work and pictures with CDs and DVDs so that there is some non-piratable value-added and give people more insentive to buy the original. They could even do something like putting front-row tickets in a few CDs so you can "win" something by buying the original, it would cost them next to nothing. Unless of course they want to keep inflated numbers for their "losses" due to piracy.
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
It's either A) Loose enormous amohnts of revenue because you won't release DVD titles or B) find other means of copyright protection.
The distributors and studios can't turn back the clock. DIVX is dead, VHS is on the way out. They will have to cope with piracy like they do with audio CDs and movies on tape.
In the end, it;s all about the greenbacks. DIVX was a harsh wake-up call to the industry: the consumer -won't- go where they are told to. Instead the distributors have to come to the consumer. They -could- choose to withold all future DVD releases, but they will loose waaaaaay more revenue than pirating could ever possibly account for.
SoupIsGood Food
Not even the automobile industry makes such sweeping assumptions about the behavior of their customers. If they did, wouldn't they just set governors on all cars destined for the US market so that they would not go any faster than 80 miles per hour?
Shut up man, the Feds don't need any more ideas. Besides that, if the governors on cars are anything like those on the tanks my grandfather drove in Korea, all you have to do is drop the vehicle into first at a good speed. Oh wait, they're all computer controlled now, not mechanical. Since these could easily be hacked (the speed sensor is only one input to the computer), I guess that point is moot.
Did you guys see how CNET News.com handled this?
==
Are Hollywood's fears about DVD piracy becoming reality?
That may be the case as a new software utility circulating on the Internet theoretically allows anyone with a DVD drive on their PC to make copies of DVD movies and store them on their hard drive or burn them to rewritable CD-ROM discs.
Although the software program making the rounds of newsgroups and Internet sites has the potential for mass DVD piracy, the actual logistics of copying and distributing digital movies is so complicated and unwieldy as to render the whole process "more trouble than its worth," according to one observer.
The software utility was reportedly a side effect of efforts to create a DVD software player for Linux-based computers. Real Networks' Xing DVD player lacked the traditional encryption that protects most software DVD players, allowing developers to create a software program which descrambles the encryption on a DVD movie and compresses the file to a manageable size.
===== (From: CNET News.com)
The problem with the article is that it's obviously a lie that paints Linux users as movie pirates. For one thing, the code for the program was originally written for Microsoft Windows, the fact the source is availible is a side effect of the development of a Linux DVD player, but it was cracked on Windows first. The article seems to be slanted towards most hardware companies' fears of having an open source driver for their hardware as opposed to a binary-only Windows-only driver. Also, the article does point it out, that movies are not economical to pirate yet -- So why call it a "piracy" program despite the fact that the Linux implementation was not made for that purpose? The whole CSS crapola is just a way to maintain a dictatorship monopoly on the DVD player industry.
[Record companies]
:) Right now there's too little music and too much business, but the general idea of that sort of company is a good one, which was my problem with the original poster.
:) I can't see it dropping out of use unfortunately as it's a lot shorter to type than copyright... Still, I would expect to see it defined as copyright rather than patent, hence my line of arguing. I'd have thought it was pretty clear from my argument, though, and I'd definitely have said our original poster was suggesting that copyright be removed from software, having the effect of making all software GPL to all intents and purposes, which I'd see as a Bad Thing.
:)
;) sorry it's a bit late - I've been AFK all weekend.
I agree that, in many big ways, the current implementation sucks bigtime. I can't see the mp3.com business model taking over as it is right now simply as music's still too reliant on publicity for this to truly work. But it's a definite improvement. What I was arguing for, though, was the principle that you have a company who are paid to organise studio facilities, press and promote records and generally free the band up to play and write, though not necessarily in that order
[Semantics]
Yes, it does appear that IP is becoming a confised term
It's definitely not trademarks
As an aside, I still support _some_ software patents (not many...) and would actually judge that we might get even bigger lawyers battles without them as we'd get some tortuous arguments trying to cover some of the same sort of thing with copyright. Which would be interesting...
For the one man and his dog who find this
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
In my area they sell these as "Video stabilizers" or similar. The box has a "Do not duplicate copyright material" warning, below which is a schematic for connecting two VCRs to copy tapes.
The unit itself is a black box with two RCA leads ("in" and "out") and they take a 9v battery inside. The board inside doesn't look that complicated, though the labels are removed from most of the ICs. They retail (here, in Canada) for about $15.
They do work. When you copy a tape there aren't any Macrovision-type artifacts, though the usual VHS-to-VHS copy quality loss is there.
Oh great. Now Lucas will never release SW-TPM on DVD. He's already all riled up about the AVI/ASF bootlegs floating on the Net.
---
Star Wars and Titanic are completly diffrent things, one is a 'timeless classic' and the other will be forgoten shortly, sure no one cares about titanic anymore, but people still do and will, care about Star Wars.
Also, with starwars, There will be no VHS releases ether (AFAIK), so there won't be any revinue loss to VHS.
I was thinking of buying the Matrix on VHS (that was before the goodVCD came out), but it would have cost me $79, or half as much as a cheap DVD player. If i would have had a dvd player, I probably would have gotten it, so I could have enjoyed it in dolby-digital sound and all (Yes, I've got a dolbyD amp)
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I'm sure there are a lot of people (like me) who don't buy movies because they would get bored with them quickly. I like to rent a movie, then maybe a few months later, rent it again. At say $3 a movie, that's only $6 rather than spending $20 to buy it. I don't really like watching movies 27 times in a row.
:) and they would feel at least a little guilty buying an illegal copy.
Another thing, even if there are a lot of pirates out there, are people going to buy some movie from a stranger with a DVD-R disc? If I was going to buy a movie, I would go in to a nice video store and buy one there. Also, some people actually have a conscience(I know those corporate types probably don't
I mean really, has movie piracy been a big deal before? It's not like it's really that hard to copy a VHS tape. But anyone I know that may have a bogus copy of a movie has ONE movie, and doesn't have a big collection. They're protecting something that doesn't need protection. Computer games are easily copied, and they still make lots of money. Music CD's can be easily copied, and again, they still make plenty of money.
So.. I think they should really give it a rest.
Sure it is. Many of the Anime DVDs I have bought are free from regional encoding. Or, more specifically, I think you can encode a disc with "region 0" or something that says its ok to play the disc in any region.
----
Life if possible, art at any cost.
I hate the industry whining about home piracy the people who buy movies will continue to buy them and the people who dub them will continue to dub them. Its like the software industry claiming that a 15 year old warezing a several grand copy of 3DS has cost them that much revenue and writing it off tax wise. No it has not cost them that much revenue, because that kid or adult is not gonna spend the money on that program they dont have the money period. Most who buy DVD's still will because they want the box the original etc for the next couple of years the media to transfer them to will remain to expensive anyway. Finally I seriously doubt it will cause a change in current DVDs but remember in a short time there will be a whole new DVD for HDTV standard out I would be surprised if they did not use stronger encryption for this one. (I would also be surprised if someone does not figure out a crack for the stronger encryption.) Um Just my rant. Wurst Post
Even if DVD-writers with the required capacity
are available, the number of copies should be
irrelevant:
- price for the raw DVD medium
- much more people are using a cd-player
than a computer with a burner, same will be
true for DVD
- If they really want to earn money, DVDs have
to get really popular and the few people which
are able to decrypt and copy DVDs might even
help to make them popular (same with Microsoft)
As long as you don't distribute it, you can do what you want with it. Vendors can say whatever they want, but that doesn't make their terms legally binding.
Indeed. The simple fact of the matter is that a consumer has the legal right (under US law) to create a backup copy of a recording that he has legitimately purchased. Interfering with this process through mandated "antipiracy" features is a cheat and a fraud.
I've been under the same impression. However, my cursory examination of the Copyright Act and other relevent material (Berne Convention, etc.), indicates that this is a misconception.
You are permitted a single archival copy of software following your description, but you are not permitted an archival copy of any other copyrighted matter unless you are a library, with certain restrictions and guidelines for claiming such status.
If you can give me a citation on this claim, I'd really appreciate it.
It's exactly that -- just Xing player was even easier to reverse-engineer than the rest because it usually takes time to find the decryption procedure of the key in deliberately obfuscated code. Still it was inevitable that reverse-engineering succeeded -- obfuscation increases time necessary for reverse-engineering only few times, and reasonably persistent person still won't see it as a serious problem.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Will someone knowledgeable about this subject please explain:
I understand that all DVD players except Xing encoded the list of 40-bit decryption keys, but even if Xing had encrypted it, musn't any software player know how to decrypt its own list (meaning that reverse engineering must eventually expose the decrypted list)?
In other words, encrypted data is theoretically useless unless you have the key to decrypt it. But a DVD player must use the key list, so it must also have the key to decrypt the list, right? So wouldn't it have been trivial to step through any software player and find where it decrypts the list?
There has to be something I'm not understanding here. Please explain!
People, people! The _REASON_ why the DVD CSS protection was cracked in the first place was _NOT_ to illegally copy DVDs. Rather it was to counter the lack of support (and provide support in the process) for DVD playback on systems which the DVD forum don't believe are worth the time of day. I'd love to say that this is all Microsoft's fault for its (OEM, brainwashing, etc.) wide distribution of a single platform which is the only real platform to have the support of the manufacturers. I think everyone can learn a lesson here: if you could buy a DVD enabled MTV/whatever, then those people who cracked CSS wouldn't have cracked it - they weren't out to break the law, they only used their expertise to get other system support for DVD (they weren't doing it for the hell of it). Hope you all see what I mean here. Jon.
http://www.jonmasters.org/
Ok now that the DVD copying problem has been solved. Can we work on a way to copy dreamcast games?
We have "plain text"(the decrypted data) now, so changing the keys does nothing, changing the encryptation algorithm will do little.. Anything they do that still allows the old media to be played (the media we now have decrypted) will be insecure. They can either shaft all people who have already bought DVD players, or just suck it up.. There really isn't any other option at this point...
Future media can be produced using all new keys, and DVD players firmware updated, but the DVD's we have already cracked are cracked for good. Even if they change ALL the keys, the same thing will happen again eventually. If they don't want something easily copied in digital form, the only way to do that is to change the media to a propriatery standard that can't be used in computers, ala Playstation 2. Still, pro priates will figure some way around it, and the 3l337 haX0rs will just get a sub-optimal movie to trade, ala the curent "screener" scene. There is no way to secure this against everyone.
Hopefully the studios will realize that and not do something boneheaded that causes a public uproar...
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
That's right, I beat up vcr my uncle gave me must been ... 10+ year old. And it record wonderful videos. It's so old that you can't set the clock because all the closk buttom refuse to work. The trick is wait till 12'o clock, unplug it, plug it back and there you have a correct flashing clock! The "record", "backward" bottom doesn't work either.
Since I'm a big movie fan, I never tape any movies. I don't even rend new movie from video store anymore since I watch most of them at first run firday. I only use vcr to edit some new music video and law and order.
CY
agreed, that is definitely another killer category. Just don't mix the two up. Both parties would be upset.
I am getting so tired of this "Those meanies cracked my weak encryption!" stuff. The Wired article does no good for the matter either by implying that MusicMatch is a "tool for pirates". Far from it.
3 9489139584959 7980465063
I am currently building my very own MP3 server for my living room. Why? Because I have over 600 CDs and never can find the one I want (I am a terrible housekeeper, and I have CDs laying all over the place - most not even in their jewel cases.)
As long as I am using legal copies of stuff I have in my posession that I purchased, who the hell cares? I don't give copies of stuff away - not to my relatives, not to my friends, and not even to strangers. Why should I?
I am also getting mighty sick of the recording taxes the industry is forcing us to pay. You pay a tax on cassette tape, minidisc, and now on CD-R audio discs. Why should we? The stuff I am recording at home is my stuff. It is stuff like the tape my cousin made of my grandmother when she came back from her trip to Czechoslovakia in 1980. If I want to make a copy on tape of that, I get to shell out money to "the man" because he is implying that any tapes I buy are going to be used to record the latest Spice Girls album.
I am sick to death of it.
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I was really disappointed by the article. I think what is was that turned me off was the authors assumption that anyone who wants to copy a DVD is doing something illegal.
"Rendering CD/DVD drives for computers incapable of reading music CDs or DVD movies might be another way to go"
So, do I have to buy another copy of the song if I want to listen to it on my Rio?
I can't say anything coherent, because even though I'm used to this kind of stuff from corporate PR goons, I thought Wired was on the side of the reasonable and unlobotamized.
-kevin
No, I am NOT thinking of DIVX - part of my major criticism about lack of convenience is having to deal with the physical media. I want my movies downloaded (possibly streamed) or sent through something like a cable connection, where I don't have to deal with any physical media.
I'm thinking of something like those "Digital Jukebox" services being offered by quite a few cable companies, where you pick any song you want to listen to which is being offered by the cable company & it is played through your cable connection.
The setup is nice, but I don't use it because it's too expensive, and the libraries hosted by the cable companies often don't have the songs I'm interested in hearing.
I'd like a really cheap pay-per-play (like $0.25 per play) so that you'd have to be a real nut to spend the time, effort & money to pirate the show, and I'd like to be able to select, at any time, from ALL of the movies or audio records that have been compiled by the companies that were responsible for producing them (although perhaps other companies could be responsible for compiling these libraries).
Once you have a huge selection of titles available for really cheap, there's no motivation for piracy - and many people will probably be more likely to explore some of the often-overlooked material that clutters these huge archives. Witness how many people "wander" through the MP3 archives, just because it's so easy to check out different songs and you don't have to pay anything for it.
Well, that's quite debatable. One has to go no further than Slashdot to find that Linux has more whiners than do-ers.
(Of course, this could be said about any group of software users).
Now for my little rant...
I think this is something that society will quickly learn. Information wants to be free. People play music because they LIKE to. Same with movies, same with computer games. Right now, capitalism is stifling the best and the brightest, making them more likely to try profiteering. But sooner or later, this will come to an end.
Who knows where this'll go, but given some of the recent breakthroughs in fusion and nanotech, I'd say we'll eventually end up with an OpenSource nanoassembler powered by fusion capable of self-replication (some assembly required). Yes, it's sci-fi now. But for how long... We can no longer simply dismiss the possibility. If tangible things were free, what would that mean?
Think about it.
The entertainment establishment is way too greedy. I have FREE photocopying abilities yet NEVER copy books. Why? Books are cheap, why bother. If I want I could go to a library and read the same book for FREE. If CDs, games, and DVDs were reasonably priced the copying of them would decrease. Games less than $20 are NOT worth copying, it is better to buy the original with all the documents. CDs less than $10 are the same. DVD's are VERY overpriced an old movie should NOT cost more than $10. Book publishers do NOT freak out over libraries (people can read theier books for free here). If public libraries did not exist and some one just thought of the idea of a public library the printing establishment (if it acted like the present entertainment establishment) would go to court to prevent public libraries. The entertainment industry should lower prices and copying would lessen. Encryption is a costly waste of time. SOMEONE WILL crack any encryption technique eventually. P.S. Where is the spell checking option on anonymous posts via the web site? I apologize for the spelling in this post.
People are MUCH more willing to buy "the genuine item", especially when it comes to status symbol items, like luxury cars.
Sure, the Hyundai has ABS, 2.8l engine, styling, chrome wheels, disk brakes, double wishbone suspension, leather seats, and costs only $18,000. The BMW has the same, $50,000, because it has the BMW name badge on it. (believe me, I'm *not* saying a BMW is mechanically the same as a Hyundai, but how about the case with Honda/Acura? There's very little engineering difference, made by the same damn company, yet you pay more for the Acura)
Now, if the Wal Mart soda had that Coke badge on the can. . . folks would flock to it for 25 cents less, - but hey, I buy the expensive stuff, means I'm rich, I'm important, and I have a high-paying job, three wives, 2000 sheep, 24 camels 15 donkeys, and a velvet pavillion.
Do you feel comfortable inviting your boss' boss over for dinner to your house, and showing him your collection of pirated DVDs on your DVD rack on top of your entertainment center? Or would you rather have the "legit" packaging, promenently displayed saying "I'm a good citizen, and a vigorous consumer!".
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Such a shame; Wired used to be a decent news source. However, now they're too busy playing friend-of-big-media to care about the rest of us.
Anyway: It's better to limit hardware than content? Why do either one have to be limited? I mean, the software industry has learned that people no longer accept copy-protection, but that's certainly not stopped production of new software.
Get over it, Hollywood (et al). Admit that you're losing the stranglehold monopoly that you used to have, and figure out what the rest of us have known for years:
Better content, not better copy protection, is your only key to the future.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I'm all for it. They have outlasted their usefulness. The current industry screws both the artists and the consumers. I think MP3.com and its ilk have a model much more in tune with the times.
Why did Vertigo and Mettalica put so much time, effort and money into recording Load? Because they could sell it. And why did AT&T fund Bell Labs - specifically Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan in their development of Unix and C?
People have been making great music for eons out of the pure love of making music. Many of the greatest composers and seminal musicians died dirt poor but loved making music. Making money is fine since you have to eat, but I don't believe that it is the only force at work when it comes to creative endeavors and quality workmanship. Innate curiosity and pride are just as important. For every AT&T and K&R, there is an RMS and Torvalds.
Someone else would have developed a spreadsheet for the PC in all probability, but as powerful as 1-2-3 entirely for love?
If there is a real need for spreadsheet functionality that is was not being met with an existing product, more people would probably devote their energy to it. Conversely, if the concept of a spreadsheet could be made IP by a patent, then this limits competition and, hence the possibility of better products, since it allows the owner of the IP to improve his product at a snails pace or not at all without worrying about having to compete. Simply put, I belive that the anti-competitive nature of software IP is bad for society since it allows sloppy implementations to go unchallenged. Regardless of the freedom of the underlying ideas, the person or company with the best implementations of the ideas in a product will be rewarded. And this is as it should be.
Then take Windows. Much as I dislike it, too... Now, remove it. How many home PCs do you have?
Plenty. Without M$'s anticompetitive behavior, there would probably have been a much healthier mix. Better yet, if Apple didn't have so many GUI lawyers and supposed GUI IP, I'm sure we would be much further along now than we are.
I mean, how are the software companies supposed to survive, support revenues?
They will survive if they produce the best products! That is, if they produce a product that I need and cannot (or do not have time to) create myself. I'm not saying that they should all have to roll over and die and just give away their source, only that they shouldn't be able to sue their competitor out of business if he tries to make a better version of the product based on similar ideas - because, as a consumer, I'm going to want to buy that better version that would never had appeared if the IP lawyers had their way.
It is just plain silly that someone can claim to own an idea simply because they got to the patent office first! But I've gone over that before....
If Microsoft tried to survive on such a business mdoel it'd be chaos and software quality would go through the floor.
I don't believe for a second that M$ would go out of business if they were unable to "enforce" their IP. They do, after all, have a pretty functional WYSIWYG word processor along with office and such. Even if anyone could violate M$'s "software patents", the would still have to come up with an implementation of the software which is better than M$'s - and that's a nontrivial task. If anything, it might prod M$ along and encourage them to work out their bugs faster, etc to keep their competitive edge. People are still going to want to buy the best stuff, regardless of what the IP laws are. If you make the best stuff, it will probably make you some money. But if you make a sloppy widget and are hoping to get by on your IP portfolio, then you should lose. Having the idea first (difficult to prove anyway) should not give you the right to make a mint. Making a spectacular product that actually *works* well and is affordable does give you the right to make a mint, since the business of making a product really is 1% inspiration - 99% perspiration!
Bottom line - IP restricts competition. Competition is a good thing for society at large. It makes businesses work harder, but we all win because implementations of ideas are going to be better when more than one team can run with the idea.
The industry's repeated failure to treat Linux and Linux users with common courtesy and decency is hardly the way to encourage them -not- to clone, examine, de-protect and decrypt.
I'm NOT advocating piracy, here. I believe people should respect the conditions they agree to when they buy someting, and respect the person who made the product in the first place.
On the other hand, nobody (except, apparently the commercial sector) can be oblivious to the fact that depriving any community of a product won't prevent that community building their own.
Hopefully, the result of this will be that the commercial sector will sit up and pay attention to these "lowly serfs" and "penniless geeks". I doubt it. More likely, they'll press for Open Source and long hair to be criminalised.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I read this earlier this morning and was amazed at some of the conclusions drawn regarding how to fix this problem.
... he obviously does not realized that the DVD install base for PCs is 5-10 times greater than set-top boxes which is currently 3.7 million according to CEMA. That puts 18.5 to 37 million PC-DVD ROMS that this guy wants to LOCK OUT from viewing movies just to avoid the use of rippers like DeCSS.
... I assume this would hold new encryption keys. What does that do to the existing 3,000+ DVD with the old keys, what would this upgrade cost, and can you opt-out? These are all very important questions which lead to answers as to why this is a bad idea as well.
... "If you can see/hear it, you can rip it."
... if an industry sticks it to the consumer for too long, there is a backlash where people feel that they have paid too much for too long and are entitled to things for free. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just a fact of life and human nature.
... why not try to build LOYAL consumers who will pay a fair price for a quality product ... then your piracy fears will disappear because 90% of people will pay for your product.
First off, he suggests making it so PC's cannot play DVD discs
Next he suggests that all the 3.7 million set-top players receive a firmware upgrade
The problem here is poor planning and implementation of a security system of a product that can NEVER be secure.
I've heard it said many times and I'll repeat it for those in the cheap seats
The industry needs to focus on the REASON why people would want to get the encryption keys. In this case, lack of Linux support for DVD. Other reasons people would want this is to pirate discs which cost too much. Much of the basis behind theft is the feeling of entitlement
The entertainment industry has a choke hold on the wallets of America and anything that give the user some power to breath for one second is immediately attacked with a knee-jerk reaction to snuff it out (i.e. MP3) via regulation and restrictions on private citizens right to own and utilize products in any way they choose.
Instead of treating us like cattle who carry money around for you to milk from us
But far too much data to cope with so you have to recompress it.
Except if you re-encoded it into something else, like MPEG
Which is lossy, and difficult to do well. So you lose some quality compared with the original disk.
then you don't encrypt it again, right?
It would be OK to insist that DVD players only play encrypted discs. You can't stop PC's playing unencrypted discs, of course, but it limits the market for the pirate disks.
"Can anyone name something that has been
released in the last decade that *hasn't* been cracked. "
Quantas.
Quantas never cracked.
Definately Quantas.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Actually, the porno producers have an excellent history in their DVD releases. Almost all of them lack any form of Region encoding, and thus can be played anywhere. In addition, many porn DVD's are recorded without encryption; you can concatenate the vob files together and play them from you hard drive. Er, uh, or so I hear . . . :-} The Mad Duke
Once again, we run into those pesky ol' fair use issues. Just like with software and music, I can make copies of content that I own. If I want to burn myself a copy of every game or audio CD I buy, I have that ability -- and right, as long as I don't distribute it. Same goes for movies.
So don't restrict the technology. Protect your IP legally if you want, but just remember that fair use is exactly that: FAIR.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
Ok, so because the DVD developers stiffed Linux we had some enterprising minds try and fill the void. And NOW they bitch. Had they the foresight to supply the software to begin with, it would have taken a bit longer for this to happen (did anyone ever have any doubts that it wouldn't? I didn't think so) and The Man would have been able to squeeze much more money out of Joe Consumer.
So, what happens now? I predict "DVD2" -- no change in technology, other than the fact that they'll have new encrypted keys. It'll still get broken, but their new developer contract may hold the next guy liable (which may still happen in this case, I'd imagine) for such a gaff as not encrypting the key. It'll still be 40 bit though.
--J(K) DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a pinto is like an aircraft carrier.
A lot of people seem to think that intellectual property is like physical property. That you can own it, buy it, sell it. Well they're completely wrong. Owning information makes no sense at all except in a culture whose technology is too primitive to make copying easy. Well those days are over now. It's going to be interesting watching how our culture adapts - especially the effects on an economy that thinks it can control the distribution of information for profit.
-- SIGFPE
After all, they're the ones buying a "Control Free" DVD burner for $50,000 so they can build a "Pirate DVD Factory" in Malaysia.
They're not making a piddling couple of copies of Phantom Menace; they're making 20,000 copies.
It is likely that this "Commercial Piracy" is of considerably greater importance than anything that would occur from consumers burning their own DVD...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
"People are MUCH more willing to buy "the genuine item", especially when it comes to status symbol items, like luxury cars" I run FreeBSD on my laptop and make it as prominently displayed on my desktop as I can. It says that I have taste. It says that I'm not a moron. It gives me kudos among the people whose opinion I care about. And it's FREE! Well...I'm not 100% serious...
-- SIGFPE
The author of this inane article, that slanders the wonderful and intelligent people who found a loophole in a poorly designed system, brings up yet another thoughtless point when he compares decription-free DVD equal to MP3s. The only reason digital music (in the form of MP3s) has had such an explosion in recent years is that people can copy 5MB files with relative ease. Even a modem can download these files overnight. But DVDs take 9GB or more, and its already compressed! Illegal videos ripped from DVDs are not going to start flying across the "internet" like this journalist implies.
As for stopping the Average Joe from copying DVDs at home, why bother? Sure, I suppose I could burn a copy of my favorite DVD for a friend, supposing I felt like spending $10 for the media and an hour burning something that costs $19.95 new. On top of $500+ drive. That's like copying a $3.99 "bargain rack" (ie. stuff that doesn't sell) to a $2 CDR. The movie industry better be scared now.
Suggesting replacing all of the firmware is the most ludicrous idea yet. Do you know how much it would cost to, first, come up with a new better standard, update all the existing players, and impliment recalls to replace them. Far more then they have to worry about from the Average Joe copying movies at his house.
Sure I don't want the movie studios to wait longer to release my favorite movies (Star Wars, Back to the Future, Braveheart...), but we don't need ignorant journalists raising fears of piracy that won't happen. The movie studios need to realize what their priorities are, making the fortune they could on as-yet-unreleased films, or taking excessive measures at preventing small change pirating.
Spyky
Emedia is about to publish a VERY good article on DVD. I dont know if it's on their website yet. You guys should really hit the wired guys head with it.
What can they do? You can't recall DVDs and DVD players, because people won't return them, not to mention it would be too expensive. You can't just change the keys, because that would stop current DVD players from working. The bad PR from that is more than enough to prevent it, not to mention the PO-ed customers who would start complaining, and the possibility of class-action suits.
I think the DVD makers will just have to bite the bullet and accept that piracy will happen. Sure, it might take a little bite out of their profits, but it won't kill them, any more than it killed VHS tapes or CDs.
I know of two companies that "open up ASICs and bond out some internal wires". Their primary
business is that companies contract them to look at their competitors chips and look for circuit
patent infringements in dram chips, however, with $50 and a yard of ale I'm sure I could have
convinced at least one of them to crack open an DIVX asic (I'm sure the ale by itself would do it...)
Oh yeah, did you guys put metal alloy pockets into the one of the via layers to prevent stripping
off the fabrication layers molecule by molecule? You'd be surprized what some manufacturers do
to hide their "sins"... (and the machines that are used to expose them)
Remember there's always someone one step ahead...
Wired was talking about how now it's going to be "so easy" to make vcd's from dvd's. Does this matter? The quality of vcd's is never that high anyways, so you might as well just copy them straight from a vhs tape. You get the same result. Right?
Joseph?
I'm sure some of us can remember programs like Copy II Plus (and the PC version, but I didn't have a intel back then).
These were programs that had recipies to defeat copy protection. You pointed it at the disk, and told it which program it was, and it knew how to make a copy. They even gave out new definitions on their BBS.
Anyway, the gaming industry didn't vanish because of programs like those.
Jim
Not everyone who watches DVDs does it on a PC DVD drive. What about the users who have DVD component systems? Will they have to take their DVD player in for an upgrade in order to watch DVDs made after the hack? If so, it better be free of charge. If it isn't, you're simply going to have a whole lot of upset consumers who forked over a couple hundred bucks for a player that won't work with the "new standard", and now are being told to spend more money to make the system that they bought "compliant". Who wants to bet that if this is the case, those darn "Linux hackers" will get blamed rather than Real Networks?
-------------------- Standard disclaimer.
the advent of the cheap CD-R and MP3 hasn't (and won't) destroy the market for CD recordings. musicians can distribute their own music. i think this is a good thing, unless you're a recording label...
The real usage for this is to take movies which are "region coded" and make a new version which does not have that restriction. Pirates in Hong Kong and Taiwan have already been able to make a bit-for-bit copy of American DVD disks. However, because of the region-lockout, these disks are still playable only on American DVD players. By decrypting the bitstream, they can then master a new disk which has the territory lockout removed.
The plaintext key just made it easier. If it hadn't been for that, brute-forcing the 40-bit keys was the next step--in fact they did that too, and got a bunch of keys. If the government lets them put strong encryption in everything, it will still be breakable--because at some point, no matter what the format, the content has to be translated into plaintext so you can see/hear/read it. Copy protection is just the wishful thinking of dinosaurs. Bruce Schneier says the same thing--and the future is probably something like his street performer protocol.
Not a terribly good article, but there was one point in particular that was well, pointless. The statement was this this is the second time that computers had enabled the piracy of copyrighted material. First of all its untrue, computer enabled piracy was there as soon as commercial software was available. Scan the alt.sex.binaries.all.things.great.and.small newsgroups and you'll find many gigabytes of computer enabled content piracy.
What really bothered me was that it didn't mention that copyright violation is common even without the computer. I've got friends who've probably never bought a CD (or tape or LP going back a few years) in their lives yet have large music collections on readily available magnetic tape.
Despite this the music industry obviously still has made an enormous amount of money. I'm not trying to condone piracy at all. I'm trying to put the problem in perspective. The DVD industry can continue on, business as usual, and make billions for themselves and the movie studios. They can also sink millions into a new and improved encryption format and still make billions for themselves and the movie studios. If they do a good job they might be secure for quite some time but eventually the format will be cracked again. It'd be interesting if when one of the small players in DVD based decoders goes bankrupt an OpenSource friendly entity buys the IP.
The industry would be better off ignoring casual copying (much like is the case in the music industry now) but get legally hostile with anybody who tries to make money off of piracy.
2) Does anyone really expect that people in rural China, who pay 25 cents for each bootleg DVD disk, to bring their players back to the dealer for an unneeded firmware upgrade? If not, then how do you expect to get knowledgeable American consumers to do it? So you're implying that Chinese people are stupid then? And that 'American consumers' are omnipotent?
these escalating technological lock/crack games remind me of the early home computer days when software houses would come up with some copy protection scheme - which is just putting up a big sign that says, "Crack Me" in the first place - and inevitably someone in the rest of the world finds a way around it. Like someone said, most movies get old after one or two viewings anyway; the real prob is people who want to make and *SELL* unofficial copies, and they can be prosecuted in other ways than inconveniencing the mostly innocent law abiding rest of us over fear of what a very few would do.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
What the entertainment industry is to lobby for all newborns to be implanted with real-time retinal scanners. Anytime the human viewed copyrighted material, whatever the medium, the software cops would be able to charge for it.
That's the question. I believe that the motion picture industry is so upset because they thought they had finally found a way around that pesky pirating issue. People have been pirating movies for a long time on video cassette. Now granted I'm young and can't remember a time when there weren't recordable video cassettes, but I don't remember a huge uproar about people being able to copy movies from one tape to another.
It's essentially the same with the music industry example of cd's and mp3, I don't remember an uproar about the fact that people could copy music from one tape to another, but when they copy music from a cd and put it in mp3 format everyone makes a fuss.
This whole thing is just a new spin on an old issue, and the industry is shocked because it had such faith in its format. This is for the movie industry what the first mp3's were to the music industry.
On a lighter note, I wonder how long it will take for DVD for Linux to come out. If I could code worth anything I'd try to contribute.
*disclaimer*
I'm not neccessarily advocating pirating of movies, music, or anything else, just asking why this is being made to appear as a new phenomenon.
"I swear I won't break you if you let me take you where the willows never weep" -- Switchblade Symphony
Peaple will always find ways to get around restrictions placed on them.
If we had on-demand access to the full collections of movies produced by these studios, for something as cheap as $0.25-$1.00 per play, then very few people would really find it practical to copy them, much less store them.
Not sure how much money the studios would be able to make - the major cost savings would be getting rid of the physical distribution of media (which might upset the manufacturers of that physical media), but the overhead of producing the programs & doing the marketing & advertising for the programs is still there.
Can anyone else think of a distribution model which will allow the people who produce these programs to make a buck? Or will there be a trend toward finding ways to make producing the programs cheaper, so that companies WILL be able to make a buck, even if they can't charge much?
I did a search on DVD at freshmeat and got nothing that can actually play a DVD movie in Linux. Not even the DeCSS util was listed there. Anyone got some links to the code/binary?
It discusses what to do about computer PERIPHERALS just so the movie industry won't have to worry about pirates?
Give me a break.
"Average Joe" has been copying VHS tapes for years. That certainly didn't stop the huge growth of the home video-rental and sale industry. It seems that all of a sudden, just because a computer is involved, there is rampant paranoia about crackers and pirates.
The article itself admits that stopgap measures are unlikely to have any effect on the professional pirates. By this, I mean the people who would have the resources to copy the original packaging and sell it as the real thing. This is what the industry should worry about.
Crippling MY hardware just because I MIGHT use it illegally is bullshit. Kindof goes hand in hand with the industry "tax" on items like CD-R discs and cassette tapes. They have more than enough money already. Quit whining about the smidgeon of a percent of people who:
a) actually have the hardware necessary to copy DVDs,
b) actually have the bandwidth to share them on the internet, and
c) actually find this an entertaining pastime even though it is far more costly than buying the actual DVD release.
The whole recording industry, both video and audio makes me sick.
SEAL
This was not a good article at all, it was half a page of repetition of everything we already heard. The article also assumes that this was a bad development, failing to notice that while bad for the IP industry, this is a freedom issue for many users. I don't mind paying for my movies, but I don't like the idea that the producers and the player are conspiring to keep me from the accessing the actual movie. My machines work for me, following my agenda: I do not like the idea of having any machine that is doing somebody elses bidding in my house. period.
It also makes the assumption that the problem can be solved by simply tightening the security. Recalling all the millions of cdplayers that are out there would cost a fortune, as would halting the production of DVDs until all new keys were in every player. Who is going to pay? I doubt most of the electronics companies care enough.
And on top of that, what is about the new system that is going to make so magically more difficult to crack? Yes, the code got out easy because Xing were clumsy (or intentionally leaked it, who knows), but if they start again I can promise some other company will be clumsy next. And
even if it isn't as easy next time, trying to make software running on somebodies PC safe against side channel attacks is a garantuan, if not impossible task.
And if they try to make the crypto stronger so people can't known-plaintext out the other keys once one is compromised, they have crypto restrictions to deal with. Wow, maybe the ip industry could do us a favour here...
The only way another CSS, or for that matter SDMI (any bets as to how long SDMI holds? A month? two?) will work is if the content creaters hold complete control over all the hardware that can decrypt the media, and allows no software players what so ever. How many would like to see new formats like that?
Maybe they should just bring back DivX. There's an idea (bar the fact that people realized you could "crack" DivX players by plugging them out)...
-
it's well known that pornography has driven the acceptance of new video media formats such as vhs, and now I'm sure it's doing wonders for DVD. As well, porno's are indeed the movies you watch over and over and over and over again. What does this mean? Chances are if you can make a perfect copy of porno dvd's the 'adult' industry is not going to like it. I am not sure what the ramifications of this are, but just something to think about.
- "And if there's one thing about Linux users, they're do-ers, not whiners."
I can live with that. Sounds to me like a good-ole' hard-working individual chalked one up for himself. Bully for them. Innovation and brains aren't dead yet.As far as Wired's solution for the "problem", I don't think they quite have it. Make it economically attractive for consumers to buy an original, instead of spending $1500 in computer equipment (total value of the system) in order to make a poorer quality copy!! Am I the only one this is obvious to?
The videotapes that you rent at BlockBuster cost the company $4 and a profit-sharing agreement. Then, after making a couple hundred dollars on renting each copy, they sell you the used tape for (what?) $10 to $15? Nice, huh?
DVDs are only going to make this better. They don't wear out as quickly/easily as videotape. They have more features. AND they're cheaper to manufacture!! Think what that'll do to the fat-cat's profit margins.
I'm sick of this. I've had it with the greed. Gonna quit. Gonna go live in a cabin in Montana with a nice bear-skin rug. Yeah, right.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
All the hand-wringing over this is really amusing. What it points to is the fact that the vendors of DVD movies don't understand their business: they think they're selling movies, when what they're really selling is convenience.
What I mean by this is that, when you "buy" a DVD movie (or VHS, or whatever), you don't own the actual movie. All you're really buying is a license to view this one copy of the movie in perpetuity. If you wanted to, you could wait for a friend to buy it and watch their copy, or wait for it to show up in dollar revival houses, but you want to see it now in all its digital glory, so you shell out the US$20 to buy the license.
Now, the point is, viewed from this perspective the cracking of the encryption system is fairly irrelevant. Sure, I could try to download some 9GB file from a pirate FTP site over a 56k modem (have fun), or I could buy some cruddy VCD-quality pirate disk. But that's not convenient! For US$20 I can get the whole movie, in crystal-clear MPG2 and Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, right now! What kind of a moron would futz with the pirate stuff when the real deal is so cheap?
Audio CDs aren't encrypted, and the advent of the cheap CD-R and MP3 hasn't (and won't) destroy the market for CD recordings. What they absolutely do, however, is prevent the industry from gouging consumers with ridiculous prices. Piracy only becomes economically sensible when the real product is priced so high that people think the product's value doesn't correlate to its price.
Andy Patrizio suggests that the thing for the industry to do would be to change the encryption firmware used for DVD, thus negating the hack. Andy Patrizio, who is normally a very good tech reporter, is on crack. He seriously proposes telling the 2 million plus people in the US alone who have bought players in the last 2 years that their substantial investment is instantly obsolete? Just as the DVD market is taking off? This is idiocy. No hardware solution is feasible when you have a large installed base of non-upgradable or difficult to upgrade players.
So the thing for the industry to do would be to keep pumping out great DVDs and keep the prices in the US$20-29 dollar range, which seems to be the "sweet spot" for consumer acceptance. But of course they won't do this; they'll cry "pirates!" and raise the price on product to squeeze margins before the market collapses, which will lead otherwise honest people to pirate DVDs because they can't justify spending $50 on a movie (ask the laserdisc producers about this), which will collapse the market.
Or maybe I'm being too cynical. I hope so. It'll be interesting to see what happens, that's for sure.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Read my blog.
i wish the technology world would just wake up and realize that nothing is uncrackable. every new technology can be cracked, in time. Sega was just recently boasting about their uncrackable GD-ROM format, which was then cracked, now DVD. Why can't they just realize that everything will be cracked eventually? If a technolgoy that is dubbed "uncrackable" is out there, some shmuck with nothing better to do will do it, maybe not for the right reasons, but he will. So the technology people shouldn't complain when something is cracked, the challenge was there and someone took advantage of it, 'nuff said.
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This Post has been brought to you by the letter "E".
...is that they don't seem to mind losing waaaaaaay more revenue than pirating could ever possibly account for. Witness George Lucas's inexplicable stance on releasing Star Wars on DVD. He has announced that no DVD releases, even of the original trilogy, will take place until the entire series is complete in 2006. In doing so, he is leaving countless millions of dollars on the table for no obvious reason, not to mention providing the DVD bootlegging community with their ultimate 'killer app.'
I'm personally nervous about the irrational behavior of businesses like this. In my own little corner of the software business, we like money. If we have something to sell, we sell it. Not so in the home-video business. In light of the CSS hack, the same studios who bought into DIVX (Fox, Paramount, Disney...) will be the first in line to withhold future DVD releases out of an unjustified sense of paranoia. Never mind that when discs cost only $15-$20 apiece, there's absolutely no incentive to pirate them in the first place.
Oh, well. Maybe this will be the last nail in the coffin of rental-pricing windows. Want your DVDs pirated, Fox? Release them at a $100 price point for the first six months. That ought to do the trick nicely.
I know for a fact that some DVD movie releases have a unique identifying number on every disc. However, I don't know if all releases do. This is called the BCA (Burst Cutting Area??) number.
If the same BCA number starts popping up in many places, it can become a lot easier to track down the source of the illegal copies. And let's be serious, the industry doesn't care about individual pirates (people doing that with VHS and CD's are relatively insignificant and they still make huge profits), they want to catch the big time mass copiers.
Q.) Isn't pirating part of the reason they have the silly regional encoding on DVD's? There's no reason that I see why NTSC, PAL and SECAM can't all come from the same disk... my Creative player will output PAL and NTSC already.
Okay, assume the DVD guys panic and rapidly implement some other way of "protecting their interests". Is there a way to crack it no matter what encryption they use?
What about doing something similar to what unfuck.exe does for the Microsoft "secure" audio? I mean, for a software DVD player what's stopping a program from capturing the images straight from the memory on the video card?
Okay, it would be a processor hog, but I'm sure it can be done. For software players, the data has to live somewhere on the system.
Okay, assume the DVD guys panic and rapidly implement some other way of "protecting their interests". Is there a way to crack it no matter what encryption they use?
What about doing something similar to what unfuck.exe does for the Microsoft "secure" audio? I mean, for a software DVD player what's stopping a program from capturing the images straight from the memory on the video card?
Okay, it would be a processor hog, but I'm sure it can be done. For software players, the data has to live somewhere on the system.
The tone of the author in this piece seems very anti-Linux. It's almost as if he's blaming Linus himself for this issue surfacing.
Let's face it. If DVDs are pirated as much as the Motion Picture Association fears, then the company that made the Xing DVD player will be sued and put out of business.
But what I want to know is, how can I ENCRYPT to a DVD so that I can put my home movies that I converted from 8mm to VHS, on DVD?
Then, how do I write those spiffy features for the DVD?
I've gotten off on a tangent...
Of course we all know that the only good crypto system is one that's been through lots of public exposure and attacks .... and passed .... all that's happened really is that the DVD one's got it's public exposure and failed .... they just shouldn't have released it before it was proven.
And remember this isn't the first DVD crack .... others have involved subverting Win95 to get at unencrypted bits on their way to the screen
Although I agree with the previous post in general, there are a couple of parts I don't agree with. AC brings up a good point with libraries, but I don't think they're actually the same as pirating. I don't know about the libraries elsewhere, but at mine, I can borrow CDs and tapes (audio and video) as well as books. I'm sure DVDs will be available there soon. The thing is, the selection is still limited, and I have to return it (or pay for it) eventually. With piracy, I have a permanent copy for myself. Also, as far as copying books, it's a lot simpler to copy a CD than to photocopy an entire book. Try it. One more thing - many authors (and publishers) hate libraries.
While I personally agree that it is better to have an original copy, with all of the manuals, packaging, etc., I know many people who don't feel that way at all. And economically, things would have to get really cheap to match the price of making a copy. That alone is reason enough for some people to pirate.
Does this mean the end of the GPL? Does this mean that I can mirror Slashdot, but without those pesky ads?
IP isn't forfeited in theory or in actuality just because someone has a copy of it. I can hold a Coke can in my hand, but I could be sued if I made my own Coke can. I can copy a DVD and distribute it to my friends, but I could be sued (or put in jail) for theft of intellectual property.
You're unable to conceive of something as property unless you can hold it in your hand, or sit on it.
How do you think our "culture" will adapt to the realization that trademarks, patents, copyrights, are all smoke and mirrors? Who will write novels or create cheesy sci-fi props if there is no intellectual property?
i thank [dabuzz] greatly for the above needed-to-be-said wisdom but I would like to remind everyone that the issue of DVD piracy is almost COMPLETELY unrelated to DeCSS.
.sig quote: want slashdot fame? "first post ;-)" doesn't cut it any more. try writing in with a worthwile story!
The author( Andy Patrizio) of the wired article nearly explicitly states that the purpose of a the Linux software for decrypting and copying a dvd to a hard drive is sctrictly for piracy purposes. This is absolutely untrue and makes even Linux hackers (the real ones, not crax0rz) look like criminals!
If Mr Patrizio would have bothered to do just a tiny bit of research on this story he would have discovered that in order for Linux users to be able to play DVDs, they must first copy the disc to the hard drive and then use an AC-3 player to watch the movie.
pre-.sig
"Perspective is lost in the spirit of the chase." -[I have no clue who said this]
Also, the key was only 40 bit. I'm surprised they didn't just brute-force it.
I wouldn't blame the coders of DeCSS. I'd blame DVD for using such an asininely stupid encryption scheme, where every DVD needs to have decryption keys for every registered player. That's just stupid... it means that if some new vendor comes onto the market, they need to use someone else's established decryption key just to play the current installed base of movies. And all it takes is a rogue person with the sacred knowledge releasing (on purpose or accidentally in the case of Xing) one of the decryption keys.
No, I'm not saying I can think of a better scheme. :) Go to the article about DeCSS for stuff like that. I just think it's quite an unfair light this author has put the coders in; he also makes it sound as though DVD->VCD conversion has been a rampant problem now, but didn't DeCSS just come out a few days ago? It seems that they've been confusing 'speculation' and 'fact.'
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
I bought very few VHS tapes recently with DVD replacing it soon. I plan on buying several of my favorite movies on DVD. But when some format replaces DVD, why should I have to buy the exact same thing again?
First, you dont have to actively encrypt your MPEG2 files for them to be usable in a DVD player (at least, not in any way that i know off)
:-)
You take your videomaterial, and then run it through an MPEG2 encoder (Ligos, for example, or Darim Vision) and then you master your DVD in some authoring software, the only one i know of i Daikins Scenarist NT, which by the pictures i've seen from it should be very graphical, and thus very easy to work with.
You use Scenarist to create your fancy-schmanzy menu system (based on TIFF/TGA images, which you can create in eg. Photoshop, 3DS Max, Lightwave, Paintshop Pro or wherever), and then finally write it down to VOB files. (It might be that Scenarist actually encodes the files at this point, using the CSS algorithm, but to be honest, i dont really know)
Then you ship it to your DVD printing facility, and let them make your final glass master, and press a couple'o these babies out, and youre good to go.
http://come.to/freezy3000 has a interesting article about creating a MiniDVD (DVD on a CDR).
I agree that Lucas's behaviour on Star Wars DVDs is puzzling.
I've got an idea, though: maybe he's waiting until the really big hype has died down, so that a year or so after Episode 3 comes out, he'll have yet another bottomless pit of money to draw from. There'll be a huge media blitz. "See Star Wars at home, in a whole new stunning format!"
Or maybe he's just crazy.
Either way, I still like the movies. Yeah, even Phantom Menace. Yes, I do. If you don't, bite me.
The industry is going bonkers because there is now an easy way to transfer contents from a medium unto a computer. The industry is screaming bloody murder, as they figure this will mean the end of old-fashioned, healthy and amoral capitalism and empower users.
Sounds familiar? MP3, anyone?
Well, tough luck. The truth of the matter is, they're making a fuss over nothing. I may download "pirated" MP3s from the Internet, but the sheer time it takes means I'll usually settle for a song or two, then buy the album in a record store if I really like it.
Same goes for movies, really. Right now, I don't have a DVD reader, so I deal with VHS. I watch movies in theaters or on VHS, and if I like a film a lot, I'll buy it on VHS. Sure, I could just copy the VHS from the video rental store, but guess what? It's so much nicer to have a nice box, and feel like you have the real thing. Superficial? Maybe. But I'm not the only one doing that.
I think the same will go with DVDs, however easy they are to copy. Some people will get the movie for free, but so what? Other people, like me, will keep on buying the real thing. At $30 or lower, it's not that much to have a nice little video collection. It's the same reason I have original CDs in my music collection.
The movie industry should take a long, hard look at the CD and gaming industry. Has Sony gone bankrupt since those PSX chips hit the market? Is David Bowie on the streets because he places free MP3s on the net? Will the Wachowsky brothers have to resort to begging if you get a free copy of the Matrix DVD?
Anyone with a modicum of common sense will know the answer to all of the above is a resounding no.
"Knowledge = Power = Energy = Mass"
1) How does the entertainment industry deal with the installed base of DVD software? Recalling it all under the technicalities of a personal use license would result in about as much compliance as state "use tax" self assessments.
2) Does anyone really expect that people in rural China, who pay 25 cents for each bootleg DVD disk, to bring their players back to the dealer for an unneeded firmware upgrade? If not, then how do you expect to get knowledgeable American consumers to do it?
3) Imagine the number of class action suits if the entertainment industry got together and decided to release a disk encoding scheme that was different enough to require a firmware upgrade. The lawyers would argue that such a format change would be an illegal restraint of trade because the industry presumed that the owner of every DVD intended to violate the copyright law.
Not even the automobile industry makes such sweeping assumptions about the behavior of their customers. If they did, wouldn't they just set governors on all cars destined for the US market so that they would not go any faster than 80 miles per hour?
4) Isn't this a great example of why the commercial software vendors should release Linux versions of their software? If you accept the main point of the article, the Linux community would not have reverse-engineered the DVD player software if someone like RealNetworks had released one, right?
5) Maybe Xing / RealNetworks intended for their DVD key to be discovered so that they could run a worldwide sting operation on all the bootleggers that exploited their unencrypted key.
Hmmm....
-- Dave Aiello
Well said. MP3.com ran an article (way back in the day before the IPO and the whole new "we are sooo corporate redesign") called "Why drug dealers don't sell aspirin." The upshot of the article is that people would much rather get a common product at a reasonable price from a reputable source. The rise of MP3s was caused by the gross price inflation of music CDs. Same goes here.
I'll see if I can dig up the URL of that old article...
Can your IM do this?
this type of sensationalist crap pisses me off. First of all they claim that this cracking was done on behalf of the "Linux community", even though the DeCSS program was written for Windows! Secondly the author suggests that we should all accept infringements upon on freedom (such as the freedom to make backup copies of our discs, or the freedom to watch DVDs on our computer) so that we can have the privilege of buying the next crop of mediocre movies from Hollywood.
This article is in _no one's_ best interest. Wired can go to hell.
I contest the notion that the availability of DVD-ROM drives creates the urge to pirate films. If the proposed changes the the DVD format were enacted, the same Hotline warez kiddies who pipe VCDs out their dormroom ethernet would just hook up a VHS player to their machines.
Multimedia files are no longer beyond the file capacity of home computers. My first CD-ROM drive came with a computer that had a 1 GB drive (Macintosh Quadra 840AV). At that time, although the software for duplication existed, it was hardly logical to make a disk image of Myst.
Although a MS Word file might take up a megabyte instead of 100kB, the 10GB+ drives that come with any new machine reflect the users' desire for media files, be they MP3s, AIFFs, or VCDs. Storing the new NIN or Tori double CDs has become trivial and inexpensive.
It is the state of computing today, of storage and of bandwidth, that allows for personal piracy. Stopping mass duplication and distribution should be the goal of the industries affected. Hampering the technology and the products can only be a shot in the foot.
Thank you, --Max
bugger.net | MunkAndPhyber.com
As far as I'm concerned Slashdot is a one-stop news source. It saves time when I just want some quick news. More importantly (the best part IMO), it's a discussion forum for current news. Wired doesn't have a forum for discussing it's articles (does it?), so why not post it here too? There's been a few times I've seen an article posted on another site that I'd wished had been posted on Slashdot too.
I'm sorry, their spin on this really sucks. All of the articles they've done have been thoroughly hysterical. The "piracy" issue has been argued to death here and elsewhere with mp3's. DVD video is much the same.
:)
It's hardly a surprise that the scrambler was broken. One of the things the author of the wired article keeps misrepresenting is that XING somehow "forgot to encrypt" their decryption key. The CSS license requires implementations to obfuscate the algorithm (this is security through obscurity, after all). This is what XING failed to do, which made dissassembly much easier. It's quite possible to obtain the keys from other players--it just takes more work. In any case, the scrambler quite weak and would have been broken anyway. In fact, Bruce Schneier mentions in this cryptogram that the DVD cipher was broken "within months of [its] disclosure." What's new here is public documentation, unencumbered by NDA, not that news the the algorithm is fundamentally flawed.
As this new article briefly mentions, many of us are working on this just so we can watch the damn movies we've bought. Please see the livid project for a good collection of current open source work in this direction. The list archives have some intelligent discussion of the CSS crack, including "That was too easy!" hypotheses for the conspiracy theorists.
There's still a lot of work to be done. We can unscramble encrypted movies now, but there's still the byzantine navigation file format to figure out...which actually seems to be a much harder problem.
What is it with this "sob sob sob... if they had DVD support for linux, this never would have happened, it's all their fault". Lets not kid ourselves, this technology would have been cracked sooner or later regardless of if it was available for linux. They were stupid for using 40bit encryption and they were stupid for assuming that all their licencees were intelligent enough to assume that "YES, our keys should also be encryption".
Next off, as far as ethics are concerned, I admit to downloading commercial mp3's at work. But chances are that if I like the album I'll go and buy it. Try to support the artist (as if they actually see any of the money any way). For most people its too much of a pain in the ass to pirate music, movies etc. I think that people are making this to be a much bigger deal then it actually is.
Lets look at the issues
1 - A new technology has been cracked, whoop dee doo. Can anyone name something that has been released in the last decade that *hasn't* been cracked.
2 - People have the ability to pirate commercial DVD's. People have had the ability to pirate commercial anything for ages. Software, music (tapes, cds), movies(vhs, asf, vcd) etc.
I think this whole issue has been blown way out of proportion. I hope the movie industry is smart enough to realize that.
When I worked at PGP, one of the Big Five record labels came to us and asked us to design a crypto system for encrypted music, much like what just got broken with DVD. Despite being a cash-hungry start up, we sent them packing, because our analysis was that there was no way to make a system like that unbreakable. Since PGP's reputation depended on our security prowess, we decided the short-term cash wasn't nearly as important as the long-term damage our business would suffer when this stuff was cracked, as we knew it would be. As Phil Z. has said recently, "Encrypted music is like having a secure channel to Linda Tripp."
This is just the same old thinking that is paralyzing all of Hollywood. There is this enormous fear in all parts of the entertainment industry of digital technology. Controlling exactly how much data a PC DVD drive can write, or requiring firmware upgrades to ALL DVD drives on the market is NOT going to solve the problem. All it's going to do is alienate people from these formats.
All of the entertainment industry has been trying to use the move to digital formats to lock things down a lot more than they are, now. In theory, your ability to make "fair use" copies of DVDs still exists. In reality, Congress has made it illegal to create a device to break the encryption. I don't suppose the fact that the brakers, in this case, were overseas will halt the entertainment industry's inevitable cries for more legislative action on these issues.
Unfortunately, the entertainment industry is between a rock and a hard place - they can either open up a little and let average people do basically honest things, or they can be completely crushed by piracy. Hiding behind innefctive security will, in the end, make things worse by forcing average users to pirate media in order to do what they want. It's the same old story of the digital age - do what the people want, and maintain a little control. Or go completely against them and get crushed.
It will be telling to see how the industry reacts to this latest issue. I'm hopeful maybe some lessons were learned. If they think we're all going to reflash our DVDs, I think they'll be suprised. The customer doesn't care about encryption as long as it doesn't cause him any hassle. Hollywood has basically two choices, now - kill DVD (either by forcing a reflash, or by refusing to release movies in it at all), or recognize that the genie is out of the bottle. I'm hopeful they'll do the latter. They're going to have to wake up and smell the coffe, eventually. I just hope it's now and not in five years.
It's the video equivelent of how we used to rip audio. You'd press play and then use another program to capture the audio output.
Unfortunately it was damn hard to get what you recorded in that way to sound as good as the CD (this depended on how picky you were and balancing levels and turning any software EQ off).
It'd be the same with DVD. No reason you couldn't use something to capture the screen output to a file, but it's never going to be as good a copy as the bit-for-bit copy available now that the encryption is gone.
The whole thing reminds me of the horrible copy protection schemes for games back in the day. The code wheels, disks with a bad sector, etc. All it does is annoy the paying customers, the pirates broke thru all that shit and disabled it. Same thing here.
They're saying that the Linux coders felt ignored because there wasn't a DVD decoder for Linux, so reversed-engineered it. To quote the article, Linux users are doers, not whiners. (Although you have to wonder about that when you go through some Slashdot threads.)
They then go on to say that someone else took it further and made the application that decodes the DVD and dumps it in unencoded format.
That's a far cry from accusing Linux users of all being hackers. It just shows there's a lot of insightful and clever Linux users, and they can do pretty much anything when they set their mind to it.
I don't know; I find it very flattering, and not insulting at all. No moral judgement is made on Linux users throughout the article.
"Knowledge = Power = Energy = Mass"
I read the article... the way they make it seem is that it was done so "people could watch DVD's under linux."
This leads to one potential solution for the industry: Have support for Linux, and you won't be cracked. (Not necessarily a bad thing. 8-)
I'd like to see my decoder card supported linux, but for now i'll just use my home theatre setup.
I'd also like to see my iomega buz *cough*trash*cough* supported under ANY os, but hey, such is life.
"Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear, Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair... Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy was he?"
one thing that nobody has brought up yet is the _size_ of dvd movies as it relates to piracy.
:)
think about it... 9 gigs of data? even if you're on a ds3 that'd still be an ugly download. imagine trying to download that on a modem connection! granted, the iso scene is thriving due to cable and adsl, along with all the college kids with Tx lines on campus, but even within the iso scene the hideously large ones don't see much traffic. think about baldur's gate (5 cds). it made its way around the iso scene for about a month and then disappeared because people, in general, wanted to free up space on their systems and the vast majority of pirates really just didn't feel like sitting and downloading about 3gb of data, especially on a modem connection. and that's only about 1/3 of what we're talking about for dvd movies. someone on a 56k connection wouldn't even entertain the notion of downloading 9 gigs of data, for ANY reason. until we all have ds3 lines to our houses, dvd piracy on the net will be virtually nonexistent, and the realware piracy (people physically trading and copying dvd's) isn't going to be enough of an issue to make anyone even the slightest bit nervous about lost revenues.
i think that most people will find that this whole shebang is nothing more than your standard industry reaction to the evil computer geeks lancing their illusory security bubble and once the movie industry's wide-eyed, white-knuckled fear of the evil techiepeople subsides we can all go back to doing what we were all doing before. the industries can keep making it tougher to crack their security and some 14 year old l33t d00d |-|aXx0r out in rural idaho will keep cracking it with ease. and meanwhile all us happy little geeks can go do what we wanted to do in the first place...buy and/or rent dvd movies and watch them on our tv's and in little windows on our desktops
-dk
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
Here's the URL for the article. It is by Michael Robertson....
http://bboard.mp3.com/mp3/ubb/F orum8/HTML/000015.html
Can your IM do this?
While I generally have a lot more respect for wired writers than most journalists in general, I still see them as...well...just plain dumb and uninformed.
:)
I quote from the article:
"But high-capacity recordable DVD is coming. In the first quarter of 2000, there will be 4.7GB recordable DVD drives, and DVD copying will be much easier. It may not be a bad idea to hold off on releasing the drives until the copy protection issue is sorted out.
Why advocate such limitations? Because it beats the alternative, which is that movie studios will withhold future releases. And DVD enthusiasts are eagerly awaiting such film classics as Star Wars, Fantasia, and ET."
Uh, well excuse me, but the studios can go to hell before I advocate holding back technology (at least technology that I see as good). What a pathetic encryption scheme to begin with anyway. It deserved to be cracked. Whoever approved this should be shot (people's head are probably rolling over this right now, hopefully).
There are several things the movie industry can do:
1) Do nothing.
Probably the best solution for all. Piracy won't dent their sales that much (even the music industry hasn't been hit that hard yet). This will keep sales at a decent level (compared to the other possible industry reactions). They're already making boatloads of money off of DVD in spite of themselves when they didn't support it in the first place. In the original article on the crack there were good posts on how the movie industry was terrified by VCR's in the beginning as well (obviously unfounded), and the fact that it costs a lot less to make DVD's than it does to make a video cassette, even though the DVD disc will cost you about twice as much on average. Financially there just isn't that much to fear.
2) Create a new encrytion scheme.
Clearly not a good idea for several reasons, although I'm sure they'll be considering it. Any encryption scheme they come up with will be cracked eventually. It would also render all existing hardware obsolete, which is unfair, unethical, and a PR nightmare. This also includes any other "protection schemes" they might come up with that don't necessarily involve encrytion.
3) Enact one of those "you're all pirates" "taxes".
Similar to the charge that exists on all recordable media now (the extent of this I'm not sure of). In order to "offset" the "losses" of pirateing, they might just jack up the price a certain %. Another pathetic idea, but I included it since it's been done before.
It was pointed out by a number of people why piracy won't be such a big deal in the short term (next few years) in the first article about the crack. In the long term it might, but they have something else to fear. This isn't directly relevant but I thought it deserved a thought, since it's related to current happenings in the music industry.
Large record companies are quickly becoming obsolete middlemen with the exception of marketing. The same could happen to the movie industry down the road. Star Wars episode 1 was the beginning of this, I think (This may have been discussed here before, I've been a regular reader for only a few months now). With advances in computer technology, the price of movie making is coming way down. Star wars cost about 60 million I think? Thats a lot less than the typical action/sci fi movie with lots of explositions, etc. This could radically alter the movie industry landscape in the future. Every writer/director/movie maker could have their own small company, with a small studio for actors to act in, and a back room full of computers for all the rest. They'll be able to do actors digitally down the road as well. With the costs reduced (maybe to around a million bucks per film?), maybe I could go see a movie for a dollar. Wouldn't that be great? Of course, savings like that are rarely passed on to the consumer. Oh well, I can always dream
Regional lockouts were demanded by the movie studios. They want to be able to release movies first in the US and later use the same film stock (which is quite expensive) to release in foreign markets. The foreign release often happens about the same time as the domestic video/DVD release. They don't want people to be able to mail order a DVD from the US instead of going to the theater.
Not that this necessarily make much sense, but movie studios apparently strongly believe that it does. It helps that the US movie studios don't care that you can't purchase a french DVD that is unavailable in the US, since they probably didn't make it.
I'm not sure if it is possible to make a playble video DVD without regional encoding, but if not there should be.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
My theory is that, just like cd audio, people will copy dvd's to their harddrives, and distribute them on the internet, just as mp3, except now it will be mp4. Better go off and reserve www.mp4.com!
For the longest time.. DVD vendors like creative labs, and the DVD consortium as a whole haven't taken linux support any thought. Really.. Nobody was willing to support it and it always came to the claim the x company couldn't create the drivers because y company held the rights on the chip and y company wouldn't do it..etc. Finally they got what they deserved - a kick in the ass. ANY ENCRYPTION SOFTWARE IN THE FUTURE WILL BE THE SAME ISSUE. because there will always be a leak to the specs and someone will always reverse engineer it. Whatever it is be it hardware or software.. no of these vendors mangement or consortium members seem to have a clue about it. DVD and any future versions will be the same way. Get smart: 1) add Linux support (we are willing to accept binary part of the encryption software part only. your product is then safe.. and we all are happy.) Don't do this and it will be hacked and your investment folks (movie industry) is screwed. 2) be open about everything.. but the encrption and provide a good driver early. Now vendors like Creative and the like have a useless encryption for DVD. - and pirating is going to be very easy now. Good luck everybody for your ignorance. nobody is going to keep waiting for your DVD drivers.. They will just download the recordable versions to anyone can record encrypted DVD bytes and send them on ftp sites. What a sad thing for DVD encrption..
Hmm, they suggest some truly wonderful ideas to the DVD makers, like that all computer DVD-Rom drives ought to be crippled so they can't play movies! This is my opinion of piracy, piracy is not, mainly, the average person copying some form of media for their own use rather than buying it. If this were true, why would people buy tapes of anything that had ever appeared on TV or cable? No, the main problem with piracy is commercial pirates, big organized crime operations located in Asia (and other parts of the world, including, I imagine, the US) who sell professional-quality versions of tapes, CDs, etc. (The fact is, consumerism operates on a few principles and one of them is that an official product is always held in higher regard than a cheap, sorry-looking knock-off. People don't buy tapes because they have too, they do it because they want too.)
This article seems to be written by information luddites, who advocate crippling consumer technology or holding it back because it is too dangerous.
Incidentally, the most laughable thing in the article is that content will be restricted if cracked DVD continues to exist in the world. What they actually mean is that "you won't be able to get an official copy of Star Wars for DVD, but you'll probably be able to get a professional quality version made from a print of the movie in China at that sleazy, disreputable pawn shop up the street, or wherever pirate goods are sold." If this is the case, doesn't it make more sense for studios to release official versions of DVDs, rather than losing their potential profits to pirates?
You know, once upon a time there was no protection against piracy except the law, which was all people relied upon. Nowadays, if people want to rely on technology to stop piracy, they should realize that they are fighting a losing battle. Once I own something, as long as I'm not planning to break the law, it is my right to rewire the thing as I see fit. I'm offended by the concept that any piece of consumer technology that I own which is crippled needs to be allowed to stay crippled or else I'm some kind of evil person. Anyway, that's what this article seemed to be implying.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
This is OT for DVD
Actually, it's quite on-topic, since most DVDs are also encoded with Macrovision so you can't even make an analog copy by plugging your player's video output into your VCR.
From what I hear DVD's are pretty big in the size department. While people may pass them around the net like ISO's, unless you have a DVD writer, what use are they.
- Xabbu
- Jimbob
It's simple. Let's say the movie is the message 'm', and it's encrypted with a *single* encryption key, so the DVD disk contains E(m).
You need D(), where D(E(m)) = m. Only the idiots at Xing actually store D() in their software, everyone else stores e(D()). This means that if you blindly use the software decryption key you get e(D(E(m))) = e(m).
So how do you get D()? Easy - it's the key on the disk: d(). Apply the key from the disk *and* the software and you get d(e(D(E(m)))) = m. If you're using a suitable algorithm, you can have d() and E() transparently different for each disk. From Xing, we know that this is not the case with current DVDs.
All of this is pretty stupid with a DVD, but a similar technique can be used for intelligent peripherals used for authentication purposes. (Think smart cards, PDAs, etc.)
Example: I buy anime that is deliberately split up by the vendor into 1 hour or half hour per DVD chunks. I want to combine eps to actually fill up DVDs for less disc swapping during playback. Does this make me a pirate? Is this legal for me to do? Depends who you ask.
DVD's cost too much. Buying another copy of the DVD movie is $20 in most cases. Buying the DVD RAM itself is at least $25! So piracy of movies is hardly feasible. Maybe music or games, perhaps, but not movies. Pirating anything on DVD is not very cost effective with the cost of DVD media.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
the real pirates out there, I mean the industrial pirates, not two geeks with a software hack, but the guys who do the serious damage, the companies in foreign nations with, shall we say, lax copyright protection laws, don't care about encryption.
all the home entertainment DVD players out there probably won't play an unencrypted DVD. (correct me if I'm wrong here) so an unencrypted dvd copy is useless EXCEPT to someone who wants to watch their DVD's ONLY on their computer (great on a laptop on a plane, but at home? come on!)
The big boys are gonna make a bit-for-bit complete copy of the DVD, INCLUDING the encrypted key, duplicate packaging and sell the ripoff copies for less than the "real thing".
The real reason they are upset is that this hack reduces their perceived control of the medium.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
I find it very odd when taking a screen shot of a playing DVD, I think it has something to do with this encryption but I dont know. Has anyone else tried it? Sorry for being "Off Topic" , Rob.
"The best way to deal with this is to stop innovation and forbid consumers from having the technology"? "Perhaps computer CD-Roms and DVD-Roms can be made to not play audio CDs and DVDs"?
Balls!
Who _is_ this clown? I admit I stopped reading Wired a long time ago, but DAMN... are we seriously talking about intentionally making barriers to entry to the entertainment industry for anyone not a big money-spewing corporation?? This goes waaaay beyond the pale and is the most shocking thing I've seen in weeks. WHAT?
First of all, trying to remove 'consumer' ability to record 'standard' audio CDs and work with them on the computer is already way out of line. I know people who've already begun to make teeny little record companies for spare change, releasing music that's really neat music, and xeroxing off gatefold liners or whatever just to do their art. They don't make a lot of money at it, but that's not the point- they have the ability to get in at the ground floor. Given enough money there are lots of processing plants ready to press 1000 CDs for not too much money, even with inserts included, even with printing on the CDs- and that'd be _standard_ audio CDs same as any chart-topper. The means of production have never been so available- and this Wired clown sees nothing wrong with taking all that away? (You _know_ that along with 'CD-Roms cannot play audio CDs anymore' would go 'or record them')
Then, on top of that: has anyone seriously considered what DVD could mean in this context? Think 'Blair Witch Project', in another sense think of all the kids playing with 3DSMax and stuff. Isn't it obvious that, where the 80s were the beginning of the home _audio_ recording studio, the new century will clearly be the beginning of *tadah*
The Home Movie Studio.
Think of it. Forget copying storebought movies, that's lame and not the point and they suck more and more so who cares? Just think of what access to tools could really mean. Kids in their basements, groups of people in their spare time, 'bands' of actors and student cinematographers could start using the technology, and not be limited to Blair Witch production values- hell no! You could learn from the known techniques of the greats, buy a couple good halogen floodlights, or for that matter put together entire CGI films, or do anime or Disney-style animated movies depending on the amount of effort you wanted to put in. Disney's prewar multiplane camera cost millions. Today you can do that with Photoshop for hundreds, or with POV-Ray, even more elaborately, for nada, and there's no reason the GIMP couldn't be altered into specialised tools for such purposes.
And at the end of the chain? No longer demo reels of 16mm film for which nobody has a projector. Not even VHS tape that's not great in quality and few people have genlocks and things to be able to work with it extensively. Suddenly anybody can produce creative work and release in the prevalent consumer digital format, same as with the CD! Suddenly people's creativity can express itself in FILM.
Unless, that is, somebody just so happens to arrange matters so the technology is withheld. Unless somebody just so happens to make things so hot for the people who'd _own_ DVD duplicators on a large scale, that there ends up being _no_ way to get from the burn-one stage to the burn-1000 stage without signing with a movie studio. Unless SOMEBODY, imagine that, decides that instead of letting people have the technology and power to create, it's better to burn all the books, outlaw unlicensed arting and filming, and lock things down for good.
Doesn't this seem like something to prevent at all costs?
Does it have _anything_ to do with pirates at all?
Aren't pirates a really useful excuse to make sure that people in general don't end up getting the technology they need to produce their own art, music and FILMS without depending entirely on the entertainment industries for anything of that nature?
DON'T BE FOOLED. This isn't about the right to pirate at all! That's a side-issue, though it has some merit. What's really going on is this: these industries are so consumed with greed and desperation to control their revenue streams, that they are effectively trying to deprive the world of the technology to _create_ with. It's like forbidding the sale of paper in the Middle Ages. It's like allowing computers and mice and joysticks but forbidding keyboards because they could be used to type incendiary words. And that's such a serious threat, such a major problem, that the plight of ripped-off consumers wanting to copy their DVDs of The Matrix- well, that pales into insignificance. Being forced to buy another copy of The Matrix is _not_ that horrible. Being forced away from the tools that you could use to make your own movie like that- _is_ horrible.
It's absolutely got to be stopped, and the real issues must be known. Think of the artists, musicians, filmmakers who are so close to having amazing tools and could be denied them over this nonsense. This is unacceptable.
They've been doing it for ages already.
If they change the keys without changing the key length how long do you suppose it would take distributed.net to brute force it? 56 bit DES fell in 39 days in the DES II Challenge. If I understand correctly the DVD encryption should be much easier than that.