Slashdot Mirror
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?
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?
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.
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
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
The reason that I do not plan to buy a DVD player before Christmas is the technical problems that have not been ironed out with the format. There are just too many complaints of DVD's that don't play properly - lip sync is off, or skipping, or certain discs won't play in certain recorders.
The explination that I have heard is that the standards are murky in a lot of areas, and the interpitation is giving rise to incompatability.
I am sure that this will be worked out in the next few months. But until it is, I'm keeping my money in my pocket.
Restricting technology because some pirates might use it is just plain silly.
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.
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.
You completely forgot several important factors such as compression, color bit depth and so on.
Current TV is sampled at about 1000x1024x24. All you need is another layer or a two sided player or a slightly better compression scheme to get 1600 x 1200 x 24.
DVD can handle this easily.
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.
Your comments reminded me of Eben Moglen's excellent essay Anarchism Triumphant. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
94141592651829395028512312356878594818483935819
8012456989047663620151201231566801865112556408748
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
Why indeed, there is digital cinema from Qualcomm. The idea is to have a digital projector project a feature film that is sent digitally in encrypted form from a central hub and locally stored.
One of my professors at HMC worked on the project and said the result is quite impressive. There have been some demonstrations including screenings of the Phantom Menance, but no wide commercial release yet.
Something like this is clearly the wave of the future, since film duplication and distribution is so expensive. It remains to be seen whether it's Qualcomm or some other technology that prevails.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
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?
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
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."
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.
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.
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)...
-
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.
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?
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.'
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
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"
Stranger things have happened. In the Washington, DC & Baltimore area, Sprint deployed a mobile phone network called "Sprint Spectrum". It was supposed to be the eventual nation wide standard. Two years later, Sprint decided to use a different standard when they did the nation wide deployment. All Sprint would give previous subscribers was a $25 discount on the trade-in of their old phone. For those of us who purchased the $199 phone, it was a bit of a rip-off.
Needless to say, a class action lawsuit came out of this. Sprint told people buying the phones that this was the standard for nation wide phones on their network. They changed their mind and stranded people who had made buying decisions on that fact.
Is a situation with DVD-II signicantly different? The manufacturers told us that this was THE standard for DVD. If they roll out a new set of players that are substantially the same as the old ones (except for the encryption method) and don't take care of the previous purchasers, the class action lawyers will be all over it.
World Beach List, my latest project.
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!"
"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.