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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?
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.
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.
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.
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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 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."
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?
"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.