Macrovision Releases DVD Copy Protection 686
msblack writes "The Los Angeles Times is reporting that the good folks at Macrovision have unveiled a new system that will thwart 97% of existing DVD copying software while maintaining compatibility with existing DVD players. Macrovision claims that DVD copying results in $1 billion loss for studios out of $27.5 billion in sales. With piracy resulting in only 4% loss, why are the studios making such a big deal? The article also reports (mistakenly) that the market is pressing 100s of billions of DVD annually. Who's buying all those DVDs?" I'm skeptical of their claims, since historically Macrovision's anti-copying measures have been little more than easily circumvented snake oil, but maybe this time they've got their plan down.
Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Insightful)
Suuurrre.. Then come the artifacts, the quirky behavior, then you have to shell for a new DVD player to get it all sorted out, suddenly your old DVDs are now flaky so you have to keep 2 DVD players... Sigh. If only there were a way to copy them all to one format so you wouldn't have these problems...
Macrovision claims that DVD copying results in $1 billion loss for studios out of $27.5 billion in sales. With piracy resulting in only 4% loss, why are the studios making such a big deal?
Obviously not posted by a business owner of any sort. 4% loss may sound paltry, but if you choose to look at that 4% as being taken out of your net profit it'll look considerable larger, i.e. 4% out of $27B - expenses, assume a profit margin of 50%, and it's 8% Would you be happy buying a 12-pack at the corner store, but having to sacrifice one can/bottle to some guy at the exit door for no apparent reason?
The article also reports (mistakenly) that the market is pressing 100s of billions of DVD annually. Who's buying all those DVDs?"
Maybe they accidently included the AOL CDs.
I'm skeptical of their claims, since historically Macrovision's anti-copying measures have been little more than easily circumvented snake oil, but maybe this time they've got their plan down.
Hey, it's a consumer driven economy, gotta come up with some new angle that everyone's going to give you 4% of for no apparent reason...
It's like the theory of evolution... (Score:5, Insightful)
So the 3% that survive will propogate the rest of the Internet. Or more likely the 3% that survive will propogate it's technology to the 97% of those that didn't. It's like antibiotics and resistant bacteria, the game continues. Until you find something that's 100% bulletbroof (MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!) it's hopeless Motion Picture industry....
Obligatory (-1, overrated) (Score:2, Insightful)
will be cracked... (Score:2, Insightful)
riiight (Score:3, Insightful)
They're admitting that people existing cracks work on the new system! How long is it going to take for that 3% to become 100%? I give it about a month from the release of the first DVD with the new system
Re:It's like the theory of evolution... (Score:2, Insightful)
They'll never stop piracy... It's been here since copyright...
won't work (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing to see here.
Only 4%? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lol, go ask any retailer why they should care if their shrink is only 4%. They'll punch you in the mouth.
I have some ideas... (Score:5, Insightful)
We can automatically install a driver on Windows machines to make the disc un-rippable (oh.. that didn't work either!)
We can add a special time-code that prevents ripping... (Defeated by a marker!)
Seriously.. when will these guys give up? Go after the people selling the shit on the streets and leave the consumers alone..
Before you say you have a right to a backup... (Score:1, Insightful)
A backup is fair use, true, but we've got law saying you can't circumvent these protections to make one. Besides, if you take care of your media you don't really need them -- "backups" are traditionally heavily abused -- and DVDs are more resistant than CDs.
It'd be nice if they'd put in a low-cost replacement program for damaged DVDs, though.
Most people are honest. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even people who don't have moral qualms about this tend not to run off copies for their friends for many reasons, because it's a hassle. It takes a long time when its easier to just lend a friend a disc.
The people who actually cause most harm to the industry are the ones who sell the pirated discs. This sort of technology isn't going to deter them. If it can be circumvented, they'll find out how. The costs are insignificant against profits.
Re:It's like the theory of evolution... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. Because when someone buys a DVD, it's 100% profit for industry. There's absolutely no production or shipping costs on the part of the producer, because DVDs and their packages grow on magic trees in candyland, and are delivered to Best Buy by the volunteer video fairy
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, though, the concept that if 4% of all movies are being copied across the internet that this is replacing an equivalent amount of DVD sales is ridiculous. They try to make these sort of claims with music. The reality is that the majority (not all, but most) of people pirating movies and music are penniless high school/college students and the like, who - if they couldn't download that latest Eminem album or copy of The Lord of the Rings from the net - wouldn't be headed out to the store to buy it any time soon.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:2, Insightful)
that's a bit of a faulty analogy, given that the movie industry isn't actually losing any DVDs that they pressed, just theoretical sales. As always, these figures assume that someone would in fact purchase a DVD if they weren't able to get it for free. Which makes no sense. I don't copy DVDs, but I don't really buy them either. I rent them, which costs the movie industry money in lost sales, as well, according to that sort of logic. Which, of course, isn't true, because if I couldn't rent the movie, I probably just wouldn't watch it.
Re:It's like the theory of evolution... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which brings us back to the real question:
How much has (will?) this "copy-protection" mechanism cost to design and implement?
If they're so strapped for cash, why even bother if it only works for 97%? As the OP stated, that 3% will just become the preferred method. This all just seems like a bunch of sound, fury, and wasted money, signifying nothing.
-Grym
Way to use a horrible analogy. (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing is that this *isn't* shrink.
If you asked them why they should care that 4% of people won't buy something from them, what will they say?
Analog Hole (Score:5, Insightful)
This is they key quote from the article, in my opinion:
"We're always interested in another tool," said one executive who asked not to be named. "But until they fix the analog hole ... it doesn't solve the problem."
For those of you who don't remember the '80s, the "Analog Hole" was all we had back then, we used audio and video cassette for backup and sharing purposes.
This battle was fought two decades ago when fair use was upheld and we all got to keep our VCRs and double-cassette decks. I contend that the concern of the *AA is not only to protect themselves from the new threat to their business model that digital media represents, but to regain ground they lost twenty years ago.
Re:Before you say you have a right to a backup... (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, no that should be the MINIMUM they should do if we are just licensing the pleasure of watching the movie from them. Then the media it is on is inconsequential. Otherwise if we're paying for the disc, then we get to do whatever we want with it. They need to choose which method they want to offer, not just take the best of both worlds.
Re:Only 4%? (Score:1, Insightful)
Fact is, piracy is creating 4% more versions of a DVD in any format than what are sold legitimately. Out of that how many people would have bought the DVD anyway? If that person downloads "OMG Movie LOL" and likes it, maybe they'll go to the cinema for "OMG Movie LOL 2!!1one" and generate revenue there. Maybe people balance their DVD/CD/cinema purchases because they only have $50 a month to spend on these, so unless they are buying pirate DVDs for little less than retail
Oh My God, what about the massive DVD lending market! That could be like 25% of sales lost!
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Insightful)
$27.5 billion in sales annually
If we assume that 100s only means 100, then that means that each DVD sold in America sells for an average price of $0.28. Now, I've personally never seen a new DVD sell for anything less than $10 on sale, so this must mean that there are billions and billions of DVDs being sold for $0.01 or LESS in order to bring down the average cost.
Or else the people at Macrovision are idiots (DING, DING, DING! We have a winner!) and can't perform simple arithmetic.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry, there will be by next week.
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sorry, I'm not that familiar with the US constitution. Which amendment is that?
What I'm trying to get at, who decides who should have what rights? Should we have the right to backup our DVDs? Or, if we forget to backup our DVDs and they break, copy the DVD of a friend if they happen to have a copy of the same movie? And if our copy was the last, are we entitled to a new copy of a different movie of the same studio? What about the freedom of movie producers to determine what product they sell?
Obviously, the RIAA and MPAA are saying that they should decide who has those rights (and the DMCA gets them quite a lot), and that they should have everything and their customers nothing. And their customers are screaming about that, and claiming that they should have everything and the RIAA and the MPAA nothing.
The truth, as always, is probably somewhere in the middle. We need to change the legal infrastructure to support the most effective market. Whether that means making copy protection obligatory or forbidden or neither is a question I'll gladly leave to the reader.
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:3, Insightful)
Amen to that! I'm pretty lazy about this sort of thing and even I'm almost moved to action when I get "operation currently not permitted by disc." I mean, the nerve of a frickin' DVD to try telling me what I can and can't do. I'm surprised more people aren't pissed off about this.
Anyone else have any Thomas the Train DVDs. I swear it takes me about 10 minutes to start one of those stupid things.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:3, Insightful)
Blockbuster movies do easily recoup this initial investment. Although we often hear about movies raking in milions over the first week, marginally profitable or even loss-making productions also exist. For these, DVD/CD sales help fund future projects or limit losses.
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:3, Insightful)
Congress
Courts
President
Who gets to put these clowns in that position of power: the voter.
What happens after these clowns are placed in office...well its sorta like MS' plug and pray... we plug em in, and we pray that they work for us.
I believe the courts ruled that making digital backups is legal for the consumer as long as they own a legit copy of the original (and keep it). So no copying the original dvd, and then selling (giving) the original dvd to someone while keeping the copy.
Re:Before you say you have a right to a backup... (Score:1, Insightful)
Section 101 states that *any* digital media that can be read by a computer is in fact a "computer program" in the eyes of US copyright law.
Section 117 states that the owner of a lawfully acquired copy of a computer program - i.e., any digital media - may copy AND/OR adapt that content for archival purposes, provided he maintains possession of the original.
No limit on number of copies.
The adaptation clause allows transforming from one format to another (CD audio -> ogg vorbis or MP3; DVD -> MPG).
In fact, it's even legal to "cause an adaptation to be made" - if my mother-in-law wants me to copy her DVDs for her, I can do that for her (I can't keep a copy for myself, but I can make copies of her stuff and give the originals and the copies back to her). You don't have to know how to do it yourself; you just need to know someone who does and it's legal for them to do it.
These are clauses that the *AA would dearly love you to ignore in copyright law, but the fact remains that copyright law explicitly states that if you do these things, it is by definition NOT copyright infringement.
--AC
(IANAL; TINLA)
Re:Foils 97% of copying software? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, the hitch would be if it stopped 97% because of hardware issues, like, you couldn't rip it in 97% of the DVD-ROM drives out there. That might be a problem. But it's hard to imagine a scheme that allows computer drives to read the data enough to play the movie but not enough to rip it.
DVD-R/DL (Score:5, Insightful)
With piracy resulting in only 4% loss, why are the studios making such a big deal?
Because double-layer DVD-Rs are just now hitting the market seriously. DL DVD-Rs have the same storage capacity as commercial DVDs, allowing them to be ripped directly rather than transcoded. DL media is currently $5-$10 per, which makes ripping not competitive with renting. In a few months we can expect to start seeing $1 media for the now-$100 DL burners: this is the MPAA's nightmare.
In the longer term, home network bandwidth costs are still plummeting. I'm up to 1.5Mbps/1Mbps on my cheap home link. When bandwidths like these and larger become widespread, the other shoe drops. Then MPAA finds itself in a position that in many ways is worse than the current RIAA position. It is much harder for MPAA to cut the cost of content production to establish a competitive position. Also, paid movie performances (movie theatres) are struggling in a way that paid music performances (concerts) are not.
I'd be grasping at straws like Macrovision too.../p
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:5, Insightful)
At a laundromat I went to regularly, the attendent had a laptop setup with a firewire DVD-R and would burn movies for his "customers" while they did laundry for $5 each. And so on and so on.
The people that you listed are not "casual". They are blatant theives. They are not only ripping and burning DVDs they are distributing and selling them. Just because they aren't what YOU consider to be "geeks" that were at the heart of the DVD ripping scene in years passed doesn't mean that they are "casual users".
Please don't confuse these people with Joe Blow with the family or me and my personal DVD collection at home.
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at that russian mp3 website (can't remember the name) where you pay about 5 cents per song. They could start doing that with DVDs. That's what they are affraid of.
Re:Way to use a horrible analogy. (Score:1, Insightful)
As an _economic incentive_ to creators we gave them limited copyright. Large media corporations have been abusing that incentive so badly now that ordinary people, people you work with, pass in the street, or ask to babysit your kids, are deliberately and consciously breaking the laws created to enforce this incentive.
Since the laws derive from the authority of the people, and not (as you seem to presume) from any ethical precept, the most likely consequence, after a lot of people get hurt, is that they'll be heavily revised or struck altogether. This may mean that Batman 17 never gets made, or that Julia Roberts is unable to afford her own weight in diamonds when she retires. Be sure to whine about this on
There are rights derived from ethical rules about the ownership of ideas, but those rights concern authorship (you may see "the moral right of the author..." text in books once in a while) and the right to proper credit. You won't catch your babysitter renaming all her Britney Spears MP3s to have her name instead of Britney's, nor do DVD traders alter the title & credits to put their name in place of the director or producer.
If a movie isn't worth making for what you were paid to make it: Don't make it. Don't come to me, the ordinary citizen to beg for complicated and impossible to enforce rules that might allow you to scrape back the difference later. That's insane. If you need more money, find people to give you more money. There seem to be a lot of movie fans on Slashdot, some of whom would want to help fund Batman 17 and ensure that "Dark Knight eats a chicken burger" gets onto the big screen. It might have to be made for $170 000 instead $170 million, but it can still be made if people really want to see it.
What has to stop is the nonsense of equating property laws founded out of an ethical duty to protect the weak, with an economic incentive abused to protect only the strong.
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:3, Insightful)
Guess what the industry said no and that was that.
Now you have a guy in a Laundromat who is providing this service. Guess the people have spoken.
Ummmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Insightful)
25 cent DVDs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's like the theory of evolution... (Score:3, Insightful)
Your analogy is flawed. The difference is that the Bank doesn't want its data sitting in the living rooms of millions of people.
We can agree that bank security, while not invulnerable, can be implemented with reasonably good security because, by design, not many have access to and knowledge of its security measures.
This isn't the case with DVDs. Both the data and the means to extract it (the players) are commonly available. The system is inherently insecure. The best they can do is make it a hassle to extract the data--which is exactly what the current system does. Why waste money in attempting in vain to do anything more?
-Grym
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't checked how these things work these days, but back in the time of Videocassettes, studios did all their financial balancing based on cinema sales alone.
This means that they would project their releases and productions in a way that would guarantee a decent aggregate profit for any given year, without considering tape sales. Tape sales were looked on as an annual loss (people won't go back to the theatre to watch it if they own it), so most shows only went to tape after the projections had been met.
So effectively, the only costs for the cassettes were in the cassette mastering, duplication, and distribution, and any profit above break even was an added bonus.
The incentive to release movies in this way was mostly branding; if you saw that MGM produced these good movies, and certain celebrities generally gave a good performance, you'd be more likely to go see the next MGM film in the theatre that starred those actors.
Re:Baby locksmiths? (Score:3, Insightful)
Pull your head out of your ass.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:3, Insightful)
Next thing, you'll tell me they're biased. Or that good video game reviews are bought and sold. Or that the radio industry is still engaging in payola.
In related news, butterflies are 1% brighter today (Score:3, Insightful)
Except i this case, given that it's Macrovision, the moment's advantage would be more like orange coloration that implies toxicity -- like butterflies that don't get eaten because they just look like they'd taste bad.
Who wants to place bets on this evolutionary race? Will it be the ponderous industry that still hasn't gotten its head around the whole point-to-point (as opposed to broadcast) distribution model? The one that's still occasionally claiming, for form's sake, that VCRs were bad for their business? Or will it be the nasty piratical p2p types who've proven so much, much more flexible in the past? Which one of these is going to take advantage of a faster rate of mutation?
My money's on the scurvy dogs. (Arrr.)
Like I'm really worried... (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, how exactly is this going to affect those who already don't pay for movies?
So Macrovision puts more copy protection on a DVD:
So basically, when it comes down to it, Macrovision affects only those who get their movies through legitimate means. It won't have any effect on those already breaking the law, and it will only further reduce any incentive of using the DVD format.
Why do I watch downloaded movies? Why don't I buy many DVD's? Because DVD copy prevention sucks. It's that simple - I don't feel like buying something from an organization that regards me as somehow criminal because I have an interest in their product.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:1, Insightful)
Or a bunch of people are making a little bit of profit... the people that made the movie, the printing house, the distributor, a bunch of truck drivers, then finally the store that sells the movie.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Local pricing of DVDs (Score:3, Insightful)
Until SDMI (Score:2, Insightful)
This will contravene the assumed rights of 'Fair Use', but may end up accepted by the masses.
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:3, Insightful)
I paid for it. I paid every single cent they asked for. Now I want to watch it, when I want to, where I want to, and on whatever device I chose to.
Consider that average minimum wage in, say, Mexico, is about 5 USD PER DAY.
[...]
Consider, now, that for a hit title, like Spider-Man 2, we are talking about thousands of [3-dollar] illegal copies sold, instead of thousands of [15-dollar] legitimate ones.
People who earn 5 USD per day will not buy a 15 USD disc. Period. When 1000 illegal copies are sold, this does not mean 15000 USD lost revenues for Hollywood, since 9 out of 10 people would never have afforted the disc at 15 USD apiece!
This kind of math, also seen at the RIAA in their MP3 jihad, drives me nuts. When some teenager downloads 300 CDs worth of MP3s in a month, that does not mean the RIAA just lost 15000 USD. There is no bloody way that this teenager would have spent 15 grands for CDs.
This does not justify illegal copies. Not at all. This is about an accurate and honest assessment of lost revenue, instead of Propaganda.
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:1, Insightful)
Here's what really bugs me about CCS. It's not that they encrypted it but that the media companies have placed artificial export controls onto the media, denying my right to purchase DVDs from other countries. This contravene's the WTO rules on free movement of goods. Ever try buying a Japanese anime from Japan to watch it? If you can't rip it, you'd literally have to buy a DVD player from Japan to watch it too (unless you can get a grey market multi-region player).
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:3, Insightful)
Making copies and selling them, OTOH, moves into the area that I (and I think most slashdotters) consider "wrong." Such a person is no longer a casual copier.
What's stupid is that DRM and related schemes tend to only affect the casual users. In the world that the MPAA is trying to create, your average 4x4 drivin' good ol' boy can't make a backup copy or skip the commercials, but a major piracy operation doesn't even notice. Anybody making money from piracy can afford the necessary equipment to make perfect copies, which are unaffected by almost all copy protection schemes (those which don't require a chip in your head).
How RipGuard probably works... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ripping programs such as AnyDVD and DVD Decrypter are already starting to work around this type of protection. It probably won't be long before they'll analyze the menu VM code and only copy sections of the disc that a set-top player could read, rendering this protection effectively useless. Or, looking from Macrovision's perspective, ripening the market for RipLock 2.0.
After all, Macrovision is not in the business of preventing copying. They're in the business of selling copy-restriction technology to **AA fatheads who think they will improve their sales by crippling their products.
Re:More returns/refunds? (Score:4, Insightful)
This particularly move though was done unilaterally to all retailers at once. It was done under the banner of stopping theft and piracy (those nasty crooks are stealing movies and bringing them back for refunds and/or they're taking them home, copying them and bringing them back). Even Wal-mart would have trouble fighting that, as then they could be made out as supportive of crooks.
You have one other element too, customer abuse, that did not help. Many people have been treating Wal-mart and other stores as free rental shops. They would buy a movie (on DVD or VHS) the day of release, take it home, watch it, come back the next day and claim it didn't work and get a refund. I'm quite sure other retailers experienced this as well. In fact this may have been an element as to why the studios started refusing to credit returns unless they were exchanged.
Your last argument shows a very vast lack of understanding on how retail handles returns though. Even through this new policy there still are legitimate returns where they swap because of a defective disc/tape. Wal-mart stores all have to handle tons of returns even under the current policy, the others wouldn't have added much overheard to costs since the whole processing procedure hasn't changed, there's just fewer to handle. They also still process hundreds of movies a week in each store that they find stolen with the cases left behind. They have more of those in a week than they ever did returns, overall this hasn't impacted their returns processing much at all. Certainly the impact's not been enough to make it worth the customer ire it's caused.
I'm not one to defend Wal-mart, they have more wrong with them than right (especially when it comes to how they treat their employees), but in this case the movie studios are the real culprits, and the blame needs to go to where it belongs.
Who?? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's also great to know that this new scheme will also be cracked very quickly. Oh I love this game so much. But hey, this is from the industry that provides DVD player software that turns your volume down while you use it and offers to SELL you the ability to hear movies at full volume as an add on...
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:4, Insightful)
The hong kong market will do this once, press a bagillion of the things at $.02 a piece and some schmuck on ebay will buy them for $5, and then sell them for $45 and tell you that theyre not bootlegged and just have chinese writing on the covers, and the mispellings on the case art/credits are just your eyes betraying you.
Basically the guy who just wants a copy to watch and wouldnt have bought it anyway because he's broke will just have to wait a little longer, the people that mass produce the copies will have to wait longer but then have a straightened out version than can pump out at the same speed they always did.. and meanwhile the people getting punished are the ones with older dvd player whose motors just burnt out and the people who like fast forwarding.
I don't see this changing anything, sure itll take you two hours to rip a movie, and a little time to clean it up maybe, but in the end, its no real problem to anyone who wants to make a copy.
Re:Rentals are money, too (Score:1, Insightful)
Downloaded movies are usually trash from beginning to end.
People are renting/borrowing and ripping.
I give any copy protection about 3 months before it's cracked. Sony's new encryption scheme used on "The Grudge" and a few other movies is already cracked.
Encryption doesn't guarantee a sale. Never has and never will! I wish they'd just give up and eat it as a loss leader.