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.
Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:5, Interesting)
On to the serious stuff:
"If it takes a long time and the frustration level gets too high, you're not going to prevent 100% of it, but you can stop the casual user," Kaye said. "Why not try?"
The "casual user" doesn't give a shit. They rent their mainstream crap movies on DVDs at the local monopolistic rental store and they bring it back three days late. They aren't ripping movies to share, save, etc.
The technique confounds ripping programs without damaging computers, preventing the discs from playing or reducing picture quality, he said.
Would it damage the drive if a computer DVD player tried to play the disc and was constantly hitting the false errors it was creating? If it isn't going to disable the players how will it stop the rippers? So what, it takes real-time to rip the DVD? Oh no!
Consumer advocates said Hollywood had the right to put out unrippable discs. But such a move would ignore public demand for the ability to back up DVDs and take their movie collections on the road.
Public demand? Public RIGHTS. We have the right to make backups of our owned discs and put them into a format that is portable. The media continues to fall for the tricks being implemented by the MPAA's PR machine. I suggest that they refrain from spreading the misinformation created by the corporations PR machine as it does nothing but continue to erode the freedoms we are entitled to.
If they decide that we should not be able to make a backup of our media that is an identical copy then I should be reimbursed when the disc is no longer usable. Even if that means 25+ years from now. Don't like that and don't think it's realistic? Tough, it is realistic because I can ensure that right now by making backups.
Discs that do not allow me to fast forward through FBI warnings, commercials, etc, get ripped and burned in a format that is immediately watchable from the time I stick it in the player. I don't care about animated menus, extras, features, commentary, bonus scenes. I want the movie to play w/o interruption the second I close that tray. If I paid for something I don't see what I shouldn't be able to do with it as I wish as long as it stays in my possession.
If Macrovision and the MPAA want to end piracy they best do it in a way that doesn't affect my personal freedoms when I purchase a piece of media.
More returns/refunds? (Score:5, Interesting)
Movies... (Score:5, Interesting)
In 10 years, it's not going to matter, as On-Demand channels will start carying every movie under the sun.
Re:First sharpies, now what? (Score:2, Interesting)
Office equipment doesn't defeat copy protection. People defeat copy protection.
And so far not even the most brutal totalitarian government in history has managed to ban humans.
Re:It's like the theory of evolution... (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting analogy. You could also argue that less than 3% of the people on the internet are spammers, but we do tend to notice them, don't we?
3 people our of 100 ripping discs is probably more than adequate to distribute a large number, depending upon how they're set up. Some guy in Chicago, several months back, was basically running a factory in his house. Of course, he's an exceptional case, but he makes up for some volume, displacing those who do very little.
Probably they're largest concern is the professionals who rip and burn and sell at flea markets, etc.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Interesting)
An amusing aside is the Google ads at the bottom of that article.
Re:It's like the theory of evolution... (Score:3, Interesting)
No big deal, you just read raw data, ignoring read errors, and deal with it later.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked in the logistics industry several years ago and it really got me thinking about the costs of packaging and distribution. Granted, per 1,000 of DVD's it probably wasn't much, but when you broke them out 5 to this store, 5 to that, etc. you had to pay the hands that did the work. Packaging, too as you allude, isn't free, though it's probably less than 50 cents per DVD.
The producer needs to make a profit, the distributor needs to make a profit and the store needs to make a profit. All that considered, I'm moderately impressed that I can pick up some movies on DVD for $10. Which is a bit less than a matinee ticket, bucket of popcorn and a medium Cherry Coke.
What I like about this: (Score:1, Interesting)
So let's see, they get to piss off only the people who pay for their products (people downloading torrents and burning dvds or rigging DIY DVD jukeboxes won't even notice).
It's hard to imagine them coming up with a more ill concieved plan which didn't involve ill tempered sea bass.
I'm already seeing fewer movies because of those fucking dots. I think the real question is, "Are they trying to get me to watch more on-demand cable, or play more video games?"
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically you'll now leave the corner store with one bottle missing from your 12 pack and 10% of the beer gone from the other 11 to cover the costs of the Macrovision stuff.
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:5, Interesting)
The moral of the story is that there is no way they can make a protection scheme that will work without disabling software players, so this is just a waste of time and money. The industry is probably buying into it so that they can look like they're doing something.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:1, Interesting)
Seriously?
hahaha
I'd guess that 25 million plus households have one in the US. Probably more like 50 million.
Re:Before you say you have a right to a backup... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, it'd be nice.
How about they make it the law that if I don't have fair use rights to make a backup, then they are obligated to provide 1 for 1 replacement of damaged media.
Oh wait, I forgot, all laws benefit the MPAA, screw the people who ACTUALLY buy their product!
Re:It's like the theory of evolution... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:2, Interesting)
Or maybe the reporter at the LA Times did the math wrong?
Re:Before you say you have a right to a backup... (Score:2, Interesting)
U.S. Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 101 states:
A "computer program" is a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result.
A DVD contains a set of statements or instructions that can be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result (playing the movie). That makes the content on the DVD a "computer program" under the definitions provided by US Copyright Law.
According to U.S. Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 117, Paragraph a.2.
"... it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided
Thus, per U.S. Copyright Code, I have the right to make copies (plural; in fact, I have the right to make _as_many_archival_copies_as_I_want_ provided I have lawfully obtained and continue to own the original DVD). This is not an "implied right" or "fair use" claim; this is an explicit, enumerated case of non-infringement in the body of copyright law as presently constituted.
I suggest you study copyright law a little better instead of regurgitating what someone else tells you. Thank you for playing.
--AC
Rentals are money, too (Score:5, Interesting)
So while it's clearly faulty to assert that every downloaded movie is a lost sale, it's just as faulty to say that nobody who downloaded a movie would have bought it or rented it. The correct answer is somewhere in between.
I don't know whether the 4% figure means that for every 24 sales there is one illegal download, or if it's some accountant's estimation of the actual number of sales they would have had if the downloads weren't available. It could well be the latter; it doesn't sound completely unreasonable to me.
But we'd be having the same argument if it were 2% or 1%. I strongly doubt that it's 0%. As the grandparent post points out, shrinkage comes out of your profit margin and can mean the difference between profit and loss.
Re:What I like about this: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:5, Interesting)
What I find funny is that whenever I've tried to pause to read the FBI warning, the DVD wouldn't let me. I've often wondered if that kind of thing could hold up in court. Can I be held responsible for complying to a warning that I wasn't given fair ability to read fully?
It might not be hard to do... (Score:4, Interesting)
Wouldn't it be possible to write a script that reads the DVD bit by bit and places those same bits in the same order on a blank DVD? Since we are talking about digital media, isn't a bit-by-bit copy the same as the original? I'm not talking about cracking code or changing the data while maintaining useability, just making a copy. Or is something going on that would make bit-by-bit copying impossible?
If bit-by-bit copying is possible, what could keep a copy from working while allowing the original, other than watermarks on blank/non-blank media coupled with hardware that checks for watermarks? (Obviously, watermarking isn't what the article is about since they maintain that their system will work with existing hardware.)
So, if the kid in the basement can write a bit-by-bit copying script, doesn't that defeat all anti-piracy checks on digital media that don't involve the blanks themselves?
What about a case like Disney... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:97% must mean Windows-only (Score:2, Interesting)
I know that, and you know that, but Macrovision isn't going to care about accurate OS usage stats when trying to sell a product. They just want it to look effective.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:3, Interesting)
$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.
Two problems with that analysis:
1. "Pressed" != "sales". I read awhile back that for every CD sold, some surprisingly large multiple of CDs were pressed. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the same holds true for DVDs.
2. The stats quoted are allegedly global, not U.S. domestic. I can't help but wonder how much a DVD costs once you're outside the US, Europe, Japan, and Australia.
Even in spite of that, I agree: something smells inconsistent with those numbers.
Re:Rentals are money, too (Score:5, Interesting)
In order to rent you a DVD, the video store had to buy it. They're sharing it out among a few dozen people, but the disc is still sold and the movie company gets its inch of green (or in this case, millimeter of green, but millimeters add up.)
You should read Blockbuster's annual report or NetFlix's. They have revenue sharing agreements with many (if not all for BB) major studios. They essentially get the DVDs for free but split the profit between themselves and the studio. How else could Blockbuster put (literally) hundreds of copies of new DVDs in each of its thousands of stores without tying up a huge amount of capital? Answer: they don't. The studios pony up the capital cost of the DVDs, BB throws in their distribution chain and presto, win-win.
I see stuff like this as a PR effort primarily aimed at the less technically-savvy. As long as the bulk of the market thinks piracy is impossible (or at least hard) then the studios have what they want. Mass defection, like what happened with MP3s, is what the studios want to avoid. Or at least delay.
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:1, Interesting)
For example, I talked to my father this weekend and he started asking me about downloading movies and copying DVD's. I gave him a brief explanation of the process, the legal issues as I understand them etc. Then I asked why he wanted to know. It turns out that several of his friends (50-65 year old non power users) do this on a regular basis. They rent movies once, and copy them. Or some of them were downloading them off the net. These aren't the people I would normally expect to be copying DVD's (especially since I've known most of them my whole life), yet they are.
Another example would be some friends of my wife. They are a doctor and nurse, They have a very nice income and certainly have the extra cash laying around to purchase DVD's etc with. However, if you look at their DVD collection you notice immediatly that it consists almost entirely of DVD-R's. Especially the childrens movies. Again, these are people that are not power users by any means. They know how to get on the Internet and download movies, they know how to use the software they got for $29.99 to copy the movies they rent and burn the ones they download.
If it weren't extremely easy to copy movies these people probably wouldn't be doing it. If some company offering DRM can make it even a little bit harder to copy movies, these people will probably not be copying movies until someone else circumvents that DRM. The sad truth is that for most people it has nothing to do with backing up thier media, but with not having to pay for it in the first place. Then again I suppose you could use that as an argument that the media is over priced in the first place and the price these people are willing to pay is the $3-6 that you pay for a one night rental at the local [Insert Rental Monopoly Here] and a blank DVD. In which case the only way for the media companies to regain this income is to price thier media appropriately.
97% of current DVD rippers 3% of future rippers (Score:4, Interesting)
Macrovision makes money, the ripping problem is not solved.
You are either... (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when I was a kid, about 15 or so years ago, my parents bought me a game for my TRS-80 Color Computer, called "Gates of Delerium", from a company in Canada called "Diecom". It was basically a clone of the old Ultima RPG. It came on a couple of floppies, and it had a custom copy protection scheme on the main game floppy that didn't allow it to be copied using the normal commands of the Color Computer disk system for backups, nor could you use anything else (the second floppy was for player data - it could be easily copied). I played that game often, but not fanatically, and took very good care of all of my disks. Then, I graduated high school, left home, went to school, time passed...
Fast forward many years: I decide to get my old system back, feeling nostalgic, etc - and having played with various emulators (mainly Jeff Vavasour's stuff), I want to get my old stuff converted and saved to preserve it. I set up my old system, and start going through the disks...
Most of my disks are fine - I am able to copy them easily. Some are corrupted, some of the stuff copies, some of it is garbled, likely lost. Some of disks are completely garbled. But then I come to my Gates of Delerium floppies...
Trying them out on my original machine, the game disk loads so far, then hangs - it seems like it is so close to loading, yet so far. The disk looks fine, not dirty, etc - but it won't load. I try making copies (even a supposedly byte-for-byte copy using various ROM routines) - but no go there, either. I try running it in the emulator (off the original floppy and a 1.2 Mb 5.25" drive) - no dice. Now I am dismayed - have I lost the game for good?
Through a lot of work, I manage to track down one of the principles of the company, one of founders, Dave Dies himself. The company Diecom is long out of business, and Dave (at the time) was doing his own software development for games on PDAs and cell phones (can't remember the name of the company off hand). I was able to get in contact with him, and talk with him about my problems, but he couldn't offer much in the way of help.
Off and on, I posted this story occasionally to various forums, most frequently here on /. - a couple of years passed since I talked with Dave, and I had basically let the matter sit - knowing that the disk might be getting worse with age, but what more could I do?
One day, I get an email from some guy in Canada, and to make a long story that was suppose to be short shorter - we ended up (along with help from another guy) getting Gates of Delerium working, at least in emulation mode. It took a special hardware disk copier made by a non-descript company in Germany which one of these guys owned, some custom code work to cause the disk controller on the CoCo to read and write non-standard tracks (which was how the copy protection mainly worked), some guesswork (which one of the guys had used to port other Diecom software to the CoCo emulator in MESS), and a little bit of luck (that three guys, only one of which owned a real copy of the game, -me-, which was partially broken - all could come together over the internet and do this - that is luck). Since that time, I have only seen *one* other copy of Gates of Delerium being sold on Ebay, and have only heard of a couple of other people who owned it or knew about it. It was -this- close to being gone forever.
In the end, would it have really mattered? No. Life wouldn't have come to a screeching halt, but the world would be just a little poorer for it, and the leftover CoCo enthusiasts and emulation fans would have also lost a bit of history, too. All this - because one company a long time ago decided that it was better to make it impossible or nearly so - to copy a piece of software. If it can happen to a lowly floppy, it can happen to a movie on a DVD - in fact, it is already happenning to DVDs - the funky "rotting" that is occurring, and delamination -
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep, and as a consumer I won't be buying any Macrovision protected DVDs until I see reviews from reputable sources that let me know they work correctly in all 3 of the DVD players I have.
I have been bit so many times by copy protection that I regularly put off buying software I'm interested in until the issues get shaken out and I no longer buy new music in non-digital format.
I guess it is too much to hope for that if this format does cause problems with existing DVD players that it costs them a lot more than 4% of their sales. People will probably just accept problems with the same baffled acceptance that they always seem to.
Re:If I can play it, I can copy it (Score:5, Interesting)
THANK YOU. I had exactly this attitude with a German EMI CD my girlfriend brought home from a concert. While ripping our collected piles of CDs so she could take them to work on her laptop and I could put them on my mp3 player, I noticed that these guys had some third-rate safedisc "protection" on it.
Alcohol 120% made pretty short shrift of it, but I wrote a (fairly civil) nastygram to the head of their copy protection program to the extent that I will (a) never buy another disc from them again, and (b) tell all my friends to do the same, especially the non-technical ones, because EMI Germany produces broken CDs which you may not be able to play on your new iPod.
There's an axiom out there to the extent that every pissed off customer means, through his/her network, between 7 and 14 additional lost customers. I received a very politely worded letter back, trying to explain and justify why they're doing this, the tone of which I appreciated, but the contents of which didn't change my mind.
I wrote my original mail because of a suggestion to do so which I found on a blog when searching for solutions to my problem, and have been offering the same suggestion to other people when I hear of a legitimate owner of some form of media being inconvenienced by copy protection. I have washed my hands of the affair, I have loads of good albums, and I don't really need anything from that particular vendor.
The outcome of this will be either that nothing changes, in which case neither I nor the vendor care, or that I've done my little bit to contribute to EMI Germany losing enough business to think again about treating potential customers like potential criminals. In this scenario, I have also not been inconvenienced, but have maybe helped others have an easier time of backing up their discs.
Your attitude is superb--I encourage anyone who objects to the idea of purchasing something and then being told what they can or cannot do with it , to just vote with your wallet--it's the most effective vote you have.
Important question: why is it OK to copy? (Score:5, Interesting)
The basic problem is that the whole pricing model for products based on IP is out of whack.
Supply and demand works fine for commodities and raw materials. Competition keeps prices near the actual costs of production. But IP based products don't have consistent costs of production, so there is no solid basis for a given price.
Software is the best example; generally all of the costs are R & D and support. There is virtually no cost per unit produced. Most software developers just make up a price that seems to work for marketing purposes. Buying a shrink-wrapped box at a fixed cost is an insane price model since it doesn't account for the costs of production in any way. If not enough copies are sold the company folds and no one can get support. If too many copies are sold then the company earns obscene profits, which is fine for the employees but not very efficient for everyone else.
The CPU market is a less direct example with some bizarre pricing anomalies. Intel has marketed CPUs for years with no connection between production costs and prices. They have sold CPUs with functionality diked off on the die. This would be like selling a car with a V8 engine, only 4 of the cylinders have been permanently disabled.
Intel also rates each CPU they sell for a particular speed and then locks that CPU so that it cannot easily run faster. If their yields at high speeds are good but there is demand for slower CPUs then they will lock CPUs at that slower speed even though they are capable of running faster. This would be like buying a car with an engine that could run at 200 HP, but the engine has been permanently modified to only produce 150 HP. And this modification has been made because the manufacturer can't find enough people to pay extra for 50 more HP.
I think there is something wrong when producers sell products that are less functional for marketing reasons rather than production costs. If the fully functional product costs the same to make then it should cost the same to buy. Whoever comes up with a business model that accounts for this is going to be very rich.
Re:It's like the theory of evolution... (Score:3, Interesting)
All this for only a buck.
At that price, and with no garbage to dispose of, why the hell even bother ripping/burning a backup copy? If I want a backup copy, I'll just go buy another one for a dollar.
Let that be a lesson to the industry.
How they're probably doing it. (Score:2, Interesting)
DVD tech basically boils down to a symbolic interpretive code that lets a content producer create programs that a standard DVD player can read. It's not just the MPEG4 data streams; there's this whole architecture that the designer can use to create nifty menus and DVD options and stuff like that. The code is limited and there's some question over whether the whole rig is Turing Complete (I think that's the term - it's been awhile), but the basis of DVD playback is via interpretative program code rather than straight decrypt and playback.
Just about the only way I could see that an aftermarket protection scheme could work is if they reencrypt with a new formula and then use that code architecture to create a wrapper around the CSS decrypt step. In theory, those DVDs would play back on any CSS-licensed player that accesses the title tracks through the menu code.. but any player that attempts to access the title tracks directly would be stopped by the new encryption scheme.
It wouldn't be long before someone broke the scheme, because that code *still* has to be read in order to be executed on software players, but the promise is enough to give a corporate-think exec a warm fuzzy. Ultimately the only way it'd stick would be to figure out how to exclude software players, but I imagine that'd do some damage to playability on hardware players as well.
I'm just saying this stuff from memory; it'd been a few years since I was really well-read on the subject. Maybe there's someone else here who'd be so kind as to clarify the details.
Scripted playback (Score:3, Interesting)
Other ways to make the ripping task more difficult is to use the multi-angle features to put parts of the movie on different angles and script it to switch between them at the appropriate times. Such tricks could be performed for audio tracks as well.
This doesn't defeat rippers that seek a duplicate copy; it is more to defeat people who selectively rip then transcode (to other codecs or a different bitrate to fit on one layer), not bothering to pull unwanted data from the disc. It will hurt those that want to quickly distribute multiple copies for profit and are confident in their ripping to not bother with a quality assurance-playback that it was ripped successfully. They'll get bit and lose black-marketshare.
The players are supposed to support such scripting, so it should work even for software players, as long as you play the disc as it was encoded and not transcoding.
And I'll say this: if this turns out to be what they're doing, and they've patented it instead of keeping it as a trade secret, I'd say their patent fails the obviousness test and should not have been granted.
Re:Scripted playback (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It might not be hard to do... (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically, no. CDs and DVDs have several layers of encoding for error correction purposes. The lowest level is 14 to 8 encoding. That is, every 8 bits are stored are 14 bits on the physical medium. Then there is the CIRC (Cross Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code), that is used to perform error correction on data sectors (a 2352 byte sector yields 2048 bytes of actual data). What Macromedia is probably doing is screwing with these values. They put in invalid 14-bit patterns that interact with RS Error Correction Codes, combined with some bad data here in there. Your DVD player, who's primary responsibility is to play at realtime, eats these errors with only minor glitches. Your computer DVD drive, who's primary responsibility is to deliver correct data, barfs on all this garbage and tries to read it again and again.
Even worse, you can't get the 14-bit pattern from your drive without tapping into the laser mechanism. This correction is done at the servo level, and never passed out to the host system (not even on the IIS port). Besides, since the disc contains invalid "bits", you can never get a true bit-for-bit copy.