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...
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: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.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:3, Funny)
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: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:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Interesting)
An amusing aside is the Google ads at the bottom of that article.
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:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:3, Informative)
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:5, Funny)
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: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: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, so
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry, there will be by next week.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Macrovision (Score:5, Funny)
If the alternative is spending an extra $0.10 a can on beer that tastes funny, I'll toss the bouncer a bottle every trip.
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 D
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:Rentals are money, too (Score:3, Informative)
Also, the versions of video releases sold to rental stores have a *huge* markup. I don't have much experience with the pricing scheme, but I stumbled across a vendor selling the rental version of one of the shitty Nemesis movies for something like $75. This is a movi
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:Rentals are money, too (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, this was 8 years ago; we didn't do DVDs and we had a decent lead time on most titles over the "street date".
Re:Rentals are money, too (Score:4, Informative)
The Blockbuster I worked in didn't function that way... Of course, this was 8 years ago
Ok, so I don't know exactly when it happened... but to quote from Blockbuster's 2000 10-K filing:
Since the late 1980s, revenue-sharing agreements have been available to home video chains and independent video dealers through deals brokered by distributors such as Rentrak Corporation and SuperComm, Inc.
So, 8 years ago would be 1997. My reading of BB's 2000 10-K is that revenue-sharing agreements were fairly new to BB then. Further down they indicate that a restructuring of their business model occured in 1998 and that they entered into revenue-sharing arrangements with six major studios. Anyway, you can always read it youself [10kwizard.com].
Anyway, it's shocking how much companies are forced to reveal in their SEC filings. But your 8-year-old data is, unsurprisingly, pretty much out of date.
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:It might not be hard to do... (Score:5, Informative)
The people who release these on the internet however, generally release them in a compressed form that requires decrypting the original and re-encoding it to some other format. (usually DivX).
Re:It might not be hard to do... (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know anything about this fun new scheme from Macrovision, but one reason you can't just make an exact duplicate of a retail DVD on normal consumer equipment is that the part of the disc where the CSS key lives is not writable on a DVD-ROM. Without this key, players cannot decrypt the content on the disc.
If you've got the equipment you can, of course, press proper discs... but do you?
Sadly, it is. (Score:4, Informative)
So you can't just do a bitwise copy, unless the source DVD isn't encrypted, you need to break the CSS encryption and write the unencrypted data to your destination disc.
Phil
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.
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: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: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: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?
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:5, Funny)
So download a ripped copy off Kazaa and hit pause in MPlayer. That way you can have all the time you need to ensure you're complying with the law.
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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: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'
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.
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:5, Informative)
That may be in the US, Canada, Europe, Japan and Korea.
But you have no idea what the piracy problem is like in, for example, Latin America or Southeast Asia. An original DVD will cost you about 15 USD. Why pay that, whan you can rent it for 3 USD, you ask? Well, why pay 3 USD for a rent, when you can own a not-so-shabby quality copy of it for the same price? 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.
Not that I favor Macrovision, tho...
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.
Re:Local pricing of DVDs (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:5, Informative)
Analog, digital, it doesn't matter, space-shifting is space-shifting. The law is clear, I can (privately) do what I like with the copy of a copyrighted work I purchased barring any additional restrictions I agreed to when I purchased it (EULA).
Call it an "exception" if you like but Fair Use is still a principle written into the law and supported by many court precedents.
Re:What I like about this: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 orig
Re:Keep your hands off my purchased media! (Score:3, Insightful)
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....
Re:It's like the theory of evolution... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's like the theory of evolution... (Score:5, Funny)
Actually it means quite a bit. The buggy stuff will go away and we'll be left with good functional software. They just made the QA process better
-nB
Re:It's like the theory of evolution... (Score:5, Funny)
Hehe. That was my line of thinking. The rest of us will continue using the stuff that works.
With DVD's pushing between 20 and 30 bucks and blanks under 50 cents each, you would be a fool not to make a copy general play. But that wasn't the real thing that pushed me over the edge to making a copy of every DVD I buy. It's the shit they pile on at the front of it.
At first it was insert dvd, get main menu, watch movie. Then it became insert dvd, get previews for upcoming movies, press menu button to get to menu. Then it became insert dvd, fastward through god damn fucking previews, main menu. Now on some its insert dvd, wait through ads, threats, preveiws you don't give a fuck about, can't fastword, menu button doesn't do shit.
GOD DAMN FUCKING BASTARDS!!! I KNOW WHAT FUCKING MOVIES ARE COMING, I JUST WANT TO WATCH THE FUCKING MOVIE!
While backing up the movie, I simply rip the shit out. God Damn Bastards
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
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
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
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
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 indu
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:It's like the theory of evolution... (Score:3, Interesting)
More returns/refunds? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:More returns/refunds? (Score:4, Informative)
Also, according to the article on the BBC [bbc.co.uk]:
Macrovision said the new technology will work in "nearly all" current DVD players when applied to the discs, but it did not specify how many machines could have a problem with RipGuard.
(this is in contrast to the 'maintaining compatibility with existing DVD players' comment in the article linked to by Slashdot).
Re:More returns/refunds? (Score:5, Informative)
Wal-mart actually isn't the bad guy on this one, the studios started refusing to credit Wal-mart for the returns unless they followed the above rules. Faced with eating the losses for the studio's moronic rules or implementing them what retailer is going to refuse? That's why you can't take a disc back that won't play in your player and get another movie. (And yes, they did this to all retailers at the same time, not just Wal-mart.)
Basically this new and improved Macrovision will play in all DVD players, because if it doesn't your only option will be to buy a new one that will play it. From the studio's perspective I'm sure they think this is a fair solution.
Re:More returns/refunds? (Score:3, Informative)
And yes I have done this in the past, got my money back, and had the packing slip sent to me. It wasn't wal-mart (it was best buy). Their other option was to credit me my money, and I keep the pro
Re:More returns/refunds? (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, Joe-Wally-World might not be able to do it, but talk to his manager. You will get your money back.
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.
First sharpies, now what? (Score:4, Funny)
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Now.... (Score:3, Funny)
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
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.
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.
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?
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..
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.
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.
"Releases new copy protection?" (Score:3, Funny)
97% (Score:3, Funny)
Either that's a Homer stat ("47.5% of all statistics are made up on the spot") or there are 33 DVD-copying apps out there and one of them is about to become much more popular than it was.
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
What about a case like Disney... (Score:5, Interesting)
97% of current DVD rippers 3% of future rippers (Score:4, Interesting)
Macrovision makes money, the ripping problem is not solved.
Analog Hole (Score:3, Funny)
Ummmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
25 cent DVDs? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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:Before you say you have a right to a backup... (Score:3, Informative)
What? no... (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I understand, telling someone how you did it is not illegal, but probably ill-advised. Telling someone how to do it is very likely protected speech. Giving him tools is clearly illegal, unless those tools have substantial non-circumvention use.
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: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!
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:Baby locksmiths? (Score:3, Insightful)
Pull your head out of your ass.
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.
Re:Something tells me... (Score:4, Funny)
Instantly, in fact.
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.
Re:PR0N, people. Don't forget the PR0N industry. (Score:3, Funny)
You must be hanging out on the wrong streets then.