News New copy-proof DVDs on the way?

Macrovision are attempting to slam the door in Ripper's faces with a new copy-protection system for DVDs that alledgedly make it impossible to *cough* Back-up *cough* the disc with current rip technology, yet will still play on existing DVD gear. This from News.com:

Content-protection company Macrovision is expected to release a new DVD copy-protection technology Tuesday in hopes of substantially broadening its role in Hollywood's antipiracy effort.

The company is pointing to the failure of the copy-proofing on today's DVDs, which was broken in 1999. Courts have ordered that DVD-copying tools be taken off the market, but variations of the software remain widely available online.

Macrovision's new "RipGuard DVD" technology can prevent much of the copying now being done with those tools and can help bolster studios' DVD sales even if it's not perfect, company executives say.

"Encryption standards either work or they don't," said Adam Gervin, Macrovision's senior director of marketing, "Now the cat's out of the bag. (DVD sales) are going to be one of the main sources of revenue for Hollywood for a long time, so why leave billions of dollars on the table when you can do something about it?"

The company could be hard pressed to break into an arena of the content protection market that has historically been managed by companies or industry groups closely associated with the Hollywood studios themselves. However, studios have been deeply concerned by the failure of today's DVD copy protection and might be willing to experiment with an alternative if it proves practical.

More here

Of course, the inability to rip these discs will last Ooo, lets say a couple of months. By then the Heir to DVD John's throne (If not Mr DeCSS himself) will have cracked the system and have made it public. Several high profile courtcases later, along with the de-rigur aqquitals and it's back to square one for the movie industry and Macrovision. Fast forward another 6 years, GOTO 10...

 

At the end of the day someone will crack it, no doubt.
And anything that can be played can be backed up, at worst in real time.

 

I agree, it made me laugh just reading the title, copy-proof, YEAHHHH RIGHT .

Death

 

Yeah the rippers will catch up within about a month. More worrying, though, is that, like all the botched 'copy protection' some studios are now putting on audio CDs (violating the red book standard, but that's for another thread...), this new tech is going to hamper some legitimate use of DVDs. I won't be at all surprised if we start hearing complaints that the new DVDs won't play in some older DVD players, or on certain DVD-ROM drives. You have to wonder why the studios won't play the long game - they see the short term benefit of putting another obstacle in the way of the crackers, who will inevitably and quickly get round it, but they ignore the bad publicity in the longer term, and the fact that any perceived benefit is soon neutralised.

The irony is, like copy protected CDs, people are going to have to resort to illegal copies with the copy protection stripped out, just to be able to use the product as intended!

 

Oops, seems I made a mistake in my above post. It transpires that Macrovision has discovered the Holy Grail! Silly me.

So their magical system doesn't inhibit the playback of the discs in any DVD player or PC drive, yet is able to fox the software that reads the same bitstream but dumps it to a DRM-free file on HDD rather than an MPEG decoder. Then I shall bow down and pray before the mighty altar of Macrovision.

Yeah, right.

 

I would be shocked at the very least if any type of encryption resulted in higher DVD sales. Personally I don't buy the "millions of people are stealing our movies instead of buying them" argument. Talk to any Joe Sixpack, and they'll tell you that they have no clue how to download movies. Most don't know how to download music either.

The people that are hardcore about downloading everything they own are not going to rush out to buy a movie because they can't download it. Christ, have you seen some of the movies people have on direct connect, or any other P2P program? Half of them are movies NO ONE would ever watch. It's more of a "I can so I will" attitude, not an "I have to see this movie, it's supose to be great" attitude.

The rental market is the obvious "sales loss" for movie companies, but I'm sure the number of people who copy every dvd they rent is also pretty low. The average person doesn't want to to spend possibly upwards of 4 hours copying a movie that they just rented. If the studios were THAT worried about people copying rental DVDs they would do the same thing they did with VHS. VHS movies for rental stores cost $150-$250, and until a few years ago you could not get most new releases unless you were willing to pay that much for yourself. For all I know you still can't get new releases, I haven't bought a VHS movie in years.

It seems like this whole situation is either the movie studios are thinking that every single person who downloads, or copies a rental would actually buy it if they couldn't get it for free, or they just don't like the fact that a relatively small number of people are getting to watch it for free.

Either way, they're out of their minds. If they stopped piracy 100% I'm sure they would see some kind of profit, but I doubt it would be anywhere near the "billions" that they say they are losing. If they are worried about people seeing it for free, they might as well ask how many people are going to be viewing the movie at the counter when you buy it, and charge accordingly. That'd be the day huh?

My two cents.

 

[way offtopic]
nitro, how did you get a custom title at 42 posts?
i wanna be a spidermodder
[/offtopic]

edit:forgot to post my ontopic stuff
i think i say this every time i come across a piracy thread in any forum. my cd collection is mostly pirated music(but i live in canada, so it's legal). Of the cd's i have downloaded, there are none i would have bought. they are for the most case not worth buying, i would have just listened to them over the radio, or maybe bought a couple single tracks off itunes. same thing with my movie collection: if i can't rip movies i rent to my hdd, that doesn't mean i would buy them, just that i would not watch the movies more than once.

 

End of the hour more like. I mean they could even set up some roundabout way where it plays and re-records the movie in realtime (or preferably faster, although doing it in the background while watching wouldn't bad either)

In fact, I have more trouble backing up my old macrovision-proteced VHS tapes (legitamately) than any DVD out there. Blame ATI's TV software for not ignoring it on incoming sources (but I found a loophole, still irritating).

I agree with supertoad though - there are very few things I've gotten that I would have bought if other... *ahem* alternatives weren't available. A couple but certainly not the majority. And most of that stuff is stuff that I simply can't find for the life of me.

 

I was reading through this thread, nodding and saying, "bingo!" to myself, and also lamenting the fact that I had no reason to post anything. But then I saw something that piqued my interest:

Could you explain how that works to me? I mean, I live in Australia and know nothing of Canadian copyright law, but it just doesn't sound right somehow.

Also, reading the full article, I get the impression that someone sat down and read the DVD movie specification, looked at a bunch of the code in DVD players going to market, and said, "Well heck! There's a whole bunch of extra info that most DVD players never bother checking, but it's used by DVD ripping software! Well, let's slap some bogus values in there and give them a hard time! I mean, it's not as if the ripping software programmers are going to update their programs so they don't rely on that data anymore!"

Nezuji

 

Canadian law says file sharing is legal. Heres a ecsert from a judge's ruling:

Full Story Here

 

well if a quick run about in dvd shrink wont work, time to drop it into the dvd player hooked to a tv tuner again.

 

i cant see this working as almost every countries copyright laws allow the backup of your movies/music/software. if we cant backup our things then they are breaking the countries federal laws and thus stopping us executing our rights.

my 2cents. damn i feel sorry for you guys in the UK

 

Australia's doesn't. And just because you are allowed too, does not necessarily mean that they have to let you have a way to do it.

 

Yeah, the situation in Canada is that you can legally share something you own a legitimate copy of, because the Canadian courts (sensibly in my opinion) have decided that the copyright infringement in downloading a track on P2P is committed by the downloader, not the uploader. The rationale is that it is the responsibility of each person using the copying device (in this case the P2P network) to ensure they do not infringe copyright - by instigating the download of a track he doesn't have a legal copy of, the downloader is the culprit.

So you can quite legally share your entire music collection in Canada, and there is a legitimate reason why you might do this - suppose you own an album on copy protected CD or on vinyl and you want to put it onto your iPod - you can either go to the hassle of hooking a stereo up to your PC line in and create an el crappo copy that way, or you could download someone else's digital copy on P2P.

However, supertoad, this does not go to say that owning pirated CDs in Canada is legal. That's just daft. You breached copyright by downloading them, and you continue to breach it by keeping them. The mere fact that under Canadian law the person you downloaded from did nothing wrong does not vindicate you.

 

Quite! You're only allowed to do anything becasue it hasn't been legislated against. All they have to do is introduce legislation and you can kiss goodbye to your 'rights'...

 

this is our new copy proof dvd it comes with 4 private security gaurds who hack off ne ones arms who try to opy it. And just in case they overpower the gaurds, we have substituted the DVD for an angle grinding disc, we'll get those barstards who are making copies of their own dvd yet! (rather than them who are just downloading it off the internet).

Macrovision are a bunch of **** the CD one they did i found so damn funny (whilst luckily i don't own a CD with it on) the idea that if u haddent paid for it, and pirated it, you could easily transfer it to your HD3, but NOOO, you paid for it (you fool!) so you can't do that (enless u have a green felt tip pen).

 

it wont be long after they release it that it will be cracked....

if it can be connected to a computer it can be hacked...

 

In Simple words. If it can be made, it can be broken..

Heh.. RipGuard? Vob_Blanker can probabloy do most the the DVDs right now...For backup purposes.

 

So i take it they didnt notice last time someone rolled out with a copy protection scheem that was "uncrackable" was beaten in about a week. Why dont they just get a god damned clue and admitt that most normal people cannot afford to buy lots of DVDs fof $20 each that may or may nott have a lot of goodie content...

Whatever, I know like always someone somewhere will find a way around like they ALWAYS do.

 

imo the only way they could get rid of copying films is to release a new disk format and dont release a optical drive for computers and only release a player for it so no one will be able to read it on a computer and therefore not be able to copy it