Disney Encrypting Screener DVDs to Prevent Piracy 262
Sascha J. writes "Disney is continuing their war against piracy. To their Oscar reviewers they now send out special encrypted DVDs, which can be played only on a DVD player of the "Cinea" series. From the article: "The DVD players are encoded with recipients' names, and screeners sent to those people are specifically encrypted so they can be seen only on those particular DVD players." Yet, Disney is alone on this. Sony and Universal Pictures said they won't follow that step."
Re:geez, come on... (Score:5, Informative)
another option is to use the same amount of opaqueness and put a block covering up the text making it just a rectangular block. No need for 2 feeds in this one...just a good algo...
Besides people really dont mind having blocked out patches on video so much...
a lot of people download even telesync versions of movies which are missing parts of the screen...
Re:How is this a solution? (Score:2, Informative)
Nothing, but there are a few deterrents:
-A small reduction in quality (Boo hoo)
-The time it takes to play the whole thing, then recompress it. (Of course, you could just do the first while you're watching it, and the second overnight.)
-Much higher chance of having interrupts, skips, etc. (Blah)
-You lose the DVD menus! (This would actually matter.)
Basically, the same reason people choose to disable the copy-protection on those new CDs that Sony has been putting out, rather than playing-and-recording. Plus the DVD menus.
waht about (Score:3, Informative)
So when disney finds these on the net, its a simple matter of decoding and looking up the watermark to find out who to nail...whereas before they had no idea who released it onto the net.
Re:My thought (Score:5, Informative)
Re:waht about (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Missing something (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How is this a solution? (Score:5, Informative)
With those companies as the basis for my statements, the screeners for direct-to-video films and about-to-hit-DVD films are fully-featured with all of the bonus materials and menus that you'd get if you purchased the DVD. Some things may change when the DVD hits stores (bonus features added, changed menus, things of that nature), but generally, they're the same thing you'd purchase from your retailer of choice.
Screener copies of movies that are currently in theaters or are about to hit theaters are bare-bones. You get the typical piracy warning before jumping to a very simple menu (with nothing more than "Play Movie" as an option), or it goes straight from the warning into the movie.
Re: well, not exactly (Score:2, Informative)
Watermarks are more of a problem. I don't think I'd let a screener DVD out my door without comparing it to another screener DVD for watermarks. The biggest problem is that you aren't supposed to know if a watermark is even there without knowing its design. That means you can't really ever be sure that there isn't watermarking unless you compare two sources.
Digital watermark, rather (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the wonders of modern technology suggest a rather simpler solution. Digital watermarking [wikipedia.org] of video streams is a fairly well-developed field, with several companies offering working products. The "invisible" watermark is some extra bits of "payload" added by some transformation of the images -- nothing which perceptibly degrades image quality -- and can be recovered again by some simple transformation of the data.
Algorithms exist which embed this information "visually", in the sense that it is distirbuted across the whole or much of the image, and it survives "classic" image processing such as resizing, lossy compression, and recolouration of the image (not to any degree, of course, but you'd be ruining the movie before you got rid of the watermark), rather than just being a few specific bits which can be deleted or edited. Some of these techniques are also intended to be tamper-proof, in the sense that without the watermark-creator's key it is very hard to know how to remove or alter the watermark.
Such a watermark would seem to be much better than a glaring visual signal, for tracking down the originator of a leaked copy. It wouldn't stop viewers enjoying their leaked copies, but the leaker could be held accountable.
Re:How is this a solution? (Score:4, Informative)
You miss the point - these screener DVDS are *very* limited in number - they are DVDs sent off to the people who vote in the Oscars. Each of these is then watermarked with the name of the person who recieves the DVD for reviewing. Then if copies do surface then Disney can analyse the footage, say - it is you who has copied it! and maybe sue the dude to whom the DVD was provided to and at least not give them anymore.
Disney have now gone a step further by saying it will only play on one range of DVD players. This is probably because the last time they caught someone for bottlegging stuff, the actor Carmine Caridi [imdb.com] had 'lent' the DVDs to a friend who he thought was just a film buff.
Looking it up on the web the whole story has a tragic end [afterdawn.com] for the pirate involved.
So, yeah they can be copied and distributed. But it makes it too traceable, too much hassle and a recipient has too much to loose, to make the whole thing worthwhile.
Re:I work for Disney: an Open Letter (Score:3, Informative)
An old and tired troll. [google.com]
Re:How is this a solution? (Score:3, Informative)
Disney knows that this doesn't stop things from ULTIMATELY being leaked, but it does slow down releases. Most leaks, I assume, since I'm guilty of EXACTLY this, come from people like me. I have a family member who is a reviewer. Every year around this time EVERY movie worth ANY Oscar consideration (and quite a few that aren't) get dropped on my family member's desk in a nice studio-copy DVD. Some silver pressed, early store copies - some DVD-Rs, but still from the studio.
I watch these moves. I take these movies home. I even show them to my friends. In the case of movies with "Christmas" release dates (which exist only to get them in this year's Oscar consideration - like last year's Million Dollar Baby and Life Aquatic), I've been known to keep a copy for myself.
While this new method probably wouldn't stop me, it is going to stop a lot of casual one-off DVD pre-release pirates from getting movies onto ye ole intraweb. It might even slow down one of the big release groups because their "inside guy" who's too cool to list in the .NFO file doesn't give his copy to someone like me this year...and I've got better things to do with my time than upload DVDs to Usenet.
This year, nobody gets one of my Disney movies and posts it - because I won't be watching one, because it's too much of a PITA. It'll still get reviewed by my reviewer family member though - if they send 'em one of them thar fancy players, that is.
Re:Missing something (Score:2, Informative)
It means that any incentive to leak the screener will disappear because they will be caught by the embedded watermark (presumably added by the special DVD player? Or maybe that is to stop them using the 'my son's friend's dog's niece did it, not me!' excuse).
I'm actually not against this to be honest. Disney want to stop pre-release screeners getting online because they do hurt their bottom line and it is a nasty breach of trust. They'll do this by making it not easy (special player required) and if it is done, they'll find the leakers (via the watermark), sue them, and remove them from their preview mailings. Any other leaker will be put off doing the same.
It won't stop actual end-user DVD releases being copied and put online. However the worry is that the technology will drop in price until all players will embed a watermark of that player's serial number. Meaning we shouldn't ever register these types of products with the manufacturer
* i'm assuming here that Disney is actually putting a per-reviewer watermark, or that this special DVD player will add it, onto the DVDs they send out. Otherwise this system is rather pointless, as you point out
Re:geez, come on... (Score:3, Informative)
For each color channel, the watermarked value is given by:
which means that
where Original_value is the numerical value of the channel before watermarking, Watermarked_value is the numerical value of the channel after watermarking, and Watermark is the numerical value of the watermarks corresponding channel that is being combined with this channel.
All this means that a static watermark image is easy to remove, as long as you know what it is. In a 2-hour movie, there's 172 800 frames, so you have plenty of data to comb through with statistical analysis or whatever - simply find places where the value of some channel suddenly changes in every frame. And once you have the watermark figured out, it is a simple matter of basic mathemathics to remove it.
It is impossible to make a watermark that would work against people who know how it works. After the first person gets busted, the prosecution will have to show him how their watermark works if they want to use it as evidence against him (IANAL, so I could be wrong in this; but it seems to me that is impossible to give a fair trial without letting the defendant defend himself, which he can't do if he doesn't know what evidence is stacked against him). After that, every hacker in the world will start figuring out clever ways around it.
Not hard at all; you just need to be smarter than everyone else in the world combined ;).