Disney Encrypting Screener DVDs to Prevent Piracy

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."

Ah well

[Data Link Layer]

Disney realeases bad movies anyways.

geez, come on...

[clambake]

Just put a big, slightly visible watermark across the entire screen of the name of the guy you sent the DVD to. Like, just a 4% opaque "EBERT AND ROPER" diaganal across the screen. Then when it's turned to video, it'll either have to be blurred out, and thur ruin the film, or you've caught the guy whol let it out of his hands... How hard is it people!?

Idea

[smallguy78]

Here's a novel idea, instead of fannying about trying to stop people copying your films (which people always will), you join the 21st century and make your films distributed on an internet download site, with a reduction of $2 on the cinema price.

It's a barmy idea that Apple and Napster tried, but it might just work!

Not serious...

[278MorkandMindy]

They don't think this measure will have any effect do they? Really? I have a MUCH better suggestion. Don't send them out. It is a win/win situation. No-one gives them bad reviews and they strike a blow against piracy! /cough/ Spend more time thinking about how to make a movie I want to buy, then make it a reasonable price...

Better use for money

[jimsteri]

I would believe they would make more profit if they used the money they use for developing copy protection for actually creating better content. These protections never work anyway..

So the Academy is the pirate syndicate?

[The Wooden Badger]

This is really funny. Disney is basically saying that the academy is the biggest problem in the whole movie copying/pirating thing. Can this be seen as anything but a cheap shot at the Academy? Sure they're thwarting piracy. How easy is it to get your hands on one of these bad boys to begin with? If I put my mind to it I think I could figure out who one person is who would actually get one of these DVDs and that's because my brother taught the guy golf lessons a few years back. (I got to see Titanic on VHS when it was still in the theaters and I'm glad I didn't have to pay to see that steaming pile.) The odds of actually knowing who would have one of these and actually be able to get your hands on it is just about impossible. All I can figure is that there is either A. an extremely unlikely chance of stealing a delivery of a DVD and pirating it, or B. the people that are intended to receive them are considered by Disney to be entirely untrustworthy. Disney has to send them or risk not getting any awards, so instead they blow a load of money to make themselves look like a bunch of paranoid idiots. I think I'll go out on a limb and say that Disney isn't going to earn any more awards for future movies. I guess on the bright side Disney isn't really trying to win any awards for the movies they put out lately.

Re:How is this a solution?

[mwvdlee]

Since we're talking about screeners, are there even menus on these DVDs?

Re:geez, come on...

[Mr_Tulip]

2 problems with this:
1)The DVD could have been intercepted in the production stage, so the recipients name is purely accidental/random.
2)The DVD could be intercepted at the delivery stage, which may at least tell you which postal office is ripping off the studio.

While having a dedicated DVD player solves these problems to some extent, it is only a matter of time before someone manages to crack the encryption or get hold of an original Cinea model to do the ripping.

Re:Disney?

[DrSkwid]

yeah, no one made any $ out of selling copies of Monters Inc. at swap meets

Re:waht about

[bhtooefr]

What is the quality of the watermark?

Is it a durable watermark? I'm thinking that a lossy compression scheme could damage it very badly.

Re:My thought

[-brazil-]

The issue is that the recipients of these DVDs are reviewers from which you want positive reviews of your movie. Making them jump through hoops for that doesn't sound like a very smart move.

OTOH, it's apparently exactly these screeners that are a common source of high-quality pre-cinematic-release-bootlegs, which must be by far the most painful (for the makers) kind, so it's understandavle that they'd risk a backlash from the reviewers to prevent them.

Re:Missing something

[-brazil-]

You guess wrong - at least where the next generation of hardware is concerned. The data between your HDTV and the player will be encrypted, and the player will refuse to work (or only output a low-res version of the movie) when connected to a display that does not authenticate itself. A player that does not do this will be made illegal (won't be allowed to use some of the patented key technolgies). Same with the HDDVD/BlueRay format war: the technological merits are irrelevant, it's all about which fromat can offer the most restrictive and unbreakable DRM.

Re:geez, come on...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post is good. It's really too bad YOU're too stupid to spell a 3-letter word correctly, it would really improve YOUr credibility. YOU should really think about it.

Are the films really that desirable?

[Zog The Undeniable]

Which self-respecting pirate wants to watch saccharine Disney material anyway? If they fsck up the Narnia books the same way as they usually do with existing literature, I shall not be happy.

Re:waht about

[maxwell demon]

What about inserting/deleting single frames at well-known (to Disney, of course not to the receiver) positions before/after cuts? There's no way the person copying it could know if the cut should have been one frame earlier or later. Moreover this is likely to be relatively robust to recompression (yes, there may be some dropped frames, but unless it's a very bad quality recording, the probability that more than one or two are exactly at movie cuts should be very low.
Now you may claim that it's possible to randomly cut frames at any cut on recompression. But that assumes the one copying it knows or at least suspects that information may be coded in this way (I'm sure Disney will never say in which way they watermark those movies).
I'm sure there are other simple ways to robustly hide data in a movie which one finds with very little thinking. If several of them are used, I'm sure almost anyone wanting to remove the watermark will miss at least one of them, unless he is very well informed about the watermarking used.
Of course with enough knowledge of the type of watermarking, one can destroy any watermark (simply overwrite it with a different one).

Re:Idea

[bgog]

Dude, they arn't talking about regular DVDs. They are talking about 'Screeners' These are DVDs of the movies that are nomiated for an Oscar. The members of the acadamy then watch them and vote. Most of the movies have NOT been released on DVD yet.

The trouble they have with these is that people leak them. When their movie is released on the internet 2 months before the DVD is available to buy it can really hurt them. So they have been playing with stuff like digital watermards and stuff JUST for the screeners.

Now I'm with most slashdotters when it comes to fair-use. I don't want my damn DVDs encrypted or copy protected. Not because I want to steal them but because I may want to back them up or put them on my computer. Anyway I'm with the studio's when it comes to the screeners. They have sent pre-release versions of thier product to a limited set of reviewers and they don't deserve to have their movies released prematurely onto the internets.

Re:How is this a solution?

[squoozer]

You state that losing the menus is the most important failing of recoridng from the output. While I admit that it may be considered a failing for some personally I quite like it when the menus are stipped off. It makes a DVD simplicity itself. You put the disk in teh drive... that's it. The film just plays. It's really quite relaxing in fact.

Screenings

[pev]

So, they can't deliver screenings on DVD securely any more without resorting to draconian measures. So what? Why can't they just go back to the days when you had a company rep with the film showing it in a private theatre to a collected audience. It was social, people could actually _talk_ to each other about it and they could have the rep answer viewers questions and no hope of the screeners geting duplicated bar shaky-hand-cam action. I would theorise that this is because they save a bit of cash by doing it via mail with a DVD instead. But they claim their losing millions due to the pirated pre-release getting out?! Do the math!

~Pev

Re:waht about

[Tim C]

That's true, but it may also put the dampener on the groups if the individuals recieving the screeners are more reluctant to supply them/rips in case they do get fingered.

If a rip was easily tracable back to me if the group stuffed up stripping out the watermark (or just lied about intending to do it), I'd think long and hard about taking the risk.

Oh, spare me!

[mhollis]

I have worked in television for over 20 years and during part of that time worked in a facility that duplicated screeners.

I think everyone needs to realize that the production of these illegally pirated films from screeners is an inside job. Unless Disney wants to set up and maintain a secure duplication facility somewhere, staffed only by trusted individuals who are constantly monitored for theft, there will always be those who "make a few copies for their friends."

Disney isn't about to do this because Disney is in the filmmaking and entertainment business, not the mass duplication and standards-conversion business. And it is from those facilities that the content leaks out. Try as they might, unless they spend a whole lot of money that, on its face does not please their shareholders, they're pretty much stuck with these inside jobs.

As to the high-quality bootleg copies, that tends to be the result of running an "extra" master of the film transfer and is either an organized crime issue or "yet another inside job."

Re:How is this a solution?

[ZachPruckowski]

Sounds too complicated. I think a lot of people miss a big point with the electronic security. There is need to make security uncompromisable. Once they simply make things too difficult, no one will bother. If it took getting two reviewer's copies and doing hours of digital editing to remove the watermark, as well as the hours of physically recording (as opposed to ripping) the DVDs, you're gonna lose a lot of potential copiers, simply because it is too much work, which ultimately stymies the interest in piracy, since it is harder to download and there is less choice among potential qualities and formats.

Re:So the Academy is the pirate syndicate?

[scsscs]

This would be insightful if not for the fact that Oscar DVD screeners do get leaked and are released by groups on to the Internet every year. It's not as impossible as you think.

Re:How is this a solution? - It is READ BELOW

[meatplow]

Actually, as someone who is familiar with this 'technology', you couldn't be more wrong.

Take the DVD, encode it to 80kbs (mpeg4 or whatever), back to vhs, back to 80kbs (divx or whatever), run a wipe and eliminate over 50% of the picture.
If you do that, forensically it can still be identified. Multiple images in EVERY frame. Potentially unique to every disc.
It is trackable back to the source.

And you got modded up to 3 ???? Wow. Did any of your comments come from facts? or did you just make it all up ?

Meatplow