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."
How is this a solution? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nasty Precedent (Score:1, Interesting)
Missing something (Score:4, Interesting)
Better idea! (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone care anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)
If so, congrats Disney. In which case from my own experience, it must be working. You don't pirate what you don't want.
Re:How is this a solution? (Score:5, Interesting)
I presume the output from the beast contains your machine identity. A pirate copy would have a tracable name, address, phone number, etc. The studio would know which player and which disk was compromised. Think it as a personalized version of the movie with the screener brown dots. The dots would not just be print copy number. It would be everything that says arrest John Doe at 1212 Main street for making this pirate copy.
Re:Copy protection is pointless (Score:3, Interesting)
It is quite easy to include some "watermark" feature that will make the camcorder refuse to record the TV image, or make it tracable to the origin somehow.
Compare with fladbed scanners that refuse to scan money.
Weak rings (Score:3, Interesting)
Somewhere into the DVD player the content gets unencrypted: there you can copy it with, at worst, some soldering skills.
Somewhere the content is completely clear text before being encrypted: someone working there could access and copy it.
Movie and music companies can loose more money because of product quality than piracy. And becuase of high investments in screener encryption!
My father was sent one of these (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not impressed.
Ours is actually connected with a composite video lead rather than scart and every few minutes black bands begin to appear across the picture, which I assume is some sort of an anti-copying measure but also somewhat ruins the film.
The machine was difficult to set up, requiring registration, which is a pain, especialyl when you have to call a call-centre which is only open during US West Coast office hours. (which isn't really anyone's fault). The biggest issue, however, is the fact that, to my knowledge, he hasn't actually recieved any films which need to be watched using it.
As an ordinary DVD player it's worse than the first one that we ever had - it takes a good 30 seconds to start up and then obeys all the 'do-not-skip' tags, which isn't too bad for screeners because they generally go straight to the film, but with ordinary DVDs it's a torturous wait every time you want to watch it, at least you could fast forward with VHS.
Basically, the machines are a pain for everyone and it was a really bad idea on the part of Disney.
Re:My father was sent one of these (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate to post twice but i have a question.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Secure delivery (Score:1, Interesting)
Losing the menus is a plus point (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Ah well (Score:5, Interesting)
Disney realeases bad movies anyways.
Disney just wants to make a profit. They have their reputation from the old days to rest on, and now they pretty much get by on name recognition. They make (most) movies on the cheapest budget and target audiences such as young teenagers that don't know any better. These young men and women drag their parents along to the theaters and the DVD stores to spend money. Disney makes tons of cash, and everything works fine for them.
This is not always true, however. For being cliched and unoriginal (based off an amusement park ride and every other pirate movie), Pirates of the Carribean was, in my opinion, an excellent movie. Besides outstanding acting and directing, the one man responsible for it not sucking was Jerry Bruckheimer. As far as producing goes, that man has the Midas touch. While I think there are too many CSI shows and they get old, he still does a good job producing them. He did a good job on Pirates of the Carribean. I haven't checked, but I hope he produces the sequel too.
Re:Idea (Score:2, Interesting)
The fact that this got moderated up is an excellent demonstration of how terribly broken Slashdot's moderation is, and how misdirected the Slashdot groupthink is.
This story is about screen pre-releases that are sent to industry insiders, often before the movie is even in the theaters. Basically it's a pirate's dream come true - perfect quality (no shoddy videocamera work), and it's a 0-day prerelease. It has nothing at all to do with consumer DVDs. Obviously they want to protect these. All of the standard anti-[anti-piracy] tongue-waging and moralizing is out of place here, as this has 0 impact on the everyday consumer (well - unless you're a 0-day thief).
Hell, why don't they make 'em free while they're at it! Then there's be no piracy!
To move to the topic of general piracy (nothing to do with the story, but it's what made several people strangely moderate up your post), and to generalize, there are two primary kinds of pirates: there are the hardcore pirates who think the world owes them, and it's their god given right to pirate DVDs (they'll have the long littany of reasons why they should be able to pirace. The most humorous is the paradoxical "movies and music are so terrible anyways, that they don't deserve my money"), then there are the everyday keeping-up-with-the-Joneses types. The latter kind is actually vastly more common than the former, and they pirate simply because they see everyone else doing it, and they don't want to be the sucker (the power of social proof and context).
For the latter half you just need some half-decent "make it some trouble" measures, as well as some legal deterrents. Already the RIAAs lawsuits have scared a large number of people away from the warez scene (which, incidentally, thins the herd and makes the hardcore pirates more visible), but even then the industry was tempered in that it said that it was only going after major distributors - if they randomly went after some guy who had one song or movie available for upload (usually inadvertently courtesy of their tool, as most keeping-up pirates just want to leech, get their stuff and get out), the warez scenes would absolutely dry up.
BTW: I can order most movies through my digital cable box, including new DVD releases. It's vastly easier than downloading one from the net. Does that satisfy your anti-piracy requirements?
My watermark solution as a filmmaker (Score:3, Interesting)
However, that said, the concern I have is early, unfinished copies of the film getting out, or rushes, or other intermediate stuff that would diminish the enjoyment of the final product by being released early.
So I have an elegant an unobtrusive solution to track the few copies that people are working with as a matter of necessity:
My watermark is done per copy so it is unique, and involves changing three to four pixels only on one frame of the film in minor ways so they are not easily visible to the human eye when watching. Shift the colour of some pixels by only a couple of points, such that they are damn close to the real thing, but obvious if you know which frame to check and where, when blown up to 500% or so of original size.
Then simply keep a database of the "security dots" and where they are in each copy, eg:
45332 700 431 0 0 8
The above is frame 45332, X position 700, Y position 431, and the colour in RGB format. Three or four of those and a list of who has that copy, and I'm 100% able to figure out who leaked without degrading the picture in any visible way.
It isn't intrusive like CAP codes, and keeps everyone involved in working on the project from leaking copies as they know it can be traced back to them.
Why can't Hollywood studios do it the same way?
Re:As someone who watches screeners... (Score:3, Interesting)
N+1 Algorithm (Score:4, Interesting)
"N+1" refers to how you are defeating a cross-tagging system against N people by having N+1 collaborate. For simple per-person tagging, N=1, so you need 2 people to collaborate to remove the tag. The third person is only there to prove that there are no more tags.
There are two ways you can try to defeat this. One is to make N quite large, for example by putting tags that identify pairs of viewers, triples of viewers, etc. that would catch people collaborating.
The other way is to make the tag part of the encoding process, such that (almost) the whole disk changes for each viewer. The problem with this is that MPEG2 encoding takes many hours, and would have to be done for each viewer individually. Also, it would need to be sophisticated, as it would have to survive recompression. The pirates would be able to spot this, however, and do a frame-by-frame (+/- a few frames to thwart frame addition/deletion) comparison and randomize or average anything that changes.
Personally, if I were a recipient of such screeners *and* I wanted to pirate them, I would give the disk to someone and stage a break-in of my house.
Melissa