Ghostbusters Is First Film Released On USB Key 448
arcticstoat writes "Are you the USB keymaster? You could be soon if you pick up PNY's new 2GB USB flashdrive, which comes pre-loaded with Ghostbusters. A spokesperson for PNY explained that it comes with a form of DRM that prevents you from copying the movie. 'They have DRM protection,' explained the spokesperson, 'so customers can download the movie onto their laptop or PC if they wish, but they have to have the USB drive plugged in to watch the movie, as the DRM is locked in the USB drive.' The music industry has been playing around with USB flash drives for a few years now, but it hasn't been a massive success yet; will USB movies fare any better?"
Re:countdown (Score:2, Interesting)
Or... oh wait, Ghostbusters?
Re:countdown (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. There is no chance this DRM will work. My question is what are they afraid of? Ghostbusters has been on the pirate bay since at least 2005. I'm sure it was on Limewire and Kazaa before that. If they are testing to see if this DRM will work, they already know the answer. It works OK for the non-technical folk, and has no chance in hell for the people who would actually want to buy a movie on USB stick (if it didn't have DRM, at least). This just seems like one of the most useless ideas Hollywood has had.
Re:One positive (Score:5, Interesting)
How is this better than DVD? (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
No novelty packaging.. fail! (Score:3, Interesting)
I can see this take off actually, the product allows for all sort of novelty packaging and product shapes. Forget about browsing the alphabet of your closet to find Spider-Man, just find the Spider-Man shaped USB key! Collecting large quantities might make organised storage a bit of a challenge though.
Does USB mass storage provide a way to ensure read-only access though? I wouldn't want some virus to have the potential to delete my porn, erm, Star Trek collection.
Re:countdown (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I'm guessing they're just wanting to see what people will do. For that purpose, an already widely "pirated" film would be ideal.
The model of distributing the film on a USB key that serves as a DRM dongle is very curious. From a consumer point of view, this looks a lot like the way DVDs are supposed to work: the material is tied to the delivery vehicle. But -- you can also copy the movie to your hard disk, although it is still tied to the key. So, it's kind of an answer to iTunes, where you have a master key to your entire collection.
The USB format allows you to do kinds of cryptographic protections you couldn't do in a DVD. If the system requires Vista style DRM protections in the OS, then cracking the protection would be considerably harder as long as you can't just copy the file onto a hard disk. Allowing the user to copy the file to disk makes this a very interesting test. Clearly, this means that crackers will be able to put the entire DRM protocol under a microscope.
Maybe this is even what is intended.
There are a number of possible outcomes, all of which are interesting to a company that is evaluating a technology:
(1) The play from USB option is proven insecure.
(2) The play from disk option is proven insecure.
(3) One of [1,2], but not both.
(4) Both of [1,2], but sufficiently inconvenient to deter casual infringers.
etc.
Re:terrible idea (Score:3, Interesting)
We all make our choices. (Score:4, Interesting)
DRM, in this case, is a choice between DRM'd content and no content at all. I'd rather have DRM'd content than none.
I, on the other hand, would rather do with none than with DRM.
I made that choice when the DVDs supplanted videotape and didn't buy DVD movies - or buy or rent any movies at all - until after CSS was cracked and the movie industry gave up on their attempts to stuff that genie back into the bottle. No blu-ray players for me, either. Stopped buying CDs, too, when they started experimenting with the early computer-speaker-blowing "copy protection" that corrupted the data and depended on the error correction on players to recover the music (and thus corrupted it when you got real errors from a dirty disk) and never really got back into purchasing new music after that.
Never actually MADE a backup copy. And never downloaded a "pirated" song or movie, either. I just don't buy encumbered stuff.
Instead I found other ways to amuse myself. (For instance: The amazing number and variety of animals outside the place on the high desert put on a continuous show that's quite entertaining - especially when I flush the well and create a puddle that draws them in from miles around. And there's lots of amusement on the net that is not "pirated" copyrighted content.)
Interestingly, I don't really miss the corporate "content". Either the quality took a nosedive around that time or the product stopped matching my (quite broad) tastes. (Though from what I hear of some local bands it's more the former than the latter.)
We all make our choices.
Re:terrible idea (Score:3, Interesting)
You still haven't explained how it can take only six seconds for you to "put the disc in the media center I built" and then "walk by and grab the disc off the tray and put it in my library".
Unless you also built a stasis booth into your living room there's going to be a little bit more time in between those two events.
Re:terrible idea (Score:3, Interesting)
USB keys are definitely a terrible idea, especially if you're required to have the USB key plugged in to watch the movie. The DRM is going to kill this idea pretty damn quickly; I know I certainly won't be buying. Also, 2GB is barely enough capacity to distribute a film with a reasonable bit-rate and resolution. It's less than DVD and even with h.264 instead of MPEG2, it's not going to be as good.
I've thought for a while that selling DRM-free movies on 32GB SD cards would be a better solution than Blu-ray, with the ability to transfer the movie onto a hard drive. Imagine walking into a store, plugging in your own reusable SD card into computer kiosk, selecting the movie you want, paying and having it loaded onto your card for you. (This could be done over the internet too, but it may not be practical yet given that not everyone has high speed broadband, overly restrictive usage caps in some countries, and the fact that ISPs are already complaining about having insufficient capacity to deal with the demand.) Then, when you get home, plug your SD card into your media centre, complete with several terabytes of storage and copying it.
I know there's no way of this happening in the short term thanks to DRM and the relatively high cost of setting up a multi-terrabyte storage system with redundancy (e.g. RAID or something like Drobo) compared with the cost of, say, a blu-ray player. But DRM completely failed for the music industry and it's only a matter of time before it fails for the movie industry too, and the cost of storage is constantly falling.
Re:terrible idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really. Bypassing digital rights management is prohibited _except_ as provided for fair use (and a select few other uses). What's prohibited is for anyone else to help you in any way to crack the DRM yourself. So you don't lose your rights to fair use, they just prevent nearly everyone from exercising their rights by making the hurdle to use nearly insurmountable (personally cracking the system and coding the decryption software from scratch). The good thing is that it's not illegal to use someone else measure, just that it is illegal to provide such a measure. That's how Slysoft gets away with it (anydvd and anydvdhd, both of which decrypt content quite well) - they're located in Antigua. They can't sell it to you in the united states, but it is perfectly legal to buy it. Since Antigua and the US have been involved in a monumental pissing match of late, they aren't interested in helping enforce any US laws.
Re:terrible idea (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that Hollywood isn't going to listen to you. They think that movie files can be DRM'd the same way as physical disks can and so they demand it.
The problem is they are pissing in their own pool. The digital download scene is a wasteland of proprietary DRM schemes, proprietary players, proprietary devices attached to proprietary services. The result is consumers are scared, confused and angry. You might need one device / player for one movie bought from one place and another device / player for another. You might even discover that your movie cannot be transferred or doesn't even work because the service was cancelled. It's happened with PlaysForSure and might happen to Amazon Unbox too some day. Only an idiot would try and build up a collection of titles amongst this chaos.
Look at what proprietary did to the music scene. Even Apple has begun to backdown from it and offer unencumbered downloads instead.
The industry really needs to adopt a single common file format, preferably with passive watermarking and no restrictions on usage. The result would be a massive upsurge in spending. Consumers would be confident in the format because they can purchase and manage their collection from anywhere. Consumers also get a better deal because stores are forced to compete on price and service. Any losses due to piracy would be dwarfed by legitimate sales. If they must implement a DRM, it should be one which is managed by an independent entity, allows fair use, and protects the consumer if a store dies or cancels its service.