‘Stuffing in algorithms’
p2pnet.net News:- “Over time, I believe that technological innovation is the best way to go. All of our companies are working very closely with the best brains in the information technology industry right now to try to see if there’s some way that we can deal with the piracy problem.
“I have said, technology is what causes the problem, and technology will be the salvation of the problem. I really do believe we can stuff enough algorithms in a movie that only the dedicated hackers can spend the time and effort to try to plumb through those 1,000 algorithms to try to find a way to beat it. In time, we’ll be able to do this, because I have great faith in the technological genius that’s out there.”
So says Jack Valenti in J.D. Lasica’s interview with him featured in Engadget here.
Valenti ‘retired,’ recently, handing over to Dan Glickman. However, he’s still being widely quoted as the president of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and Glickman has yet to surface as the official MPAA mouthpiece.
Be that as it may, Valenti also says, “I’ve seen camcorded movies that are uploaded to the Net and they are very, very watchable. A lot of camcording is taking advantage of the fact you can go into a theater and plug in to one of those sound systems you have in the armchair for hard-of-hearing people. And the sound comes over crystal clear – beautiful sound. These camcorders are small, they’re digital, and they do a remarkable job of duplicating the film.”
Has he expressed his views to Sony, one of the MPAA’s owners, we wonder? Sony’s electronics manufacturing arm makes a lot of money selling easy-to-conceal but extremely functional camcorders, not to speak of cheap burners. And the big computer makers out there routinely produce systems with built-in high end DVD and CD gear.
Lasica quotes Valenti as saying if everything stayed as it is, the studios could probably survive it. But, “I visited the labs at Caltech, and they’re running an experiment called FAST where they can bring down a DVD-quality movie in 5 seconds. The director told me it could be operative in the market in 18 months.
“Well, my face blanched.”
He also says, “Some new business model may want to put a movie out on the Internet just after it leaves theatrical exhibition. We can’t afford to let that be copied at that juncture because it’s the [home entertainment] aftermarket where you make your profits.”
Home entertainment is where the profits are, according to Valenti? That’s particularly poignant considering, “We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine.”
The words are Valenti’s and they were uttered in 1981 when the entertainment industry was being threatened by the arrival of, Yes, the Betamax VCR.
The Engadget feature also quotes him as saying, “I hope that within a year the finest brains in the IT community will come up with this stuff. A lot of people are working on it – IBM, Microsoft and maybe 10 other companies, plus the universities of Caltech and MIT, to try to find the kind of security clothing that we need to put around our movies.”
In other words, instead of developing technology to benefit the world at large, Hollywood has the high tech sectors and leading US teaching universities researching and developing ‘product’ to protect and enhance the entertainment industry’s bottom line.
Read the interview and weep.
August 31st, 2004 at 5:11 pm
The part about home entertainment profits contrasted to the 1981 utterings is a classic
Got the best brains working on protection for digital video files? From their view, DRM is necessary for some protection from copying. From my view, there is a very fine line between necessary DRM and DRM that crosses the line and drives away the consumer irreparably.
Some reasons why Movielink doesn’t work:
1) According to one PC World editor, the files are between 500-600 MB. Last time I checked on ‘illegal’ networks, the minimum ‘modern’ size of a movie averaged 700 MB. And the resolution on these networks is far better.
2) There are no restrictions on the ‘illegal’ versions, so people can do as they please with these things.
3) These ‘illegal’ files are uploaded usually 1 month before DVD release.
That means there is a ‘weak link’ in the chain of movie production. If these guys could finish the transfer to DVD and more or less finalize the disc w/o extras (that come later for retail release), and release that version using XviD’s maximum quality setting (quantizer = 1.00), properly cropped w/ correct AR of course, they would be releasing a file indistinguishable from DVD at half the bitrate and half the size for those with broadband who don’t care about the extras and want the movie fast (and have their own burners). Oh yeah, XviD is open-source and doesn’t (afaik) use protection mechanisms. Oh well, so much for that idea.
August 31st, 2004 at 5:54 pm
Hi: If you wrote the post above, could you please contact me at jon[at]p2pnet[dot]net?
Gracias and Cheers! : )
August 31st, 2004 at 8:23 pm
It only takes one person to write a program to bypass the algorithms and then the program is released and it spreads like wildfire.
September 2nd, 2004 at 9:41 am
when did Valenti say what?