The first thing to consider is that all DRM systems are at some level bogus – they are forced to rely on obsfucation by the simple fact that every piece of information needed to display the “protected” content must be available to the player. All they can do is make it hard to find – but if someone looks hard enough, they will work it out.

The designers of the original DVD CSS recognised this, which is why they provided a table of different keys for different players – this meant that if one key was compromised, it could be removed from later discs without affecting any other player. Of course, this didn’t work in the end, since the crypto was weak – as soon as one key was known, it provided enough material (the decrypted title key) for a known plaintext attack on all the other keys, and the entire system was compromised.

So this is just an attempt to add another layer of obsfucation on top of an already cracked framework – but with the additional restriction that it has to be capable of operating with all the players that are currently on the market. In effect, it has to work around holes or grey areas in the spec – and the DVD consortium did a sufficently good job of writing it that I don’t think there are that many of them.

Of course, the more cynical might suspect that this is just an attempt by MVSN to distract attention from the fact that their biggest single source of income (the copy prevention system that’s built into VCRs by legal mandate in the US) is slowly generating less and less income as the number of VCRs sold decreases. Add to this that SafeDisc is getting less popular with the publishers (mostly because it now has a lot of people trying to crack each new release – some of who are very very good. Even a well designed system will have problems standing up to that sort of concerted attack…) and you can see why the company wants some good PR. I personally think that it’s going to end up blowing up in their faces, though – the first release to use this technology will almost certainly end up ripped and posted far quicker than it otherwise would have, just on general principles.

Copy protection is a waste of time, money, and effort.

They’re just trying to mint money using the entertainment industry as the suckers.

Cheers!

The fix, rip at 1 or 2x. Sure it takes longer, but its still copyable. Splatting errors all around the disk isnt going to prevent copying.

How many people that are in the prerecorded dvd business other than the seven major movie studios are going to waste a pile of money into worthless technology that would be only applied to new movie releases ?

The rewards would be dubious at best.

Do you realize how expensive it be per dvd for the movie studios to convert their entire and current dvd catalog to the new technology ?

THE EXPENSE WOULD NOT BE WORTH IT ………..

YOU CAN BUY PRERECORDED DVDS AT WAL MART FOR LESS THAN TEN BUCKS.

LOL !!

And to think, it took the virtual community only days to figure out a 99 cent marker could bypass their “anti-piracy” software. Like in 2001, the digital world has nothing to fear with this new “threat”. Ripping software will adapt in short order to enable one to copy their favorite movies in case of damage to their original copy. Which ever way you see it, good or bad, burning copies of DVDs and CDs is here to stay… this is merely a hiccup.

TT

TT