Disney’s Dolby DRM screeners
p2p news / p2pnet: Walt Disney studios has virtually accused movie critics and the people who vote on the Oscars of being potential thieves and pirates, the terms used by the entertainment and software cartels to describe file sharers.
Disney says from now on, it`ll release DVD screeners, made exclusively by a Dolby Laboratories unit, Cinea, and engineered to thwart illegal copying, says Reuters.
“We feel like this is a really strong first step in addition to all the other things we do to combat piracy,” it has Dennis Rice, who heads Disney’s Oscar publicity campaign, saying.
However, screeners, distributed to the Hollywood and media elite, are also regularly converted into digital files and posted on the p2p networks and that being so, where do they come from?
From where else?
Ex-MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) boss Jack Valenti tried to stamp out screeners. He failed, but not before he`d set the cat amongst the pigeons.
Now Cinea plans to distribute 12,000 players to members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, says Reuters, adding:
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.
Larry Roth, vice president of marketing and business development for Cinea, said the company expects to send players to other groups like the Screen Actors Guild and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which awards the Golden Globes. He said details with those other groups were still being worked out.
Thousands of custom players, eh? Wonder how much they each cost, and who’s footing the bill and how many will be used to convert screeners so they can show up online?
The MPAA has spent a fortune trying to convince the world that BitTorrent sites and hundreds of millions of men, women and child file sharers, not to mention counterfeiters, are largely responsible for movie industry losses in the billions of dollars.
At the same time, MPAA owners are reporting sky-high, record breaking revenues.
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See:-
Reuters – Disney backs antipiracy tech for Oscar DVDs, October 24, 2005
October 25th, 2005 at 4:05 pm
One news story pegged the cost at 1000 dollars per player. So thats 12 million before a single dvd has been seen. Can you imagine sending these things to actors, directors and critics….people with huge egos and arrogant as hell and telling them they must hook up the players themselves, not let anybody else use the player, they are being watched, etc etc. ? How many of the intended recipients will resent the program and refuse to use the player, return it, junk it, maybe vote against the Disney films as retaliation or publicly mock the program? And what if the player doesnt work? Who is gonna service it for these high rollers?
If Disney loses even a few oscar votes over this silly move, somebodys head is gonna roll.
October 25th, 2005 at 7:14 pm
This can be seen as a test of the features of the new DRM that will be used with the new higher-density DVDs (HD-DVD and Blue-Ray). This system allows for keys that are unique per player, allowing the revoking of player keys to that level of accuracy. One of the failures of DVD CSS was that it had a key that was shared by all DVD players from the same manufacturer, making it impossible to revoke keys that were known to have been extracted from players.
This whole thing is of course nonsense. They are distributing keys embedded within these players to people they already accused of being likely infringers. If they are correct then these copyright infringers will (with the help of a technically advanced friend) extract the key from the player, unlock the content, and then distribute it DRM-free in ways that are unlikely to be tracked.
See also:
More thinking about what is wrong with “digital locks” around digital content
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/1145
October 25th, 2005 at 9:26 pm
Or they can just capture the analog output of the player and convert back to digital. This is why vista and all it’s attendant hardware is being developed. No unencrypted analog output ANYWHERE. Unless the key(s) can be broken you would have to mic the speakers and cam the monitor. I can see it now, even headphones will have to be USB devices. When the public figures out that virtually ALL of the current hi-def AND digital audio devices out there will be obsolete* if hollywood gets it’s way people will be PISSED. I can’t wait.
*Obsolete only for playing back DRM infected hollywood content.
October 26th, 2005 at 12:57 am
Unless the players insert a digital watermark into the video that can not be seen by a human eye. This would allow them to trace the source back to the player that created it.
You do not need to encrtypt the analog output if you can easily watermark it. In the long term someone will findout how they do this and create systems to remove it, but untill then people are easy to catch.