p2p news / p2pnet: Not long ago I read about a technology presented at the Paris DVD Forum. It’ll probably be integrated into the HD-DVD (and Blu-ray) standard as a Digitral Restrictions Management (DRM) content protection technology.

It’s method is quite simple: it’s like a broadcast flag on the audio channel.

Protected content will have an audio watermark during playback which can’t be heard by the human ear, but can be detected by the players. The watermark will stop your player if the copy contains the signal and it’s not the original. So if you copy the content of the disk by any method, with a camera in the theatre, for example, your device will can’t play it.

I’m sure the movie industry has high hopes for this, but I don’t.

First of all I don’t understand what they want to stop with it.

They can’t stop people who’d like to publish it in on the Net. They’re smart enough to remove the watermark. They can delete or “scramble” it. Someone will create an audio filter to do this the day after the premiere of the technology, which will make it even easier.

It’s also possible that the watermark will disappear during the compression of the sound.

Almost all audio codec (such as mp3, ogg etc.) is based on an algorithm which removes inaudible noises – such as the watermark. So by the time the content gets to the user, it won’t have the signal.

But even if it does contain Hollywood’s silent noise, it can still be played on non-compatible devices … like a computer.

Yes, it’ll stop not-so-professional users from creating a copy, but so can other kinds of supposed DRM, so it’s just a waste of time.

The only thing this technology can achieve is to offer 10 minutes of extra time before the content arrives on the p2p networks.

But there is another, more important question raised about this.

Why do studios think it’s important to fight against cam releases and other low-quality rips when they themselves supply “0-day” movie ‘pirates’?

Every article about I’ve read about the audio broadcast flag states it’ll be very useful against a camcorder.

Oh yeah… I’m sure this will be the end of cam-releases. They studios will give away hundreds perfect quality digital copies at the premiere day.

No one downloads or creates a cam when there’s a DVD rip available.

Yep, it’s highly possible these copies will have all almost all modern DRM and watermarks, and they’ll be guarded and everything. But it’s been proven many times that these protections are useless. There’s always a weak point.

The ‘pirates’ will be able to copy the data, as they do today from analog film strips. The only difference is TeleCine machines are very expensive, which is why most TC release are much lower in quality: the groups can afford only the cheapest ones.

Meanwhile, soon, HD-DVD readers will cost no more than a DVD does today.

So they’ll try to use a ‘new’ technology in a fight against a method of piracy which’ll disappear by the time they’ll have a chance to test it.

Yet an other useless effort…

Benedek Toth – p2pnet
[Toth is a software engineer from Hungary. He edits p2pinfo Magyarország, which focuses on about file sharing and related issues, and also contibutes to a movie portal and many other files haring-related sites. ]

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 7th, 2005 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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