How do you track people who pay cash?
IF: Blu Ray wins format war THEN: Sony laughs all the way to the bank?
- Thread starter Crayon
- Start date
How do you track people who pay cash?
inefficient
Veteran
Software players will be a tiny niche market compared to standalone. When hi-def optical becomes mainstream, standalone will be far and away the predominant mechanism for watching movies as it is today with DVD. Why would they care about making life harder for software playback when it's not their market? They could have outright banned software playback and the building of PCs/notebooks with high-def optical and it would have next to zero effect on their bottom line to sell movies to endusers in the long run.
MS could get away with it for end users because MS is your only choice on the PC. If MS adds activation, you buy a PC, and boom, you have activation. Well guess what, for next-gen optical, AACS-LA is the monopoly authority here, and both disc formats, BluRay and HD-DVD delegate to them. The consumer has no where to go, and Hollywood in their wisdom, could simply refuse to deal with any publishing medium not following AACS-LA requirements.
If AACS-LA tells software vendors that they will not get DeviceKeys without adding activation, all software players will have activation, and the consumer will have no choice in the matter, other than to buy standalone players.
I mean, let's get real here. "Activation" is not so burdensome that consumers won't purchase prices with it. Cable boxes, satellite boxes, Vista, XBox Live, iTunes, and on and on, all of these devices have online activation of some sort and consumers have not run away. iTunes is the best example of widespread burdensome DRM in action, and iTunes isn't even a monopoly! It has 60% marketshare and people can get un-drmed MP3s, yet consumers still flock.
So, your "business concerns" argument lacks evidence, and counter-evidence exists.
AACS already added enormous delays and expense to next-gen optical. Hollywood's obsession with DRM knows no bounds, so I think you underestimate how much effort they are willing to expend on copyright violation. Traitor tracing does not endanger business interests, because for the most part, it is part of the mastering process and the consumer is unaware of it.
Online activation of software players is not very dangerous to their business interests either. AACS already has such a mechanism in its architecture to deal with Mandatory Managed Copy, so if players are built to deal with Managed Copy, they will already have client/server authentication built into them. All AACS would have to do is require software players to require MMC to be activated before playback of content, during the setup of the player.
Just a thought -
Crazy hypothetical: 360 becomes the dominant player in the market by 2010 - Their downloadable video service becomes very popular to the point of competing with hd-dvd/bluray movies sales. When Sony puts Spiderman4 on Video Marketplace, does Microsoft laugh all the way to the bank or do they just stay home and laugh with an online bank transaction?
Just a thought
Crazy hypothetical: 360 becomes the dominant player in the market by 2010 - Their downloadable video service becomes very popular to the point of competing with hd-dvd/bluray movies sales. When Sony puts Spiderman4 on Video Marketplace, does Microsoft laugh all the way to the bank or do they just stay home and laugh with an online bank transaction?
Just a thought
Just a thought -
Crazy hypothetical: 360 becomes the dominant player in the market by 2010 - Their downloadable video service becomes very popular to the point of competing with hd-dvd/bluray movies sales. When Sony puts Spiderman4 on Video Marketplace, does Microsoft laugh all the way to the bank or do they just stay home and laugh with an online bank transaction?
Just a thought
In that scenario, Microsoft will enjoy a sealed box with dominant market share that they totally control all content delivery to, while everyone continues to rage against Sony for their proprietary disc format.
Software players is one thing and i´m pretty sure it will be very very easy to activate all the software players in the world. Your looking at this from the eyes of the one person that is at home trying to crack this stuff but there is big money in this for real criminals and they will get all they need. Credit cards are stolen everyday, software activation with a stolen card is easy, there are more stuff brewing, apparently the BluRay stuff in the PS3 has a loophole, there will be loopholes in standalone players (the A1 is a given for crackers to attack). And besides all this i am sure we will start seeing keys being spread that makes it possible for Linux owners to watch their HD-DVD on their platform.
It will be done and it has been done, since yesterday hdtv blogger lists 3 new titles as being released with a total of 10 HD-DVD titles out. Now i´m not a HD-DVD supporter i think it´s a stupid format that is to limited for a true next gen and i find the only reason it´s still alive is Sony hate. But i´m a little worried if this could give me, a movie collector, trouble in the future if Hollywood gets cold feet. So in some ways i would hope that what you say is true but right now this format is blown open to all kinds of piracy, the cat is out of the bag, the patient is dead, the nerds "won" again.
And what would be the incentive for professional pirates to perform massive identity theft to steal mega numbers of activated software players, in order to rip content, in order to give it away for free?
The incentive for DVD pirates was the fact that DVD players can read duplicated knock-off discs, so professional pirates made massive amounts of money selling DVDs to regular old consumers who were watching them on DVD players, not watching them via PCs. They made *MONEY* doing it, and hence, it was worth the risk.
But for BRDVD, pirates have no capability to take ripped content and re-encode it such that existing HD-DVD/BR-DVD standalone units will play it. At best, they'd be able to make a DVD or VCD out of it, but at that point, why go through all the trouble to ripoff an HD copy, when you're just going to produce a DVD quality disk.
There is no money in online ripping and trading except for the few pirates willing to risk running for-pay warez sites, and it's alot easier to take down a guy running a warez site than to track illicitly mastered DVDs from underground chinese duplicators.
The only kinds of people to engage in credit card theft in order to steal, rip, and trade content online are small fry pirates, most of them teenage boys. That said, if someone steals 100,000 credit cards, there's alot more money in using the cards to siphon money directly than ordering 100,000 activation keys. Why would the real criminals, Russians, Nigerians, Chinese, bother wasting stolen financial accounts on HD ripping when there's no money in it, and high risk of being caught?
The types of threat models being offered up here is ridiculous. AACS is meant to stop widespread disc duplication and serious mass pirates, not people who love spending dozens of hours trying to track down torrent trackers hosting a particular HD rip, waiting a LOOOONG time to leech 15gigabytes, only to watch it massively paired down from the true HD-DVD experience, no menus, no extras, etc.
There is a huge labor cost to pirating in terms of time spent searching for and downloading shit. I don't engage in it too often, because it's friggin annoying. Sure, I go to the usual torrent search sites, I spent lots of time hunting to find seeds of software I want, and invariably, it's either dead, there's too few seeders, no one has 100% of the file, or it's a fake file.
What's not mentioned in all of this, is a denial of service attack on P2P sites by the industry. They've got the money, and it would not be hard for them to buy up enough bots around the net, offering up corrupt torrents. They could also hire massive numbers of indians to sit around and do nothing but write comments, reviews, and rankings on trackers on phony files, impersonating pirate groups, etc.
This would invariably force sites to spring up, like the old ShareReactor that reviews torrents, verifies their authenticity, etc. However, these sites, being the beacon in the storm of chaff being put out, are highly visible, and themselves subject to legal attack.
No one's saying you won't be able to get your hands on ripped content. What's being said is that it will be harder to produce knockoff discs that play in real players, and harder for people to evade the industry, because next-gen discs leave far more forensic information around for tracking, coupled with the DMCA, being a serious pirate and reverse engineering software OR hardware players is risking REAL jail time.
The incentive for DVD pirates was the fact that DVD players can read duplicated knock-off discs, so professional pirates made massive amounts of money selling DVDs to regular old consumers who were watching them on DVD players, not watching them via PCs. They made *MONEY* doing it, and hence, it was worth the risk.
But for BRDVD, pirates have no capability to take ripped content and re-encode it such that existing HD-DVD/BR-DVD standalone units will play it. At best, they'd be able to make a DVD or VCD out of it, but at that point, why go through all the trouble to ripoff an HD copy, when you're just going to produce a DVD quality disk.
There is no money in online ripping and trading except for the few pirates willing to risk running for-pay warez sites, and it's alot easier to take down a guy running a warez site than to track illicitly mastered DVDs from underground chinese duplicators.
The only kinds of people to engage in credit card theft in order to steal, rip, and trade content online are small fry pirates, most of them teenage boys. That said, if someone steals 100,000 credit cards, there's alot more money in using the cards to siphon money directly than ordering 100,000 activation keys. Why would the real criminals, Russians, Nigerians, Chinese, bother wasting stolen financial accounts on HD ripping when there's no money in it, and high risk of being caught?
The types of threat models being offered up here is ridiculous. AACS is meant to stop widespread disc duplication and serious mass pirates, not people who love spending dozens of hours trying to track down torrent trackers hosting a particular HD rip, waiting a LOOOONG time to leech 15gigabytes, only to watch it massively paired down from the true HD-DVD experience, no menus, no extras, etc.
There is a huge labor cost to pirating in terms of time spent searching for and downloading shit. I don't engage in it too often, because it's friggin annoying. Sure, I go to the usual torrent search sites, I spent lots of time hunting to find seeds of software I want, and invariably, it's either dead, there's too few seeders, no one has 100% of the file, or it's a fake file.
What's not mentioned in all of this, is a denial of service attack on P2P sites by the industry. They've got the money, and it would not be hard for them to buy up enough bots around the net, offering up corrupt torrents. They could also hire massive numbers of indians to sit around and do nothing but write comments, reviews, and rankings on trackers on phony files, impersonating pirate groups, etc.
This would invariably force sites to spring up, like the old ShareReactor that reviews torrents, verifies their authenticity, etc. However, these sites, being the beacon in the storm of chaff being put out, are highly visible, and themselves subject to legal attack.
No one's saying you won't be able to get your hands on ripped content. What's being said is that it will be harder to produce knockoff discs that play in real players, and harder for people to evade the industry, because next-gen discs leave far more forensic information around for tracking, coupled with the DMCA, being a serious pirate and reverse engineering software OR hardware players is risking REAL jail time.
deathkiller
Newcomer
What prevent burning BD-R video? There is some mechanism that prevent user created BD movies? I think that the only reason that pirated hd-movies aren't sold now is that the BD-R media cost too much, for now.
In my country (Spain) P2P is legal as long as you don't make money of it, piracy is rampant and doesn't seem that it will change in a near future.
You must be joking...
I think were done here, thanks for you insight on the protection system.
I'm not joking. First of all, the RIAA and MPAA have already hired firms that specialize in running DOS attacks against pirate networks, as well as firms that specialize in running spiders in the web and p2p networks looking for copyrighted content.
Secondly, why do you get to assert pirates with uber resources and resourcefulness who engage in massive risk taking on complex schemes to thwart AACS-LA, but can't can imagine the industry engaging in any nefarious activity against pirates.
scooby_dooby
Legend
They'll never win that war. The pirates will just devise a way to identify the true torrents, big organizations like the MPAA move WAY to slow to win that fight.
Windows Media 10 was cracked in 2005.
If you can get a hold of the unencrypted bitstreams there's no particular reason why you couldn't re-author these into a DRM-free HD DVD or BluRay disc. No re-encoding necessary. AFAIK the only problem that is being encountered dealing with the ripped content is dealing with titles that include IME (In Movie Experience) content. With naked bitstreams to be examined, though, I expect this problem to be sorted out.
I was just pointing out how the current method of obtaining keys (which is very easy) could be just as easily defeated. As I pointed out, I expect this to be a continual process of crack,patch, re-crack, re-patch....
You have to admit that my suggested changes drastically limit the number of individuals who will be able to accomplish a crack, though. As I said, this is not an area I can speak about from a position of great technical knowledge and I certainly never intended to imply that I was presenting "the" solution.
I believe that while an impossible to crack system may not be possible, prohibitively difficult is probably good enough and will likely be the target that the SW player devs will shoot for.
So, which standalone HD-DVD and BR units can can take recordable BRD and HD-DVD discs with VC-1/H.264/MPEG2 rips burned on them and play them back? You'll have to squeeze them onto a DVD-9 if you're lucky, and that would take re-encoding for most.
And, you'd lose menus, TruHD sound tracks, multiple soundtracks, and most everything else.
The point is, the pirates can't make rips which can playback in the average joe's standalone player. Why do you think the unique-volume ID and ROMmark exists? The whole point is to prevent rips burned on copied disks, or bit-for-bit clones from playing back properly. Why would they design their players so that if some guy succeeded in slapping an AVI or MOV file on a ROM, he could watch the movie?
BTW, let's not forget that that with BD+ it's possible the player could be configured to look for watermarks as well, which won't be removed by ripping.
They aren't going to be able to completely stop super-determined idiots from spending hours scouring torrent sites looking to download 15-30gb rips and playing them back on a desktop computer media player. Hollywood isn't interested in this people, as long as they remain underground.
What Hollywood doesn't want is people selling cloned optical disks that playback in millions of receivers, and they don't want people selling devices which hook up to the TV and run bittorrent clients to for-pay mass-pirate sites where people can buy or download movies from the ease of their living room, like a sort of Tivo-Torrent.
There will always be people ripping movies. Hell, people download and watch SHAKYCAM movies today, and it would not be hard to aim a High-Def MiniDV camera at a high-quality display in a good sound studio and capure a movie via analog process. So ultimately, they cannot stop some form of rips to those people willing to waste their time on them.
What they don't want is average people getting *easy* idiot proof and convenient access to next-gen optical content in a way that preserves everything.
Sure, big organizations do, but AACS-LA isn't, and many many small startup companies, alot of them started by former pirate scene people, are selling anti-piracy services. If pirates can devise a way to identify true torrents, they'll be rich, because they'll also be able to solve the email spam problem too.
Mintmaster
Veteran
I didn't know this. Does this mean HD-DVD recorders for home movies will never happen? We have to stick with DV tapes or use an HTPC for our HD camcorder footage?
