Custom DVDs & Players For Academy Members

xyankee writes "In an effort to curtail the piracy and bootlegging of DVD screeners, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has endorsed a plan to distribute about 6,000 special DVD players to members that will play specially encrypted screener discs that would be earmarked for a specific academy voter and would play only on that person's machine. The Associated Press has the full story, while Laurence Roth, VP and co-founder of Cinea, Inc., the company behind the technology, says 'the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked.'"

lol

[Toraz Chryx]

"the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked."

Setting themselves up for a MONSTROUS fall there...

Security

[sploo22]

I think this has quite a good chance of being secure. With such a small number of players that aren't publicly available, and with no need for backward compatibility, they can throw in more DRM than you can shake a stick at. Heck, it even appears to record on the disc each time you play it.

Probably gonna be redundant.. but..

[CdBee]

If it has a video-out port, it can be used to copy the disk. Unless they plan on shipping integrated DVD players with a built-in screen it's not going to work.

One word...

[randomErr]

Analog. Plug a VCR into the analog out and a $30 'video stabelizer' and you got a copy.

Took em long enough...

[Anonymous Coward]

You figure they would have done this straight out, instead of just shotgunning the discs out to everybody. Everybody wins - the voters get to watch the discs whenever they want, without having to deal with some crazy 24-hour mission impossible self-destructing DVD, the Academy is reasonably sure that some random relative won't be copying discs to put online, and they managed to do it without having to buy off any new politicians to pass another law restricting everybody's rights.

Yes, it isn't foolproof, but at least they're trying a reasonable solution, instead of poking everybody's eyes out with lawyers.

Re:lol

[gl4ss]

why hack when they can just get it analogically off the disc in extremely high quality as well?

somebody just invented a good way to milk money off from mpaa..
.

Re:Security

[Sam3.14]

They will definitely be more secure than normal ones, but I'm sure people will manage to copy them. Why not just plug the output cables of the DVD player into a recording device and let it run.

PGP style

[gilesjuk]

They're using private, public key encryption. While this isn't impossible to crack can you imagine how long it will take to decode the data on a DVD? The film will be available to buy by the time you manage to crack it.

Re:Riiiiight....

[throwaway18]

One of the basic rules of cryptography is that you NEVER encrypt the same thing with different keys.

No it isn't. You are half remembering the rule for one time pads (not any time of encryption) that you should never use the a one time pad twice.

Re:Probably gonna be redundant.. but..

[gl4ss]

if it can be watched in decent quality it can be copied.. something the mpaa execs don't want to believe it seems, they don't want to believe it so hard that they even want to believe that these schemes work so they pump out money on them, money that's just adding to the 'piracy' problems lost money..

(hell, I would be VERY surprised if piracy hurt major mpaa members more than what the license costs for macrovisions shit protections have cost them over the years)

Won't stop a thing!

[N8F8]

If the device is capable of outputting a standard video sognal for display on a monitor, encrypting the disc is almost pointless. The correlation between video quality and bootlegging worthiness is small. People in third world countries routinely rent movies filmed with handheld cameras- audience noise, mysterious shadows and crappy acoustics, etc.

Re:Probably gonna be redundant.. but..

[kfg]

Has everyone forgotten that you still have this kind of copy protection?

Has everyone forgotten that all you need to get around it is a TV monitor with video out as well?

KFG

Re:lol

[Angstroem]

The only way it could be "hacked" is if you found a way to extract the shared key from the hardware dvd player or the shared key for a specific player was leaked mpaa. That could happen, but it's not to likely.

Oh, sure. Never ever did any vital information leave a company which built their business model on a very algorithm, or from the company which created the security model for them.

You might not be aware of this, but one reason for certain pay TV stations being hacked as easily as it was (and I'm not talking about analog "encryption") was that sufficient information leaked.

And as stated elsewhere: There's still the analog output. Sure, they might put have in some watermarking. They most likely did. But I frankly doubt that there is something like *robust* watermarking for audio and video without significantly impair the signal quality, thus causing noticeable artefacts. (If there is, I'd love to see a pointer to scientifical papers, cause I'm quite interested in such methods myself.)

A solution in 1 second

[doktorstop]

DRM... MacroVision... special players & MAYBE one day special TVs... totally useless as long as the ultimate goal is to watch the movie... with unprotected human eyes

just take a digital camera, point it at the TV screen... et voila! Sure, won't be DVD quality, but, in home conditions, the quality will beat telesync =)

Re:Riiiiight....

[wfberg]

Suppose this new system has only one key per disc, coded for a particular private player, using 256-bit Rijndael encryption. It will indeed be uncrackable given only the disc, which is what the quote said.

It gets easier the more discs you have, though, since then you end up in the realm of differential cryptanalysis.

Also, they seem to be most worried about the academy members themselves - and they still get to see the movies (plaintext!). Even if they're mostly worried about academy member's evil nieces that they might have obliviously handed DVDs to in the past, what's to say members won't lend DVDs+the special player to their friends and family now?

3 acedemy members acting in cahoots can also defeat watermarking efforts - simply compare the three streams and throw away any artifacts that appear in only 1 stream. This would probably be even easier to do when you (have to) depend on analogue outputs. It only makes the challenge greater.

But perhaps they're not worried about academy members, all those DVD screeners that get onto the web are all down to dumpster-diving fiends who get access to one disk, no player.

Re:Riiiiight....

[DrXym]

But which academy member would risk selling / giving away discs if it was encrypted to them? Which academy member would even give someone a tape recording of the disc when that too would very likely be watermarked? Even the latter on its own would be an effective deterrent.

I suggest that if the academy is prepared to swallow the expense of handing out the players (+ the bitching of members who have to play movies on it when their home cinema systems already has a player), they'll have a very workable security system.

Re:how long

[JWSmythe]

I think that goes along the lines of, if the software on the machine can decode it, someone else's software can do it too. :)

They story says that they'd have on-screen indications of who's tape it was too. Probably something along the lines of a text across the screen somewhere saying "Screener serial# 123456".

Making a new disk isn't impossible. I've been toying with my DirecTiVo. It has wonderful outputs to go to my receiver, but not really good outputs for recording. I bought a DVD recorder, and got creative with the wiring. Now I get S-Video in, but I'm still lacking on the audio. The DirecTiVo has the choices of digital fiber optic, or L&R RCA jacks, and the DVD recorder doesn't have a digital fiber input (I couldn't find any with that). It still makes very nice DVD's.

Once I make the DVD, it's not a really hard task to take the resulting disk and edit as needed, such as blocking over whatever is indicating who's disk it is. That may be an unreasonable task, if the text is in the middle of the screen.

I can't imagine too many Academy Awards judges wanting to go through all the bother to release a bootlegged video though. I think their trouble comes when they loan it to friends, who make copies for friends, who make copies for friends (etc, etc).

It still doesn't remove the possibility of a slightly corrupt theater manager setting up a digital video camera in the booth beside the projector and hooking into their sound board, and getting an almost perfect copy of a movie though. They could still get a movie on the Internet the night before it's released to theaters.

The Big Studios should love it....

[innot]

The studios would be expected to pay for a machine to encode its discs and a licensing fee to use Cinea's anti-piracy technology.

"So you are a small indie studio with that incredible good movie (just picked up all prizes in the european festivals).
Sorry, if you can't pay a few megabucks for the license & machines and some more kilobucks for making a few thousand individual watermarked DVDs, then the academy award is not for you.

We hope for your understanding, but we have to protect the interests of our good clients from the MPAA who are in in for business and have no problem of paying these small academy consideration fees. Thank you!

Best Regards,
Mr. Big Boss of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

DIVX does make sense

[Fubar411]

1) No one has ever successfully cracked the scheme. 2) The players could easily be manufactured again 3) The dial-up "feature" can be used to verify the academy award members are the ones watching the movie. I hated DIVX when it came out, but I can understand the studios wanting to protect their content, at least until the movie is out of the theatres. I can wait for the DVD like a good consumer, no need to pay bootleggers for someone elses work. Unless it is the original Star Wars DVD when Han shoots first.

Re:is this actually going to help?

[pedantic bore]

Catching someone isn't as good as preventing from doing it in the first place, of course. True, but convincing them they're going to get caught is an excellent way to prevent them from doing it in the first place.

Secure yet waste of money

[fermion]

First, everyone is saying this is useless because the movie can still be copied. That is not the point. People, think about what the academy is trying to prevent. They are trying to prevent the DVD from walking out of of someones house and appearing on the street where just anyone can play the DVD. This sytem effectively crushes the market for Academy DVD.

My understanding is that the DVD and player are matched. Each DVD can only be played on one player. This means that even if a DVD escapes, it likely cannot easily be played elsewhere. If a copy of the movie is made, then it was probably off the Academy Member's machine, and there is probably some way to identifiy the member based on artifacts within the movie.. This is quite different from the current situation in which a member can just claim that the disk was 'lost',

And yet one must wonder about the reason to go through such expense. Buying $6,0000 customizable DVD player that are hardened against attack cannot be cheap. Making sure that none of the unassigned DVD players hit the street must be expensive. Producing 60000 custom DVD cannot be cheap. From a bidness point of view, is there a real ROI from these costs? The theaters continue to rack up sales at astronimical rates. DVD sales continue at equal an equal nerve wrenching pace. But for some reason the Academy wants to concentrate on the management of custom DVD players rather than the creative act of making film. Madness.

Re:lol

[BitchAss]

Yup - someone's making a ton of money and it's not the mpaa.

Cinea will invest several million dollars to make and distribute the DVD players to academy members and possibly to movie critics and other awards groups.

So, wait. The mpaa has millions to spend on this new way to prevent piracy? I thought they were losing money out the ass! (they'll have to reimburse Cinea somehow - so the mpaa is really paying the millions for the DVD players and the encryption)

Sounds like they need to read this [craphound.com].

Another Screen/Recording Unit

[bogaboga]

Isn't it possible to route the output of the DVD unit to another recorder that would burn the film onto [video] tape or DVD? I am sure the graphics guys at the GIMP and MPlayer can find ways arround this new preventive measure.

Re:Security

[droleary]

I think this has quite a good chance of being secure.

Anybody that starts with that assumption, or the stated and equally unlikely "cannot be hacked" has already lost whatever battle they imagined they were fighting. There are probably more holes in making the discs than there are in distributing them. How many hands does a film pass through before it even gets to be a master copy waiting to be encrypted?

Re:lol

[1u3hr]

Can someone explain why you couldn't just record the output from the special DVD player? You would still have to worry about the watermarking, but that's not so hard, if oyu can get two or more disks.

Re:is this actually going to help?

[Kris_J]

It takes time and money to investigate and trace a watermark back to a person, no matter how easy the process.

Huh? I don't know about you, but I define easy as quick and cheap.

Re:6000 members of the Academy...

[Anonymous Writer]

most of them are decept people who only get paid ONCE for a movie - its just a tiny group who keep getting paid over and over and over for a job done once. They are rich. The others, not so much.

And how many among those 6000, who are has-beens with an expensive coke habit and a penchant for high-priced hookers, will have a problem with letting somebody hack their copy and dvd player?

Re:Not really...

[ummit]

I'm sure that this time around they use a proper algorithm...

Why are you so sure?
Time and again people have chosen laughably weak crypto algorithms and then plastered them with impressive-sounding quotes like "the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked."

They might have used a decent algorithm. But I'd put the odds at only about 50/50.
The OP is right; they're really setting themselves up for a fall.

The point isn't that it might be hacked

[Gyorg_Lavode]

It seems that everyone believes the point is that it might not be completely secure. BIG DEAL. The point is that the DVD's can't just be loaned out. Remember how the hulk was copied. A screener dvd, (one that was watermarked), was lent to a friend who decided no-one would catch him if he uploaded it. He was caught but that doesn't help that the movie was uploaded. I'd say the screeners are probably fairly trustworthy. This will 1: Keep them from loaning their disks out, (which is most likely the primary concern) and 2: make it a little tougher so that if their friend in batswana sais, "Hey, I'd REALLY like to see that", they can't say, "well, ok, let me copy it and send it over". Instead when a friend wants to watch it they'll go, "I'm sorry, it only works on my dvd player. Do you want to come over and watch it?" Yes, if they want to distribute a copy of it, they'll probably be able to, but I doubt thats the problem.

Re:PGP style

[gilesjuk]

Even if you manage to get a player that would only then give you access to one of the encyption keys. Each member will he using their own code.

Re:Riiiiight....

[N3koFever]

Each copy could have watermarks in unique locations so that when they download the leaked copy from the Internet and they see that noise covers up the watermarks at [x] location on the screen at [y] time in the movie, that corresponds to the copy sent out to person [z]. To be honest though I don't think they're that desperate to leak out movies, they'll just do it if the ability to do it is there. If the risk of being found is high enough they're not going ot bother.

Re:Riiiiight....

[kale77in]

While the RIAA would hardly like that either, the point in this case is to stop widespread distribution of a high quality print weeks or months before their official release date.

Even in these days of rottentomatoes.com, it could be worse if mere informed opinion about their latest US$150M stinker was to circulate for months before the official release date.

For example, I would have gone to see Kill Bill or LoTR on the big screen even if I'd had the DVD for months -- probably more so, in fact. The better the movie, the less it need fear from piracy.

While I think that piracy is petty more than anything -- but then I only see 4-5 films a year -- I'm probably not alone in seeing cinema now more as a special experience that maximises the impact of the films that deserve to be viewed immersively.

Re:Riiiiight....

[rob13572468]

the likely way that it will be encrypted depends on what trsnsport chip is going to be used in the dvd player: most dvd players (read 95%) use the 55xx chip made by ST thompson and that chip uses standard DES to decrypt the encrypted mpeg-2 stream. their plan is likely to be to have each member dvd/player pair use a different 8 byte key so as to ensure that they stay paired. the only problem with this is that anyone who knows the ST chip (and there are quite a few in the hacker community that do) will have the firmware and eeprom dumped from the players in about an hour. and the key recovered not long after. once you have the key, the player is no longer needed to extract the mpeg data. do this to 2 separate players and now you can extract the data from seperate dvd's and run the difference to remove the earmarking...

Every time...

[DaveCBio]

Someone says a tech cannot be hacked it creates a challenge. I think you are better off not trying to say you have the ultimate encryption.

Re:The Rube Goldburg Bypass

[kfg]

Speaking of forgetting. The point isn't weither one can, or can not bypass these means. But the effort required to do so. It all eventually reaches a point were people will simply say "to hell with it"

Have you forgotten that we aren't discussing "people", but rather members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Frickin' Sciences?

I think any of them that are sufficiently motivated and skilled to rip a DVD in the first place can handle plugging a VCR into the video out jacks.

KFG