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.'"

how long

[Janek Kozicki]

oh, this is mandatory:
how long till the "discs that cannot be hacked themselves" will be hacked?

two hours, or two weeks? (remember de-CSS code printed on t-shirts?)

is this actually going to help?

[pedantic bore]

Why go to such lengths; didn't they catch someone last year using only simple watermarking? Is there any conclusive evidence that the academy members are responsible for enough piracy to make this worthwhile?

Of course, they could just say they were doing this, and then send everyone an el-cheapo DVD player with a special decal on the front. That might be enough to psych out someone.

Re:lol

[afay]

Well, actually, if each disc is only meant to play on one specific player that they distribute, it would be incredibly easy to make it "unhackable". Just use a shared key encryption scheme. 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. And if you managed to come by one of these disc, it would really be impossible to hack (at least without incredible amounts of time or computing power).

correct me if I'm wrong

[_Shorty-dammit]

but, wasn't decss possible only because one software player left its key out in the open? Seems to me you'd need to get hold of one of those special players if you were going to crack their partner discs.

6000 members of the Academy...

[jedrek]

Do you belive you can take 6000 people of any group and find one that isn't just flat out dirty and corrupt, or at the very least, easily corruptable? Or that many Academy members won't want to hook up a special DVD player each time they watch a movie? Remember, the studios want as many Academy members as they can to watch each movie, because only that gives them a shot of getting awarded. Every 'problem' a given member has with seeing a movie will reduce its chances come Oscar night.

These are all bandaids on a huge wound.

On Hacking

[condensate]

All the previous posts have been about hacking or not hacking a DVD. Come on, we know that!!! Nothing is ever secure from hacking, so why the fuss about it.

I thin this is the beginning of a new stratagem: In principle one could sell DVD players with individual signatures that can somehow burn a tag on an individual DVD, which makes it impossible to be read and played by any other player. Now THAT's DRM for you.

Re:Security

[paul.schulz]

This is an example where an open source solution
may actually benefit everyone..

- DVD player running uClinux, enabled with
- GPG private/public keys, and a
- Web of Trust of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

This would enable encryped DVDs to be distributed
securely. What happens after they are decrypted
and played .. well, thats up to how much they
trust the people with the screener DVD's.

Re:Riiiiight....

[sploo22]

Sorry, you're right. What I was actually thinking of was never getting cryptanalysts get their hands on both the plaintext and ciphertext. IIRC, that was the main way the Enigma machine was cracked for example. Obviously, though, it's not very applicable to DVDs.

Re:Probably gonna be redundant.. but..

[jb_02_98]

Once I had a video cd that I had made, and when I tried to copy it to a tape using my DVD player, I had all sorts of problems. I looked around for a solution and found that by hooking up a mixer (audio, 2 RCA connections) I was able to "trick" the system into looking correct. So the Macrovision, at least for me, wasn't that big of an issue.

Re:PGP style

[Manip]

True. But keep in mind you don't need to crack the encryption, just reverse engineer the player.

Ka-ching

[Grrr]

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.

Your movie-ticket dollars at work.

Just give 'em a private streaming video website...

<grrr>

Re:Probably gonna be redundant.. but..

[Petronius]

here's all it'll take for someone to defeat this:

image:
- flat screen display
- tripod
- good camcorder

sound:
- grab stream from the entertainment center

put them back together... voila.

Re:Not really...

[cpghost]

How secure is AES 128+ bits anyway? MPEG streams have a pretty regular pattern that offers a lot hints to cryptanalysts. I wouldn't bet on the security of a system that encrypts 2-8 GB of data with such a regular pattern!

Cheaper solution

[Megane]

Dig up 6000 old DIVX (the dead Circuit City DIVX) players, and make discs for them.

I don't really see why they need to go to the trouble of making each disc specific to one player, because that would just increase the cost of making a run of discs. There really shouldn't be a problem with playing a disc on another member's player. Adding a unique watermark to each player though, that shouldn't be much of a problem. But watch them screw things up so that the player firmware can be copied to a budget player.

Cannot be hacked?!?!?!

[sllim]

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

You gotta be kidding. If I were some sort of technology bigwig and I wanted to buy a product and someone said those words to me I would do an about face and try real hard to not let the door hit my ass on the way out.

I would be much more impressed with the figures of what it would take to hack the discs. Cause in my opinion - encryption is made to be broken.

Now if he is saying that it cannot legally be hacked. Well that is probably true....

Re:lol

[Sancho]

It CAN contain noticeable artifacts. In fact, lots of movies these days have noticeable artifacts. You might occasionally see something in the middle part of the screen that looks like several little burns or dark spots. Those are watermarks used to keep track of what theater a film is being shown in. If it's good enough for the public, it's good enough for the Academy, who they aren't even trying to make money off of. Remember, we're talking specially coded DVDs here. They could just insert the Academy member's name at the bottom of each frame on the DVD as a "watermark" so they would be able to tell who leaked it.

Re:Riiiiight....

[DrXym]

I guess we're going to have to go back to the old fashioned way and wait for the movie to go through the movie->video store release before we rip it from a rented copy

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. Once a screener escapes into the wild (and many do) it takes a nanosecond to appear on hundreds of P2P networks. That's millions and millions of dollars in lost revenue (at least in theory).

This is what they want to stop. Personallized screeners with watermarking and dire threats would be an extremely effective way to do that.

Re:The Big Studios should love it....

[gozar]

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.

Only if they make it a requirement that you must distribute your movie to the academy members with this encryption. What's to stop a small indie studio of just distributing a regular DVD? Especially if the movie has already been released on DVD?

Give the customer another incentive

[Jane_Dozey]

It's been pointed out and proven time and again that technology does not stop piracy.
A smarter move would be to offer the customer something extra that the pirates would find much harder to offer.
How about a few little freebies to go with the actual DVD? A free poster or stickers, interactive content such as a mini-game (which wouldn't be copied using the method of copying the film via a video-output or using a videocamera), a username and password to the official website so you can access online content and enter online competitions (the username and password expiring after X access times).
A little imagination from the distributers would entice people to buy the official product since they would get more than the pirates are offering.

Re:Riiiiight....

[Thagg]

My guess for the watermarking is that there won't be just a few artifacts -- that every bit of every image will be affected in a subtle way.

That said, it is probably true that the watermarking could be defeated with access to several of the players. It would take a serious effort, at least as serious as what Felton and his group at Princeton put into cracking the audio watermarking scheme a few years ago. As you recall, he had the advantage that the watermarking scheme was disclosed very completely in a patent filing. I can't imagine anybody but some kind of organized crime group putting in that kind of effort.

The most likely avenue for exploitation of screeners is that somebody's house will be broken into, and their collection of screeners and their player stolen. I'm willing to bet that this will happen. I mean, if the entire shipment of Academy Awards statues can be stolen...

Thad

Re:how long

[JWSmythe]

My ex-wife worked at a theater for years. The movies would come by truck shipment the day before release. The movies are delivered on multiple reels, so they have to be put together into one reel. You can spot the reel changes by a small black oval flashing in the top left corner. The first flash indicates the reel change is coming. The second one indicates it should happen now. They'd also need to make sure the aspect was set correctly.

To make sure that they put the reels together correctly, they'd run the movie the night before. This was required in this theater chain, as it's kind of embarassing to have a reel run backwards, upside down, or out of order. :) The staff and a few close friends could watch the movie the night before. It was the only theater I've ever been in where it was acceptable to bring in beer, pizza, or whatever, and smoke during the movie. Talking and screaming were perfectly acceptable while we were previewing the movies. It was like sitting at home watching the movie, except with a *MUCH* bigger screen.

What I don't understand is why they still distribute on film. LCD projectors have come a *LONG* way, and have far better quality than the film projectors. Instead of shipping several reels, they could be FedEx'ing single DVD's. I know some theaters are now doing this, but the majority are still film projectors.