A Chip on DVDs Could Prevent Theft

Dieppe writes "A simple chip added to a DVD disk could prevent retail theft. According to the AP article at MSNBC, the chip would be activated at the register to make a previously dark area of the DVD clear, and therefore readable. Could this help to stem the tide of the approximate $400 million dollars in losses from brick and mortar stores? Game console DVDs could also be protected this way too. Could this help to bring the prices down on DVD games and movies?"

Will it lower the cost?

[wtfbbq]

No, people that steal wouldn't buy if they couldn't steal. The price of the dvd themselves + the burning is very cheap and the theft is really only worth the physical amount. People that steal likely aren't going to be buying if they couldn't steal. If they can't steal physically they will turn to downloading or getting a blockbuster membership and turn to ripping/burning. If anything, this added ability will just make the checkout lines in Best Buy take longer. Oh, it will also increase the production costs and the machine that will 'validate' the dvd will likely INCREASE the cost. I'm not an endorser of people stealing, but I doubt this would have anything but a negative effect. Hell, if the 'validation' fails 1 outta 100 times the whole system will likely collapse and it will just be a huge waste of money.

Re:Hahahah

[Murmer]

Yeah, if the fact that DVDs cost about fifty cents to mass-produce hasn't put a dent in their prices, I'm sure this will.

Believing that the price of something is in any way related to the cost of thing to the seller is deeply naive, a sure sign of a sucker.

Re:Why steal retail?

[laffer1]

And apparently I might have to do that. Currently, when I buy a DVD at the local best buy or any other store the people are too lazy to deactivate the anti-theft device. That means the alarm always goes off making me look like a thief, wasting my time as they search my bag and so on. Now instead of just being annoying, I'll get home and my DVD won't play! Then I have to go to the store and bitch them out costing more money in gas. Are they trying to get me to download the shit?

I'm really sick of this shit. I buy movies that I like. I buy games. I even buy music. Why do I have to suffer?

I also have to wonder why they did this with an old technology. Supposedly we need to adopt the new blueray or hd-dvd formats. Why not focus on making the players for the new formats cheaper instead of "innovating" for old formats?

Re:Why steal retail?

[adona1]

Absolutely not. Some of us prefer to have a physical media, a printed cover, DVD extras and the like. I can't be having with any of this fiddling with codecs, badly burnt discs, questionable quality...and above all, the illegality. Downloading a film deprives the studios, the actors and the crews involved in making a film.

So that's why I always steal the DVDs from stores :)

How is this any better

[Gregory Cox]

than putting an empty case on the shelf, and having the shop assistant put the DVD in the case/exchange it for a full case at the register? Is that too difficult for stores to do?

Re:Why steal retail?

[Asmandeus]

A large amount of the people who steal retail DVDs (box sets are a big target;small and expensive) are drug addicts and this is how they pay for their habit.

Now a bit more on topic...
The thief will just fence the stolen DVDs and be on his or her merry way to buy whatever drug of choice. Most likely the fence would be a pawn shop. What's to stop this pawn shop from getting a hold of one of these devices? If the pawn shop isn't eligible to obtain one, then they have two options: Steal one or package the DVDs up and get them to a reseller who will just then restock Best Buy or Target or whatever with the stolen goods.

I don't see what good this chip can do. It just causes more bullshit steps and solves nothing.

how does this prevent shrinkage?

[Artifex]

I suspect most loss is due to teenage or twentysomething clerks taking them out the back door. If you have a corrupt clerk with friends as partners, he or she is just as capable of activating the chip for a stack of discs before letting friends walk out, too.

Re:History Says: Prices will go Up.

[BootNinja]

I don't know where you were buying your CDs, but I have never in my life paid that much money for a CD. Back when I was purchasing CDs regularly, say, 10-15 years ago, I was buying them for between 11 and 13. Today, the only place I see them for less than 15 is used.

Re:Sorta cool

[hjf]

See if I buy Disney media anything ever again, it's off to TPB and netflix + anydvd + dvd decrypter.

Or you could skip disney altogether, and buy the pirate version. You see, disney gets some money from the rental, so they're not really "losing". On the other hand, if you buy the pirate version, disney gets nothing. IMHO, you have the moral right to do that, I mean, they screwed you? Well, you screw them too. 'Nuff said.

Re:Preemptive Strike!

[normuser]

Who needs China?
It sounds like some winding wire, a piece of cardboard, and a flash circuit will do.
i.e. fold the cardboard over like to make a cd mailer. tape the sides and wind the wire around it leaving the end open so you can insert / remove the disk. then charge the flash circuit and dump its capacitor through the winding wire.
Now where to get an non activated disk to play with?

Re:LOL

[pipingguy]

This has happened to me a few times (on the way into and out of stores, sometimes both) and it is really annoying. I carry a couple of RFID-enabled devices (building access cards/fobs) so I always wonder if some scanners' settings are set too high.

Sometimes I enter a store and the alarm goes off - on the way out it doesn't, whether I've bought something or not.

Not really

[zogger]

The actual complex machines that *play* CDs have dropped down to now you can get a new small one portable for like $9.99 or something, it certainly didn't double or triple in price. Shoot, portable video DVD players are like 50 bucks now.

Nope, plastic disks with digital bits on them are being sold at tremendous cartel inflated hyper-gouging prices. And everyone and their cousin leroy knows that, hence why so little respect for the MAFIAA dons and their last century business models. The music and movie industries could make a lot more money and just elimnate all the DRM customer annoyances by just being realistic on prices, two bucks for a music CD, 3 bucks for a video DVD. Make them be impulse item priced, and people would by and large not even bother with downloading any more, and if they had continually dropped prices as tech advances allowed them, they could have about stopped so called "piracy" before it even got real popular. People by and large just hate to be price gouged, they lose all respect for the other side and act accordingly. The industry should look at lower per unit gross, but over all higher net by really upping volume of sales by DROPPING PRICES RADICALLY.

The doofuses who make the final pricing decisions on entertainment cartel distributed CDs and DVDs are mostly multi zillionaires who live in extremely expensive areas of the country and to them 20 bucks is chump change, nothing, like a quarter in your pocket or something, they *think* it's a cheap price, because they have no practical frame of reference compared to most people. Median US *household* income is 46 thousand bucks, it isn't $460,000 or one million 460,000 or ten million 460,000, which is what those media dons make, some huge a$$ lotta money. They have *no* practical frame of reference on pricing. They just can't relate. That's the main thing they just don't grok, which causes all the problems, and why they bribe off congress and whatnot to legislate in their business model. They just don't get it why their sales are dropping. And it's just plain stupid, they could probably make a lot more money just by being a little more realistic on retail pricing and going for a big push on volume sales.

Re:Hahahah

[Shihar]

The DvD might cost 50 cents to make, but local stores don't get them at 50 cents a pop. Local stores pay far closer to what you pay. This technology could potentially cut the cost to the store that sell the DvD by reducing stolen inventory. Because stores that sell DvDs are actually competitive and don't have a government granted monopoly like the makers of the DvD do (in the form of copyright), prices will fall if the cost of the system is less than the amount of money saved in reduced theft.

Competitive markets actually work. That fancy computer you are sitting in front of is a result of one of the most horrifically competitive markets in the world (semiconductors), and that is why you have what would be a super computer in 1980 humming away on your desktop (or laptop). While the copyright owners are not playing by normal competitive rules, the stores that sell the DvDs are. Anything to reduce their costs is going to result in lower costs for the consumer.

Re:"A Chip on DVDs Could Prevent Theft"

[nacturation]

It will stop the theft of DVDs for only about 15 minutes, all the while introducing another level of complexity and failure into the legal purchase process.

I don't think that's the real reason. Retailers are already on the hook for any "slippage" that occurs in their inventory. Why should the studio get involved since they're compensated regardless? What this will do is prevent the return of any movies. Now when you purchase it the cashier will have to remove the shrinkwrap, peel off those "security stickers" along the edges, open the case, remove the DVD, activate it, and then give you the now-opened product. Good luck returning that one as I doubt they'll re-sticker and shrinkwrap it for you.

And if they ever do introduce this and you really want to protest it, you can take a bunch of DVDs to the cashier, watch as they activate all of them, then tell them you've changed your mind and no longer wish to purchase them.
 

More like: Will it be the next DRM?

[Moraelin]

Real question is: will it be a part of the next gen DRM?

I mean, rhetoric about cutting down losses and all, well, it's good and fine. But here you have something that prevents a disc from being played, unless the correct key is sent to a chip. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky? Because I'm sure that someone at Sony just did. And if (ad absurdum) they didn't, then MS just did, in its quest to convince the MPAA and RIAA to make its own protection schemes the new entertainment centre standard.

I mean, it's a no brainer. Make the disc revert to opaque after a while, and have to be re-activated. So every time it has to be played in an authorized player.

As a bonus, it's got all the potential in the world to implement some other nasty roadblocks to fair use. E.g.,

- region coding. No more just messing with the firmware to make other region DVDs play, the chips for different regions can be physically tuned to different frequencies.

- killing the second-hand market for good. E.g., make the chip also contain a small flash area, just enough to hold the player's own key. The first time it's played, it stores the player's ID there, and subsequently refuses to activate on anything else. (Extra bonus: now you also need need to buy a new DVD each time you buy a new player.)

- limits on how often you can play the DVD. Pretty trivial: the chip also contains a counter, and when that limit is reached, it can no longer be activated. In the video market it actually has actually a legitimate use: mail-order rentals where you don't actually have to bring it back. But imagine the fun when your next Windows version has such a chip, to stop all those pirates from installing one copy of Windows on 20 machines. (And incidentally also stop anyone from reinstalling it more than once or twice after their hard drive failed, or they got pwned by a virus, or whatever.)

Etc.

And unlike just encryption, some of these can be a much bigger pain in the rear to defeat.

E.g., a counter on the chip can physically and irreversibly blow a tiny fuse for each time it's played. When it's out of fuses, that's it. There is no decryption key you can post on Digg or print on a t-shirt, that will bypass a physically destroyed circuit.

E.g., the chip doesn't need to be reprogrammable from outside in any form or shape. So there's no way to just crack its firmware to make it stay transparent. In fact, at that size and given that you want the absolute minimum power consumption, it doesn't need a firmware at all. It can simply be hard-wired.

Downside, there are physical ways to attack it, such as replacing the chip or marinating the disc in some chemical that neutralizes the dye. Both are a far bigger pain in the arse for Jack Sixpack than just downloading a cracked driver or firmware. I don't see Jack drilling holes and inserting micro-chips that gladly. Plus, it requires buying something tangible, such as a replacement chip, which is easier to trace and prosecute than an offshore warez site.

Re:"A Chip on DVDs Could Prevent Theft"

[SausageOfDoom]

Well, if the number of times I've set off store alarms is anything to go by (after buying something and the monkey at the till forgetting to deactive the security tag), then I'd expect a lot of people to get home and find their shiny new DVD doesn't actually work, and they have to take it back. I dread to think of the nightmare that would be for online retailers.