DVD Piracy - The Solution (long)

Cafe Society
1

I know this is a weird place to post this but I don’t know where else to go. Plus I like getting just everyday normal (HA!) people’s opinions.

I work at a major movie studio in the DVD department. I’m a fan as well so I feel lucky to work where I do.

With high-def starting to come out and different formats battling it out, the studios are having a hard time coming up with a solution on how to provide the consumer with their product without fear of piracy.

I understand this but it’s frustrating when I want to rip in a DVD so I can put it in my digital library and stream to my computers or the entertainment system.

My idea is that the studios should expect you to rip in your DVDs and play them off your computer. The DVD serves as the master that you can re-rip at any time when a new codex becomes available. That way, new formats can be introduced but it won’t force the consumer to buy into yet another system. And you can put your disc up on the shelf where it’s less likely to get damaged.

You might argue that if we were able to re-rip the DVD over and over again the studio would lose money. No, the studios can do what they do now, release a new version every few years with more stuff. People buy it up. Plus they won’t feel alienated because they have to buy into an entire new format. At least for awhile. With HD-DVD and Blu-ray just now coming out, it better be a damn good long while.

Well, if they can rip it in, then what keeps people from giving it to a buddy? And this form of piracy is very wide spread and is probably costing the studios a good amount of money - but still. Anyhow, they should come up with a system like the iTunes store. What you buy there is good to play on 5 computers that you authorize through their system.

So I was thinking that when you get a new DVD, you can rip it in on your computer, it’s good to play on 2-3 machines that you authorize with the studio. However it’s done, it should be painless to the consumer. If you want to rip it on more than the allowed systems, it would let you know and then you could purchase more authorizations as you see fit.

However, if you have several computers on a network, only one computer needs to be authorized. If a computer is taken off of the network, such as a laptop, that computer would not be able to play the file. It would need to be authorized. If the computer that is authorized is taken off of the network none of the other computers could play the file unless they were authorized as well.

Price breakdown for a 2-hour movie would be something like this (multiply by 150%-200% for studio greed):
Internet download (iTunes, etc.) good quality, fast downloads - $5
Internet dowloads would be a different and separate purchase that doesn’t factor into the DVD itself or the authorizations. Just another option for consumers.
Hi-Def DVD (HD-DVD, Blu-ray, etc.) with 2 authorizations - $15-$25
Each extra authorization - $7
Extra authorizations would be good for the studio as well as the consumer in a rental scenario. The studio makes money from the rental as well as the rip if the consumer decides they want to keep it. The consumer gets a high quality rip for less than the price of a new DVD.

You cannot copy the file from one system to another. You need the DVD to rip it in. The physical DVD can be played on any DVD playback device - you can take it to a buddy’s house for the evening or let them borrow it. Playback devices like the iPod or Zune would be treated the same way they are now - they themselves do not need to be authorize but the computer that they are copied from need to be. Files cannot be copied off of these playback devices.

As far as making a backup copy? No problem. What happens if your house burns down with your DVD and the computers that you authorized? You will need to purchase the DVD again.

I want to keep it simple. I would like both the studios and the consumers to benefit. I would like to watch my DVD where I want, when I want. I don’t mind having a few small limitations because of piracy but I don’t want to be treated like a criminal. I don’t mind paying for extras and options as long as the price is fair and I’m not being forced into buying something I don’t want.

It’s a lot and if you made it this far - thanks! I’m sure I’m overlooking something. But if you have anything to add, post away. Who knows, we might get someone to listen.

2

Ben Franklin, in his youth, wasn’t a rich person. He gleaned knowledge by reading books, but books were still rather expensive. In order to combat that, they formed a “Junto”, or a reading club. They’d get 5 or 6 people together, and they’d swap books amongst each other.

The veiled point is that books survived just fine. There are libraries and Amazon, and ebooks, and the like. Similarly, there’s music. Music was on records. Eventually, this newfangled device known as a radio came into vogue. Music executives had a similar dilemma and a similar complaint: “Music for free? How in the hell are they going to pay for records if they get music for free?? Radio is the death of music as we know it!”

Music lived.

Then came cassettes and cds, where people could make mix cds and copy at will.

“How in the hell are we going to make oodles of cash if people keep “stealing” music? This is the death of music as we know it!”

Then came the Internets and downloading and file sharing. The long-winded point is that I could give a rat’s ass about the music executives or studios and their money. The artists are what’s important and technology will eventually make the middleman (studios and executives) obsolete. They’re going into this fight arguing against technology and trying to find ways to throttle it to keep themselves at the feeding trough.

Their problem, not mine. They’re going to be gone relatively soon anyways.

I get the feeling that this isn’t even close to what you wanted to hear/were looking for.

3

I would get pretty annoyed, though, if for one reason or another I go through three or so home computers and find after I buy the fourth one I have to replace all of my dvd’s because I used up all of my system rips.

4

This sounds like it would be problematic at best and a real headache for the customer service phone reps at the studio/publisher/whatever. I don’t think that a non-techno savvy person would be able to find the value in this scheme.

Bolding mine. This doesn’t sound simple at all. The simple thing would be for the publishers to concentrate on producing a product that we want to have, not locking in their profit for perpetuity. Any authorization/dongle/encryption is a direct message to the consumer: you are a thief and can not be trusted.

5

No, you are right. I meant to put a disclaimer that this is not what I want nor do I believe there should be any sort of lock on the product that we buy but, and this is a big but, the studios are putting these locks on if we like it are not.

The way it’s going to be is that you can buy a DVD and play in on a playback device just like normal. If you don’t intent on ripping in your DVD then nothing has changed. The ripping aspect is for people who want to be able to backup their DVD and playback their files.

This wasn’t meant to be a debate if it right or wrong. Just an open discussion about the best possible way to deal with a situation that we might be forced into.

6

This is true but I think it applies more to the music industry as opposed to the film industry. It’s true that the studios worry about nothing but money but it’s one thing to get a few people together and record a song. It’s much harder to produce a professional film on your own.

As far as how CDs works is how I believe DVDs should work. You can playback in any machine and can rip to a file that you can copy from any system to any system without having to pay for it.

That’s not how the studios look at it however.

7

I don’t think there is a solution to DVD/CD/Whatever piracy. Recent history has shown us that, no matter what anti-piracy solution the studios implement, it’s broken almost immediately- and in some cases, before the “solution” ever actually hits the market. The problem is, of course, that the anti-piracy people are far outnumbered by the pro-piracy people. Hackers only have to get lucky once- the studios have to be lucky all the time. What’s more, breaking the anti-piracy solution is considered to be fun (and a badge of honor) for the hackers- so they’re very motivated.

Of course, any sort of solution the studios implement will mean another layer of irritation for the average user. Since anything the studios try to do will already be thwarted by the hackers, the only people who have to deal with the inconvenience will be the average user.

In other words, anti-piracy solutions are doomed to fail, and in their failure, they only inconvenience the people who would be buying that product in the first place.

Eventually, and I think it’s already happening, people will realize the easiest way to get the product (movies, music, books) will be to download them from the hackers who have already put the product into a conveniently downloaded package.

The end result is that any sort of DRM/Anti-Piracy solution will merely drive down the legal purchases of the product… which means less money for the studios and artists… and, eventually, fewer products being produced. The studios are shooting themselves in their collective feet.

The studios should make it EASIER to get the product, not harder. Studios should allow people to purchase and download the product directly from the studios’ websites, in addition to ordering physical media. Granted, once purchases, it’s “out in the wild”- it can be freely passed from individual to individual- and the studio will no longer make money off of it. I don’t see a solution to this problem, except through licensing deals. The studios need to focus on licensing their music to movies, TV shows, radio- any sort of mass entertainment which is for-pay, rather than trying to prevent the average joe from downloading their product.

8

Which would be terrible for the artists involved. Without the middlemen, then no one knows about their music. There’s just too much noise on the Internet for people to find good music. I’m guessing at least 85%+ of the music you own by artists discovered and promoted by the studios. The single most important thing to an artist making money is promotion, and no individual can come close to what a studio can do.

And the studios will just find a way to make money on concerts. One of many factors of the rise of people like Brittney Spears and the like is because they can fill stadiums so losses due to copying aren’t a problem.

This is a typical delusional belief by people who know nothing about how artists make money. If it was all file sharing, musicians overall would make less money than they currently do. Promotion and exposure is nice, but try going to the local grocer and buy bread with exposure.

So file sharing guarantees good music gets lost in the shuffle, while crappy lowest-common-denominator music is the only music you can find. And instead of 90% of artists unable to make a living at it (and an artist’s ability to make a living at it means he or she has the time to create even more and better work), you have 99.9% of the artists unable to make a living at it.

Frankly, if you aren’t willing to pay the artists, then you’re going to get crappy art. If an artist can’t promote (and no artist can), even the best are going to be lost.

So if you want crappy music and you also want to screw artists on a scale that makes the most preditory of music companies look like Mother Theresa, go right ahead and download music for free. But don’t pretend you’re helping anyone other than yourself.

9

Back to the OP – it’s overly complicated as a plan, but there’s no reason why licenses can be changed so that the owner buys the license but not the media.

Or just keep the old media.

10

And some of us are not buying their bullshit whether they like it or not. I’m simply not buying any product that limits my use of it.

11

I’m not entirely sure how much longer this will be true. I think once sites like Pandora and last.fm gain in both popularity and technology, the vastness of available music will be much more manageable.

12

Silly. The solution is obvious:

Make sure every legitimately-bought DVD has a loud, annoying anti-piracy warning before the movie!

13

Or better yet- during the movie!

14

The whole point is that this is impossible in the first place.

RealityChuck, the same technologies that make it possible for people to bypass the record companies also make it possible for artists to effectively self-promote. And the most effective form of promotion is free distribution of the product.

15

for me you could flip that guess and be much closer to the truth, and I am not that unusual in that way, a huge %age of the population thats into music doesnt care for the mainstream garbage. That said, its Sad the only thing studios promote is total crap like Brittney Spears

this is the typical answer from the antipiracy people. and I personally find it to be total bs. for the last 5-8 years 90% of my music purchases have come from my ability to hear a song some place unusual (compared to studio controled promotions) like net radio stations. after hearing something I like I can usually download it and see if I really like the cd…then strangely I go buy the thing. if you think studios are good for all musicians then check out Michael Penn. heres a guy who gets signed but doesnt play their games and wow, what a mystery…great artist who gets ZERO promotion from his studio.

What? are you kidding me? you can hear crappy lowest common denomiator music EVERYWHERE. radio, tv, internet, satalite. that garbage is all pervasive. File sharing is the Only way I have been able to find great non mainstream music and hear it without making a full cd purchase first.

I agree that the artist needs to get paid. but I disagree that studios are the only thing getting musicians the kind of exposure they need. its the music Industry after all. they only thing they give a crap about is money and the next big hit. they never have and never will give a crap about quality.

if you add the line “and then dont make any purchases based on those downloads” you and I are in total agreement on this one.

16

The studios practice (IMHO) an even stupider form of greed in that they would rather have their product sitting on a shelf making $0 than expose it to the possibility of being copied.

The solution to DVD piracy is, after milking the initial release for a few weeks, sell all of the copies you can at $9.00 a copy. Very few people are going to trouble themselves to steal something so accessible and so cheap.

17

It will apply to the film industry very soon. Look no further than YouTube. It’s cheaper and cheaper to make better and better quality videos and movies.

18

There’s clearly something to the idea of “useable DRM”. iTunes has shown that with lenient enough barriers to certain kinds of use, people are willing to shell out money for digitally restricted music. They’re probably willing to do the same for digitally restricted video, too. However, making the DRM unobtrusive in most cases hasn’t effected piracy of the music in any appreciable way, nor has it kept people from breaking the DRM.

The first suggestion, that only one computer on a network need be authorized, is a huge security hole. How big a network will one computer authorize, for one? Back in college, the residential dorm network easily had hundreds of computers on it. Even if you limit it to a certain size, VPN software can easily make a “local” network out of an arbitrary set of nodes on the internet.

The idea that you could keep the ripped file from being copied relies on having control of the operating system software, which relies on having control of the hardware to the extent that you can keep unsigned programs from being run. It’s a massive and intrusive security chain that content producers have been trying to mandate for years, but have been mostly unsuccessful at. Whether they will eventually be able to accomplish that kind of thing is still up in the air, but it certainly won’t be ready for HDDVD or Bluray, and I doubt it’ll be there for at least the next two generations of disc. And it will have to be legislatively mandated, since the hardware makers don’t have the same goals as the content makers. I don’t know about the Zune, but you can certainly copy songs off of the iPod.

19

I work at a subtitling company, and IMO, it’s not possible for a studio to deliver a movie or TV show without piracy happening. It really doesn’t matter what safeguards you implement into the DVDs or into software or hardware. Eventually, somewhere, someone will find a work-around. Somewhere, someone in a post-production facility will sneak out a thumb drive full of files. In order to completely solve the pirating problem, you have to stop selling DVDs and CDs and media recorders and hard drives. And studios would have to do everything, including all post-production work, in-house, using robots.

Studios and organizations like RIAA have two major mental blocks to an acceptable resolution to piracy-- they’re resistant to the technology, and they’re greedy. Their solution to the problem is DRM that only serves to entertain wannabe hacker-types and make legitimate customers wary (assuming they’re even aware the DRM is there).

It has been shown that people will continue to pay for DVDs and CDs. There is a way for studios to remain profitable; they just need to adapt. They’re just largely unwilling to do so. It’s pretty simple, to me-- if consumers are gonna be downloading your movies anyway, make it on your terms. If pirates are going to make your products available for download anyway, be the source consumers turn to first.

20

I think this is the right thought. Computers are to versatile and the gap between the technically literate and illiterate for any DRM to be implemented which is remotely effective and which avoids creating more problems than it solves.

If the movie studios and RIAA were to become the preferred source then piracy would reduce to a minor issue. iTunes is a good example. For most people the ability to d/l a song of high quality, complete with ID3 tags and album art quickly is worth the $1 it costs just to avoid the hassle of searching P2P software programs, sifting through garbage and waiting for the slow ass download to complete. If iTunes got rid of their DRM I think even more people would abandon P2P software which is ripe with spyware and other downsides.

With TV and movies the argument is even more valid because of the bandwidth investment in downloading that movie file. To locate and transfer a file can take days via a P2P program, if for $5-$10 I can get a high quality copy direct from the studio in an hour we’ve got something.