AfterDawn: News

DVD screeners to get extended protection

As preview copies of movies, widely known as screening copies or screeners, constantly leak to the internet, the movie industry is planning a to implement a much stronger hardware based copy protection. The new scheme includes special DVD player hardware, watermarking, and inserting contact information to the image.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has endorsed a plan to distribute about 6,000 special DVD players to members. Specially encrypted discs, known as screeners, would be earmarked for a specific academy voter and would play only on that person's machine. The player also would imprint an invisible watermark on the disc each time it is viewed. In addition, if someone uses a camcorder to tape the movie as it is playing on a monitor, that image would contain information on the person assigned the machine.
...
The success of that effort led Cinea Inc., a division of Dolby Laboratories, to approach the academy about a combination of encryption and watermarking so studios could once again distribute screeners on DVDs.

Source: EMediaLive

Written by: Lasse Penttinen @ 7 Jul 2004 11:04

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• 13 comments

• brent1a

  How naiive can you be? They seriously think that someone, anyone, out there won't be able to crack this "encryption"? Give me a break. The only way they will be able to stifle illegal screeners from circulating is by not producing and issuing them at all.

  7.7.2004 12:56 #1

• Enishi

  Yeah, this will take all of a few hours for someone to crack, then its back to square one for those knucklheads

  7.7.2004 21:19 #2

• lazygig

  Seriously, its getting to the point wher eits just made to piss us off and need to get some other software

  7.7.2004 21:32 #3

• Motomatt

  LOL.... As I am sure all of you are..

  7.7.2004 21:44 #4

• Toiletman

  This looks pretty tight in security. I'll have to wait and see... don't be so sure guys.

  8.7.2004 09:17 #5

• spammy

  The encryption will do its job just by making it much harder. Remember that the screeners have very limited circulation anyway - and many of the people who led to copies did so because they didn't care, or because it was very easy to do. Especially with the risk that a watermark has been missed and the academy will know who made the copy - I think that a system like this could work quite well.

  8.7.2004 12:11 #6

• Toiletman

  Maybe even too well.
  

  Everyone is entitled to their own true opinion. Either respect that or don't.

  9.7.2004 13:09 #7

• brent1a

  Yeah well all I am saying is that all it took for the security of DVD's to be cracked (a few years ago) was a teenage kid in Norway or Poland (or whatever) to write 100k of code. Maybe you haven't heard what the market for bootleg movies is like in Asia but the last time I read some numbers it was many hundreds of millions of dollars per year. They're not just trying to dupe a few idiots in Kansas, they're trying to take on a whole black market industry.

  9.7.2004 14:20 #8

• signal

  ok, here is my two cents. WHY DO YOU CARE? YOUR NOT REALLY SUPPOSED TO EVEN TRY TO GET IT SOP WHY EVEN GET MAD ABOUT IT. Oh yeah, unless u just like to steal things...but i wouldnt think anyone here would do such things.

  9.7.2004 18:29 #9

• brent1a

  Who's getting mad? No need to use your CAPS, chief. It's simply a discussion about how 'they' think that, yet again, they can stop someone from stealing from them. Just like everyone steals music and steals their own movies (when backing up of course) & 'they' can't turn any type of profit. Some people trust the stuff that 'they' come up with, I don't. I'm not an MPAA member nor do I know one so I will not be able to test the validity of my argument at all. I'm just guessing based on past events and actions of other people.

  10.7.2004 05:56 #10

• tucker001

  there's always the analog hole

  26.12.2007 23:03 #11

• emugamer

  I'm just baffled that they send out 6,000 copies of a film pre-release. Why not just have members show up at special theatres at different times to view it? And if they can't make it, the oh well. Is it more cost effective to build 6,000 new machines incorporating a new technology and then ship them out, and then produce 6,000 screeners with special encryption for each movie? How did they decide that they need that many people to watch a movie before it's released? With the law of averages, they could probably knock that number down to at most 1,000 and still get close reviews. It's just stupid to think that with 6,000 copies floating around, it's not going to get leaked. Maybe they should re-evaluate who they are sending them to and why.

  27.12.2007 12:10 #12

• mpenney

  How do you get to be on the distrubution list for the screeners to give your input on the movie?
  
  Rules have changed by the way

  10.10.2008 23:03 #13