posted 01-04-2005 05:40 PM                       

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DVD Copy Protection: Take 2

The next generation of technology won't have a Hollywood ending

By Tekla S. Perry

In 1999, a 16-year-old Norwegian high school student took on the motion-picture industry and won. The teenager, Jon Johansen, wrote software that decrypted the Content Scrambling System (CSS) that rearranges the bits on prerecorded DVDs to prevent the discs' being played back on unauthorized hardware. Until Johansen wrote his software utility, which he called DeCSS, you could copy the bits from a DVD to your computer hard drive, but because those bits were scrambled, you couldn't play a movie from those copied bits.

Johansen's DeCSS soon reached every corner of the globe, thanks to the Internet, and prompted a host of legal battles. In the end, Norwegian judges ruled his actions legal, but U.S. judges ruled the distribution of the software illegal. Nevertheless, anybody who wants to make a copy of a DVD can now do so easily, much to the dismay of the entertainment industry. It is not clear whether such copying is done legally under copyright law, but no individuals have been prosecuted for making copies for their own use.

With manufacturers about to unveil a new generation of DVD players and discs, moviemakers now see a rare opportunity to get the horse back into the barn and lock the door tight. So, this past July, two entertainment companies joined with six electronics manufacturers and chip makers to announce the creation of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), the copy protection scheme designed to keep future generations safe from pirated DVDs. The specification was due by year-end 2004, and products incorporating it are slated to appear by year-end 2005.

Backers of the protection method are betting that AACS technology will finally thwart unauthorized copying of DVDs while allowing consumers to distribute movies legitimately over networks within their homes, play them on a variety of devices (standard televisions, portable movie players, and laptop computers), and store them on home media servers. "We wouldn't be investing our time otherwise," says Michael Ripley, the chairman of the AACS alliance's technical working group.

But critics of the technology say it is bound to fail in achieving its most important objective—blocking wholesale pirating of DVDs—and it may irritate consumers if the promised in-home distribution isn't quickly forthcoming and easy to use. The AACS project "doesn't make very much sense," says Seth Schoen, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "The commercial copyright infringers in Southeast Asia that burn billions of counterfeit discs will not be deterred by this."

AACS
GOAL: To develop a specification for copy protection of next-generation DVDs
why it's a loser: It won't deter commercial copyright infringers
ORGANIZATION: AACS License Administrator
NUMBER OF PEOPLE: Not available
BUDGET: Not specified

EFFORTS THAT BRING TOGETHER INDUSTRIES with competing interests are challenging at the least and have often broken down acrimoniously. Witness the failure of the Secure Digital Music Initiative, an attempt to bring watermarking technology to digital music. Also keep in mind the different goals the entertainment and electronics industries certainly have. Movie moguls would prefer to make all copying impossible. You want two copies of a movie? Buy two. By contrast, electronics firms would prefer relatively unrestricted copying, because being able to move videos you already own to new devices (such as media servers or handheld players) helps drive sales of those devices.

"Any of these [electronics and entertainment] consortiums runs the risk of collapsing under its own weight," Michael McGuire, research director of the media team for GartnerG2, in San Jose, Calif., told IEEE Spectrum.

The AACS group was founded by IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic (Matsushita Electric), Sony, Toshiba, Disney, and Warner Bros. Studios. The alliance is optimistic, says Panasonic representative Richard Doherty. "So far, it's going very well, though discussions are spirited at times," he adds.

"We are confident that AACS technology will be part of the next generation of content on optical media," declares AACS's Ripley, who is a senior staff engineer at Intel Corp., in Santa Clara, Calif.

The key to the spirit of compromise is an agreement that the AACS specification will allow consumers to move the data on an optical disc to the various devices they own, including video servers and portable video players, either directly or via a home network. In all the scenarios developed by the AACS alliance, that data would exist on the disc in encrypted form. It would stay encrypted when transferred to other devices and would be decrypted by those devices. The details of this portability have not been announced, but the technological underpinnings are expected to be included when the first version of the copy protection specification is released.

Once products do ship, potential crackers—including teens in basements, academics, and large-scale pirates—will undoubtedly tackle this new encryption challenge. Some details of the specification were apparently still under discussion as this article went to press, including where on the disc the encryption codes will be physically stored.

But one key parameter has been made public. The CSS encryption in the first generation of DVDs, which Johansen defeated, used a proprietary 40-bit key for encryption. AACS will use a so-called strong key, the 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard approved by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.

"This removes one of the obviously dumb things from CSS—they were using a cipher that was easy to break," says Dan Wallach, assistant professor of computer science at Rice University, in Houston.

Because even strong keys can be compromised, the heart of the new protection technology will be its ability to keep on protecting data even after it has been cracked.

The basic idea in recovering from cracking is to make a compromised player key obsolete. Compromised players could continue to play old discs, but not new releases. And crackers would have to start all over again.

Ripley identifies a technology called media key block as an important element in recovering from cracking. With this system, there are actually two keys—one is on the disc itself, but it doesn't work until it is decoded by a second key installed in each player. Multiple versions of this second key can exist; indeed, it is possible that each player would have a unique key, or that groups of players would share keys. Either way, if one key is compromised in the way that CSS was compromised by Johansen and if that decoding method becomes public, new DVDs could include updated on-disc keys that would cause the compromised player-based key to fail. They would, nevertheless, still work with other, uncompromised player-based keys.

Under this scenario, it seems that additional methods might still be needed, since someone who cracks a key but doesn't broadcast that fact could fly under the radar and be able to continue to copy new releases.

AACS's plan shows that the industry has learned from its embarrassing experience with the Norwegian teenager. But that lesson doesn't solve the whole problem, says Rice University's Wallach. "When you give a secret to a million people, and one of them reverse-engineers it and releases a movie, you might not even be able to identify what key you need to disable," he points out.

GartnerG2's McGuire says he appreciates the industry's need to address cracking, but he also sees the cycle of crack/fix/crack as an endless loop. The motivation to crack high-value content like movies isn't going to go away, he notes, so the overall economic benefit to the industry is not obvious.

"The movie-studio people are thinking that by doing this, they can maybe slow commercial copyright infringers down for two weeks, and that would improve their bottom line," says the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Schoen. "I would be impressed if that is the case. No technical measure ever has been proven to have an effect on these people."

PERHAPS THE BIGGEST QUESTION OF ALL is: Will consumers who have become used to freely copying DVDs for viewing on their hard drives or for sharing with friends accept a new technology that restricts such copying?

"We can understand that the technology companies and movie studios have become attached to the idea of creating proprietary encryption for optical discs, but it doesn't do much good in terms of the stated objective of preventing copyright infringement, and it has a lot of downside for consumers," says Schoen.

He and others say success or failure of the approach may hinge on whether consumers will be able to move videos around a home network and among multiple players right from the outset. If they can, they might be more willing to accept the new technology. "It might lead to a higher level of satisfaction for mainstream consumers," Schoen says. "So there will be less pressure from them for unauthorized products that allow backups. But at this point, the details are a bit sparse."

If they can't, individual consumers will find ways to transfer their content anyway, Wallach says. "It is not a matter of if—it is a matter of when. As long as I have the technology in my living room to watch it for myself, I can modify the system to extract the video. They can make it hard, but they can't make it impossible.

"They are living in a fantasy world," he concludes.

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posted 01-05-2005 12:36 AM                       

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And crackers would have to start all over again.

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posted 01-09-2005 12:27 AM                    

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The "format war" that studios and consumers were hoping would never happen will begin this fall, with the announcement by Warner Bros, Paramount and Universal of their initial offerings on HD-DVD. Many of the titles represent recent blockbusters and classic contemporary films, with special effects films and animation-related films surprisingly high on the list, including high definition bows for Forrest Gump, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, Sleepy Hollow, The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie (all Paramount), Contact, Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone/Chamber Of Secrets/Prisoner Of Azkaban, The Mask, The Matrix Trilogy, Spawn, Troy (from Warners), and Van Helsing, Apollo 13, 12 Monkeys, Dune and Waterworld (Universal).

As a co-developer and chief advocate of the format, Warner Home Video really is throwing themselves behind the launch, with several even-yet-to-open-theatrically titles already lined up for HD-DVD release, including this summer's Batman Begins, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, The Dukes of Hazzard and House Of Wax, as well as recent hits Ocean’s Twelve and The Polar Express. For real animated delights, we'll have to see what Disney offers us on the competing Blu-Ray format, developed and being pushed by Sony. DVD File has the full list - sadly we consumers can only stand on the sidelines as the battle begins...

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posted 01-09-2005 01:06 AM                       

quote: Mike Olpin

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Point goes to the HD-DVD camp.

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Huh? They are playing for points?

Oh please don't let the inferior HD-DVD win!

posted 01-09-2005 11:21 AM                    

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with several even-yet-to-open-theatrically titles already lined up for HD-DVD release, including this summer's Batman Begins, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, The Dukes of Hazzard and House Of Wax,

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There ya go. They're planning DVD releases BEFORE the films ever hit theaters.

=TMP=

posted 03-26-2005 02:10 PM                       

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Top exec says the two competing formats may come together.

Paul Kallender, IDG News Service
Thursday, March 24, 2005

After more than a year of touting Blu-ray Disc as the best technology to replace DVD for storing high-definition video, a top executive at Sony, one of Blu-ray's major backers, has opened the door to the possibility of unifying the format with its arch rival, HD-DVD.

"Listening to the voice of the consumers, having two rival formats is disappointing and we haven't totally given up on the possibility of integration or compromise," Ryoji Chubachi, Sony's president-elect, said at a news conference Thursday in which he discussed the company's performance and future strategy.

The statement may surprise backers of the rival camps, who have assembled consortiums of major electronics companies, disc makers, and Hollywood studios to promote the formats in a battle that echoes one fought a quarter of a century ago between Betamax and VHS.

HD-DVD backers, which include NEC and Toshiba, say HD-DVDs can be produced for about the same price as DVDs and are backward-compatible with DVDs and CDs, making the format more convenient for both consumers and the industry. HD-DVD movie titles, PC drives, and players are all due out by the end of the year.

Sony has steadfastly promoted Blu-ray as a technology that has greater capacity, saying this makes the format more useful because more content can be stored on a disc. The technology also has wider support in the technology industry, although release dates for movie titles have not yet been announced.

Reaching a Compromise

Chubachi's comments mark the second time that a Sony executive has signaled the possibility of a compromise between the two camps. In January, Ken Kutaragi, executive deputy president of Sony, said a format war was not in the public interest and that Sony had not ruled out the possibility of uniting the formats.

As Sony's future president, Chubachi's remarks Thursday may carry more weight. Currently head of Sony's electronic components and manufacturing businesses, he will replace Kunitake Ando as Sony president on June 22 following the recent shake-up of Sony's top management. That shake-up saw Kutaragi step down from Sony's board, although he still heads its important gaming business.

Kutaragi also admitted in January that Sony, by supporting its proprietary audio encoding system and not the widely-supported MP3 format, had lost ground to competitors such as Apple Computer in the portable music player market, which Sony had once dominated with the Walkman.

While Sony's technological and engineering base is sound, the company must ensure that its products are aligned with the wants of consumers, Chubachi said. Sony's engineers have traditionally been regarded within the company as heroes and the creators of new markets, but recently their ideas have not always led to products that matched consumers' needs, he said.

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posted 04-21-2005 05:11 PM                       

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Sony, Toshiba to develop common next-generation DVD format
TOKYO — Sony Corp and Toshiba Corp have started talks toward an agreement to jointly develop a new unified standard for next-generation DVDs, after battling three years to push for separate rival standards, company sources said Thursday.

Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co introduced the Blu-ray standard in February 2002, and Toshiba and NEC Corp followed with the HD DVD standard.

The two camps are expected to agree as early as next week to unify their next-generation DVD formats into a common standard to cut costs and benefit consumers. Engineers are negotiating to jointly develop a new format incorporating the strengths of their existing technologies, they said.

They have already talked to Hollywood film producers as DVD title suppliers about the hybrid format, the sources said.

Sony and Toshiba have so far developed and promoted different formats, dividing other Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers into two camps.

Next-generation DVD players use blue lasers to give a shorter wavelength than the red light used for current DVDs and CDs, allowing the storage of the large volume of data necessary to allow DVD quality similar to high-definition television.

The two formats touted by the groups would not have been compatible with one another. A Blu-ray movie disc, for example, would not play on an HD DVD player.

The rivalry would have caused confusion and inconvenience for consumers, similar to the war between VHS and Betamax videocassette formats in the 1980s.

After competing over the past three years, the two camps are now considering a hybrid format, acknowledging that the standards need to be unified to popularize next-generation DVD players and software titles, the sources said.

"In developing the present DVDs, manufacturers unified the standards when it was almost too late," a source said. "It is desirable to have a single standard for next-generation DVDs as well."

Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co introduced the Blu-ray format in February 2002. Toshiba and NEC Corp soon followed with the HD DVD standard.

Both standards are capable of accommodating a movie on a single disc in high-definition format, but their data structures are very different.

The battle between the major Japanese electronics firms has caused a split between consumer electronics makers and movie companies in the United States and other countries. Some electronics firms, including Paris-based Thomson S.A., have said they will support both HD DVD and Blu-ray formats.

Supporters of the Blu-ray technology include Apple Computer Inc, Dell Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Samsung Electronics Co.

Among the Hollywood studios, Walt Disney Co and Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc back the Blu-ray. HD DVD supporters include Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros Studios.

Behind the move to unify the next-generation DVD formats is a fear that the two camps could go down together if personal computers were developed to store massive amounts of data such as television programs and make DVDs meaningless, an industry analyst said.

Hollywood movie companies have apparently requested the Japanese firms to unify the new DVD formats since the existence of two different formats could force their DVD production costs to double, another analyst said.

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