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RE: [dvd-discuss] Technology Admin comments



On Mon, 15 Jul 2002, Glendon M. Gross wrote:

> Doesn't this technology have the potential to engender a black market
> in the "Recoding" of DVD titles?  While I am mildly sympathetic to
> concerns about piracy of large numbers of DVD's and remarketing them
> in a different region, I also suspect that the DeCSS may actually
> facilitate a new kind of piracy by providing a motive for "crackers"
> to recode a DVD for different regions.  Then they would purchase it
> for one region and pirate it for the rest.  After all, what is the
> cost of a single DVD vs. the potential revenue of marketing it to an
> entire REGION?  They could easily buy one and then sell thousands of
> black market recoded copies.

Tell me about it..

The last time I installed a game (and had to look up a 20 digit 'security
code) I had an interesting realization. The pirated version of that game
was in many ways far superior to the version I bought.

It didn't crap out randomly 2 days later when my disk-compression happened
to compress it. I don't have to look up (and store for posperity) a 20
digit code. (Get 10 games/programs a year and within 5 years you'd have to
keep track of over 1000 digits of codes. How many CD's of software do YOU
have that cannot be installed because the codes have been lost?)

By that same token, if you see one of those broken audio CD's thats
designed to not be ripped... Guess what, they've made the MP3's more
useful than the product they're selling. MP3's can be played directly,
or be decompressed into an audio CD that can be played in any audio
player and in any computer (including Mac's!)

Again, the pirated product is superior to the music they sell.

And with DVD's, they've done it again. The DIVX doesn't care which country
you're in. It doesn't care if you want to skip the boring parts. It just
plays. Divx versions of movies are superior to what they sell.

Now, lets go to the future with all these ideas of digitally-controlled
online music. For example, the new Napster, or the online music vendors
not selling MP3's. Again, the product they are trying to sell is far
inferior to pirating it.


So, we get to the current situation, where copyright holders are doing
their damndest to insure that the product they're attempting to sell and
make money off of is in many ways inferior to the product they're trying
to sell.

One notes that these types of control schemes are doomed to failure.
All it takes is ONE person who can extract the plaintext of the audio or
the movie.... who can then reencode it into MP3 or Divx. Or one cracker
find a way to bypass the code restricting the use of the game. So, the
benefit of this is nill.

The cost of this is making their product less valuable to their customers
than having their customers buy an infringed copy.

Scott