The industry is beginning to make it harder to buy discs, argues Barry Fox, and many ‘copy protection’ methods are still not the ideal answer.
UK Government Minister Ed Vaizey was due to keynote the Annual General Meeting of the British Video Association. But he pulled out and his place was taken by Luke Johnson, Chairman of private equity house Risk Capital Partners Ltd and former Chairman of Channel 4.
Vaizey is marginally more clued-up and frank than most of the Ministers who have toyed with the UK movie and music industries over recent years, but the BVA surely got more food for thought from Johnson.
“It’s been very helpful to your industry that it still takes so long to download a movie,” he said in an on-stage ‘fireside chat’ with BVA Director General, Lavinia Carey. “If people could download video at the same speeds as music you would have been pirated to death. “Amazon and Apple are becoming ever more powerful. All digital business is concentrated on the West Coast of the US. Amazon now owns over 50% of e-commerce in the US. That’s scary. They take a big share and don’t invest in content. Google is parasitic. Its advertising revenue is going to Google’s HQ in the US. Why aren’t more people in the content industry shouting about this? They are cowardly. Google should be paying more tax in the UK, moving into creating content and paying a levy on content from YouTube. Google is a just a bigger, posher version of Pirate Bay.”
There is another way to look at this though. It’s all too easy to lose digital content stored on a PC or portable player or cloud. So, like a lot of older folk, I still collect my music and movies on discs. But buying discs gets harder every day. The music and movie companies want people to buy or rent digital copies because it is cheaper than replicating, warehousing and distributing. As a result, HMV is the only big disc chain still in the game, and the company is hurting and trying to move into gadget hardware. I am often forced to use Google and Amazon to buy discs.
Replicator MPO is the latest company to pin faith on disposable, limited play discs as an alternative to rental or download. Previous systems – SpectraDisc, Flexplay and EZ-D – were trialled in 2003/4 and flopped. They relied on dyes trapped in the disc surface which changed colour after removal from a sleeve and exposure to light, so the player laser could no longer read the disc.
The new MPO system uses a corrosive fluid, which slowly destroys the vital Table of Contents that digitally indexes a disc's content. Once the TOC has gone the disc will not play.
MPO unveiled the system by giving everyone attending the BVA AGM a sample DVD, Michael Flatley Returns as Lord of the Dance. The DVD sleeve is labelled as “compatible with all DVD players...for 48 hours after its first viewing”. I tested a copy and it still played normally after 24 hours; after 48 hours the DVD would not play, exactly as per the sleeve note.
Previous disposable discs were criticized on environmental grounds. The sample MPO sleeve assures: “This product respects the environment...the DVD and sleeve is recyclable”. But MPO was cagey on technical details, saying only that the corrosive fluid is “like saline” and harmless. A little detective work soon told more.
MPO’s sample DVDs referred to a web site (www.dvd-d.com) which referred on to developer FDD Technologies AG of Zug, Switzerland (www.fddtechnologies.ch).
FDD calls the disc ‘DVD-D’ and patent searches revealed eight international filings by FDD Technologies in 2004 and 2006, of which granted US patent 7,914,870 from Patrick Larroche explains the system most clearly. A sticky fluid, such as a mix of water and glycol, with corrosive acid or alkaline additive, is trapped in a reservoir under the disc surface, near the disc centre. The centre of mass of the disc does not coincide with its centre of rotation. So when the disc spins in a player it is slightly unbalanced and this causes vibration which moves the corrosive fluid into contact with the metal TOC. As the fluid moves it rebalances the disc and reduces the vibration.
All very clever but, as with previous limited play systems, there is nothing to stop the owner using a PC and unauthorized (but widely available) copy software to make a permanent copy of the disc while it still plays.
Patents also tell an interesting back story on the problems faced by the companies now promising ‘managed copy’ music and movies – discs that permit controlled-use copying of HD content for home servers, back-up and portable play. The current absurd situation is that home servers are sold without the ability to rip optical discs to hard disc or solid state memory, but dealers are trained to install ripping software and teach customers how to activate it!
Panasonic, Samsung, Sandisk, Sony and Toshiba have now got together to offer the ‘Next Generation Secure Memory Initiative’. Panasonic’s European and US filings EP 2299446 and US 2011/0052153 tell how HD content copying involves a lot more than ripping. The managed process requires reading, recompressing and encrypting of the digital stream, as well as writing the copy. This, admits Panasonic, can be very slow and makes the owner “bored”, which explains why there has so far been “little possibility of the managed copy being adopted in home appliances.”
One answer is to let the owner watch an advert or play a screen game while the job is progressing. But a new kind of player is needed, with intelligence to cope with all the different digital rights management systems favoured by different content providers and movie studios. If the processing power of the player is overloaded, the copy may fail, leaving the user effectively charged for the failed attempt.
Panasonic’s solution is for the player to go dumbly on line to the content provider and access a central copy control server. The player then reads a PMSN (Pre-recorded Media Serial Number) which is stored in the BCA (Burst Cutting Area) near the lead-in area of a BD, and which only a licensed BD player can read. If this serial number confirms that the disc is a genuine original, the server authorizes the making of a copy. The player also checks the blank disc or memory device to ensure it is approved as secure and cannot itself be copied. Only then is the copy made, and logged by the content provider’s server.
While all this is going on the player ‘virtually ejects’ the BD; the disc is physically still in the player but only available for checking and copying. Otherwise the player behaves as if the disc were no longer loaded and blocks any attempt at playback while the copy is being made. But it can still dumbly display promotional material or a simple game. The clear message is that commercial success of NGSMI Managed Copy systems will depend on how simple they can be made to use.
