Columbia Tristar has taken to shipping high-res "Superbit" DVDs in Europe without Macrovision, the expensive and ineffectual technology used to keep home users from making VHS recordings from their own DVDs. The Macrovision company charges the film companies big bucks for licenses to their technology, so that viewers who want to make a copy of their DVDs for the kids' room or the cottage have to shell out for a second disc instead.
Except that Macrovision's technology stinks. It's trivial to circumvent (though the DMCA makes such circumvention illegal, even if the copy you make isn't), and it makes home-theater setups unnecessarily complex.
So Columbia-Tristar is forgoing paying for Macrovision licenses for its new Superbit titles and releasing without the copy-prevention technology. The discs are marked "Warning: This disc is copy protected," but this refers to CSS, the "content scrambling system" that ensures that viewers can't watch DVDs from other regions (i.e., watch American DVDs in Europe), and makes it impossible to ship legal open source DVD players.
Macrovision is reportedly upset with Columbia-Tristar, though, since it views this warning as a kind of protective coloration for the Superbit discs, using Macrovision's reputation to intimidate viewers without paying Macrovision's protection money.
The New Scientist article on this reads like a motion-picture-studio press-release. Consider this graf:
Like other DVDs, the disks do have tough digital copy protection, meaning only hackers can duplicate them with a PC. But Macrovision, a technology that prevents people copying by simply connecting the analogue output of a DVD player to the analogue input of a recorder, has not been used.
The "tough digital copy protection" they discuss, CSS, was broken by Norweigan teenagers in an afternoon.
Or this:
The new Home Copying report, from international market research company Understanding and Solutions (U&S), suggests that those who copy illegally make at least a dozen analogue copies of movie DVDs or VHS tapes every year.
The courts haven't ever ruled on whether making a copy of a DVD that you own to VHS for backup or format-shifting is illegal, and furthermore, copying sections of movies for instructional or critical purposes is perfectly legal.
The story doesn't call out the fact that the "protection" measures in DVD are in place to control what paying, law-abiding customers can do with their property — format-shifting, time-shifting, backup — but does not even slow down real "pirates" who make bootleg editions of DVDs and sell them for profit. In other words, the "protection" here is protection from you, not from criminals.
(Thanks, Druidbros!)
