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 COPY PROTECTION - WHO NEEDS IT?

DVDs are just the latest in a long line of recordable media which have been at the centre of battles between those who want the right to copy and those who don’t. Huw Collingbourne feels a distinct sense of déjà vu.

 

Having bought a movie on a DVD you may consider that you have a perfect right to make a backup copy for safe keeping. Unfortunately for the honest user there are also plenty of people with more nefarious plans. In short, there is a pretty brisk trade in pirated DVDs. Pirated copying is blatant. It is often quite easy to find obviously pirated DVD movies for sale on Internet trading sites such as EBay. No wonder then that the movie distributors go to some lengths to protect their copyright by encrypting the video files so that they can’t be copied.

Years ago, software manufacturers used to do much the same thing. Popular programs such as Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase used various types of protection to prevent users making copies. But no sooner had some new type of copy protection been developed by one company than some other company would release a tool to crack it. In the ‘80s, a company called Central Point Software made a good living from a suite of copy-protection-cracking tools called Copy-II-PC. So what happened to Central Point Software? Were they run out of town like the unprincipled blagards they were? Nope, far from it. They were bought up by that eminently respectable company Symantec. Mind you, by that time, Lotus 1-2-3- and the rest had given up the copy protection battle. They were forced to accept that software buyers didn’t like copy protection and so, giving way to market pressure, they removed it. The movie industry has yet to find some similar accommodation with DVD buyers.

In more recent times, we’ve seen battles to prevent online sharing of audio by ‘rogue’ services such as Napster. Initially the record industry wanted to shut down these services and prevent people from sharing audio. It quickly became apparent that this was not a realistic possibility. So, on the basis that “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’,” the rogues were legitimised. They were, you might say, brought out of the cold and into the comfortable warmth of the corporate dining room. The relaunched Napster 2.0 now sells songs to bring in income for large and small record labels. Originally Napster was condemned by the record companies for supplying tracks which people could burn onto a CD instead of buying CDs from a record shop. By a delicious irony, the new Napster is owned by Roxio - a company that specialises in CD (and DVD) burning software.

Perhaps the way forward for the movie industry is to stop selling their DVD products at such ludicrously high prices. The prices in Europe, for example, are usually much higher than in the USA and ‘region coding’ on the DVDs prevents American disks from being played on DVD players sold in other countries. Well, in theory at any rate. These days, ‘region free’ DVD players are readily available and cheap to buy, making region coding pretty damn' pointless.

Instead of fighting a losing battle against the will of the consumers (who, not surprisingly like their DVDs to be cheap rather than expensive), DVD distributors are going to have to stop being so greedy. High prices are music to the DVD pirates' ears. New copy protection methods are not the answer to the problem.

Some major players in the industry are now starting to realise that it makes no sense to fight against consumer demand. Instead, they should aim to satisfy that demand. Sony has recently announced its plans to supply films for digital download in an attempt to do for movies what Apple’s iTunes has done for music. The recent trend in low cost DVD rentals is another step towards a solution. The plain fact of the matter is that, if movies are readily available for rental or download at a reasonable price, the demand for pirated DVDs will dwindle. After all, why should anyone pay for an illegal copy of a movie when they can get a legal one for a similar price?

When view-on-demand over the Internet becomes a reality for large numbers of people, that again may be another nail in the coffin of the pirate DVD industry. By that time, maybe buying and burning videos over the Internet will become a legitimate business rather than a criminal activity.

See also our guide to software for burning DVDs

June 2005

 


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