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p2pnet.net News View:- “Last week I wrote about the antitrust issues raised by the use of encryption to ‘protect, content,” says professor Ed Felten in his Freedom to Tinker blog.
Here, he gives a concrete example.
Read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
HD-DVD Requires Digital Imprimatur
By Edward Felten - Freedom to Tinker
HD-DVD, one of the two candidates for the next-gen DVD format, uses a “content protection” technology called AACS. And AACS, it turns out, requires a digital imprimatur on any content before it can be published.
(The imprimatur — the term is Latin for “let it be printed” — was an early technology of censorship. The original imprimatur was a stamp of approval granted by a Catholic bishop to certify that a work was free from doctrinal or moral error. In some times and places, it was illegal to print a work that didn’t have an imprimatur. Today, the term refers to any system in which a central entity must approve works before they can be published.)
The technical details are in the AACS Pre-recorded Video Book Specification. The digital imprimatur is called a “content certificate” (see p. 5 for overview), and is created “at a secure facility operated by [the AACS organization]” (p. 8 ). It is forbidden to publish any work without an imprimatur, and player devices are forbidden to play any work that lacks an imprimatur.
Like the original imprimatur, the AACS one can be revoked retroactively. AACS calls this “content revocation”. Every disc that is manufactured is required to carry an up-to-date list of revoked works. Player devices are required to keep track of which works have been revoked, and to refuse to play revoked works.
The AACS documents avoid giving a rationale for this feature. The closest they come to a rationale is a statement that the system was designed so that “[c]ompliant players can authenticate that content came from an authorized, licensed replicator” (p. 1). But the system as described does not seem designed for that goal — if it were, the disc would be signed (and the signature possibly revoked) by the replicator, not by the central AACS organization. Also, the actual design replaces “can authenticate” by “must authenticate, and must refuse to play if authentication fails”.
The goal of HD-DVD is to become the dominant format for release of movies. If this happens, the HD-DVD/AACS imprimatur will be ripe for anticompetitive abuses. Who will decide when the imprimatur will be used, and how? Apparently it will be the AACS organization. We don’t know how that organization is run, but we know that its founding members are Disney, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, and Warner Brothers. A briefing on the AACS site explains the “AACS Structure” by listing the founders.
I hope the antitrust authorities are watching this very closely. I hope, too, that consumers are watching and will vote with their dollars against this kind of system.
(Thanks, Craig)
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July 24th, 2005 at 6:17 pm
HD-DVD Is not as good as Blu-Ray, and doesn’t hold nearly as much!
The only advantage HD-DVD has over Blu-ray, is the creators advertize more security over Blu-ray, when if fact, they dont have it… Blu-ray can do exactly the same thing…
In a way Blu-ray is like Beta… supperior, yet not as popular among the movie industries… which is sad…
Although this time Blu-ray has a better chance… as long as it gets more publicity than HD-DVD, and gets more support!
July 24th, 2005 at 6:45 pm
I don’t like this, if I understand it correctly. If the discs are giving instructions to the player. What instructions?
Is it not to play a certain say, movie in a certain format? Or is it a set of instructions not to play again? In otherwords if say if I have a player that can be modified does it cancel the ability of that particular player to work? I didn’t get too clear a description out of that message.
The idea that someone can say look, I don’t like this or that particular work and don’t think you should see it is cause for alarm. That they can do it to a player you purchased with your money doesn’t make it better. I guess the next move would be to ensure that all players you could buy on the market contained one of these devices. I swear the first time I find such in equipment I possess and spent my money on will be the last day I own it. If all contains it, I won’t own any of like again.
What it means is if the industry is considering at all how the market and the people that spend their money on equipment think in the terms of satisfaction, they would be wise to kill this idea at the start. If the end goal is the holy grail of no copy under any circumstances, then my goal will be no use for such a product under any circumstances.
July 25th, 2005 at 12:10 am
Probably why HD has the majority of the movie studios on it’s side…
July 25th, 2005 at 12:41 am
Central Media Database Systems reported that an unknown assailant broke security safegaurds and erased all data used for HD-DVD security.
“We were aware of it right after it happened,” reports Ima Idiot, spokesperson for CMDS. “Because of the severity and swiftness of the attack, we feel that it was initiated from multiple sources.”
According to reports, hackers broke several layers of security and initiated a format on machines that serve the “imprimatur” for HD-DVD players. That is, these machines protect your player from illegal, dangerous discs. Without this code, HD-DVD players cannot play a disc.
“We know that a few of the machines that actually do the front end work of talking to the players were still active and broadcasting heavily when they were shut down,” reports Idiot. “We’re not sure what they were doing.”
When asked what this means for the consumer who has a new HD-DVD player, Idiot was very upbeat. “We don’t anticipate much more than two weeks delay before we have the system up and running again. Almost all data was backed up. Primarily only newer releases will have to be requested from the authorizing studio. This process rarely takes longer than a month. We’re working around the clock to get these machines back up. We plan on issuing new security software to each player, which will make the system less vulnerable to this in the future.”
“While we sympathize with the consumer who’s player will not work during this short outage, we understand fully,” Idiot continued. “This system has stopped the piracy of copyrighted content, which offers a better value and more choices for the consumer.”
CMDS reports that they plan on prosecuting the individuals responsible for this breach.
***
Not really, but doesn’t that make you giddy thinking about something like that happening? The entire system shut down, all those expensive devices now so much dead weight.
Just wait…
- gryphon
July 25th, 2005 at 4:06 am
Who needs this “next” generation DVD shit when
1) DVD
2) VCD
works just fine. And in case you want hi-definition video, there are:
1) XviD
2) Theora/Vorbis
BTW, I’m a video producer myself, and these two OPEN (GPL) codecs KICK ASS. They have:
a) Excellent compression
b) lightning fast encoding
c) ligntning fast decoding
d) Small filesize footprint
e) flexibility
f) Free and complies with open standards.
The machines of the future will more resemble powerful PORTABLE computers, so all of this HD-DVD & Blue-Ray hype is really irrelevant.
July 25th, 2005 at 4:07 am
Keep your video files on your computer and removable media (flash, etc) in XivD / DivX, or Theora/Vorbis formats.
It doesn’t get better than that — plus, the file size will be 1/10 of that “next gen” shit!
July 25th, 2005 at 5:37 am
I know people who will NOT play DVD’s that are compressed in any way. VCD just wouldn’t even be a thought to them.
They want High-Definition, everything.
Your option is not an option for them.
Now me, I don’ care, but many Videophiles do.
July 25th, 2005 at 5:39 am
Doesn’t this assume that all computers will be networked?
How will you watch your DVD’s when camping, or out of a networked area? Or if you just don’t WANT the internet? Or you turn it off for safety sakes?
Hmmmmm
July 25th, 2005 at 11:36 am
yeah, xvid is the best.
i think the reason for this HD-DVD vs. Blue-ray business is mostly economics.
blue-ray was promised to the consumer a few years ago as the new standard. but it’s been slow in coming and not affordable to the majority.
now that HD tv’s are “coming down in price” (not really, but they claim they are) and several tv programs are broadcast in HDTV format (although most people don’t have a HDTV) the lamestream media and manufacturers are jumping on the HD bandwagon and wanting to push another unwanted, unaffordable format or system on people.
if - as another person here claims - that Blue-ray is better than HD-DVD, the way to better publicise it is to rename it as “HD Blue-ray”. anything called “High Definition” will receive the desired publicity immediately.
July 25th, 2005 at 11:51 am
well, people will get online to play dvd, there is nothing wrong, people will do it
just look at that DRM crap half life 2 , you need to be online to play single player, so ? , people get online, drm will work, people are fucking stupid, im fed up of this fscked up world where 99% of the population are a bunch of fucking IDIOTS
grumbl
July 25th, 2005 at 2:11 pm
The problem with any next-gen format, be it Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, or anything that will come later is that all of them will have insane encryption placed on them before reaching the consumer market.
I’m not sure if the studios realize that what they are doing is an exercise in futility, but they’ve seen how easy CSS was to crack, so they are going to get more and more desperate.
Blu-Ray will have some stupid DRM on it if and when commercial product is released on it.
July 25th, 2005 at 4:40 pm
Isn’t this exactly the same as DiVX was initially intended to be?
Not Divx the computer video codec, but I believe circuit city was working on a DVD rental system where specially manufactured DVD players had to be hooked up to a phone line. To play a DVD in said machine, one had to simply drop it in the machine and allow the player hooked up to the phone line to communicate with a central server that allowed the disc to be verified and only then could it be played. This meant that DiVX encoded DVDs could only be played in DiVX enabled players.
Did they not learn anything from that failed attempt in consumer control?
Or do they think they can build a better mouse trap?
The extent to which large corporations are trying to control consumers is getting to be too much, and pretty scary.
Pretty soon I won’t be able to shit unless the toilet seat recognizes my ass print… and I will have to pay a premium for it!
Ted V.
July 25th, 2005 at 8:31 pm
It is almost identical to the DIVX (DIgital Video eXpress) program offered by Circuit City and created by Ziffren, Brittenham, Branca and Fischer (Lawyers.) The local machine kept track of the discs it was allowed to play, but the verification was done remotely. It *had* to be connected to a landline phone. Titles were limited, fullscreen only (usually,) and unlimited viewing cost just as much as what was then called “Open DVD.”
The DIVX system was shut down in 1999 and taken off-line in 2001. Circuit City did offer a refund, and the DIVX players were still DVD capable, so the poor sap that bought the crap had the ability to get most of his/her money back. $100 was offered for players and full refund of the upgrade-to-unlimited charges for discs.
Those discs are now useless, because there is no system to verify them. To the best of my knowledge, nothing today can play them.
If they (HD-DVD) follow the same line of thinking, you’ll need to connect your player to a phone to make it play a disc. Useless for people like me who no longer have a wired phone line.
Then again, people are starting to warm to the idea of DRM-laden music tracks, so maybe a DRM-laden video format will be accepted.
Let’s hope it isn’t.
July 25th, 2005 at 8:36 pm
Actually, reviewing what little information is left on DIVX, it looks like you had to verify each time you wanted to play.
Nice.
Looks like I’m sticking with regular DVD.
July 26th, 2005 at 5:17 am
“Like the original imprimatur, the AACS one can be revoked retroactively. AACS calls this “content revocation”. Every disc that is manufactured is required to carry an up-to-date list of revoked works.”
So the system updates offline everytime you buy a new movie and put it in the tray. This means that if you have an older disk that has recently been revoked, you can still watch it until the day you buy a new movie and watch that one because that’s when it will update your player’s block list, making the old disk unwatchable. The system doesn’t connect to the internet at all, instead it relies on consumers constantly buying or renting new releases to keep their players up-to-date.
Disney must love this idea. They can release one of their classic films for a while and then put it in the vault. Then when they re-release the movie ten years later they can “expire” all the previous copies of the disk, forcing their customers to buy the new one.
July 26th, 2005 at 5:40 am
It doesn’t sound like the players actually connect to a central server to access this list of revoked content. Instead this list is distributed with each new movie release, and when you put a new movie in your player it quietly updates the player’s block list in the background. The above situation could sitll occur, but the damage would be far worse than gryphon suggests. The next new release would contain a hacked block list containing the disk id numbers of every current release. The flaw would not be noticed until long after the disks were shipped to retailers and sold nationwide. The only solution would be a complete factory recall of the offending disks, because every time someone tries to play the movie it will render their player useless. They might be able to sell new movies capable of unblocking old ones, but that could take months, and by the time they are ready to ship most HD-DVD owners will have tossed their players in the trash.
-Mazer
July 26th, 2005 at 5:40 pm
Interesting. It does appear to say that the list will be onboard the disc, doesn’t it.
I can see a lot of problems with that scheme. What’s to stop an illegal disc from carrying a valid certificate?
It would seem to me that once the bootleggers found a key that worked, every fake disc in the world would have that key. If it’s not a dynamic system, it’s going to take almost no power to break. Microsoft can only get away with checking and denying keys because they dynamically update lists.
Of course, if it is dynamic, and someone makes a fake with a good key, then the player that is told not to play the fake will also not play the real disc, unless a combination CRC/Key method is used. Imagine waiting for a few hours as your player does a checksum on a new disc.
How much you want to bet that computer drives and -R media won’t have/support this system?
August 2nd, 2005 at 9:17 am
“well, people will get online to play dvd, there is nothing wrong, people will do it
just look at that DRM crap half life 2 , you need to be online to play single player, so ? , people get online, drm will work, people are fucking stupid, im fed up of this fscked up world where 99% of the population are a bunch of fucking IDIOTS ”
Ehh… This has nothing to do with stupidity though.
In the case of Half-Life 2, it’s an FPS, a traditionally multiplayer genre, the vast majority of people who play it will already have the internet, some may not even realize that it’s connecting.
Consumers normally buy into stupid DRM bullshit only because oftentimes they’re too dumb to realize that it’s even there. However, if some kind of player requires the internet to play a movie disc… Most consumers will interpret that as an inferior product, since today portable DVD players are pretty popular.
In any case, this is really moot, because HD DVD players *wont* connect to the internet (except optionally… I heard that some models will have built-in online shopping and other features as extra incentive to sell the players), as others have pointed out, what they’re planning is to have a revocation list on the new discs.
Also, for people stating that this will ‘update’ your player, there hasn’t been any indication of that. Because think about it, on a PC HD DVD player, that would not be possible. So packing something like this on the discs which only works on the hardware-based players seems kind of odd, it’s more likely that old discs would work, and new ones would just not work. And another thing, this ‘content revocation’ thing doesn’t make much sense. See, the incentive for revoking *players* is that the cracked player keys will be used to decode the video of much of the content out there without a licensed player… But with the discs, all it would let you do is burn your own home made movies or some other video files…
And so here’s where the confusion sets in, I imagine that they’re doing that to try and prevent people from burning downloaded copyrighted content, but that’s silly since downloaded content normally comes in the form of divx, which many people will just play straight in the player (if it supports it) or make a VCD or SVCD or something, furthermore… most people don’t usually burn downloaded movies like that except to free up HD space, they just watch them on their PC’s.
The confusing part is that I had the impression that the home-DVD-movies market was pretty big amongst families who like to record their home videos on DVD and send it to other family members. If each HD DVD disc needs to be ‘authorized’ then that means you wont be able to make such home movies. This totally cuts off the HD DVD-R market in half. The whole freakin’ point of having the PC use a writable format that is compatible with the formats used in the audio/video markets, is so that you can make your *own* content and your own discs. That’s why CD-R’s took off, and that’s why DVD-R’s took off as well. If HD DVD is locked this way, then HD DVD-R will not really fly, people will just stick with their DVD-R’s and put up with having to use 3-4 discs instead of one HD DVD (hell, it may even end up cheaper by then).
Also, a final note here, you guys should know that Blu-ray is actually the worse of these two evils. Sony has been trying to monopolize the market with a format for years, and now this is their first real chance. Even though Blu-ray sort of has it’s own standards body, it’s still Sony that will gain 90% of the benefit from any successes regarding Blu-ray. Furthermore, Blu-ray’s DRM will be just as stiff as HD DVD’s, and perhaps even worse, there’s some concern that SPDC (the protection it’ll use) will even cause some playability issues. HD DVD is at *least* backed by the DVD Forum, which is an already established group. I think we should stick with the enemy that we ‘know’ and not trade them in for one that we don’t know.
One thing that people don’t get is that Blu-ray threatens to bring us back into the dark ages of fragile CD-ROM’s, only this time instead of the top being sensitive (which few people were aware of), the bottom of the disc will be sensitive. This is why Blu-ray discs originally used caddies, but now they supposedly have this ‘protective’ coating which I imagine amounts to some kind of layer of nailpolish under the disc. DVD’s (and HD DVD’s) are sandwhiched between two 0.6mm plastic substrates, which protects the data layer from scratches. This means that even if the plastic itself is scratched, it doesn’t matter, the laser just has to work a bit harder, and after a few passes, it sees the data (if your player doesn’t have a buffer, then this is what causes skipping), but the data is still there and it’s still intact. With Blu-ray, the data layer sits 0.1mm away from the bottom of the disc, this highly increases the likelyhood that something can scratch into it and actually damage it.
But HEY! It’s okay, I imagine Sony expects us to just buy the disc over again.
Even if they will be more expensive…
Oh, and that’s another point, some people here mentioned that HD DVD’s biggest claim is AACS, but that’s false. The whole idea behind HD DVD is that it’s cost-effective, it costs little more than a DVD to produce, so current DVD factories can start rolling them out anytime with mere tweaks. Blu-ray however will require *massive* overhauls to production plants.
Honestly, if you *have* to choose one of these evil beasts, I’d say go with the one that wont be expensive for years to come. Hopefully it’s popularity will cause the entire system to be cracked wide open (including the whole algorithm they use) and then they won’t be able to stop any non-licensed players or non-licensed content from being made, we’ll have a DeAACS. hehe
And anyone wondering about Blu-ray’s supposed 100 or 200 GB capacity, well, dream on. That won’t be useful to movie studios or to you. Burning a dual-layer disc is already complicated enough, imagine burning a 4 or 8 layer disc, it’s likely to be so expensive that just getting two or four discs would be cheaper. And since the PS3 is launching with only 50GB capacity, well, the Blu-ray standard for *movies* will be effectively *locked* at that capacity, since they can’t turn back the clock. That leaves only the console gaming industry, which is a proprietary industry anyways, so they don’t even *have* to use widespread standards, the loss or victory of Blu-ray will not affect that industry.
Anyways, sorry to make this such a huge post. But whatever, I made an article about this recently at my LJ, if anyone wishes to read it, click here:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/zentoria/1057.html
Note that I don’t talk about the DRM there, except for a small disclamer at the end. I’ll make it clear here though that I despise DRM, but as I said, it’s unlikely that we’ll just convince them to stop their petty little format war, so I say might as well choose the lesser of two evils and hope that rising popularity causes this format to be cracked wide open like a nut. I read an article recently about how cracking HDCP (the protection scheeme for HDMI, ugh… it has a ‘revocation’ scheeme similar to AACS and the SPDC thing for Blu-ray) could very well be as simple as getting hold of a certain amount of keys, like um, I forgot how many, maybe like um, 40 or something… Anyways, apparently if that may keys were found, it would be possible to figure out the whole algorithm and bust the entire system wide open. If the same strategy applies to AACS, then crackers may just decide to get organized to bust this system as fast as possible. We can always hope.
January 1st, 2006 at 12:16 am
I would agree with you there. The problem with all of this stuff is that you have to give people incentive to buy it and that includes being able to make a disc copy that you can take with you anywhere. I looked at other options besides a dvd player and dvd recorder hooked together and there was no other good way unless you have a computer. The arcos portable video player costs more than twice as much as my dvd recorder!