Well, we've done it again. We've gone and cracked the encryption scheme on DVD movies. First we killed the recording industry. And now, while it's still barely cold, we're already knocking nails into the coffin of the motion picture industry for dessert.
That's what Hollywood studio execs would have you believe, anyway. And yet, maybe the real loser in the entertainment industry's war against media piracy isn't the corporation — it's the consumer.
Not long ago, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) raised a big stink over the MP3 audio format. They argued that sales of consumer-marketed MP3 players would mean untold millions of dollars in lost revenue. They went so far as to take the issue to court, seeking an injunction to prevent Diamond Multimedia from shipping its portable Rio MP3 player — and they lost.
So here we are. Against the RIAA's wishes, a number of manufacturers now have MP3 hardware on the market, with more products appearing steadily. No doubt, the music industry's done for. You've probably already hocked your CD player on eBay, as you download all the new tunes from Internet MP3 sites instead. And now, thanks to a cunning teenage hacker from Norway, it probably won't be long before you stop paying to see movies, too.
So goes the thinking in Hollywood, at least, where the spread of digital piracy has kept movie execs up nights for some time. In Asia, the most popular video format is Video CD, or VCD. These low-capacity discs lack the playback quality, duration, or features of DVDs. But, being digital, they're easy to duplicate. Organized black marketers bootleg like crazy, selling copies in the electronics bazaars of Hong Kong or Taipei for just a few bucks apiece.
In an industry where the only things rising faster than box office prices are the budgets of the films themselves, this is a major film studio's worst nightmare. So when the DVD consortium proposed the new medium as a way of delivering high quality movies to the U.S. market, Hollywood balked. After all, every time any new format is introduced in America, it's never long before some wise guy starts babbling about how "Fair Use" duplication is allowed under copyright law, and then all hell breaks loose. It'd be Asia all over again.
To assuage Hollywood's fears, the DVD format's backers incorporated the "Content Scrambling System," or CSS. Would-be pirates who try to simply copy the data off a CSS-encoded DVD end up with gibberish. Instead, the disc must be decrypted as it's played, using a proprietary algorithm licensed from CSS's developers. This is costly to DVD player vendors, perhaps — but then, the licensing fees they pay are just passed along to the consumer, as part of the player's retail price. Everyone has to chip in — after all, it's the American economy at stake.
CSS encryption was a crafty technology, and one that was certified "unsinkable" by more than one industry authority. So we shouldn't hold it against these movie moguls too much, that they were undone by the guile of one adolescent Norwegian. It wasn't so long ago that James Cameron pitched them a similar story, and the resulting movie netted them millions of dollars. But apparently they, like me, dozed off before the last half-hour of the film. Or maybe they just failed to grasp the inevitable.
What 15-year-old Jon Johansen realized was that since a DVD movie is necessarily decrypted during playback, then that's when to go after the data — not while it's sitting encrypted on the disc itself. Following this brainstorm, he and two others set out to engineer a program that would exploit the flaw. In essence, Johansen's software plays back a DVD movie, like any other player software. But rather than sending the decrypted data to the PC screen, Johansen's player re-routes it to the hard drive, where it gets saved to a file in its unencrypted form.
Not exactly an engineering marvel, but it does the trick — so, start the clock. It won't be long now before movies "ripped" from DVD will be available on bootleg Web sites, just like MP3s. Now that DVD's important copy protection is broken, nobody will ever buy a DVD again — or, so we're told.
What now? I imagine the publishing industry will be the next to try and protect their products from piracy with some kind of snazzy encryption scheme. Sure, there's not much demand for bootleg copies of paperback novels on the Internet yet, but technological advances are always making piracy easier. At 20 cents a page, a Xerox copy of James Clavell's Shogun would have cost you $242 from the local library. But following the advent of personal photocopiers, you could have had Noble House for about forty bucks.
A dumb idea, you say? Who would make the effort? But you might say the same of the so-called DVD piracy threat. At the 150K/second speed of your average DSL line, a typical three gigabyte DVD would take about six hours to download. Worse, while low capacity DVD-ROM burners are slowly becoming available, dual-layer DVD authoring equipment still runs around $30,000.
Even those studio execs who perceive a threat will admit, outright DVD piracy is still infeasible. Instead, most speculation revolves around the possibility that the decrypted DVD movies will be converted to the more easily duplicated VCD format. Of course, once this is done, viewers lose the picture quality, the 5.1 surround soundtrack, and all the interactive special features on the original DVD. But this way, the total time to download and burn each movie is around three hours.
Then again, multiply that time by the current federal minimum wage of $5.15, add the price of the CD-R media and the cost of each copied movie remains around $19.50. Meanwhile, The Matrix, a film widely bootlegged before its official release in home versions, can now be had in full DVD format from various online retailers, features and all, for as little as $17.
Current list prices of other DVDs can run as high as $40. So, given the choice between the full DVD and a bootleg VCD copy of, say, the baffling faux-Catholic summer horror flick Stigmata — some viewers might indeed skip the DVD. Then again, they might just opt for a rental. Maybe.
At any rate, there's no doubt that some home PC users will now create VCDs from DVDs, where they couldn't before. That this would cause a significant increase in video piracy is unlikely, however, since most of these VCDs are already available from Asia, sometimes long before an "official" home version has been released. The most pirated VCD in history is Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, a film for which no DVD exists. It's Asia's large-scale, organized piracy operations that really threaten the movie industry, not casual copying of post-market DVDs.
Nonetheless, the entertainment industry continues to spend millions of R&D dollars coming up with new copy protection schemes, which will eventually be broken in turn. Wherever there exists a technology to prevent us from duplicating digital media, some hacker is going to be intrigued enough to go and break it. It happened for DVDs, it happened for Sony PlayStation games before that, and it will continue to happen.
Meanwhile, consumers will keep paying for these efforts, as the associated licensing fees and surcharges are passed along into retail prices. So I wonder: Does the consumer lose more because CSS encryption was cracked? Or because it was there to be cracked in the first place?
