News.com reports that movie studios are racing to find a technology that will keep people from making copies of DVDs, hoping to learn from the misfortunes of the recording industry:
Tron is the author of a piece of software called SmartRipper, which allows DVDs to be copied fairly easily to a computer hard drive, and from there burned onto recordable DVDs.
So far, it's hardly a threat on the level that Napster once was. But cross Tron and his peers with rapidly falling prices of DVD burners, and it's easy to see why Hollywood executives are nervous.
The studios' attempt to close the door on DVD copying is just one push in a broad effort aimed at ensuring Hollywood avoids the piracy that has plagued the recording industry for the past several years. Because movies are much bigger files and because DVDs already have some copy protection included, the film industry has so far escaped much of the dangers posed by Napster and latter-day Net file-swapping programs such as Morpheus or Kazaa.
Movie studios have already moved once to block DVD copying. When the format was originally released in the mid-1990s, executives worried that consumers would be able to make perfect digital copies of movies. Industry projections at that time forecast that DVD players that included the ability to record to a blank disc would be in the market by the end of 1999.
Technical plans aren't final yet. But essentially a watermark would insert instructions directly into the movies that would tell DVD players and recorders whether a movie could be copied. If it was copied illegally, the movie could not be played on hardware that included the watermark-recognition technology. These instructions would theoretically be carried with the movie even if it was copied using a program such as SmartRipper.
The plan would work on two levels. A DVD burner that recognizes a "don't copy" watermark would simply refuse to burn the copy. Similarly, a DVD player that is loaded with an unencrypted movie would look for the watermark. If it finds a "don't copy" stamp on a copied DVD, it would refuse to play the movie.
I wonder if these plans will ever be put to use and if so how long it will take before a solution pops-up (CloneDVD ).. Read the full article here.
Source: C|Net News.com
