Entries Tagged 'Digital Rights Management' ↓

This is bad news: 

Blockbuster Inc. said Wednesday that it had reached a deal for exclusive United States rental rights to movies from the Weinstein Company, whose founders created the Miramax studio and sold it to Disney.

The deal will keep all movies from Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s new production company out of the hands of Netflix, the online service that competes with Blockbuster, the nation’s largest movie-rental chain.

I’m really not sure I understand how this is possible. Doesn’t the First Sale doctrine make it possible for Netflix to buy DVDs through any legal channel and rent them to anyone it wants without having to get permission from the copyright holder?

(via Ezra Klein)

So, you think you can bypass your cable company by trading copies of The Sopranos over BitTorrent? That’s what this guy thought, too:

HBO has been watching. Then they went and tattled on me to Charter.

The download at issue is the second episode of the latest season of The Sopranos. All 359 megabytes of it. The people representing HBO recommended that Charter terminate my service. Charter basically said not to do it again or else they “will have no choice but to terminate” my account.

Read the comments and you’ll see that he was using the Peer Guardian program, which supposedly protects P2P connections from snoops.

He posted PDF copies of the warning letter from Charter and the original Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice from HBO to Charter.

Tony S. would be proud.

(via Lost Remote)

Here’s a quick follow-up to my Ouch! Bitten by DRM post from this morning.

I set up Media Center to record a movie on HBO Pacific at 9:30 MST. The movie in question? Wrongfully Accused, starring Leslie Neilsen, which sounds truly awful - the sacrifices I make in the name of science.

According to the Recorded TV list, Media Center recorded it just fine, but trying to play it back results in the dreaded “Restricted Content” error.

In fact, trying to watch any copy protected HBO content on this Media Center PC results in the same error after only a few seconds of viewing. I just tested using both tuners, and was unable to watch Miss Congeniality 2 on HBO Pacific or Jennifer Eight on HBO2. No great loss content-wise, but the bigger problem is making me very angry, to say the least.

For the most part, I use the DirecTiVo box in the living room to record HBO programming. It still works just fine. These days I mostly use the Media Center PC to record movies on unrestricted cable channels, including Comedy Central, American Movie Classics, and Turner Movie Classics. I assume this problem began occurring sometime on or before January 6, as that’s the first day when content I recorded from HBO turned out to be unwatchable. Last fall, I had no trouble watching HBO programming on this computer, so something has changed, and not for the better.

A post at Aaron Stebner’s blog, “Content protection errors in Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005″ offers a clue to the origin of the problem:

I have heard of several folks running into issues playing protected content (such as purchased songs/movies, or HBO television shows) after installing Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005. As I described here, Update Rollup 2 installs an updated Digital Rights Management (DRM) redistributable package. We are still investigating reports of content protection problems in order to identify root causes and provide fixes.

Aaron points to a Knowledge Base article, “The Windows Media Digital Rights Management system may not work if your computer hardware changes”, which identifies one possible cause of this problem:

The Microsoft Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM) system may not work if you make changes to your computer hardware. You may not be able to play protected content. Protected content includes content such as songs that you have bought and downloaded from an online store.

You may receive the following error messages:

• The license to play the packaged media is invalid.
• C00D277F - Secure storage protection error. Restore your licenses from a previous backup and try again.

This issue occurs because the Windows Media DRM system maintains information based on the hardware configuration of the computer. If certain components are changed, Windows Media DRM may not work because it may view the change as an unauthorized attempt to move protected content to another computer.

This issue may occur if you have made one or more of the following changes to your computer hardware:

• You recently changed hardware components, such as the CPU or the motherboard.
• You modified any one of your computer’s Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) settings that affect hardware components, such as disabling CPU hyper-threading.
• You moved the hard disk drive from one computer to another computer.

Well, that’s not the error I’m getting, but the underlying issue sounds familiar, especially given that I upgraded the hard drive on this machine last fall and used a disk imaging program to copy the contents of the old disk to the new one.

I’ll try resetting Windows Media DRM using the steps in the KB article. I’ll let you know how it works.

Update: Yep, that worked. But it required multiple steps that demanded more expertise than it is reasonable to expect any Windows user to go through. I didn’t bother backing up my licenses to see if my existing content would play back after the restoration. My guess is that it wouldn’t have worked.

DRM sucks.

Here’s a message you don’t want to see on your Media Center machine:

This occurs when you try to play back a copy-protected file - in this case, a movie recorded from HBO Signature - on a computer other than the one it was recorded on. Media Center Extenders include code that bypasses this restriction so that you can view recorded shows elsewhere on your network, as long as they’re playing back on the main Media Center box where they were originally recorded.

The trouble is, I got this message when I tried to play back a movie on the Media Center machine where it was originally recorded. And now I see that the same problem is affecting another movie recorded the same day, from the Starz channel. What went wrong? I’m not sure. Did I copy this particular movie file to a different partition?

I’ll do some more tests and see if I can figure out where the problem lies. Meanwhile, I won’t be watching Three Days of the Condor or Lenny anytime soon.

Update: See the follow-up here.

Shorter Tony Glover:

“I don’t really understand technology all that well, and you have a funny name.”

Details here (with some background here and here).

A new Business Week article, Daggers Drawn Over DVDs, has gotten a lot of publicity for its melodramatic description of a supposed shouting match between Bill Gates and Sony CEO Howard Stringer. Typically, our entertainment-obsessed journalists buried the story. After you get past the catfight, you read this:

Microsoft and Intel paint a futuristic picture of the digital home, with sleek PCs powered by their software and chips in the central role. The PC would shuttle music, photos, and video from room to room—and grab off the Web everything from the latest Tom Cruise blockbuster to a National Public Radio podcast.

Sony and its supporters are skittish about the latest movies being zipped around the house. Blu-ray disks can hold more content than today’s DVDs, but they would be used in much the same way. The new disks would be plopped into a DVD player, and copyrighted material, like Hollywood movies, couldn’t be ripped to a computer’s hard drive without a studio’s permission.

Neither world sounds perfect, but of the two competing visions, I want the one that gives me more options, not fewer.

On the Internet, a hoax can spread just as fast as a genuine news story. That’s the lesson from the bogus story published in an obscure UK business magazine yesterday that claimed Microsoft is about to unleash a new single-play DVD format.

Paul Thurrott reprinted the story without giving credit to the original source. Bink.nu picked up the story from Paul and reprinted it verbatim.

Techdirt commented on the original story, with attribution but without any fact-checking. So did John Walkenbach.

The funny part? There’s no truth to the story. None whatsoever. In fact, the original story sparked a flurry of e-mails around Microsoft as people in different groups tried to figure out where on earth this story came from. After the head-scratching stopped, a spokesmen told me, they concluded that the story was not true. “It appears to be confusing an existing feature within Windows Media DRM that allows for single-play of promotional digital material. This has been an option for content owners to use for some time for the Windows Media format - it does not apply to MPEG2 content found on DVDs.”

Downloaded content in the Windows Media format can be DRM-protected, and if the content owner wants to limit it to a specific number of plays, or to set an expiration date for the content, that’s an option, just as it is with subscription-based music services. But it’s only one of many options, and it has nothing to do with DVDs.

So, case closed. The single-play DVD format can go back to the 1990s, where it rightfully belongs.

Update: No, Virginia, there are no cheap, disposable DVDs from Microsoft in the pipeline. Get the final word from Microsoft here.

[Cross-posted at Ed Bott's Windows Expertise]

I’ve seen this story reported on several sites already today, including Techdirt. The comments at TechDirt, like all the others, point to an article at The Business Online that claims Microsoft is about to resurrect one of the truly bad ideas of the 1990s:

Computer software giant Microsoft has developed a cheap, disposable pre-recorded DVD disc that consumers can play only once. The discs would give Hollywood increased control over the release of new films and allow consumers the chance to watch a film at the fraction of the price of an ordinary pre-recorded DVD. More important, the discs would prevent copying and digital piracy, which is costing the film and music industry billions in lost revenues.

The revolutionary product could be on the market as early as next year, with the new DVD players needed to view them. Microsoft hopes it will help the company dominate home entertainment as it dominates the desktop computer market.

The reactions to this story are predictable: “How dare Microsoft do this,” and “Doesn’t anyone remember the Divx disaster?”

But I was more interested in the strange journalism at work here. The story includes only one offhand reference to “a senior source in the company,” and it’s a little odd to see all these assertions being presented as outright facts rather than attributed to someone. Most experienced reporters would go out of their way to provide details and attributions. Their absence here is telling.

I’d never heard of this publication before, and Google doesn’t exactly give it a lot of respect either. With stories like this, it’s no wonder.

My guess is that the real story here is somewhere between “way off base” and “complete fabrication.”

Anyone want to take bets?

Update: Yep. It’s a hoax.

Chris Lanier has an excellent response to the ongoing discussion over HDTV in Windows Media Center Edition 2005. I don’t agree with 100% of what he’s written, but I agree with most of it, and I think most of our disagreements are based on market approaches more than technical facts. I’ll have more to say about this later.

I was really, really disappointed by Thomas Hawk’s response, however. I though this remark in particular was a cheap shot:

According to Chris, Vista will change everything and finally give us, through our savior DRM, the closed box within an open box and the HDTV that I and others crave along with it.

Thomas is grossly misinterpreting Chris’s argument. To characterize Chris as advocating for “our savior DRM” is insulting and wrong.

Thomas is not alone. Chris has taken a bunch of arrows in the past few months from people who can’t seem to get past their emotional response. They keep ignoring the most essential fact: The DRM is already there in the encrypted cable or satellite signal. Any company - Microsoft, TiVo, the Myth TV community, or any third party - has to deal with it.

The satellite companies have no mechanism of any kind to allow third parties to access the encrypted data stream. None. TiVo cut a deal with DirecTV to build DVR hardware into DirecTV’s set-top box, but DirecTV sells those boxes and owns those customers. TiVo just collects a few dollars per subscriber for supplying the back-end services.

Cable companies have an umbrella organization (CableLabs) and a technology (Open Cable Application Platform) that third parties can implement to get their technologies into the encrypted data stream. Getting certified by CableLabs means you’ve successfully met their requirements for maintaining a secure data path that can’t be copied.

The implication of the sarcastic remarks aimed at Chris is that he is in favor of selling Windows users down the river by advocating that DRM be imposed on our wonderful free digital world. In reality, Chris is explaining what technology companies like Microsoft have to do to play successfully in the modern media universe. You might not like that universe, but that’s the one we live in.