Cryptography Research wants piracy speed bump on HD DVDs

[Ian G]

Bill Stewart wrote:

> At 09:08 AM 12/15/2004, Ian Grigg wrote:
>
>> Let me get this right. ...
>> ...
>> A blockbuster worth $100m gets cracked ... and
>> the crack gets watermarked with the Id of the
>> $100 machine that played it.
>> ...
>> So the solution is to punish the $100 machine by
>> asking them to call Disney with a CC in hand?
>
>
> If you're in a profit-making business of pirating DVDs for money,
> then having your $100 DVD burner stop being able to play DVDs
> from a given studio is just a business expense.
>
> But if you're a typical hobbyist pirate,
> file-sharing your DVDs for free to other people
> who are sharing their pirated DVDs,
> rather than spending $2 to rent them at Blockbuster,
> then it's probably really annoying,
> and you're probably out of business with that DVD burner,
> though your other $39 DVD player can play them just fine.


John Kelsey wrote:

>Think about the effect on P2P systems, if having one extracted movie from your player available for sharing meant that your player would stop working for all new content....  
>
>I'm not saying I think this (or any other technical solution I've seen) will work.  I'm saying that it's a pretty reasonable attempt to undermine participation in P2P systems.
>  
>

I think in comment to both Bill and John, the counter
argument seems to be the same:  is this likely to make
a difference in practice?  I can't see it.  Yet.

If Alice, notorious p2p pirate, has this particular DVD
player in front of her, she simply factors it in.  Instead
of releasing her copies in dribs and drabs, she releases
them in batch.  Once released, the player is determined
to be an "old material only" player.  But this is no barrier
as DVD players now retail for the price of 10 DVDs, so
upgrading every 6 months is really no drama.



Where this *does* has an effect, I think, is that when
the black-booted IP police come in through the front
door (and I mean, through it...) and seize all the guilty
tech equipment, what they also pick up is a player that
has been identified to be a source of pirated material.

So before the judge, they can state that they found
pirated material, the IP number was tracked, *and*
they found the tools, as identified by other pirated
material distributed on the net.  This wipes out the
defence of "using Kazaa for bona fide purposes".

Also, if they have a way of tracking the purchases
of players, then they can more easily get warrants
for their non-radial door penetration manouvers.
Imagine a world where all DVD players are barcoded
with serial numbers, and the sale is related to a
credit card.  Closed loop, easy to show sufficient to
the judge to get the warrant.

Which would be even nicer if we could enter a new
crime onto the books to the effect of "purchasing a
DVD player without a credit card."

iang


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