Amazing Article About DVD's (must read)

This is one of the most informative / intellectual articles I have come across pertaining to DVD burners and copyright management in cyberspace. How I "came across" this article was courtesy of Ravsitar, who deserves full credit for pointint it out to me.

http://overclockers.com/articles916/


Pages 2 and 3 are especially interesting, as they deal with real life piracy situations and the actions already taken, and that will be taken. Trust me on this one, its a good article.

I don't know if video piracy will reach the levels of audio piracy. After all, you can listen to music almost any time but you need to pay attention to videos. There just isn't enough time to watch the videos I already have. We only get 24 hours a day. And I have a few hundred channels to watch if I have some spare time.

Also, the cost is very different. A soundtrack CD from a movie costs almost as much as the whole movie DVD! People sell bootlegs of current movies at the PC Fairs that I go to but once the real movie comes out, who wants a bootleg? The boot is $10 and the original is $20 with better quality and extra footage. And that will be $15 in a few months.

Also, movies are always going to pull in tons of money from theater runs. That more than recoups the investment in creating it. So anything they get from retail sales is just gravy. CD sales have to recoup the whole cost of making the CD and then make a profit.

Actually, I think Ed may be right on movie piracy if they don't catch it.

A pre-release bootleg is totaly different than a post-release bootleg. Pre-releases will allways suck as they come from a dude who smuggled a camera into the theater. Quallity != Good. With post-release though, the media exists in a digital domain already, just waiting for an exact copy (with exact quality) to be made.

Currently you can find quite a few people (at least in the anime world) selling bootleged CDs and Videos. The quality of Videos does suck, but CDs are spot on in quite a few cases. The reason? You can buy a CD, stick it in a drive and get a 1 for 1 digital copy that you burn to hundreds of others. Stick a well done label on it, and place it inside a nice copy of the retail's box, and sell it. Voila, nobody knows the difference unless they're looking

With video currently, the technology is here to create 1 for 1 digital copies, but not to burn them in several cases. Because lots of videos are now dual-layer, it's very hard to squish the entire DVD onto a single-layer disk. So, like Ed said, people will get rid of parts, burn the rest of a video to a seperate DVD, or do some additional compressing. Whatever way they go, it will be noticible right now if a bootleg is released, regardless of how perfect the packaging it comes in is.

When they start coming out with dual-layer burners though, it will be possible to create 1 for 1 exact copies and 1 for 1 exact burns. Nothing will have to be cut, or stuck on another DVD, or compressed. The quality and contents will not change one iota. This means that video piracy will start increasing. Just like audio piracy slowly increased with the advent of of cheap CD burners.


The ability to create exact copies, coupled with a movie rental 'subsciption', and you've got a recipie for bootleg mayhem. Pay $20 a month, and rent all the DVDs you want from Blockbuster. Rip and burn them all to dual-layer DVDs, and give them right back. Repeat. You've got the tools to create pretty cheap bootlegs.

I will agree that the scheme above is relativly useless for purely in home use. Average Joe would rent a single DVD and copy it for 'later use'. And even that may not happen to a significant extent if you look at how pirated VHS tapes were when they were in their prime.

However, scheme above is great for 'industrial' bootleggers. They're the people making copies of everything, and selling them anywhere they can find a profit. Usually Ebay


My coppers
(Great article BTW)

JigPu