RFID To Track Play of DVDs And CDs? 237
jayp00001 writes, "A Taiwan-based maker of DVDs and CDs for major studios is about to begin putting RFID chips in disks. The eventual aim is for DVD and CD players equipped with an RFID reader to prevent copied or out-of-region disks from being played."
Are they trying to encourage piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
I buy loads of CDs from other countries, mainly US & Japan and if this will stop me being able to play them then sorry guys, I'm going to start to explore other avenues..
Re:Are they trying to encourage piracy (Score:5, Funny)
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no you do not.
You need a conductor of a mesh size smaller that the minimum (smallest) wavelength you want to block. Mesh of 1" squares is more than adequate up to the low GHz range. Screen door mesh (assuming metal and not plastic) is good for the mid to high tens of GHz.
You will also gain a ton more by having two 1" square meshes offset and at less than one wavelength apart (for the target of ~2.5GHz and lower) than you would for
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Anyway, the concrete/rebar thing actually works quite well up to a couple hundred MHz. Think of the old 900MHz cell phones and how much trouble they were inside buildings (esp. parking structures).
The true parinoid, have a double insulated enclosure with both a floating faraday and a grounded faraday. Each of these faradays are in a sealed enclosure, the foating faraday has Brown/Pink/White (IIRC order of preferance) noise coupled to it while the ou
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Re:Are they trying to encourage piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't region-encoded discs already... well... region-encoded?
Either people buy legit US/Japanese/whatever players (which you can't guard against with RFID chips), or they get their existing player chipped to bypass the whole region-protection mechanism - is there any reason to think this isn't going to work with the new RFID players, too?
Of course, if the DVD players refuse to play unRFIDed discs then they'll be a bit useless for all the existing DVDs out there (nothing like breaking backwards-compatability to hurt a new product). If the RFIDed DVDs have some kind of (data) flag on the disc to turn RFID-checking it on it's liable to be trivial to reverse-engineer or omit the flag when copying the disc, too.
Even if it does somehow "eliminate optical disc piracy in the entertainment and IT sectors", does anyone else think it's wonderful how they've finally managed to do it just about the time that broadband and bittorrent have made "optical disc" piracy obsolete, even in the mainstream?
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Re:Are they trying to encourage piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what I'm wondering is why not just cut a working rfid tag from a disc and stick it right in the case next to the reader? Then, no matter what disk you put in the player, if the player looks for a chip it will find one.
Even if there is an optical bit on the disc telling the chip reader what specific response to look for, I'm willing to bet that the chip reader will have some sort of generic pass code that can be sent to it (used for debugging or testing purposes) and it will only be a matter of time before some engineers crack the system to make generic rfid chips to place in the player case to bypass the disc-embedded ones.
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Watch out. You'll probably use a disc you don't care for as the chip donor, and when the player starts phoning home, you'll wind up on the demographic mailing lists of people who listen to this one Morrissey album 18 times a day.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Do thet say "license the movie today?" No. It's "Own Lion King on DVD today." "OWN Narnia on DVD today." "Own the original trilogy on DVD today."
Please stop parroting those idiots' (read idiots' as:
They (the content producers themselves) re promoting the indisputable fact that you OWN the copy of that content. The only thing you CANNOT
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Obviously, it is. It is "illegal copying", not stealing. These are materially different. These are so materially different that you should sit down and think carefully through why I'm saying the following until you get it (and shut up about the topic until you have gotten it): When you are labelling illegal copying as stealing, you cannot
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Actually, no - Failure to obey region coding doesn't even count as copyright violation. It doesn't break ANY laws (except, in just a few countries, if you circumvent the access control mechanism involved) whatsoever.
Industry cartels (generally illegal, but somehow they've gotten away with this in the movie and video game industries) have NO authority of enforcement whatsoever. Thus the "need" for various forced region coding scheme
hmm.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:hmm.... (Score:4, Interesting)
This idea is a complete non-starter in any case - are they really saying that I won't be able to burn my crappy home movies of my daughter to DVD to post to my parents?
Re:hmm.... (Score:4, Insightful)
There are always at least one brand that will sell a player without rfid like what happen with dezoned dvd player. In the beginning it was difficult to find one, after a while some brand started to sell some and not it is not even possible to find a player that check zone encoding on dvd.
Off course the movie studio could use the RFID to store something mandatory to read the DVD. But that would mean making DVD incompatible with the huge park of player already existing. There is no way they will try that at the same time than they try to introduce the next generation of players ( they want people to replace their DVD player by a next generation one, not buy another dvd player )
The only way this technology would be usefull is if you make a law that outlaw DVD player with the RFID reader, but xxAA have more juicy target for their "buy you own politician puppet" budget.
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What I find invading, is if they require that th DVD player be networke
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Doesn't matter whether or not the features could be just as easily done on both systems..
All you have to put on the CD is that it's for use with RFID players only, and that it differs from the standard CD because it has special tracks on it. Never mind it can be played in a regular player, I'm sure most people wouldn't try it anyway and would accept their new $200 cd player for their living room.
What a bargain (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What a bargain (Score:5, Informative)
Sony ... is that you?
Seriously, I've always told my friends to steer away from name-brand dvd players for exactly that reason. My supposedly crappy Apex is region-free out of the box, plays everything I can throw at it, and "just works". Other brands that my friends and relatives bought AFTER I WARNED THEM NOT TO just don't.
And when I go "I told you so" they go "yeah, but its a name brand and it costs more. It SHOULD work better."
People don't listen. The worst part ... when their name brand unit dies ... AND THEY DO IT AGAIN! Rrrrr! (And its not even Talk Like A Pirate Day until tomorrow)
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My first DVD player was an Apex.
It performed quite well for about a year and then suddenly died _JUST_ past the warranty expiration date.
I bought a Toshiba DVD player after that... had it for years now and never had problems.
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Warning Label (Score:4, Informative)
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Then what choice is there?
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Tomorrow is Talk Like A Pirate Day.
Now, I'm not actually suggesting anything...
If it won't play in my DVD player, it's not a DVD (Score:4, Insightful)
On another, rather important, note, they mention it for HD-DVD. HD-DVD doesn't even _have_ region encoding, so they can't tell me the disc is from the wrong one; that's why I want HD-DVD rather than Blu-Ray.
Re:If it won't play in my DVD player, it's not a D (Score:3, Informative)
Post-facto crippling via firmware (Score:2)
Re:If it won't play in my DVD player, it's not a D (Score:2, Interesting)
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As the new disks can not be changed in such a way to break them on 'old' players there is just going to be 'legit' players and 'old' players, note: 'old' players can not be classed as non-legit.
This is all based on the fact the goverments do not do something stupid on the behalf of the movie companys.
Re:If it won't play in my DVD player, it's not a D (Score:4, Informative)
This statement needs to be changed to say that HD-DVD doesn't have region encoding now. The fact that it is not being imposed now does not mean that it won't be imposed in the future. A web search can provide some interesting comments on this.
The thing that I find most interesting about HD-DVD is that the whole idea of PAL or NTSC discs is going away. At least so far it appears that HD-DVD's standard will be 24 fps video and it will expect the hardware (HD-DVD player and TV) to correctly display the image in whatever format is necessary.
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The end of those stickers? (Score:5, Interesting)
That would be nice.
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RFID embedded in the disk would of course set off the scanners if not disabled. Since they have no intention of turning it off the store would just update their scanner to ignore that one as it passed by.
Easy hardware fix (Score:2, Funny)
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Aluminum foil over the RFID detector? Burn a copy? (Score:3, Interesting)
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1) Cover the disk in foil
2) snip the RFID reader in the player making it recognise legacy disk
3) destroy the RFID tag in the disk using LARGE electromagnet
4) refuse to buy one
thinking about point 3... I have used the technique before to destroy a RFID tag on thing I purchased. Aside from the problems of small popping when the foil in the tag melts, it seems to be a good way of destroying lots of tags. A strategically placed electromagnet and a sensor and you could hit every one that passed!
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The RFID-Zapper project uses a camera flash coil to induce enough current in the aerial to kill the silicon. I have tested something similar using a CCFL backlight inverter coil.
RFID-Zapper [events.ccc.de]
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A place I worked at a couple years ago had problems with people "deactivating" the RFID tags on sales tags using a similar device to a bulk eraser. As long as you can induce sufficient current to destroy the aerial traces, or the silicon you are fine. I don't think it would do much for any electronics nearby though. The CD should be fine!
Well, I've tried to play nice... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Well, I've tried to play nice... (Score:4, Insightful)
For me, that'll mean 'Radio'. Free, and ubiquitous.
Try telling someone aged about 16 about the 'digital music services' that're 'streamed everywhere, in real time, capable of being received and decoded by cheap chips built into modern mobile phones'. They get really excited, then you tell them it's called 'rad-ee-oo' and they get pissed off ;-)
Justin.
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Then ClearChannel came along, bought most of the stations and the only thing they play is shit.
I don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
This sounds like just another stupid application of RFID. For the all the effort involved it would be simpler to just embed a hidden track and read that.
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Well for starters, hidden tracks can be copied. I don't expect there to be blank writable media with the RFID included, so it will always be easy to discern a pre-recorded (ie store bought) disc versus a consumer-written disc. As far as disabling the RFID reader in the player, I'm sure that will be extremely difficult in these days of "system on a chip" - more than likely it will be embedded in the one-and-only
It still needs a sensor (Score:2)
Some way or another, it has to read the RFID chip.
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Long-term impact (Score:5, Insightful)
In that event, I have to ask a simple question:
Will the revenue previously lost to piracy be fed back to the consumer? Will we see cheaper CDs anywhere?
Of course not. It's basic fucking economic theory that you can charge more if you segregate a market. Piracy be damned, fair-use my arse - this is just a desperate attempt to control the market, which can only lead to higher prices for legitimate, law-abiding consumers.
Bastards.
This is really becoming silly (Score:2)
If they could, they already would (Score:2)
Snake Oil (Score:2)
Could mean consumer-unbreakable protection (Score:4, Interesting)
Ever heard of system-on-chip?
I can tell you right now that it is extremely doable to put the necessary rfid reader circuity inside the drive controller ASIC and connect it to a simple loop antenna by a couple of pins (remember it only needs to have a range of an inch or so).
The controller chip could even scan for the correct impedance to prevent people from breaking the antenna trace, or (this is a good one) have a 'verification' RFID somewhere inside the drive case:
If the RFID reader part of the controller can't read the unique id of it's matching verification RFID (remember nowadays it's possible to have a small pseudo-PROM area of an ASIC) it won't let you use the drive..
We are seeing the end of the consumer-hackable hardware era; modern hardware can and will prevent all but the most dedicated hardware hackers with expensive logic analyzers from making unauthorized copies.
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Still... I get most of my out of region movies via bittorent anyway so I can at least get English subtitles.
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Therefore, it will have some identification system labeling it as "a disk that should be protected". This has to be
a) an extra code or lack of code, since you cant go back and mark the already produced legacy DVD's
b) laser-readable, because you still have to read it on a copied disk without RFID
Therefore, the vulnerability will not be in the RFID, but in the identification code. Rip a DVD, delete the code
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Dear hollywood (Score:5, Insightful)
. The people who actally make the films really don't care. They get their royalties if the disc is bought in the US, Europe, Taiwan or anywhere else. They really just want to make a living doing what they love.
The end users hate region coding. It means they often have to wait, often end up with an inferior version, and basically reduces consumer choice while increasing their costs.
The manufacturers don't like region coding. It makes their players considerably less popular. They go to considerable lengths to find ways around the region coding requirement. Multi-region is a key selling point of a player to anyone with any interest in importing discs. They're going to do the ame thing to try to get around RFID chips. Or anything else you might like to try. And they're really not going to be happy about having to increase their costs to add an RFID reader. These companies are working on tiny margins. No matter how cheap, RFID readers will eat into this.
Dear USA and a couple of others.... (Score:2)
One of the reasons given for region encoding is the different standards between regions, paticularly the PAL standard used in most of the world and the completely rubbish NTSC standard used in the US. If everything was on PAL discs you'd have loads of US consumers complaining that they don't look right on their TV sets (and in the PAL world complaining about the massive drop in quality).
If you want to get rid of region encoding we need on TV standard.
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At least 'til free trade was canceled by our politicians who'd rather listen to lobbyists than to what they kept telling us was the perfect market model.
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No, that has nothing to do with region coding. Most DVD players now can play PAL or NTSC and convert them to either. The region coding is because they want to avoid people being able to buy a DVD wherever it is being sold at the lowest price, and thus be able to price it high in one country, and low in another country, depending on local demand and economy. It is also used to manage release windows - a movie may still be in theaters or first-run TV release, and they don't want DVD sales to interfere.
You
If they can read it... (Score:3, Insightful)
What they will do is make the incentive bigger for criminals to copy these disks, and they make the incentive bigger for curious people to try and hack the protection of these disks. They will also piss the general disk-buying public off by creating disks that will more often not play rather than play.
No winners here... is that my problem? Last time I have seen a Hollywood movie is so long ago I can't even remember.
Hadn't you heard? (Score:3, Funny)
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They still make movies there? I thought they went the same way every business and only kept the management on site while outsourcing all the real work.
Not a bad idea... (Score:2)
Article at ArsTechnica doubts if it will work (Score:5, Informative)
Big Claims (Score:2)
Bonus content (Score:2, Insightful)
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
People figured out how to get rid of CSS, what makes the studios think that this will be any harder?
Amazing how they invest so much money in this stuff, when it's not likely to last longer than a few months.
that does it... (Score:2)
Please explain to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Suppose I'm a fan of movies made in France
What they really should call that is "out of monopololistic control zone."
Tom
Hope the imbalance that results... (Score:2)
A few damaged DVD players might put the kibosh on this scheme.
MAYBE the suits will notice... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, I have always wondered whether the push to DRM is actually driven by any clear-headed, realistic, cost/benefit analysis based on good, real data... or whether it's an irrational emotional response on the part of media executives. Or the result of very good, misleading sales pitches by the vendors of DRM technology.
...but it's not very likely. (Score:2)
The hardware... (Score:2)
Weighting (Score:2)
How about using this in a non-evil way? (Score:2)
Easily Fixed. (Score:2)
If the disc itself can withstand a EMP pulse, just build yourself a RFID Zapper [events.ccc.de].
What other requirements will they have? (Score:2)
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Until someone figures out how to disable the chip?
Put it in the microwave. Oh wait....
This won't work for long (Score:2, Insightful)
-legacy disks won't play (people won't like it, but I can see it happening)
-legacy disks will play, the fact that RFID is needed sits as data on the disk
both things will be fixable with a programmable RFID chip, provided their code isn't too complicated (which it can't be, since they're delevering the encrypted content, the algorithm AND the key, just obfuscated)
you can also mod the
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Then you're in violation of the DMCA and may well be arrested. Have you been asleep for the last six years?
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Uh, no. You may see it as the right thing to do and I may see it as the right thing to do, but the owner of the material can disburse it as they wish. You as the customer, have one right, and one right only -- buy it or not.
The customer has no choice (Score:2)
This role can only be fulfilled if he has any kind of choice, though. And, no matter where you look, today, that choice is lacking. You cannot choose between the HDDVD-Player with or without DRM. It is FORBIDDEN to manufacture a HDDVD player that circumvents DRM (or doesn't implement it).
Free ma
Funny thing about the free market. . . (Score:2)