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RFID To Track Play of DVDs And CDs?
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Sep 18, 2006 06:48 AM
from the long-arm-of-DRM dept.
from the long-arm-of-DRM dept.
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."
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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)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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
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?
Parent
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:The right to steal? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Parent
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
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)
Parent
Warning Label (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Re:If it won't play in my DVD player, it's not a D (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Parent
The end of those stickers? (Score:5, Interesting)
That would be nice.
Re: (Score:2)
Easy hardware fix (Score:2, Funny)
Aluminum foil over the RFID detector? Burn a copy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Parent
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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)
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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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)
Not a bad idea... (Score:2)
Article at ArsTechnica doubts if it will work (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Then you're in violation of the DMCA and may well be arrested. Have you been asleep for the last six years?