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Watermarks, Holograms as DVD CSS Replacement 38

Posted by michael from the version-2.0 dept.
andyo writes: "Given all the discussion of technical anti-copying measures recently, it might be interesting to see the replacement technologies that the industry is working on after the DeCSS embarrassment. Watermarks (which came up in an earlier Slashdot discussion) and holograms are mentioned in this article on Planet IT."
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Watermarks, Holograms as DVD CSS replacement More

Watermarks, Holograms as DVD CSS replacement

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  • Hmm, I guess I'll do without TV and only use the internet & my tapes. Maybe I'll loose the internet to a cable company later, but I hope to push it out enough years that I'm pushing up daisies by the time it happens. Enough people still time shift with tape that all digital will be delayed.

  • Well, I never said my idea was perfect, ;) indeed I said there were probably ways to abuse this system, and you found a few... There should be a method for ownership transfer (with the new owner agreeing to the same fine system as the 1st owner,) and a way for reporting theft similar to the policies for reporting theft of credit cards, to limit liability for the original owner. We don't want people to buy tracks, send bogus "My music was stolen" letters to avoid fines and then start bootlegging, owners still have to have some responsibility.

    Also, the watermark damn well better be strong. I'd suggest using some sort of digital signature in the watermark that ensures that even if the watermark could be removed, it could not be forged with current technology before the heat-death of the universe.

    As for "buying something outright and owning it," that never was entirely true. When you buy a CD, DVD, software in the store, you're buying the media, fancy packaging, and a license for unlimited personal use of the information on the media, codified by copyright. This is how it worked for most of the 20th century.

    Also just for arguments sake, let's say the $100 fine was per song, and that the owner could be fined a maximum of 5 times for incidents or $500, then he would be permanently banned from my online music service as a habitual offender, thus preventing further damage to the owner, the music service and the artists. (You know, get too many speeding tickets and lose your driver's license.)

  • They do spend a LOT of money on marketing. For example the publishers pay the retailers tens of thousands of dollars for the right to display an endcap, the cardbord displays advertising a game at places like Babbages.

    Yes, I'm also suspicious about the amount of money actually lost to piracy. Noone has been able to come up with reasonably plausible numbers. I think PC Gamer came up with the $1.00 number out of the blue.

    I am disappointed that the developers don't get a bigger piece of the pie. They're in the same boat as musicians - getting the shaft from the publishers.

  • I have my PS2 hooked through my VCR and it plays DVDs just fine, and plays games just fine as well. I have even recorded a DVD I own to VHS just to test it and it works fine.

  • true (Score:1)

    by Grifter ( 12763 )
    True it can be watermarked, but who says that they have to know that I bought it... I'll pay cash for it and use a fake name or whatever, they aren't going to deny me to purchase that DVD because they can't verify my SSN or telephone number.

    Also what if my DVDs get stolen, there will have to be somthing set up so I can report it... and if I am forced to register everything then I'll just report it all stolen

    Big deal, why don't they stop trying to stop us from copying it and just give up.
  • I wonder how much the DVD's would cost if their was no added cost for ANTIPIRACY software/hardware/firmware technology. The consumer is billed for the added cost of the disk, in addition to the modest fee of 3000us for the player. Creating new technology to defeat the "piracy problem" will forever be a reactive game because the pirators will adapt and overcome. Solution: Sell the disks as usual, prosecute the big offenders, lower the costs of the disks.
  • This has already happened to some extent. Sony has made it so that their PS2 will not work if DVD movies are played through a VCR, by monkeying with the video signal. I am not sure if the same thing happens when playing the games, but this would be a pretty effective method of preventing copies of the DVDs from being made.

    Interesting too, that Sony incorporates this tech into their PS2 and at the same time, they make quite a few movies.

  • I thought I'd post a comment on their article, but first I had to join up and become a member. After filling out their nice form and submitting it, they rejected my application. Seems I don't make purchasing decisions worth enough money for my opinions to matter :)
    Anyhoo, the article reads (between the lines) like the writer has a clue. They spend four pages explaining how CSS was designed to prevent "piracy", how it failed, and what factions are involved in the next generation of "copy protection". The holograms to identify legit DVDs is actually a good way (for now) of detecting counterfeit (read commercially pirated) disks, but what evidence have we seen that the MPAA even remebers that the commercial pirates are the people who are really hurting their members bottom lines?
  • ...and it exists on near every DVD player not just the PS2.

    http://www.macrovision.com [macrovision.com]

    Vermifax

  • And it is defeatable for about $25 from Radio Shack.

  • Watermarks and Holograms.... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I read the article and all I can say is "whoopdie doo"...

    Watermarks - rely on a detection chip. Sure the average LUSER won't be disabling the chip, but ya wanna bet that the pirates do? How hard can it be to pull some line high, or cut it? Or reprogram the firmware.... The watermarking is a waste.

    Moreover, at least *SOME* DVD producers won't want to use watermarks, and the players will have to accomodate this. So if I rip out a watermark, or change the right bits on a bit-by-bit copy to tell the box that it's not watermarked, then it's gonna play anyway...

    Who benefits from this? NO ONE...

    As for the holograms, yeah, they look pretty, but beyond "verifying" that I've got 'authentic' software, what good is it? Again, even if they check for it, the hardware's gonna have to accomodate people who don't want to waste millions to put a hologram on the disc (well, besides the Pirates and the MPAA members)... And if the disc is supposed to have one that the player is going to check for, then guess what - again, it's a software bit saying "verify that hologram" and bits can be flipped (pesky cosmic rays!).

    I know it doesn't check for the holo right now, but assuming it did - and I scratch the holo? Then what? Do I get a new DVD that I have to purchase? Will they just send me a new one in exchange? (yah right!)...

    Gist: Copy protection doesn't work. Can't work. and Won't ever work... Stop wasting everyone's time and money on this useless shit and innovate so I have to continually buy something that's worth buying rather than trying to protect something that can't be protected...

  • Putting a unique watermark on a DVD or MP3 could work, but I'd do it a bit differently. Say I was the evil overlord of an online subscription based music company and I wanted to deter piracy, I would do as follows:

    1. Make the customers sign a legally binding agreement (snail-mailed & signed with a pen if necessary) before allowing them to use my service. The contract would make them responsible for preventing copyright infringements, and make them pay a $100.00 fine for each infringement traced back to them.
    2. Every time a customer downloads a song or album, it would have a unique watermark attached to it (ideally using heavy encryption and steganography to prevent cracking and prevent altering of the watermark,) so each track can be traced back to the downloading customer.
    3. The customer is now free to use the music however he/she wishes. He can even copy it and use it in any way permitted by Fair Use. There is no copy protection in this scheme, just copyright protection. Thus, there is little incentive for most people to crack the watermark.
    4. If a track is found on the net or on the streets in an obvious copyright infringement situation (on a warez site, or found in the hands of bootleggers,) the company uses the watermark to trace the song back to the original customer, and adds a $100.00 fine to his bill. The amount is important. $100.00 is high enough to be irritating and an effective deterrent to home users, but low enough to make it not worth fighting. Legally speaking, this kind of offense should have the seriousness of a minor traffic ticket. Most infringers will gripe and grumble, but pay the fine without a big legal battle. The customer did sign a contract, making it harder to break this system with legal action. A bonus to this system is that the company and artists get a new source of income from fines. The idea is that the company issues lots of fines as a routine part of the business, rather than spending thousands of dollars trying to get a small number of pirates hung, drawn and quartered in court.

    The idea here is not to bankrupt people or create drawn out court cases, we want a simple deterrent, while still allowing fair use of copyrighted works. There should be a limit to the fines - a customer shouldn't have to pay $100,000,000 if the company catches 1,000,000 infringing copies of his track on the net. Also, there should be a fair appeals process in place, preferably through a disinterested 3rd party so the customer can contest the fine, but the process should be quick, cheap and final.

    Of course, depending of the evilness of the people implementing this plan, there are probably lots of ways for this plan to be abused. But maybe it can be turned into a fair way of fighting piracy.

    Ok, I think I just let something evil loose, flame away!

  • Costs... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    At $19.99 for a DVD - I'd buy it for the clarity, and the quality rather than getting a ripped VOB copy that's kinda shakey...

    However, that's me - an ex-college student who graduated and has a real job... if I were still making $12K a year and eating ramen noodles, I'd be dealing with the crappy quality and watching 'em on my 'puter...

    I'd suspect that the MPAA has problems with piracy in some countries because their products are OVERPRICED for those markets. Tip: Pirated products are cheaper, that's why people go for them. Reduce your prices to a level close to the pirates, and people will pay a buck or two more for your quality...(well, most will, the rest, who cares?)

    Piracy is simple market dynamics at work: People go for the lowest price....
  • Always when the software/music/movie industry want to protect stuff that they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on producing they are always bitched on here on slashdot

    Thats because the reason they spend that much money producing it is that they all know that they will receive a good return on their investment based on current levels of piracy. Since copyright and copy protection in its current form is allowing them to do this, further levels of protection seem paranoid, and are just blatent profiteering.

    Why should anyone in...say...the software industry want to stop fair use of their products?

    Because fair use includes the right to disassemble. This would allow people to make compatible competing products.

    Fair use allows us to use the product wherever we want. I don't know why the motion picture industry objects to this, but they seem to put a lot of effort into stopping us.

    Fair use allows us to sell something that we no longer want. This represents a loss of a sale in their opinion.

    Fair use means that a console company doesn't have total control of games for their console.

    The problem is that the majority of people are not only into fair use but also piracy.

    The majority of people are into fair use. I have a DVD player to watch films. Not to pirate them. If I buy a book I want to read it. Not mass produce copies. As it happens, the current level of protection allows me to do most of the things I might reasonably wish to do. Unfortunately it prevents me from making my own DVD player. Other "Copy protection" schemes would prevent me from copying something even after copyright expires, or prevent me from lending something to a friend, or making nth gen copies of music that I write and perform. Or recording a film for later viewing.
  • that is not how watermarking works.
    Watermarking is adding imperceptible (as far as most people are concerned) data to an image or sound that can be identified by a program.
    Artists can watermark their jpgs. When someone else rips off the file and claims that they created it, anyone who has the correct software can identify that it is actually made by someone else. Watermarks can be very powerful, to the point that a printed and then scanned jpg can still contain the identifying data.
    Watermarking a dvd (read 4-8 gigs of data) takes a significant amount of computer proccessing. They are not going to give each dvd they burn a unique watermark, as it wouldn't be practical. So, watermarks are going to be more like a proof of copyright imbedded into the video. I bet they will be used for region coding or some other lame thing. (Right now it is easy to decrypt the vobs and strip the region coding. Anyone with the right equipment could burn those and sell them to the bad guys. Oh no!)
    If anyone else has any brilliant ideas as to what the watermarking will be used for, or if anyone actually bothers to read the article, please reply.
    -theman2

    ps: I am still pissed that I can't buy the complete tv series "The Prisoner" collection on dvd as it is only released in europe now. If anyone has a dvd burner and wants to kill the region coding and send me some burnt copys, I will pay list price. I got the first 4 episodes and I am hooked =)

  • I've got my PS2 hooked straight into my VCR (only way it will work, old TV and all...), and it plays DVDs and games just fine. I guess they must have messed up just a little bit.

    Has anyone figured out why they bother to do this? All they do is piss off customers and anyone whos going to distribute copies of movies is going to do it with or without copy protection. Damn MagicGate...

    Like Karma doesn't matter...
    Moderators: -1, nested, oldest first!

  • The thing that all the industry suits seem to be forgetting is that no matter what copy protection/tracing/encryption/whatever scheme they come up with, it has no hope of working, since at some point the plaintext must be shown to the consumer. Try as they might, they can't get around the fact (though they would if they could) that nobody's going to pay for something unless they can view it, and if they can view it, they can copy it.

    Hopefully, the entertainment industry will someday get that clue (preferably after a brutal fragmenting of the current megalithic multinationals) and leave their legal problems with lawyers, and solve their technical with technology.

    OK,
    - B
    --

  • Maybe I'm missing the point here. So a disk is watermarked. Same as a serial number, right? "Disk Number 1212345". So Johnny Wad purchases Disk Number 1212345 and takes it home and copies it. And subsequently, twenty-million copies of Disk Number 1212345 appear on the "underground". If Johnny "registered" his copy when he purchased it, then he might be in trouble. But if he bought it at Wal Mart for $14.99 (on sale) and carried the disk out of the store in a bag in the usual manner, what has been gained by knowing that Disk Number 1212345 is now in circulation as a pirated disk?

  • Excellent. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Watermarks and holograms give people a way to identify and trace the source of pirated media, while not interfering with the consumer's fair use rights. I really hope the industry does go in this direction, as the current strategy of making locked-down, "untamperable" computer systems is beginning to frighten me.
  • the average user will now not only buy his DVD player chipped, but also his TV, radio and toaster. So the only thing that happens is that everything gets a little more expensive, will sell less because of the higher price, and anyone implementing this is shooting themselves in the foot with a depleted uranium shell. PLEASE implement watermarks...As for the hologram: the hologram only shows that the DISK is real, but doesn't do anything for the content. it just makes it easier to distinguish between an original and a copy. a scratched holo is also not problem. it just means you're hologram has a scratch on it.

    //rdj
  • Interesting idea, but what happens if someone sells a DVD to someone else who then pirates it? Or what if someone breaks into your house, steals your DVDs and pirates them? What if your computer is hacked, and your 50000 song watermarked-mp3 collection is stolen? Who's responsible?

    (Sounds like you want a kind of Viral GPL type license where you sell it to someone and they are now obligated under the same terms... or something? I dunno if you can do that. Cuz what if I just want to sell it outright..?)

    What if the songs are cracked and your id # is watermarked into them before they're distributed?

    Do you really waa legally binding agreement when you buy a DVD or music? What happened to the idea of just buying something outright and just plain owning it?

    BTW-- is your $100 fine per song? per album? per DVD? Would a double-album be some huge multi-thousand dollar fine? Is it per-infringement, or if my song gets "out" and is pirated 1,000 times, do I owe $100,000?

    It seems I'd get my 1,000,000 Napster friends together and we'd just all co-own the album, paying .000000001c each.

    W

    -------------------

  • Watermarking and Insurance (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I expressed this opinion once before at the late, great, Technocrat.net . May it rest in peace.

    My theory is that watermarked copyrighted media will create a new situation that isn't much different then the situation with our automobiles.

    When every copy of a copyrighted work is marked with a watermarked, unique serial number, the store clerks will simply record the ID of the purchaser. This isn't going to be much trouble - most people use credit cards to pay for things anyhow. And you must have an ID to rent movies - you need to present proof-of-age for certain movies - it won't be any trouble for the RIAA/MPAA to push this scheme through.

    So now what? If they find a copy of Star Wars Episode 3 with serial number 12305439 on a warez site, they can legally go after the person who purchased that title and sue him for damages. Considering the cost of this title, they will probably want $1e6 or so. He won't have the money to pay it - so what will he do?

    The customer here will do the same thing as automobile owners do today. Just as an auto can kill a whole family, causing megabucks in damages, so can copyrighted material "escape". You can't expect the customer to keep it in a locked safe and guard it with his life, anymore then you can expect a driver to never hit anything. People crash cars, and information gets "freed".

    The purchaser of copyrighted material will purchase "infringement insurance" to pay the damages for when his copyrighted material gets "freed", just as an automobile owner will purchase "liability insurance" for when he smashes another car and/or the occupants.

    In fact, just like autos, the States will probably require their citizens to purchase "copyright insurance" in order to have access to copyrighted material - just as auto insurance is mandatory.

    Of course, in order to prevent the poor from not being allowed to read, there will probably be some sort of subsidy to purchase copyright insurance for low-income individuals, as well as subsidized insurance for libraries and schools. Perhaps the government will even pay losses to copyright holders in the event that the infringer's insurance has lapsed! They do that here in Michigan for autos. This will all come out of tax money.

    It'll happen, we'll survive, and the insurance companies will get even richer. We'll be a little poorer for the insurance money.
  • A lot depends on how the hologram is checked - if the check is in the machine, then people are likely to get their machines chipped to prevent a little dirt or a large scratch on the hologram killing their disk. in any case, even if it isn't profitable to pirate the hologram, I can imagine a situation where low-cost DVDs are recycled into rubber-backed "covers" to fit on top of the playing pirate dvd as a "protection adaptor".

    on the whole though, if they are putting holograms on for anti-piracy, but *not* checking them, then they are more than acceptable - one of the risks must be of buying what you think is a full, legal copy of a DVD and ending up with a pirate copy. if all DVDs carried hard-to-copy holograms, then you couldn't claim if caught that you couldn't tell the difference.
    --

  • Why prevent people from making copies of their DVDs onto VHS tapes? If people legally own the dvd then they should have the right to make their own personal backup of it. What if they wanted the copy to take it to a relatives house to watch it, but the relative didnt have a DVD? That means that you're SOL on that one.
  • There's a major flaw in your statements. If I collect on my liability insurance, it's for something that I did unintentionally: hitting another car. If my insurance company can prove that I intentionally hit the other car, they won't pay a dime. So why would the situation be any different with "infringement insurance?"

    But... how would somebody's DVD unintentionally end up on a warez site? I can't think of any reasonable way that this could happen.

    Insurance is designed to cover things that are unavoidable and unpredictable. Whereas you copying a DVD is neither unavoidable nor unpredictable, so the argument for insurance just doesn't make any sense.
  • Well, they wouldn't actually give a shit about getting the disk back. However, if it got out onto the Net, there would be damages then. Just like if somebody steals your car and crashes it into somebody. Exactly like that.

    Unless you make it look like someone stole your car and crashed it into someboy.

    I don't think it's a big leap to assume that a movie, if stolen, would be on the 'Net the next day.

    My scenario says that someone buys the disc, gives it to a pirate friend for 'Net distribution, and claims that it got stolen, thus absolving the buyer of liability. After the claim is processed, he gets his movie back, as well as thousands of others who get that same copy.
    The states would have to investigate every claim to check for this and any other scenario that one could concoct. Well, they wouldn't have to, but we all know the pressure the $$MPAA/RIAA$$ can put on a government.

    Or even better :), the MPAA/RIAA creates a "watchdog" group, not unlike the BSA, to snoop around for unlicenced copies of DVDs. Since it'd be a private organization, it wouldn't be subject to them darn Constitutional restrictions.

    "Accountability is un-American!!" -- Opus, Bloom County
    Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
    # grep /etc/fstab dos
    /dev/da1a /msdos vfat rw 0 0
  • Macrovision plays with a VCR's automatic gain control by placing fluctuating signals in the normally invisible vertical blank portion of the video signal, causing the reproduced signal to fade in and out. It also plays with some televisions; this can be fixed with a video stabilizer [google.com] that costs in the neighborhood of $30. But if you use a stabilizer to remove the Macrovision signal and tape a DVD, you are in violation of 17 USC 1201 [cornell.edu].
    Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo [pineight.com].
  • Two things,

    1 is what are you going to do with the copy? It can't be posted and shared over the internet. This limits how far your copies can go. The tape copy can not be copied without loss unlike a digital copy.

    2 To make sure the copy is poor, the output of DVD players is Macrovision encoded ensuring the recording VCR will have fits with the signal. Try it. It is required of VCR manufactures to have a non defeatable AGC that the Macrovision signal will mess up. It is part of the VHS tm. license. You will get a copy that flashes in brightness, the color changes and the video drops out.

  • The purchaser of copyrighted material will purchase "infringement insurance" to pay the damages for when his copyrighted material gets "freed", just as an automobile owner will purchase "liability insurance" for when he smashes another car and/or the occupants.

    Who the hell is going to pay a monthly fee, or even a one-time fee, for what *might* happen to a $20 DVD?

    In fact, just like autos, the States will probably require their citizens to purchase "copyright insurance" in order to have access to copyrighted material - just as auto insurance is mandatory.

    Thus opening up a whole new level of insurance fraud.

    Droid: Intellectual Property Claim Center. 1337 d00d: Hey, my copy of "The Net" got stolen! Droid: Yes sir. We are sending two of our investigators to your residence to investigate your claim.

    The states (read: taxpayers) would have to shell out big bucks to investigate claims for $20 discs.

    Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
    # grep /etc/fstab dos
    /dev/da1a /msdos vfat rw 0 0
  • (Slashdot ate my first attempt)

    You forgot that most components of your average game console are patented, that the boot sector is copyrighted and must be bit-for-bit identical with a copy in the console's BIOS [mc.pp.se] for the disc to boot, and that the boot sector displays trademarks on screen.

    You forgot the $10 per unit royalties for console games.


    Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo [pineight.com].

  • I just saw an article in the latest issue of PC Gamer titled "Where Does Your Money Go?" showing a breakdown of the costs involved in producing a computer game. They are more expensive then you may realize. Here are the costs per game.

    • Retail costs:
      • Online Sales: $.50
      • Store buildings & real estate: $4.00
      • Money to publishers & distributors: $5.00
      • Alleged loss to pirates: $1.00
    • Publishing costs:
      • Marketing: $6.00
      • Release Party: $0.25
      • Endcaps and other in-store promotion: $0.50
      • Merchandising (T-shirts, keychains): $0.20
      • Insert ads (the games you see in Best Buy ads): $1.00
      • Cross Promotion: (Star Trek game ads during Star Trek TV shows) $1.00
      • Sales staff, PR, more advertising: $5.00
      • Production and shipping: $5.00
      • Tech Support $1.00
    • Development costs:
      • Production costs (FMV shoots, actors, studios, travel expenses): $4.00
      • Salaries (programmers have to eat): $6.00
      • Licensing a franchise such as Star Trek: $2.00
      • Licensing a game engine such as the Quake III or Unreal engine: $2.50
      • Other overhead (office space, computers & software, everything else): $5.00

    In case you can't do math, the above costs add up to $49.95 which coincidentally is what you typically pay at Babbages or Best Buy. The programmers get barely enough money to tread water. I'm not sure what the cost breakdowns are for DVD movies and music, but as has been frequently pointed out, the original creators don't get much, most of the expenses are in marketing.

  • Um... Am I missing something here? Isn't the new Digital TV's encrypted all the way to the diaplay? Didn't I see something about a law that just passed requiring all Digital TV's to use encryption? It's law. To vote against it with your pocket book, don't buy any digital TV. It's true this will set back the introduction of digital TV if nobody buys it, but don't expect to get it any other way, as it is now illegal to make a non encrypted digital TV. The TV industry learned from the RIO and are not allowing a repeat with digital TV.

  • Why prevent people from making copies of their DVDs onto VHS tapes? What if they wanted the copy to take it to a relatives house to watch it, but the relative didnt have a DVD?

    In that case, you're supposed to buy your relatives a DVD player for Christmas; royalties on DVD patents go straight back to Hollywood, who makes more money when you "Collect all six!" (one for each DVD region).


    Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo [pineight.com].

  • Re:Sony PS2 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Macrovision screws with the VCR's auto-record levels. It's been around for YEARS. You can still pipe the PS2's analog signal through the VCR, you just can't tape it. Incidentally, it's a licensing requirement from the DVD-CCA that you have Macrovision protection, so it's not just PS2 by a long way.

    Incidentally, Magic Gate is the digital protection used on the PS2 memory card, and is there to prevent Trojans being loaded onto the console. Nothing to do with DVD, other than that DVD cracks - when they appear - will probably be loaded via Magic Gate. Chipping that console is NOT going to be fun - have you taken it apart yet? ;)

  • It is required of VCR manufactures to have a non defeatable AGC that the Macrovision signal will mess up. It is part of the VHS tm. license.

    I can't believe that JVC (the VHS trademark and (formerly) patent owner) would want to cripple VCRs in such a way. Use a $30 video stabilizer [google.com].


    Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo [pineight.com].
  • how?

    --
    From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews

  • To vote against it with your pocket book, don't buy any digital TV.

    You mean "don't buy any TV." All US analog television broadcasts will go silent on January 1, 2006, when the FCC reclaims all analog television frequencies (as is its right; the Supreme Court has ruled that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments do not imply a right to broadcast). All television will be digital, encrypted, and non-recordable.

    It's true this will set back the introduction of digital TV if nobody buys it

    The law does have a provision for this, to push back the introduction of digital TV if it has not yet caught on, but Hollywood knows how to market to the sheeple[?] [everything2.com], and the sheeple follow the rule "Do what you're told; buy what you're sold."


    Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo [pineight.com].
  • Fortunately for all of us, this scheme is entirely too complicated to administer and therefore unlikely to ever happen. Think about it : cars have to be registered. EVERY transaction where ownership of the car changes hands has to be registered. Furthermore,cars can't just be thrown away; you need to scrap them. (Ever have your car break down on a freeway, come back a day later to tow it and see the police sticker ?) This ensures that the government always knows who owns the car. (Note : even then, the owner is not automatically responsible for what damage caused by the car. Consider if thieves go joyriding in his car and kill someone : not the owner's responsibility) So we can do it with cars, how come we can't do it with copyrighted material ? Because, although it WOULD (as you say)be easy to track the original sale or rental of a DVD, it would not be easy to track re-sales (which, under established copyright law - the first sale doctrine - you are perfectly entitled to do). And re-sales of re-sales ... ad infinitum. And why only DVDs ? It would be quite difficult for Congress to justify that. The scheme would have to be extended to books, magazines, newspapers - imagine having to fill out a form in order to be able to throw the morning paper in the trash after reading it ! Cost of administration : astronomical.

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