Saturday, October 6th 2007
New DRM for Blu-Ray Fails; Backfires
In another move against pirates worldwide, Sony unveiled and attempted to adopt "BD+", a type of virtual-machine encryption that allows a Blu-ray disk to determine if the player is hacked. Unfortunately, the earliest adoptions of BD+ show abysmal results. Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer and The Day After Tomorrow are the first two movies to feature BD+ encryption, and neither of them will play on Samsung's BDP-1200 and LG's BH100. While both companies promise to release firmware upgrades within the coming weeks, there is a bigger problem: disks with BD+ loaded on them take up to two minutes longer to load than their encryption-free brethren. And even when the disk does play, there's a good chance that it will either crash or stutter during playback.
Source:
Reg Hardware
16 Comments on New DRM for Blu-Ray Fails; Backfires
If there was no attempt at copy protection, piracy would probably grow more and more out of hand as other technology improves around it (cracking/ripping/burning facilities etc).
Imagine if copying a movie was as simple as copy and pasting it from your drive onto another disk?
Personally I have no problem with content creators wanting to protect their property... as I software developer myself it pisses me off that people don't care about the effort that goes into creating stuff and expect that they deserve to get it free (unless we want to give it away free ;) ).
However companies really need to put in some serious research into creating copy protection that just works without adversely effecting the user, and yes its not something they will be able to do 'on the cheap' but it needs to done sometime.
Though Why is it that Sony can't seem to understand that their not ever gonna stop the pirates? They just gotta learn that consumers don't want to pay higher and higher prices just so that a minority of people who pirate movies can be sidetracked (though not even fully stopped).
I dont like the high prices, but Id be lying if I said I wouldnt download a BD movie and burn it had I had the resources. Thanks for the help