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DVD copying software gets axed, what's next?
By: Sander Sassen
If you’ve been reading my columns for a while you must’ve noticed that I’m not
too keen on how the movie and music industry chooses to fight piracy, or rather,
as many people view it, uphold their inflated profit margins. In an attempt to
put a stop to DVD copying they’ve now targeted individuals that develop software
tools that allow you to circumvent the copy protection as found on DVDs and make
successful backups. I’m actually specifically using the word backups here as
despite the grim scenario the industry’s watchdog, the RIAA, paints most people
do not supply copies to the whole neighborhood but rather make backups of their
own, expensive, DVDs for home use.
Again I’m stumped as to why they’re resorting to such tactics and honestly they
could be in for a surprise. In most countries you’re allowed to make a backup
for home use or archiving, which sounds like fair play to me, but also have a
law which prohibits you from breaking the copy protection. So you’re basically
caught between two fires, you’re legally allowed to make a backup but breaking
the copy protection in order to do so is prohibited. In order to fix this
juxtaposition we’ll need to have a judge decide which law has precedence over
the other. If it is the latter then indeed corporate gain and profit margins are
paramount and the rights of the individual end user further limited.
But there’s a catch, many publishers have now put into place a EULA which states
that the content stored on a DVD is supplied on a loan basis, you don’t actually
own it. Hence you buy the right to use, cq. watch the movie or listen to the
audio tracks, but are not the rightful owner of the content. This creates a
whole new discussion as when that’s the case, and for some reason the carrier of
that content gets damaged, it doesn’t void your right to use the content. Hence
the carrier, CD or DVD, should be replaced at no cost by the publisher, they
cannot charge you again for something to which you already own the right to use.
This would also soften the backup argument used by many somewhat as now the
publisher will need to replace your faulty discs, regardless whether you used
them as coasters or they suffer from a manufacturing defect.
Either way it looks like we’ve entered another chapter in this ongoing saga of
the end user fighting for his or her rights and the movie and music industry
protecting their profit margins. I can’t blame the end users for putting up such
a fight, as honestly we’d like to have a say in when, where and how we use the
content we buy, whereas the movie and music industry tries to frantically limit
our choices and forces the end users to abide by their rules, which are
motivated by monetary gains, rather than ethics. If they’d just lower their
prices and adopt to market demand we’d be getting along a whole lot better,
unfortunately that’s not going to happen anytime soon by the looks of it.
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| There are 4 standard formats. D10 and D18 are not
as common. A DVD-5 (single sided) DVD-Video disc will hold nominally 133 minutes of high quality MPEG-2 encoded video, together with three surround-sound audio channels and four subtitle channels. (Without video compression one DVD-5 disc would hold only about 3 minutes of video). A DVD-9 (dual layer) disc increases the playing time to 240 minutes of continuous video. A DVD-10 (double sided) disc will hold a nominal 133 minutes on each side (ie 266 minutes in all), but the disc needs to be turned over to play the other side. A DVD-18 (dual layer, doubled sided) disc can hold 240 minutes on each side and the disc also needs to be turned over to play the other side. Most DVD is D9 or D5 format. DVD-Cloner can clone D9 to just ONE DVDr/rw disc (D5 format) without evident losing. |