BlueMonday
Can I Kick It?
I've been reading over a lot of information on the internet lately about piracy in all it's forms; be it music downloaded in MP3s, DivX encoded DVD rips, or software ISO rips. And although I do not deny the wrongfullness of distributing pirated media over the internet or on the street, I think that many people aren't seeing the bigger picture of intercorporate price-discrimination, racketeering, and the unadulerated worship of money. Take the distribution of DVD movies in the following example.
When DVD players were introduced in the late nineties, manufacturers of the new electronics included in their DVDs a file encryption called CSS (Content Scrambling System). Industry leaders, particularly those that make up the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America including major players Sony, MGM, Universal, and Warner Bros.), maintain that the CSS is an anitpiracy safegaurd. They claim that CSS was intended to prevent pirates from making copies of the movie using DVD ROMs.
The silly thing is, CSS doesn't do anything to prevent the copying of a DVD onto a hard drive. If you have a DVD ROM and have a little knowledge all you have to do is copy the DVD in it's entirety from your DVD ROM to the hard drive or onto a waiting DVD R. When you do this the you create a 4-5 Gigabyte file that includes the CSS encryption with it. You can then just take that file and play it, or if you've burned it to a DVD Rewritable media you can play it in a DVD player. Or if you have a fast internet connection or just a lot of time with a 56K you can send this to anyone.
Now admittedly, if you want to do anything with the file (like transfer it into the smaller DivX format) you will have to crack the CSS. In 1999 there were several groups in Europe that achieved this. Groups like Drink or Die and Masters of Reverse Engineering had it cracked. The MPAA was able to counter the moves made by these groups, but newer ones came out anyway that could break new company CSS encryptions and so on. Simply put, the CSS could never outdo the nerd factor. Hackers today laugh their asses off at the absurdness of CSS because of how simple it is to break. Now they have programs that can break the encryption in under three seconds by hammering CSS repeated with various codes.
The real reason for CSS is to screw the average consumer market (Joe Blow with a fistfull of cash and internet access just so he can have email and say to his buddies how connected he is with his 56K AOL connection; Joe Blow, the guy who just buys his DVDs down at Media Play). Here's how they do it:
Every DVD player out there comes with a hardware counterpart to the CSS software found on every DVD. When you put the DVD into the player, the player reads the CSS info. Ever wonder why you can't skip or fast forward through those disclaimers and piracy warnings on DVDs? That's CSS working; it is specifically forbidden for any manufacturer to distribute a DVD player that can skip those warnings. The second thing it does is display a region code for the DVD. The regions are broken down into:
When DVD players were introduced in the late nineties, manufacturers of the new electronics included in their DVDs a file encryption called CSS (Content Scrambling System). Industry leaders, particularly those that make up the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America including major players Sony, MGM, Universal, and Warner Bros.), maintain that the CSS is an anitpiracy safegaurd. They claim that CSS was intended to prevent pirates from making copies of the movie using DVD ROMs.
The silly thing is, CSS doesn't do anything to prevent the copying of a DVD onto a hard drive. If you have a DVD ROM and have a little knowledge all you have to do is copy the DVD in it's entirety from your DVD ROM to the hard drive or onto a waiting DVD R. When you do this the you create a 4-5 Gigabyte file that includes the CSS encryption with it. You can then just take that file and play it, or if you've burned it to a DVD Rewritable media you can play it in a DVD player. Or if you have a fast internet connection or just a lot of time with a 56K you can send this to anyone.
Now admittedly, if you want to do anything with the file (like transfer it into the smaller DivX format) you will have to crack the CSS. In 1999 there were several groups in Europe that achieved this. Groups like Drink or Die and Masters of Reverse Engineering had it cracked. The MPAA was able to counter the moves made by these groups, but newer ones came out anyway that could break new company CSS encryptions and so on. Simply put, the CSS could never outdo the nerd factor. Hackers today laugh their asses off at the absurdness of CSS because of how simple it is to break. Now they have programs that can break the encryption in under three seconds by hammering CSS repeated with various codes.
The real reason for CSS is to screw the average consumer market (Joe Blow with a fistfull of cash and internet access just so he can have email and say to his buddies how connected he is with his 56K AOL connection; Joe Blow, the guy who just buys his DVDs down at Media Play). Here's how they do it:
Every DVD player out there comes with a hardware counterpart to the CSS software found on every DVD. When you put the DVD into the player, the player reads the CSS info. Ever wonder why you can't skip or fast forward through those disclaimers and piracy warnings on DVDs? That's CSS working; it is specifically forbidden for any manufacturer to distribute a DVD player that can skip those warnings. The second thing it does is display a region code for the DVD. The regions are broken down into:
- zone 1: USA, Canada
- zone 2: Europe, UK, Japan, South Africa, Middle East, Greenland
- zone 3: Hong Kong, East & Southeast Asia
- zone 4: Australia, Pacific Islands, New Zealand, South America, Caribbean
- zone 5: Russia, Indian Subcontinent, North Korea, Africa, Mongolia
- zone 6: China
[/list=a]
What this allows the MPAA to do is prevent DVDs bought in one region from being played in another region. If you buy a DVD in India and then try to play it with a player purchased in Europe all that you will see is the piracy warnings. With the CSS system, the MPAA can -one- monopolize the market and -two- charge whatever price they want to on the DVDs sold. Here in the US I can buy a DVD for about $20. In truth, DVDs have huge margins. Digital technology allows them to be churned out faster and cheaper than even VHS was ever able to come close to. What they are doing is charging what they believe the market will allow them to charge. That's why CSS is split into economic zones. People in India won't pay $20 American for a DVD (most of them couldn't afford to anyway) so they are charged much much less for it (a price more reasonable for them). In Europe and America, DVDs are the most expensive since people will pay exorbitant amounts of money for them.
But that's only the first reason CSS is present. Although no one denies that Drink or Die created a CSS crack to pirate DVD movies through its massive underground network, Masters of Reverse Engineering was not. What MoRE was trying to do was create a linux platform that could read DVDs and thus you could play DVDs with a linux or unix operating system. At the time the only computer software company that would build software to play DVD movies (or formats derived from DVDs) was Microsoft. Obviously, Microsoft wasn't going to create a player for a competing operating system so it was up to the nerd world to take care of the problem.
Listen: The MPAA denies this allegation and insists that MoRE was in the pirating business. They say that they would have licensed linux and unix to play DVD if those software names would have asked for it. Sounds spot on, but licenses from the MPAA are very hard to get ahold of. The MPAA has denied numerous licenses to smaller companies on several occasions; not to mention the security payment of $750,000 to $1,000,000 and a 6% royalty charge on ALL sales. Small names like linux would never be able to get ahold of a license with extortion rates like that.
Once again this means millions, maybe billions, of dollars headed into the coffers of the MPAA and it's puppets. CSS allows them not only to charge whatever price they want to on DVDs but also allows them to completely control DVD players too. Saying as there are as many DVD players in America as there are VHS players (we're talking tens of millions of units here) and almost every electronics company producing DVD players we're definitely talking about hundred of millions of dollars going straight to the MPAA.
...when I get into the business world, I hope I can have ideas as fiendish and productive as this one.
RULE BRITANIA! 
