One-Play-Only DVD

I'll note up-front that this has been tried before as a concept and has failed miserably. My worry this time is that with the backing of MS and the continued consumer support this monster corporation has despite itself will be enough to push it, kicking and screaming, into the mainstream. Of course it'll just be "rentals" at first, but the technology involved is the real problem.

We already have the theoretical concept of consumers no longer owning anything they purchase. You just buy a license to use it under specific conditions, which with recent Federal Circuit Court rulings grow more and more narrow. This is a further step in the direction of never owning, in any way, anything that can be "DRM-ed" or licensed in some way. (And yes, you can license physical, tangible products now.)

Microsoft invents a ‘one-play only’ DVD to combat Hollywood piracy
By : Tony Glover Technology Editor

COMPUTER software giant Microsoft has developed a cheap, disposable pre-recorded DVD disc that consumers can play only once. The discs would give Hollywood increased control over the release of new films and allow consumers the chance to watch a film at the fraction of the price of an ordinary pre-recorded DVD. More important, the discs would prevent copying and digital piracy, which is costing the film and music industry billions in lost revenues.

The revolutionary product could be on the market as early as next year, with the new DVD players needed to view them. Microsoft hopes it will help the company dominate home entertainment as it dominates the desktop computer market.

The film industry has been growing increasingly alarmed at the prospect of film fans using the internet to download pirated films, just as music fans download copyrighted songs on their personal computers. Researchers at Microsoft believe they have a simple solution to the challenge of piracy. Hollywood’s movie moguls are said to be excited at the prospect of having a piracy-proof means of distribution.

Buying an ordinary DVD of a new film costs between £15 (E22, $26.40) and £20. Microsoft’s new disc will enable the studios to release a “play-once, then throw away” copy for as little as £3, much the same as renting a video or DVD. But unlike a rented DVD, the new disc allows consumers to decide when they watch films and there is no need to return it.

http://thebusinessonline.com/Stories.aspx?Microsoft%20invents%20a%20%E2%80%98one-play%20only%E2%80%99%20DVD%20to%20combat%20Hollywood%20piracy&StoryID=B7480068-F1F6-4C7B-A7A5-EEFCED0320CB&SectionID=F3B76EF0-7991-4389-B72E-D07EB5AA1CEE

Microsoft may score one for Hollywood, but do you think Sony, TDK, Fuji, and all those techno/media companies are going to let all that money go away? They make the tools (and billions off it, btw) that facilitate all this hacking and "privacy." So, it's all horsecrap.

MS says this this format can't be hacked. I'm not familiar with the technological nuts and bolts of it, but I'd venture a broad guess and say about the only protection of this variety that absolutely cannot be broken involves the Get Smart method of "this disc will self-destruct in 3...2...1..." :-)

The bigger problem is that the discs will be burned in new format that standard players cannot physically read, never mind the software required. With recent rulings and laws about patents and copyrights, even providing instructions on how to build a machine that would read a protected format the copyright or patent holder doesn't want others to build would be illegal, so you certainly couldn't get one easily as a standard consumer, meaning "cracking" the format so that it can be decoded is not an issue in any meaninful sense.

Unless some corporation or coalition of corporations, with he backing of the so-called "individual artist" who somehow thinks this sort of thing protects his or her rights and livelihood, manages to push through a law or ruling or some sort of requirement that all DVD players made after a certain date must be able to "read" this format, meaning they must include MS licensed software that does whatever voodoo it does, and that all DVD production after a certain date must be produced in this format.

Think V-Chip, Hi-Def, Digital encoding, various forms of DRM, etc.

An engineer friend of mine made a point that NOTHING can be copy protected.

As long as there's a signal that controls the TV, you can tap into it and copy it with another device.

And even if the TV is tamper proof, you can TAPE the TV itself.

made from petroleum products.)

If you have to stop the thing after hitting play, you're screwed.

If you have a power failure while watching, you're screwed.

I give any commercial launch about one week before someone figures out how to defeat it.

If the consumer says no, it probably will just fade away...
Kind of like that computer cat thing you were supposed to point at ads or newspaper articles with and the web page would magically pop up.

you buy the cd, play it for all your friends and family in the comfort of your own home theater, and toss it.

sounds a lot better than going to a movie theater with 4 people for $32 dollars and watching commercials, hearing jerk offs talk on their cell phones, etc, and the food is certainly cheaper at home is it not?

sounds like I good deal to me, though I do not have a dvd player and do not intend to get one.

This concept is a business model which you can follow or ignore as you wish.

of course you could always buying a movie camera and make your own movies, then you could do what ever you want with them at your own expense and never have to file share.

Msongs
www.msongs.com/clark2008.htm

in favor of corporate rights. There are technologies out there right now that would so drastically change things it would be a wonder. But because they place too much control in the hands of the people and take it away from the corporations we will likely never see it.

The trend is cost of production and disrtibution are trending towards zero (they will never reach absolute zero but will approach it). With fabrication techniques increasing all the time it is not unimaginable that one day we could all have devices that built whatever we needed from downloadable schematics. Essentially putting entire corporations out of business. A true boon to humanity but there is no way any corporation would ever be part of that development.

It is about control. Never forget that. The corporations have no interest in building a better society. They only have an interest in controlling society so it continues to serve its interest and not the peoples.

If that's the case, it's a total rip-off. I could get a subscription to Netflix for like 20 dollars a month and view as many DVDs as I could. With this scheme, they will probably charge, what, 3 or 4 dollars a viewing? That's roughly what they charge at Blockbuster nowadays. The only difference is that I could only watch it once instead of several times, especially if it's one of those week-long rentals.

So if I rent 10 DVDs under Netflix for the month, I pay 20 dollars. If I follow this new scheme and pay 4 dollars for a one-view DVD on the rack at Blockbuster, I would be paying 40 dollars instead.

As I have made clear before, my problem with it is that the technology being used, the laws that are being enacted, and the court rulings being handed down are creating a form of marketplace in which the corporation controls each and every aspect of a consumer's habits before, during, and after a purchase. The DMCA and associated rulings and mode of enforcement are being used to tear down personal privacy protections, limit consumer choice, and prevent reasonable competition in the marketplace. The same technology and laws used to create these devices can and are being used to ensure that once you purchase anything from a company, including tangible objects, you cannot do anything with it that company doesn't specifically allow you to do.

Ever heard of a package license? If not, that's the gem software companies dreamed up years ago that enacts a legal bond between the purchaser of a license to use a piece of software and the software company at the moment the "package" in which the software was enclosed is opened. This is now being used on full computer systems with a license that effectively states "you cannot alter this computer system in any way without permission from Computer Manufacturer X." At one time, all you had to worry about was "warranty void." In the near future, you'll be committing a crime. Recent court rulings have ruled the principles of the DMCA law extend to manufacturers that produce products that could be used to alter the computer. The specific case to which I refer involves Lexmark gathering a Federal ruling that prohibits ink companies from producing ink cartridges that can be used in its printers.

So, how is this related? It all ties together through copyright and patent law to restrict your choices as an individual and to grant the corporation more choices and control over your life. It's the creation of legal monopolies or at best "collective" monopolies wherein a very limited number of large companies, all acting in concert, manipulate the marketplace. We once had laws against this sort of thing, and people literally died fighting against this sort of corporate greed. Hell, we even had Presidents at one time who spoke eloquently of the evils of combinations and market control of this sort. Now, the law supports such practices.

I have no real practical problem with a "one-play" DVD or CD or whatever. If someone is willing to fall for this scam, they are perfectly free to go right ahead and do it. The experience of the Circuit City endeavor should be all the warning anyone needs that it is a bad idea. I do have a problem with people not seeing past their personal financial interests to see how this sort of thing negatively affects all of us.

I honestly don't know why anybody this day and age would even RENT a DVD, since prerecorded disks are so cheap.

I buy mine so I can watch them whenever I want.

Without property law legitimizing their control, they cannot possibly charge you any money for the privilege of viewing it with your eyes. It's the same idea behind charging you rent. The landlord cannot charge you rent if there is nobody to enforce his ownership over your living space. Otherwise, he may resort to force to make you pay him, and that's the medieval way of doing it.

I remember when this was a "REVOLUTIONARY WAY TO RENT MOVIES!!!!111" two years ago.

Microsoft: 2 years behind, and a more than few ideas short.

Bad, bad, bad idea for our environment. :(

It's basically like renting a movie without worrying about having to return it or send it back. The drawback, of course, is if you wanted to watch it more than once before returning it, you couldn't.

Hollywood could never pull off making all DVDs like that. It would effectively be getting rid of a huge chunk DVD revenues, because people wouldn't have a permanent product to buy, and they aren't going to keep buying a movie over and over. They'll just have more incentive to buy pirated copies. If Hollywood were stupid enough to pull that, they'd find out real quick what a bad idea it was. My only problem with it is the waste. Is the convenience of not having to bother returning or sending back your rental worth filling up landfills with even more plastic?

Another firm has developed a DVD that dies after a couple of days of use after exposure to air. I believe Disney tried it out for a bit and it failed. I think the environmental reasons are enough for most people to think that "disposable DVD" is a dumb idea. And the LAST thing we need is Microsoft DRM in all of our consumer electronics. I do not want to be paying them license fees when I buy media or players.

scheme. Didn't one of the chains try this with something called Divx already and fall flat on their face. At least with a normal rental, you can watch it one day and the kids or someone else can watch it the next night, I can lend it to my next door neighbor etc. Anyway, seems like a lame scheme. Why create a piece of plastic, use it once and throw it away? Get me some bandwidth, and do the same one-time view deal (if we must) without wasting plastic. Plastic made out of oil. Peak oil. Oil costs rising daily. Let's waste more! Great timing. Stupid Hollywood.

Oh, and surely paying tom cruise and britney spears million of millions just to make one film might be hurting hollywuss too?

" The revolutionary product could be on the market as early as next year, with the new DVD players needed to view them. "

1. I dislike expanding the throwaway culture.

2. why would I want to buy a new dvd player if mine already works fine for the dvds I own?

3. what happens if I rent a film and want to watch it again while I have it out? Or if I want to back up and rewatch a scene for some dialogue I missed. Doesn't actually matter, I suppose, since I wouldn't have the "proper" dvd player to watch it in the first place. I would just return the film unwatched for a refund.

to have disposable DVDs.

Special player would start a 24 hour clock when you first hit "play" on the disc, so you could watch it multiple times within the 24 hour period. You could also pay to "upgrade" the disc to allow you to play it again, or totally unlock it for unlimited viewing ON YOUR PLAYER ONLY. Discs were about $3.50 as I recall. No special features, usually. But I DID like the cases better than the standard DVD cases. They were the size of CD jewel cases, similar to digi-paks. But I digress...

Circuit City swore up and down that they'd support it for the long haul... but nobody else supported it, so they pulled the plug on it. Gave users like 6 months to view the discs, after which they were useless. Even if you'd paid extra for "unlimited viewing." I have a big box of these discs, hoping someday someone releases a hack. (Note, this is different than the divx encoding that's now popular on the internets.) At least the DIVX player played regular DVDs.

That's been six or seven years ago now... bad idea then, bad idea now.

No link, sorry. All I know is it is from a MS blogger:

On the Internet, a hoax can spread just as fast as a genuine news story. That’s the lesson from the bogus story published in an obscure UK business magazine yesterday that claimed Microsoft is about to unleash a new single-play DVD format.

Paul Thurrott reprinted the story without giving credit to the original source. Bink.nu picked up the story from Paul and reprinted it verbatim.

Techdirt commented on the original story, with attribution but without any fact-checking. So did John Walkenbach.

The funny part? There’s no truth to the story. None whatsoever. In fact, the original story sparked a flurry of e-mails around Microsoft as people in different groups tried to figure out where on earth this story came from. After the head-scratching stopped, a spokesmen told me, they concluded that the story was not true. “It appears to be confusing an existing feature within Windows Media DRM that allows for single-play of promotional digital material. This has been an option for content owners to use for some time for the Windows Media format - it does not apply to MPEG2 content found on DVDs.”

Downloaded content in the Windows Media format can be DRM-protected, and if the content owner wants to limit it to a specific number of plays, or to set an expiration date for the content, that’s an option, just as it is with subscription-based music services. But it’s only one of many options, and it has nothing to do with DVDs.

So, case closed. The single-play DVD format can go back to the 1990s, where it rightfully belongs.

Thanks.

I'll check around for some follow-up.


OnEdit: I followed the Slashdot thread about this and came up with some interesting tidbits.

As you said, the notation that this is a hoax comes from a MS blogger, but at present, nothing about seems to be appearing on official MS websites. That's not unexpected, but noteworthy because the information that the article is a hoax supposedly comes from an insider.

Second, and more importantly, the "hoax" label is, I believe, I bit off-base. It may or may not be a fully accurate story. It depends on how one interprets various details of emerging technologies. The problem with judging what MS is doing is that they usually are quite dishonest about it, so people who watch them are suspicious. (See this link for details published Oct. 1.) That may (or may not) have led to an overzealous reporter in this instance, but that reporter does have various details that support the conclusion drawn by the original article.

The main one of these is that the claim calling this story not true correctly points out the current MPEG2 technology used for making DVDs wouldn't support this, also noting that MS media format has long supported this sort of option and that the content provider can use it if desired. Where it gets interesting, and what is not noted by the debunking claim, is that the new HD-DVD format standard belongs to Miscroft who will use its current encoding technologies that do in fact allow this. The fact the debunker ommits while trying to discredit the very idea this seems suspicious.

Anyway, thanks again.

:shrug:

and the beta system.

They added this "functionality" to my DVR that allows content providers like HBO to delete recordings I've saved. It also prevents you from saving Tivo files on your PC.

I'm unplugging my damn Tivo from the phone line so I can't get anymore of these "upgrades".