Dvd Industry

For the millions of parents around the world, children’s television shows and movies are an important part of the day. Imagine your daughter begs you for the archived Disney classic Snow White. You can not find this DVD in any stores or order it from the Disney Web site. Your only hope is to buy it from an auction site, such as Ebay.com. The cheapest Platinum edition, the two disc movie is about $34. After shipping and handling, parents of the “got to have the Snow White DVD” child are shelling out around $40. The DVD arrives; the child tears open the packaging runs over to the DVD player and throws in the DVD. After watching the movie for 5 straight hours, Snow White gets tossed aside and Cinderella goes in. Two days later, a piercing scream comes from the living room. The newly purchased Snow White video has been thrown around one too many times and now it will not play. This would not be a problem had the parents been able to legally copy the Snow White DVD in order to allow their child to use one copy and keep the original safe.

There is a thin line between the legal and illegal copying of DVDs. This paper will discuss how the technology started and where it is going, the history of the laws, how movie producing companies are combating against this technology, what the companies who produce this technology are doing to keep their products current and how this is affecting DVD sales.

Due to the expensive nature of the film industry, $9 to go to a movie, $5 to rent a movie, $20 to buy a movie, movie lovers everywhere searched for a cheaper way to watch movies. It started back with VHS tapes, when people would buy the second VCR, connect the two and start copying their VHS tapes. Back in the 1970’s and 1980’s this was the answer to the problem of high cost movies. Then along came the world of computers and hackers. It was only so long before someone who figured out how to break the encryption on DVDs and begin to copy them.

Ushering in the new technology of DVDs developed by Toshiba in the early 1990, it was a short while before software was introduced in 1996. This software was called Content Scrambling System (CSS). “Content Scramble System (CSS) is a Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme used on almost all DVDs. It utilizes a weak, proprietary 40-bit stream cipher algorithm,” (Wikipedia, 2007). This means when a company is going to put a movie on DVD it is first encrypted. When the CSS was developed it came with a set of keys sold to manufacturers of DVD players, DVD drives and DVD which could be used to decrypt the DVDs. When a DVD is encrypted there must be a decryption key on the player in order to play the DVD.

All DVDs made during the CSS era had this encryption. “It's alleged purpose is to stop piracy, however it also enforces region coding, non-skippable FBI warnings or commercials and many other artificial restrictions,” (Touretzky, 2007). Region coding prevents a DVD made for the United States to be played in other parts of the world. If the region code does not match the DVD player it is attempted to be played on, it will not work. This is done to prevent commercial DVDs from being prematurely released in other parts of the world. Removal of the CSS code when decrypting the DVD also removes the region code. Removing the encryption allows the DVD data to be transferred.

“In various public statements CSS has been referred to as copy protection, access control, and some times simply a ‘protection system’ without stating what is protected. The claim which is most often repeated is that ‘CSS prevents movies from being illegally duplicated,’” (Warren, 2000). CSS was thought to be cracked by Jon Lech Johansen and two anonymous aides. At the time, Jon was 15. Norwegian police went to his house after receiving complaints he posted a decrypting program on his Web site. The program’s name is DeCSS. “A Norwegian private school awarded him a prize for making an outstanding contribution to society. The Norwegian government indicted him,” (Stecklow, 2005). He was given the nickname “DVD Jon.” The other two people allegedly involved in inventing DeCSS have to this day remained anonymous. There is some speculation on a Master of Reverse Engineering (MoRE) site indicating other member of the group developed the DeCSS software, and Johansen was not even part of the group when it was developed.

After posting the code his site, numerous programs have been developed to aide people in removing the encryption and copying commercial movies. It started with 321 Studio, a Saint Louis based company which began selling programs which would allow users to breach the encryption keys on DVDs and copy them. The program was called DVDXCopy. It was sold in stores, such as OfficeMax for a short time. Shortly thereafter, programs such as DVD Shrink, DVD Fab, DVD Decryptor and many others appeared