February 15, 2005 Macrovision Tries Passive Anti-Copying Technology for DVDs Macrovision is introducing a new DRM technology for DVDs, apparently based on passive changes to the data encoded on the disc, according to a news.com article by John Borland. (The article is entitled "New Copy-Proof DVDs on the way?" The answer to that question is "no.")
The new technology, called RipGuard, tries to code the DVD data on the disc in a way that triggers bugs in popular DVD ripping programs, while remaining readable on ordinary DVD players:
Macrovision's new product takes a different approach to antipiracy than it has taken for analog or audio CDs. Gervin said Macrovision engineers have spent several years looking at how various DVD-copying software packages work and have devised ways to tweak the encoding of a DVD to block most of them.
That means the audio and video content itself requires no new hardware and isn't scrambled anew, as is the case with most rights-management techniques. Someone using one of the ripping tools on a protected DVD might simply find their software crashing, or be presented with error messages instead of a copy.
As when used on CDs, this passive approach will only work against some ripping programs, and in any case will become useless as the bugs in ripping programs are fixed. If the goal is to keep protected DVD content off the P2P nets, then this product will fail.
The article argues that RipGuard can be updated over time, which is true, but not very helpful for copyright owners, for two reasons. First, there is a limited supply of disc-reading bugs in ripping programs, and each version of RipGuard will cause some of them to be fixed, making it harder to find bugs to exploit in the next RipGuard version. Second, although users can update their ripping software, there is no way to update RipGuard on DVDs that have already been sold. Once a version of RipGuard becomes useless, all of the discs produced with that version will be copyable forever after.
This is yet another anti-copying technology that will have no effect on P2P availability of content. It will make ripping somewhat more difficult for people who don't use P2P; but how does that help the studios?
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