Saying they can protect DVD discs from most copying done with variations of copying tools courts have already ordered off the market, content protection company Macrovision has released a copy-protection product called RipGuard, hoping to get a bigger piece of the Hollywood anti-piracy pie.
“Encryption standards either work or they don't,” said Macrovision senior marketing director Adam Gervin, announcing the product’s release February 15. “Now the cat’s out of the bag. (DVD sales) are going to be one of the main sources of revenue for Hollywood for a long time, so why leave billions of dollars on the table when you can do something about it?”
Analysts say one problem Macrovision might have is that DVD protection thus far has been dominated by companies or groups tied closely to Hollywood itself, but that the film industry’s growing concern over failures of current DVD protection just might open them to trying any practical alternative.
Macrovision said DVD piracy goes through two holes, one analog and one digital, and RipGuard is designed to plug both. The analog hole comes from “consumers making high-quality copies of original DVD content from the analog outputs of their DVD player, DVD recorder, or (personal computer),” Macrovision said, while the digital hole “is the result of PC-based DeCSS ripper software, which allows millions of average consumers to make unauthorized perfect digital copies of copyrighted DVDs in mere minutes,” burnable to recordable DVD discs or uploadable onto peer-to-peer file swapping networks.
The company has ambitions for the product and its technology beyond piracy protection, according to executive vice president Steve Weinstein. “Ultimately, we see RipGuard DVD and the ACP framework evolving beyond anti-piracy, and towards enablement of legitimate online transactions, interoperability in tomorrow’s digital home, and the upcoming high-definition formats,” he said in a statement at RipGuard’s release.
The original Content Scramble System protection tool was built by a coalition including Hollywood studio representatives and licensed by a group having ties to the film industry, while a new coalition of studios and companies—Warner Brothers, Disney, IBM, Microsoft, and Intel—is developing another DVD protection technology, known now as Advanced Access Content System. The latter is expected to be ready for the first high-definition video release on DVD late this year, according to published reports.
Macrovision is also using its analog protection technology to build protection for video-on-demand. The company said that would go into TiVo devices and similar set-top boxes later this year.
