ASK any movie executive and they鈥檒l tell you that you can鈥檛 plug a DVD player into a DVD recorder and copy paid-for movies onto blank discs. But you can. Tests undertaken by New 杏吧原创 show that an astonishing oversight has left the movie industry wide open to piracy of major films.
This year pirates are expected to make $1 billion on counterfeit movie discs, and Hollywood is taking legal action to try and stop them. Yet the studios have failed to implement a simple step that would protect their digital copyright in most of the world. At fault is the loose way in which copy-protection standards for DVDs were drafted.
Copy protection for the DVD format relies on invisible digital 鈥渇lags鈥� that the DVD player buries in a signal it sends to the TV. When a DVD recorder sees these signals it refuses to record. Written by Hollywood in conjunction with the manufacturers of players and discs, the copy-prevention scheme is geared to the NTSC standard for TVs used by North America and Japan. When a DVD is played, the anti-copy flag is inserted in lines 20 and 21 of the picture signal, which do not appear on screen.
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But New 杏吧原创鈥檚 tests show that these anti-copy flags are often missing in DVDs recorded for the PAL and SECAM television systems used in the rest of the world. As a result, DVD recorders can be made to copy up to three full-length movies onto a single blank DVD. Plugging the analogue output of a player into the analogue input of a recorder recompresses the already compressed digital code, putting up to six hours on a single side of a blank DVD. And it鈥檚 a cinch to convert the analogue PAL or SECAM copy into NTSC for the American pirate market.
This should not have happened. The copy-protection system for NTSC discs is written into the contracts that license the technology to the manufacturers of DVD discs and players. But when it comes to PAL and SECAM discs and players, the DVD specification merely recommends that a quite separate European standard should be used. But this standard does not mandate copy protection. Anti-copy flags, to be inserted in line 23, are only an option 鈥� and the makers of DVD players and pressing plants appear not to be taking it up. Chris Buma, who heads Philips鈥檚 disc recording division, confirms that manufacturers face 鈥渃onfusion about this system and the definitions vary per continent鈥�. A spokesman for the DVD Copy Control Association in the US says the problem won鈥檛 be resolved until its members rigidly define PAL and SECAM anti-copy flags.
The effect of this oversight emerged when Warner and Columbia Tristar decided to save millions of dollars by releasing Harry Potter, Men in Black and Spiderman on DVD without the Macrovision copy-protection system. Macrovision costs the studios five cents per disc so they decided to drop it and rely on the DVD鈥檚 own anti-copy system.
On four out of seven PAL players we tested, the Warner and Columbia movies copied perfectly. Sony鈥檚 PlayStation 2 鈥� also a DVD player 鈥� successfully copied over a British opera DVD and a jazz disc from the US.
New 杏吧原创 demonstrated the security breach last week to engineers and executives of the British Video Association. Its director-general, Lavinia Carey says: 鈥淥ur members are taking this warning seriously.鈥�