Dvd Chips 'to Kill Illegal Copying'

[Shinobi]

Embedded radio transmitter chips to track movie, music and software discs.

Simon Burns in Taipei, vnunet.com 15 Sep 2006

DVDs will soon be tracked with embedded radio transmitter chips to prevent copying and piracy, according to the company which makes movie discs for Warner, Disney, Fox and other major studios.

The technology, which can also be used for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs, will allow movie studios to remotely track individual discs as they travel from factories to retail shelves to consumers' homes.

Home DVD players will eventually be able to check on the chip embedded in a disc, and refuse to play discs which are copied or played in the 'wrong' geographical region, the companies behind the technology expect.

"This technology holds the potential to protect the intellectual property of music companies, film studios, gaming and software developers worldwide," said Gordon Yeh, chief executive of Ritek Corporation.

Ritek is the world's largest DVD maker, and its U-Tech subsidiary will make the discs.

U-Tech and IPICO, the company behind the RFID chips used in the discs, announced today that production of the 'chipped' DVDs will begin at U-Tech's main plant in Taiwan.

U-Tech's global network of factories stamps out some 500 million pre-recorded DVDs and CDs a month for major movie studios, recording studios and video games companies.

After ironing out bugs in the manufacturing process, U-Tech will work with major movie studios on a large-scale test of an RFID-based supply chain management process at its manufacturing plant and distribution centre in Australia.

RFID readers will then be built-in to home DVD players to extend the anti-copying technology into homes as part of a digital rights management system.

U-Tech described this as the "real end game" for the chip-on-disc technology, which would "eliminate optical disc piracy in the entertainment and IT sectors" .

IPICO claims that its RFID tags can be read from at least six metres away, and at a rate of thousands of tags per minute. The passive chips require no battery, as they are powered by the energy in radio waves from the RFID reader.

"I have envisioned using RFID to improve product visibility and enhance security in the optical disc industry for some time," said Yeh.

"Launching the chip-on-disc system has made this dream a reality and holds the potential to protect the intellectual property of music companies, film studios, gaming and software developers worldwide."

Gordon Westwater, president of IPICO, added: "[This is the] first step towards new international standards to safeguard optical media, and the subsequent adoption of the chip-on-disc concept as a global standard."

U-Tech Australia, where the project will undergo a large scale trial, did not reply today to vnunet.com's request for comment on the new embedded RFID chip process and the precise schedule for its rollout.

Press relations staff at U-Tech's office in Taiwan refused to provide more information about the technology.

[harflimon]

While that's really fucked up, it won't effect me since I usually just download and watch movies right on my computer. This probably won't stop that, but RFID is just exploding and going overboard. We need to fight back and get ways of stopping it. I know that small EMP's will break them, but that would make it so that the DVD players wouldn't play the DVD. this will be hard to combat, going to need to get more creative.

The thing the MPAA and RIAA don't understand is that we just evolve everytime they try to stop us. In the long run they are only making us stronger:)

[Conspiracy Dave]

I really dont think this is going to do much.

Big deal if you have RFID in every disk on a shipment. They don't have scanners everywhere you go. RFID can't be sat. tracked - If there is a scanner somewhere it's not like it's all standardized. What the fuck are they going to do? Send out the RFID police? hahaha

Somebody will always find a way around these things. Remember how Sony spend something like 20 million developing their new fool proof copy protection and they came out in a big press release and were all happy and smug.

Two days later it was headline news some guy discovered that if you just take a small sharpie and run it around the perimeter of the disk it blocks the copy protection, haha.

But for now, keep your old DVD players.

About the tracking issue, I do wonder though if in the future they will be able to use radio towers or even satellites to do sweeping scans of a region by sending out pulse signals and picking up the data on a second closely followed pass.

[harflimon]

The point is to put an RFID reader in DVD players, so that they only play DVD's that are encoded properly with RFID chips. So if effect if you want a DVD to work in a DVD player you will have to get the coding for the RFID chip and place it on DVD's yourself, or something to that effect.

[tsoldrin]

This seems a non-starter... as we've already seen RFID, even encrypted RFID, has been easilly snarfed and cloned. This, little people vs the big companies dance shall continue, as it always has. Occupying their special niche as middleman and providing absolutely nothing besides a conduit between those who create and those who consume, with little expense to themselves, the big cos will continue to fight because it is profitable for them to do so... in effect they are buying money by fighting piracy and fighting to distract everyone from the fact that there is absolutely no reason for them to exist.

This latest distraction is nothing more than a regurgitation of the "dongle" of times gone by and will no doubt be just as useless. The same can be said for the draconian lawsuits being brought down on consumers... again, it's happened before and will do little good. Perhaps for a time we will go back to the modern equivalent of underground "boards" with News User Passwords, references and voice verification, still they will be fighting a losing battle and trying to stem a relentless tide.

I see some interesting parallels between this big corp behavior and the IRS in Russo's film in that in desperation they turn to the use of "force", blackmail, extortion and scare-tactics to maintain the charade of their continued existance. Basically using their ill-gotten wealth to wield the legal system as a club to bludgeon anyone who threatens their illusion.

[Shinobi]

I can feel another VHS revolution comin on!:D

fuckit! Wheres my Betamax @

[viladrau]

nice find, thanks!
if anyone is interested, here is the original article

[Shinobi]

Thanks viladrau,I usually add a link from the source but because it mentions
vnunet.com in the second line I didnt bother:)

I think with this all going on,It only encourages people to download movies more,to use vhs more to record to dvd or vice versa thus putting on to computer and so on.Im talking about those double recorders that are out.
Its VHS to DVD,DVD to VHS,how ever which way you wanna do it,some of them recorders have HD recording and whopping big storage space(hard drive) to save the data also,so there will always be a way
I repeat there will always be a way lol There will always be a way for us to share our media wether the corps like it or not! Horray! Chips are what I eat , not no fucking invasion of privacy so fuck the corps fuck the cops and fuck all the nwo.

[viladrau]

No problem MaDiXms, I had no trouble finding it:)

My modest opinion is that (duh) this doesn't prevent copying, and in fact this is not the goal of this move, but rather to get people to start thinking rfid on products is normal with some time. Call me paranoid, but hey, critical thinking is free, and I am not required to be right all the time, it is worse not to think in this way. I don't think these people are stupid or naive.