UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

A company called ProtectDisc has implemented a new copy protection scheme for DVDs. Called Protect DVD-Video, the protect scheme is advertised to movie studios as a way to easily protect any disc from any form of copying and first appeared on the European DVD release of Silent Hill:

ProtectDVD-Video is a new form of copy protection, especially designed for DVD-Video. By combining special media structures implemented at the replicator facility with the DVD internal navigation structure, ProtectDVD makes it impossible to created 1:1 copies or complete rips of the protected DVD. ProtectDVD effectively protects DVDs against copying and ripping - and thus prevents unauthorized distribution over the internet.

From the users perspective ProtectDVD is a preferred choice because of its unique compatibility and transparent implementation.

ProtectDISC - Products

While ProtectDisc claims it’s protection scheme completely prevents copying with no loss of compatibility, ZDNet is reporting that Protect DVD-Video discs will not play in Windows Media Player at all:

The upshot of this is that if you have a DVD disc protected by Protect DVD-Video and you try to play the disc in a PC-based system using, say, Windows Media Player, the process will fail. Now, lets be clear here, we are taking about a genuine, legitimate DVD disc not working in a PC, not a pirated disc or a download via a torrent. Protect DVD-Video protects a DVD by basically making it un-playable in a DVD drive that’s in a Windows-based PC.

» Protect DVD-Video - A slap in the face for PC and Media Center owners | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com

And ProtectDVD’s claims that the copy protection is full-proof do not seem to reflect reality. Within days of the ZDNet article, AnyDVD, a DVD decryption program, released an update that easily bypasses Protect DVD-Video:

AnyDVD 6.0.8.0

Latest Changes: * New: Added support for the “Protect DVD-Video” copy protection to the option to remove “Protection based on unreadable Sectors”

FileForum New Releases

Even before AnyDVD was updated, users had already found ways to work around this new protection scheme using existing software. Forum posts around the web indicate that discs protected with this method can still be easily copied.

This is an especially pathetic case of uninnovation because the harm to paying customers is severe while the harm to pirates seems to be non-existent. Aside from preventing all legitimate customers from playing their DVDs on their computes, there does not seem to be any use for this new protection scheme. All of the standard DVD decryption software can be easily updated to allow the protected discs to be copied and most were updated within days. Once again the movie industry has chosen to punish paying customers while doing absolutely nothing to prevent piracy.

technorati tags:protectdisc, protectdvd, anydvd, dvd, video, uninnovation