Q  Is there any concern that the fear of copy restriction is going to hinder the success of next-generation DVD at all?

A  One, the early adopter of HDTV is the guy that the studios want to sell to. He’s the movie guy who bought the HD set before everyone else because he wanted the better picture. There are going to be some companies who refuse to use image constraint simply because they don’t want to alienate that early adopter. It’ll be a competitive marketplace. If the marketplace starts seeing those analog, high-definition recorders with no response to copy control signaling––and people are making high-definition rips—if I was a content owner, I would definitely start thinking about using image constraint.

In some ways, the implementation of these rights-triggering mechanisms is more of a future-use thing [something that can be implemented] if the market moves that way, or maybe a way to move the market in a certain way—but from my standpoint, I’m sitting here with a CRT television myself, so I know how these people feel.

“Nine years ago we didn’t have media servers and portable video devices, and the idea of locking content to a piece of plastic made sense.”

Q  I recently reviewed a DVD player for this magazine that also doubles as a DivX format player. And I theoretically broke quite a few laws while doing the review. But the conclusion I came away with, and the point of the review, is that it’s still not worth the hassle. It took me ten hours to download a film that didn’t look as good as the DVD in the first place because of the compression. And that was packing 4.5 gigabytes [GB] into 1 GB. HD on DVD already uses some of the most advanced compression algorithms around, and we’re still talking about 10, 20, even 30 GB of data. Do you think the size of high-definition films, already compressed with better technology than the bootleggers are using now, will impede transmission of Blu-ray or HD-DVD films on the internet? Is the time-sink alone not enough impedance?
 
A  Is compression technology going to stop with MPEG4? No. We have a paper that does some projections about downloading speeds and compression codec efficiencies, and it’s going to continue on, so I think there is great concern that, as technology advances, this will continue to be a problem in terms of compressing and uploading high-definition movies. Then you throw something like Internet2 on top of that, and it can be a very challenging world we’re going to face.

The whole area of anti-piracy and copy protection is that you’re trying to keep lazy people honest, and we’re now moving into the next generation where we can have renewability of software-based protection as well as device-level revocation when a device key is broken.
For the consumers who are using legitimate devices and using content in a legitimate manner, our hope is that the copy protection is transparent. They’re not going to know. But the guy who downloads a hack—because someone invested $100,000 to break an encryption key and made an application that circumvents the copy protection system—will be affected. The next disc that comes out will have a revocation key to disable those hacks.
But without the consumer, we don’t sell content. We don’t make any money keeping these movies locked up in a vault.