DVD copy protection and the paying customer

This Tech Talk column originally appeared in The Exponent (University of Alabama in Huntsville), Vol. 32, No. 15 (January 11, 2001). Digitized issue: UAH LOUIS archive. Reproduced here courtesy of that archive.

Although it may hurt my credibility as a technology writer, I’ll admit that I am only recently (thanks to a Christmas gift from my parents) the owner of a DVD player. I never really felt the loss; I’m not much of a tube boob. When I do watch, it’s extraordinarily likely that Bill O’Reilly or Archie Bunker is on. If you understand compound probability then you realize that I watch very little TV. In fact, I hadn’t even watched a DVD movie until this past Christmas break, despite having heard about all kinds of cool DVD features like higher quality director commentary and deleted scenes. Soy un perdedor.

I finally get the thing home and am anxious to play with it. (It has a big remote control with lots of buttons, you see.) Accumulating another geek demerit, I confess that the TV in my den is an older model, so it only has a coaxial jack. “No problem,” I thought and proceeded to wire the DVD player’s RCA output to the RCA input on the VCR. I put in a movie to check the setup but quickly saw that something was wrong; the picture’s color intensity appeared to move gradually up and down. I tried another disc and saw the same result. I flipped through the player’s manual and found small print admonishing me not to connect my new DVD player through a VCR because DVD copy protection measures distort the picture under such a setup. Marshall Brain’s very cool howstuffworks.com explains the copy protection mechanism: <URL:http://www.howstuffworks.com/question313.htm>.

Computer people have had to put up with the annoyance of copy protection for a long time. Classic games like King’s Quest made you enter random words from random lines of random pages of its manual before you could play. Apple II (you know, the machines with the green monochrome monitors and 5.25 inch floppy drives) games used exotic copy protection schemes where the game code was stored in an unorthodox way on the disk. These days, high-dollar software like Legato Networker (backup software for medium- to large-sized networks) forces you to use another program called a license server. This license server knows how many licenses you have for a particular piece of software, and licensed software won’t function unless it gets a go-ahead from the license server.

This isn’t unique to software. The NRA doesn’t like gun control because gun control measures impede both the law-abider and the law-breaker. NARAL fights abortion legislation, especially when that legislation prohibits abortion even in the cases of rape, incest, or endangered health of the mother. Copy protection fits this pattern; it irritates both the paying customer and the software pirate.

If there’s one thing computer geeks love to do, it’s tinkering. An inevitable target of that tinkering is copy protection. For every copy protection mechanism, some clever person has defeated or cracked it. Some cracks are crude, like making a photocopy of your King’s Quest manual to go with the copy of the game. Other cracks are more sophisticated, like modifying the game code to disable the copy protection. Still, there are problems. Even a paying customer who managed to lose or damage his manual was treated the same as someone who copied the game. In the instance of Networker, what if your license file becomes corrupted? You can’t retrieve it from the backup because the backup software can’t get a license because the licenses are no good!

Publishers love to hide behind copyright law, but they seem to forget (and try to defeat) fair use provisions of copyright law. One example of fair use is copying for personal use, e.g., copying your CDs so if you accidentally scratch a copy, you’re only out half a buck instead of the artificially inflated $20. As reported on inside.com, the television and motion picture industries want to place copy protection mechanisms in digital TVs that would trample all over fair use of movies and TV programming. Read the story at <URL:http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?article_id=19517&pod_id=11>. Believe it or not, consumers still have some rights, and “the customer is always right” is more than a quaint adage. As the inside.com article pointed out, we have a bazooka in our arsenal in the form of the 1984 Betamax case. We also have our monstrous collective voice. Circuit City pushed the crappy DIVX format and finally dropped it after the market turned its nose up. Know your rights. Be informed.