Spielberg's Oscar hopes hit by DRM cockups

[Bob Crabtree]

Guardian Unlimited has sniffed out a sad and rather ironic tale about how digital-rights-management cock-ups may have killed any chance of Steven Spielberg's film Munich winning awards in this year's Oscars after 5,000 members of Bafta - the British Academy of Film and Television Arts - found themselves unable to watch the preview DVDs they'd been sent.

Check out this Headline.

[DeludedGuy]

That how I managed to get a hold of Ong Bak 2, where he goes in search of his kidnapped elephant, ha.

[Platinum]

Roffletastic

[Lee H]

lmfao - just re-read it all and the fact they tried to be smart arses and add another protection to stop Region hacking the DVD's is quite funny

[Funkstar]

what i don't understand is: if they have to send out a special DVD player to each member of the panel, why do they need to region encode them?

[autopilot]

Brilliant, the more bad press DRM gets, the better

[Bob Crabtree]

what i don't understand is: if they have to send out a special DVD player to each member of the panel, why do they need to region encode them?

A very good question!

Apologies that it was necessary to ask - my original Headline really should have explained that but I was eager to get to bed and didn't spend as much time on it as I should have done.

I'll be doing an update in a bit, and this is the essence of what it will say.

Update

An intriguing question has been asked over in HEXUS.news - If they have to send out a special DVD player to each member of the panel, why do they need to region-encode them?

The answer as I see it simple and underlines the massive futility of region encoding - and the lengths that the studios will go to to try to mask that futility.

The first thing to know is that each S-VIEW player is able to play conventional DVDs, as well as S-VIEW discs, as spelt out here by Cinea.

Cinea is [sic] helping address this piracy issue through our [sic] S-VIEW Award Consideration Screener Program. The program is based on our S-VIEW secure SV300 DVD system, which uses specialized, fully featured DVD players that play both regular discs and encrypted S-VIEW DVDs. The SV300 player also inserts an indelible, invisible watermark into each copy of the content as it is played out, enabling forensic tracking if needed.

My presumption why this is the case is that someone came to the conclusion that few of the people expected to use S-VIEW players would be willing to do so unless the machines also doubled as conventional DVD players. Afterall, they'd be thinking, who'd be willing to put up with a DVD player that was used only during a few periods of each year and just cluttered things up for the rest of the time?

Trouble is, once that dual-play compromise was made, it was probably unthinkable to make the players multi-region capable - the powers that be have to be seen to be supporting the concept of discrete geographical viewing regions - and it might be VERY hard (or at very least, politically dangerous) to have multi-region implemented for S-VIEW discs but not conventional ones.

But this doesn't stop the whole thing from being a complete joke.

It's almost certain that anyone who has any serious interest in movies will be using a DVD player that is, or has been hacked to be, multi-region capable.

And that, I'd presume, includes a massive percentage of the people who will have been sent S-VIEW players. Many will not only WISH to play discs encoded for any region but will have to HAVE that capability for their jobs.

So, inevitably, they're going to have multi-region players already and their S-VIEW players will sit alongside them or only be pulled out of a cupboard during the times in the year when they're needed.

And that, I reckon, largely undermines any reason for the S-VIEW players being able to handle conventional DVD and for implementing region-encoding on S-VIEW discs.

D'oh!

[Funkstar]

thanks for the update Bob. I can see why they want to stop people copying their disks they are reviewing, but other than that this whole thing is completely pointless.