I still believe the only way to combat piracy is fair pricing so that the customer doesnt feel like they are getting taken. If the price is low enough then it wouldnt be worth the hassle to download pirated copies.

C'mon Patrick!!!!! You're not naive, or dumb, so I'll chalk that comment up to being up too early or maybe having a serious case of "optimist-itis."

Free isn't even good enough these days for many.
Films are very, very expensive to produce, and contrary to popular belief, it's not getting significantly cheaper. What comes down in production equipment costs are offset by rising costs of location, personnel, legal, clearances, and all the other minutae of making a film/video/project/recording/whatever.

Being "taken" has nothing to do with why people steal.
In fact, in the southwest, the FLDS Church exists almost exclusively on the premise that big corporations and government are "The Beast" and they train their wives and children in many methods of "suckling from the beast," or "How to steal the government and big corporations blind."

That's THEIR premise, but the bottom line is...people will justify theft no matter what.
In a wedding DVD scenario that a person in our industry is undergoing;
1. She charges $1800.00 to shoot, edit, and deliver a wedding. This involves a couple days of shooting for pre-wedding stuff, the actual event, and the reception.
2. In the package, the bride/groom receive 5 DVDs.
3. For an additional $10.00, she delivers additional DVDs in an Amaray case, printed DVD, with jacket/cover.

She just found out that the groom had duplicated 50 copies of the DVDs that she sold them in the package. It says clearly on the DVD, on the package, and in her contract that the DVDs may not be copied.
Would you assert that $10.00 in an Amaray isn't fair?
$1.00 for the DVD
$0.75 for the Amaray
$0.25 for the jacket/cover print/paper

$2.00 in hard costs, but it takes at least 15 minutes to burn 1 DVD, not to mention the cost of storage, additional boot, prep, load time. Plus a profit. So, figure $5.00 profit on the disk total.

Theft has nothing at all to do with perceived value, costs, fairness, or anything else in concept. It has everything to do with morals, decency, integrity, and honor.

The DRM we're now being forced to deal with has nothing to do with greed on the part of the producing agent. It has everything to do with a general failure on the part of society, culture, and family value to teach and embed decency and honor. We're forced to deal with DRM silliness, and have our lives seriously interrupted because people steal, cheat, and are exceptionally greedy themselves. Insurance, attorneys, cost of shrink driving up retail goods, most of the rising costs associated with these things are due to dishonest and dishonorable behavior on the part of people who comprehend an ability to take advantage of the system and then exercise that comprehension. In all walks of life. Some just happen to be less honorable than others, both culturally and individually.
It's gonna get a lot worse before it gets any better.
The Chinese, the Russians, the Mafia....They don't give a rat's a$$ about "fair pricing." They see an asset, they steal it, they replicate it, they profit from it.

Theft:1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.

Nothing in there about "fair pricing." It's just human nature. And because it's the nature of cattle to roam outside of visually defined areas, ranchers are forced to put up fences to keep cattle in, or keep other's cattle out.
DRM=Fences.
Except the fences of the early days were mere barb wire. Due to human nature, we're now forced to put up castle walls with glass on the top to protect our intellectual properties.
<rant off.>

The solution to copy protection is simple - simply make all new movies and music so uninteresting that nobody would want to take the time and trouble to make or buy copies.... Oh, wait - they're already doing that.

Nevermind.

Spot I agree with every point you made and yes it was a bit early when I posted. However, the point I am trying to make is who does DRM realyl effect? Does it prevent the big time pirates/mafia/China/Russians etc from copying? Not at all as they always find a way around it. The only people directly affected are the honest citizens who pay for their license to view/consume the content.

Nevrmind the fact that everytime a new DRM technology is researched and used, the costs get passe on to the customers, that is the customers who are paying money, not the pirate communities.

Thieves will be thieves and theres nothing we can do to stop them as a whole. The more money that is spent on DRM that always seems to end up defeated is money wasted. While it might deter some pirates or the average Joe, it does nothing to prevent the staggering mass piracy numbers.

Sadly enough, the majority of your pirates are on the inside. I dont know how many movies I have seen posted on newsgroups a week or two before they are even available retail. Or music CDs warezed 3 months before retail sale.

You are definitely right about the declining morals in modern day society. But no matter what we do, the industry will find it hard to win a war with its customers. I think BD will suffer from over restriction of content.

Piracy is just a war that no industry group can or will ever win. So to a point it is senseless to pay for a fence that fails to keep the horses in the barnyard where they belong.

I think BD will suffer from over restriction of content.

Not in the least. DVDs are currently encrypted, and yes, some folks know how to rip them, but the majority of the public doesn't know, or doesn't care, or isn't interested in ripping. Suzy Homemaker buys new DVDs every Tuesday at Walmart when they come out; she doesn't care if it's encrypted or not. The gross majority of the public doesn't care. As long as the DRM doesn't interfere with:
Removing the DVD from the package
Putting the DVD in their player
Watching the DVD on their bigscreen/projector/whatever
and doesn't interfere with connecting their DVD player to the projector/big screen...

They're just not gonna care.

Spot's right. For 99% of the public, copy protection just doesn't matter and they don't even give it a thought-- they buy or rent their DVD's and watch them, end of story.

Now, does copy protection work 100% and stop all piracy? No. But that doesn't mean it should be thrown away. Speed limits don't stop all speeders, but should we do away with speed limits? Do you want people going 100 down your little neighborhood street where kids are playing? Banks still get robbed despite the security guards, vaults, etc. Should we just get rid of all that security? Should we get rid of all of the security measures that are in place for credit cards just because it doesn't stop ALL credit card identity theft? Copy protection does at least stop casual theft, and that's still a big help to content creators, especially small ones like me.

The fact is, that home video/music is not the only thing in our lives that has protections in place that are sometimes inconvenient. There are protections in all aspects of our lives, from locks on our front doors and cars, to having to show identification at banks and to use credit cards. And frankly, for me at least, virutally all of those are more intrusive than what's in place for home video/music and software. Try going into a store and saying "I'm sorry, I forgot my credit card but I can tell you the numbers."

that's not a bad idea. Infact, that could be a neat feature. You could customize DVD's any way you wanted with that.

but you could do other things too... maybe have a random length of black at the end, each length is a different person/group burn. a small audio FX some place, or something like that.

but as you know, most authors want a simple checkbox. They don't want people to steal their stuff but they don't want to take a lot of time to figure out how to minimize their damage.

I may get into the wedding video business in a small way in the future and in reference to DSE's friends experience with wedding DVDs duplicated, I think my policy might have to be -- "The price includes 10 DVDs and if you want we'll make more at X dollars a copy. However, if you have the ability and wish to duplicate them yourself, you may."

I state this not as something anyone else should do, but I agree with the tenor of DSE's remarks concerning integrity and honor lacking today, and sometimes it's not worth trying to capture extra revenue in a one time event with a limited audience.

Now, when you've got millions invested, or you're the creator of unique works of art such as music and movies, that's a whole different realm. Over the years I've had casual friends ask me to copy software I've recommended to them, or copy this CD, etc, and they look at me like I'm part of a cult when I say that I don't think that's the right thing to do!

John - It's too bad that we don't have scripting in DVDA because all it would take is a serial number in the extras folder. Not as strong as burning unique data in the lead-out, but good enough to track simple copies.

Steve

If you burn a serie of DVDs, using the DVDA, you have a singular information on each DVD: the daten and the exact time, when you have burnde the DCD.

Beside that, it will not stop people to copy your wedding videos.

Buit it would be a nice idea to personalise each DVD in the menu- but even that will not be any copy protection, for sure. And people who copy your dvd, will not show you the copy too.

I tend to do what Douglas has suggested: sell the whole banana expensive, and do not care if somebody will copy the dvd.

it's not to stop, it's to track. if you had a DVD that was bruned with acertain serial # & you found copies of that DVD comming home with your kid from school with the same #, then you could bet the guy you sold it to is copying. Solution? Call the cops/FBI (hey, they're on the front of movies telling they stop this kind of stuff).

When I do a video job I normaly don't do DVD's. That's 100% seperate. If they order a lot of DVD's, then I lower the job price a little, but this way I'm kinda covered. The only thing I plan on doing for DVD's alone is the local highschool graduation. Every other job is priced on the job with DVD's second. If I was paramount this wouldn't work.. well, maybe it could. just release less movies & jack up the costs to the consumer. if it's a good movie they'll go. ;)

I think what Paul is saying has some merit. I'm sure it's been said before, selling DVDs is not the place to be planning on to making your money.

You do make your money in the producing--planning, shooting, editing--of the event DVD. Make your money there and let the client copy the DVD to their heart's content. You'll never get rich(!) selling DVDs of "events."

In the interest of small-run production such as weddings where you have basically one client, Steve's answer is the best. Whatever your package price is now, raise it by $100 and include 10 dvd's.

Let's not forget that Hollywood literally throws billions of dollars down the crapper trying to lure the biggest stars with ridiculous, lavish catering, gift baskets, limosines, super costly special effects for terrible scripts, redundant laws that force you to use services that aren't really necessary and then they get to write them all off as business expenses. Now who's ripping off who?
Why does King Kong need to spend so much money on advertising when word of mouth would have done a better job? A good eye should have spotted this in advance, before advertising began. I'm so sick of all the ads I've heard, that I've lost interest. If there hadn't been any ads, I would've been begging people.."You gotta see this". Everything about Hollywood is laced with horrid over-expenditures.
I remember the days when anybody could afford to live by the beach in L.A. county.
What? I'm OT again? Bye...........

My business plan doesn't depend on selling DVD duplicates. I get paid to shoot, edit and author a production. The initial sale of DVD's is it, and follow-up orders are just easy money.

It's not unlike the reality that photographers have been wrestling with for the past five years. Time was that in order to make a studio quality print, you needed a darkroom and appropriate skills. It was appropriate to wrap the cost of the darkroom and the skillset into the print prices. Personal scanners and low-cost inkjet photo printers have made that business model obsolete, but many photographers cling to the old paradigm and go absolutely ballistic when someone scans a print and makes their own copy.

Copies are becoming easier to make all the time, including DVDs and Music CDs. Get used to it. If your business model depends on you being the sole-provider of copies of the product, then you need to reexamine your business model.

I shoot stage and performance videos and depend solely on selling copies of the DVDs. I would welcome a copy-protection method that worked and didn't have potential problems for legitimate users, but it just doesn't exist. I have adjusted my pricing to encourage pre-show orders with a pre-show discount and discounts for multiple copies. I even tell the users that they may copy the disc, but recommend that instead of making a copy for a friend or relative, just order two or three at the same time (at a discount) and get the same quality and a good, clean labeled DVD. My orders have gone up.

Steve

The best way to "protect" unprotectable DVDs, or any video production, is to offer extras, for example:

- for my trading and other info-product DVDs, I offer forum members-only Q&A access that only legit, registered buyers can access

- I also offer ongoing additional content, eg live webinars, for high-end info-product DVD purchases... only registered buyers can login to these important follow-up events, that add to the initial content that was on the DVDs..

that way, it's like a "software dongle", in that 40-50% of the value of the purchase, is not the media Alone, but in what they get After they buy...

- similarly, with wedding videos you may be able to offer something like an online "Wedding Photo Blog" for the xyz family, that only registered buyers of the DVD can post to ...

that's where protections' at, is in offering extras that ARE controllable.. since the raw DVD vobs etc aren't..

make sense?

ken

sounds like a good idea but most of the people willing to rip videos will happily wath a 320x240 version with crappy sound & camera shakes jsut to save a few bucks.

>>>In a nutshell here it is: Provide a way to deliver unique, custom DVDs to each client. <<<

Actually there are already ways of doing this plus Sony is already doing it to some degree. Sony is using Postscripted ID (PID) which ID's each piece of media. But I don't think they are using it on DVD's, only CD's but by all accounts you can use it on DVD as well. Here is a little blurb from Sony:

Between 6 and 28 bytes of exclusive ID data can be inscribed in a predetermined area of the disc. Postscribed ID discs comply with the CD-ROM format and are readable by standard CD-ROM and DVD-ROM- drives on the market. By recording title specific information, such as a title number, serial number or primary account number on discs, this new technology enables user registration, registered user identification, prevention of double access, encryption key distribution, and other flexible services for individual users.

Now on the topic of "unique, custom DVDs to each client" there have been issues with the MPAA and screeners and how to track them. I know I posted info in one of these copyright type threads, but in short they have busted people via a unique number placed on the screeners. Now Disney has become the first major to sign on for DVD screeners that use a special form of copy protection. You need a special DVD player in order to view the DVD's, called S-View 300 (SV-300) put out by a Dolby offshoot called Cinea. One of the cool things about the whole S-View thing is that the player also has an ID: Individual player IDs allow content to be authorized on a player-by-player basis. Players can also be enrolled into groups, enabling discs to run only on a specific group of individual players. So for the wedding people here you could make your DVD with an ID that could only be played by, say, the bride and groom on their DVD player.

EDT - some spelling, updated a link

Interestingly enough...many of the films for Sundance have unique ID's on them for screeners too, so that folks will know who has what. Never considered using something like the Extras folder or something to place a screener ID. You could put a jpeg or image of a serial if you wished.

I've always thought that one way to get people to buy the genuine article is to provide additional material with the DVD/CD so that the user wants the whole package, not just the shiny disk. Perhaps if the wedding videographer included a nice little booklet of photos, there would be greater motivation to buy the package.

BTW, there are new forms of copy protection brewing. In browsing sites like www.doom9.org (these guys seem to get the latest on BluRay, etc. before anyone else), it appears that the latest DVDs coming out of Hollywood are NOT easily copied (example: "Madagascar"). Has nothing to do with the original encryption, which is trivially broken by any of a dozen different freeware utilities. Instead, it appears that there are broken links or something like that (I really don't know, and really don't care) so that when the user tries to make a copy using the usual programs, the routine fails halfway through. True, there are apparently ways around this, but it's not trivial. It's like the battle between locksmiths and lockpickers--a lockpicker can get through pretty much any lock , but for some it will take a great deal of effort.

re: DSE

or a 32000x32000 image of a guy flipping you the bird saying "BUSTED!" :)

riredale said "It's like the battle between locksmiths and lockpickers--a lockpicker can get through pretty much any lock , but for some it will take a great deal of effort"

so what you're sugesting is we rig the lock with TNT & unless you have the correct key it blows the lock, door, & house away? IE DVD's that fry when you copy them? Imagine how many college kids would be pissed over that one! :)

OK,
I wasn't going to do this, but just in case you're interested, here's how to "roll your own" DRM copy-protected CD . . .
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=946

cool. :)

i've seen CD's like that before, but just likethearticle says, they're easy to rip anyway.