Disney DRM's the Oscar Review Copies

It seems that Disney does not trust the movie reviewers. According to slashdot, they will now be sending all the pre-release reviewer DVD's encrypted and watermarked, and only in a format playable in a Disney issued DVD player.

Apparently each of these DVD players requires on-the-phone registration, and special setup. Furthermore they are considered to be slow, unresponsive and do not have any advanced features users come to expect from a standard player. Hell, if I was a reviewer I would send this damn thing back and tell them to stuff it. Or I would write a jaded review explaining in detail how Dinsney anti-piracy measures ruined my viewing experience.

Besides, we all know DRM is a joke. It will continue to be a joke until you introduce TCPA and allow movie studios to play a big brother tracking how many times you play their movie, and who do you give it to. By my calculations we still have at least few years till the world is brainwashed enough to sell itself to Microsoft. And by that time we will probably have no more civil liberties left so it really won't matter that much anymore.

All you need to do defeat these measures is to record the analog copy by tapping the wire between the DVD and TV and then run the output through some noise equalization algorithm. If you are extra paranoid, resample the movie at a lower framerate. You might loose quality, but any watermark that was there will probably be messed up throughly. These people do not realize that all of this could be done by a 14 year old kid. All they are doing here is wasting money. Sure, Joe Average Reviewer probably does not have enough know how to rip the crippled move - but I bet Junior from next door who has been cranking out 0-day releases since he was 10 (so for 2 years now) will have no problem with it.

Fortunately Sony and Universal have enough common sense not to waste money like this. Or do they? Here is what slashdot readers thing about this:

I hear that Sony and Universal are making the reviewers watch the movies from jail, and letting them out when the movie is officially released.

I would say this actually sounds very plausible.

Tags: disney, drm, disney drm, movie critics, reviewer copies, cinea players, piracy, anti-piracy, copyright, copyfight