Stereophile-2000-02
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As We See It John Atkinson 've recently been rereading Mark with aunique 40-bit string, or "key." Each it becomes hard to get agreement on any- Lane's and Donald Freed's 1970s DVD-V disc includes ashort in-the-clear thing, even if it's just plain common sense. Iscreenplay cum novel, Executive Action, "disc key," which is also encrypted with And the record industry may well have which develops the theory that John E all the allowed player keys. When you more to fear than the movie industry. The Kennedy was açussinated by aconspiracy insert aDVD in aplayer, aconsiderable sheer amount of data represented by an between organized crime, expatriate Cu- amount of handshaking takes place, the MPEG-2-encoded movie makes aDVD ban Batistists, and Eisenhower's "military- player using its key to descramble the intrinsically hard to copy, but asingle cut industrial complex." Long predating Oliver appropriate encrypted disc key before off aDVD-A, even if multichannel and Stone's JFK, the book is fascinating, con- playback is allowed. (Perhaps this is the 24/96, is an easily manageable amount of vincing stuff, from authors who had done reason DVD players are so slow to load.) data for anyone with amodest computer to considerable research into what really hap- The hackers got hold of aunencrypted copy. According to Matsushita spokesman pened in November 1963. But, like all con- player key and used it to reverse engineer Yoshihiro Kitadeya, as reported in aDow spiracy theories, it falls down on the hard the system. Their program, widely avail- Jones Newswire story on December 2, rock of reality: the more people and orga- able on the Internet, allows anyone with "since music requires much less data than nizations are involved in aconspiracy, the enough computer storage space to make video, it would be easier to copy individual less likelihood there is of anything happen- decrypted copies of the files that make up songs from aDVD-A disc... and distribute ing at all, let alone going according to plan. aDVD movie. them cheaply over the Internet." Thus it has been with the much-her- So now that CSS has been cracked, the That's the real danger behind the music alded launch of DVD-Audio. With so DVD Forum had to choose between dis- industry's paranoia — that the DVD-V many entities involved in the develop- abling all keys, thus turning the existing hacking will make it easier for people to ment of this high-resolution multichannel population of DVD-V players into worth- distribute their songs on the 'Net. Being music medium, progress has been painful- less junk, or developing astronger algo- paranoid doesn't mean you don't have ly slow, particularly when compared with rithm than CSS. people out to get you, and it explains the the speed with which Sony and Philips But why should the cracking of the music providers' insistence on encryption, have brought to market the competing DVD-Video encryption have had such a copy protection, and "watermarking" — Super Audio CD. The preliminary specifi- catastrophic effect on the launch of DVD- the embedding of coded identifying data cation for DVD-A was released for discus- Audio? From what I've read, the CSS algo- in the music that is sufficiently robust to sion as far back as the late spring of 1997; rithm was never intended to be astrong survive successive DIA and A/D conver- the adoption of Meridian Lossless Packing deterrent to pirates. (Heck, afriend once sions, and even the transmission of analog was announced in June 1998, and the saw apirated video that had been made by versions of the music over AM radio. DVD Forum's DVD-Audio Working someone pointing acamcorder at acinema One of the more depressing experiences Group 4 finalized the DVD-Audio 1.0 screen!) Yes, the DVD-V protection may Ihad recently was attending workshops specification in October 1998. have been hacked, but only afew comput- and paper presentations at last September's But, as Meridian's Bob Stuart told me in er geeks will have the time, patience, and Audio Engineering Society Convention on August '97, although there was agreement skill to take advantage of this. the subject of watermarking. The record among all the DVD Forum members on Common sense says that the primary industry's need for the level of protection the key components necessary to ensure protection against piracy is low pricing: At to be "robust" means that the watermark DVD-A's success in the marketplace — current DVD-V prices, Joe Sixpack has no must be high in level. The only thing pre- video, three-dimensional sound, and the motivation to do anything other than buy venting its immediately being heard is that highest possible fidelity —these were over- legal discs. And, as Barry Willis points out it is encoded to mimic the recording's shadowed by the recording industry's need in this issue, common sense also dictates noise floor, frequency-shaped so as to be for reliable copy protection. It is that need that satisfying the need of the movie and masked as much as possible by the music's that torpedoed the format's 1999 launch. record industries to protect their copy- spectrum. Yeah, right. And now, according As you can read in this issue's "Industry righted material is achimerical dream — to another "Update" story (p.17), TTR Update" (p.15), Matsushita (Technics, no matter how robust aDVD's encryption, Technologies and Macrovision are devel- Panasonic), Nippon Columbia (Denon), the unprotected datastream must eventual- oping acopy-protection system to prevent and JVC were alarmed by the cracking last ly be exposed in order for the movie to be "casual copying" of music CDs. In my November by Norwegian hackers of the viewed and the music to be heard. opinion, the balance between music-lovers DVD-Video Content Scrambling System But when so many entities are involved, and copyright holders is leaning far too (CSS) encryption scheme. They decided much in the direction of the latter. to postpone bringing their players to mar- When it comes to higher-resolution ket until the "4C Entity" — aconsortium 1Late-breaking news at the time of writing this col- music, my advice is therefore to ignore the umn was that Pioneer intends to go ahead with its late- of Matsushita, Toshiba, IBM, and Intel — December launch in Japan of two IND-Audio players: ill-fated, protection-hobbled DVD-A. develops anew copy-protection scheme the high-end. $5000 DV-AX 10, which will also play Buy instead the DVD-Video-based DADs SACDs; and the less-expensive DV-S1OA DVD-V/A for DVDs. 1 It was reported that, as a from Classic Records and Chesky, or player. Pioneer points out that while no IND-A soft- result, Nippon Columbia had to trash ware exists, these players will play IND-Vs. CDs, and invest in one of Sony's Super Audio CD 10,000 discs that had been produced in SACDs (I)V-AX10), and that purchasers will he able to players and the SACDs to play on them — time for the DVD-Audio launch. get their machines upgraded when anew encryption unless, of course, the music industry belat- scheme is announced. In the meantime. Pioneer might The DVD-Video encryption involves also release copy-protection—free DVD-A discs; the edly decides that even SACD offers inad- each manufacturer identifying its players company has already released aDVD recorder! equate protection against copying. is Stereophile, March 2000 3 .