To limit piracy, Oscars won't be prescreened with DVDs [ip]

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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From: "Steelhead" <bill () ries-knight net>
To: "Declan () Well Com" <declan () well com>
Cc: "Steelhead" <bill () ries-knight net>
Subject: How will the Oscars be screened?
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 09:57:35 -0700


Over the weekend I noted news about the elimination of DVD's as a screening
aid for the Academy Awards.  A lot of folks will not get a well deserved
Oscar because many Academy members have schedules and are in locations that
will not be served by the "Official Screenings"  it seems to have moved up
the noise scale as others have picked up the story.

http://yahoo.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,12601,00.html?yhnws
--The major studios have agreed to go along with the Motion Picture
Association
--of America's proposal to stop the sending out DVD and video screeners to
those
--who vote for the Oscars and other Hollywood awards.

In one news story Mr. Valenti himself as much as admitted that he could have
been a part of the problem by passing on screening DVD's to family and
friends and not caring where they went.

A somewhat easy solution would be to encode each DVD produced with a
signature code at the bottom of each frame much like the networks do today.
With a bit of planning, a code could be unique to each disk and allow for an
audit trail of sorts later.  Now we know the technology exists, and it seems
this would be a reasonable use of the technology, and it could be used later
as a permanent piracy feature.

As I considered this thought I wondered if we would want to have such a
feature on the DVD's we buy.  If we buy it and the DVD id, I'll call it a
serial number, is used to allow us to ask for warranty service, it could be
a good thing and it could help the MPAA to get a handle on piracy.  The
number will exist on the disk and could be tracked as far as the selling
point like the serial number on a stereo to TV.  As long as we don't
register the serial number, there would be no way to track it back to any
one person, but if we wanted a minimum 3 year warranty on the disk, we could
register it.

Footnote: at the end of this article
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/031009/3/3exja.html a similar notion has been
tossed out... but it came to me as a common sense solution.

Just my skew view

Bill Ries-Knight   ***   Stockton, CA.

My views on spam, vindicated by a new law in California.
http://www.ries-knight.net/spam/index.html
.
Sending UCE is like screwing  in church during the sermon.
If you are noticed you are shunned for the rest of your days.
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