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 COLUMN
R.I.P. DVD: The still-young age of digital video disks is coming to an inevitable end IN EVERY ONE of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry movies, you know there's a crusading maverick who's going to buck the system, an inept bureaucrat who's going to spoil the fun, and finally, a hapless partner -- the one who's got "dead meat" stamped on his forehead.
Go ahead, make my day If the struggle between the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the Linux crowd over DVD's encryption system (CSS, or Content Scrambling System) were a movie, the Linux crowd would cast itself as a crusading Dirty Harry, running roughshod over an inept and oppressive bureaucrat to mete out open-source justice. All DVDs are encrypted with CSS. The DVD's content is decrypted at playback time. The key to decrypt is being licensed, and only a licensed DVD player should be able to view DVD movies. Unfortunately, there hasn't been a DVD player for Linux. Linux geeks, being who they are, decided to take matters into their own hands. But to make a Linux DVD player, they broke DVD encryption, throwing the MPAA into a tizzy. Do you feel lucky, punk? In this saga, the MPAA plays the inept bureaucrat. To stop the distribution of DeCSS -- the utility that cracks DVD encryption -- the MPAA has gotten injunctions against a variety of geek Web sites, such as Slashdot.org and 2600.com, to stop them from posting DeCSS. In the movie industry, content piracy is the boogeyman, and DVDs aren't completely trusted. There are three kinds of film companies: those that resist DVDs and aren't putting their libraries onto the format; those who've jumped onto the format; and those on the fence, slowly testing the waters. Steven Spielberg's bad movies are on DVD, but Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jaws sure aren't. Bizarrely, the MPAA doesn't seem to understand its own technology. It is touting the DeCSS case as an anti-piracy issue, which isn't exactly right. The CSS on DVDs only prevents playback. You can still create a bit-for-bit copy of the encrypted DVD and then play it on a licensed DVD player. It just happens to be economically unfeasible to do this -- at the moment. DVD films would quickly fill today's hard drives, and DVD blank media is around $40, so it doesn't make sense to spend $40 to pirate The Matrix if you can buy a legal copy for $18. A man's gotta know his limitations But here's where Moore's Law rears its head. Very shortly, either another removable media format will have reached sufficient capacity to store DVDs, or blank DVDs will get cheaper. Then it will make economic sense for individuals to pirate. Why would the movie industry go to a format that any reasonable person can predict will be easy to pirate in the foreseeable future? Either they don't have a clue, or they have a different business model in mind. The DVD player -- the thing that got cracked -- has a license fee attached to it. Right now, it's $5,000. But perhaps the thinking is that as the blank media capacity increases in capacity, the movie industry will accept a certain level of piracy because they'll make their money in DVD player licensing fees. But now the DVD player is cracked and available without a license fee. Dying ain't much of a living With the DVD playback scheme broken -- eliminating that revenue stream -- and the coming of rampant DVD piracy thanks to broadband Internet and high-capacity storage, what's the movie industry to do? Those against DVD will become more entrenched, those on the fence will likely get knocked off, and those in favor will have to do some hard thinking about their future revenues. There's only one reasonable solution: Get out of the DVD business entirely and look to other formats and business models. The movie business will figure out something, but it looks like DVD isn't it. Because, at the end of the day, it's called show business. And, dot-coms aside, business is about finding a way to make money. So, it's hasta la vista, DVD. Senior Research Editor Sean M. Dugan will mourn DVD's passing by watching The Matrix for the gazillionth time.  RELATED SUBJECTS  Operating SystemsMORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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