James Delahunty
24 Nov 2005 8:44
Back in February this year, Macrovision made a terrible attempt to scare the "ripping community" with the introduction of RipGuard. The company claimed that RipGuard would "stop DVD rippers in their tracks" and would have a dramatic effect on the amount of content that makes its way to P2P networks. "RipGuard is designed to... reduce DVD ripping and the resulting supply of illegal peer to peer," said the firm.
However, Macrovision's "perfect" RipGuard solution does not match up to the firms claims. "We were able to circumvent the technology and rip a perfect copy of ['Madagascar'] using a free DVD ripper downloaded from the Internet," Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster wrote in a recent report. Yes that is true, "FREE" DVD ripping software already stops the RipGuard copy protection in its path.
This is bad news for Macrovision and the studios, who were promised 97% of lost revenue returned by Macrovision if they invested in RipGuard technology. In fact, Macrovision has such little faith in its own creations that it has to bully coders and sites in a desperate attempt to make these rippers disappear, so that movie studios can be fooled into believing their copy protection is as effective as they claim.
Macrovision's technology limits consumer's fair use rights by attempting to prevent them from making backup copies of their own movies. Macrovision never addresses this problem however, instead the company likes to use piracy as an excuse to justify limiting consumers rights. Also, when the company unveiled RipGuard in February, it said that it plays in "nearly all" DVD players - but of course didn't give any details on players it wouldn't work in. "Nearly all" is not good enough when a consumer has spent their own earned money on a DVD player which possibly will have problems with RipGuard DVDs.
As you all know by now, Macrovision decided to also "order" that DVD Decrypter be removed from AfterDawn's download section. This will be done on Sunday 27th November, or as soon as technically possible - but it will still be in the AfterDawn download section until then. Users are reminded that software such as AnyDVD, DVDFab Decrypter and FreeDVD are just some examples of software that can assist in creating backups and are still in our download section.
DVD Decrypter will remain in widespread use for a long time yet. Macrovision could get it removed from every site online and it would still float around P2P networks and consumers HDDs - so it would still be quite easily obtained.
Source:
Forbes