Sony presents copy protection for video DVD

March 20, 2004

Now that DVD burners are getting more and more popular, many drives are used for copying DVD videos. In order to prevent illegal copying, Sony DADC developed a copy protection called "ARccOS" that should prevent ripping of DVDs or transcoding them, in order to fit on a recordable DVD.

According to Sony DADC this is a "Copy-Control-Technology with a dynamic copy protection system" that allows to individually encrypt Video-DVDs. Unfortunately "with a daily capacity of 2.5 million discs the biggest manufacturer of optical media" as they call themselves did not tell how ARccOS will achieve this, without the risk of compatibility issues on standalone DVD players.

Almost 15% of DVD recordables sold in Germany contain illegal copies of video DVDs, according to the manufacturer. Fast DVD re-encoder like DVD2one, InstantCopy or CloneDVD, which is available in the second version since CeBIT 2004, are said to be the cause for this rapid growth of private DVD copies. Because of the high speed of half an hour or faster for re-encoding a disc, it is obvious to develop a copy protection that interferes with the requantizing engine (Compressed Domain Transcoder: CDT)

I don't think they will succeed with this protection. At least I do not know of any protection that has not been beaten yet, regardless if it should protect games or videos and neither will this protection stop anyone from copying.

For discussions about this protection and copy protections in general, our Copy Protection Forum on Club CD Freaks is the right place for you.

Source: Heise.de