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Until about March 1997, it looked as though DVD was never going to come to market, largely because the motion picture industry was carefully guarding its content until it was satisfied that a copy-protection scheme could be effectively implemented. The scheme that all DVD Forum members have agreed uponand that satisfies the Hollywood movie houses--is called CSS, or Content Scrambling System. To prevent disc-copying, all the hardware, firmware, and software are all protected by CSS. But is CSS really a solution? The technology assigns a unique encryption key to a specific DVD title. Encrypted content contained in a final CSS-protected DVD can only be descrambled by a CSS-licensed DVD player.
According to TTR Technologies, the creator of DiscGuard, all known copy-protection methods for DVD movies and DVD-ROM can be circumvented by performing a sector-by-sector copy of the original. That is, there is no place on a DVD for code keys or encrypted data to hide. Pirates do not play by the rules, and one way or another, they will obtain the equipment to copy and mass produce popular movies and software titles. These illegally produced DVDs are indistinguishable from the original and will play perfectly on DVD players and DVD readers, no matter what encryption technology is used, since the pirate DVDs will contain the same keys and scrambled data as the original.
Alan Bell, program director for the IBM DVD project office, worked very closely on the DVD working group that...