Chris Lanier

The one feature of managed copies that doesn't look too appealing right now is that the copies will have to be "refreshed" every so often, to prove that you still have the HD-DVD in your possession. That could be a real downer if all of your managed copies ask for refreshing on the same day.

From interview with Mark Knox, Consumer Electronic News' Charlie White asks the adviser to the HD DVD Promotion Group about the digital rights management used on both Blu-ray and HD DVD, the similarities between the two formats, and what affect these restrictions will have on consumers.

Knox: (Discussing AACS in general) ...So, from a CE perspective, we're not big fans of this down-rez flag thing, obviously, but we are really big fans of something called mandatory managed copy. What that means is, you can now legally make a copy. Don't confuse this with the idea that you can therefore make thousands of copies and go into business.

CEN: Because it puts a mark on there that you've made your copy, and you're done making copies?

Knox: Well, it doesn't mark the disk, but what it does do is, the managed copy takes place in an external device. It's not happening in the player, but that could happen, for example, on a Windows Media Center PC. You take your HD DVD disk, you put it on your Media Center PC, and the PC then creates a secure managed copy that lives on the hard drive of that PC. That managed copy can either be played back right from that PC, or with the right technology it could be screened from the Windows Media PC to the Xbox in the living room, for example, or it could be streamed to any one of dozens of devices that were shown at CES that enable your individual TV to access the content that you happen to have on your computer or other device within your home network.

CEN: Now I take from that name “managed copy” to mean that it's possible to decide what kind of copying can be done. For example, Netflix, when they send these HD DVDs to customers, they want to make it so you can't make any copies of that because they want you to keep sending disks back and forth, right?

Knox: Here's the way the copy is managed: It's much like a lot of video games that are sold on standard DVDs today. You can't play the game unless you put the disk in the drive. So, you've installed the thing in your PC, but it won't let you play Quake 4 , or Doom 3 or Far Cry or whatever the game is, unless the disk is there. In the case of managed copy, we may not require the disk to be there all the time, but will start a little timer going, and then every so often, it's going to say, “Hey buddy, where is that disk?” And if you ain't got the disk, you ain't got the movie. So the system is very robust, and the copy that's on the PC is encrypted and it gets unlocked on the fly every time you play it or stream it. There are various hooks and handles in the system so that even though one managed copy is legal, there would be no way for you to duplicate and distribute those copies because whoever you send it to would not have the right keys on their machine to unlock that content. It's part of that same compromise process with the AACS.

http://www.hdissues.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=37429

Would that mean that once you put an HD-DVD from Blockbuster/Netflix/YourNeighbor into a Media Center PC, you can make a "managed" HD copy to the HDD, return the HD-DVD to Blockbuster/Netflix/YourNeighbor, and then still be able to view that local copy on the Media Center PC?

Hmmmm, but the discs are not writable DVD's, so once it's returned to Netflix, how does the disc know if it was copied?

But isn't the point of making a "backup copy" so that you will have a copy if the original disc gets damaged?  The optical pick-up unit on a blu-ray disc rides very very close to the disc surface, so close that it WILL be damaged by dust, fingerprints, or scratches.  If I have to insert the original disc, well, that's just not going to work.

I think that there are security issues in the Managed Copy itself (and the physical media itself.)

Blu-ray's copy protection system may be cracked sucessfully by cracking the AACS, installing firmware that bypasses the ROM Mark on the Blu-ray, and encrypts the pirated copy, making it impossible or difficult for the BD+ to locate the pirate and block access.  Then that's square one again.  HD-DVDs are worse off, because of the weaker copy protection forms on it.  In other words, HD-DVDs and Blu-rays are in the dust.  Managed Copy?  Well, put it this way.  I believe that's the right to go when it comes to putting the disc away, as well as putting my movie to the iPod, and beaming the Managed Copy around my hous.  But somebody out there is going to break the security code and upload it to the net.  The problem, no matter how strong and sophisticated the security system is, it ain't gonna stop the pirates.

My best bet right now is to work on broadband speed and hard drive space right now, and then get the contents off the disk and on to online downloads.  That way, it's more secure, consumers are able to back up movies, games, and other content on a backup drive incase of a HDD failure or a natural disaster, being able to beam the content through a home network, and able to make copies and put them onto portable media devices.