DVD Demystified

The World Before DVD
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drives to play the music in the listing, was alarming to many, who wondered
if any of the engineers working on watermarking techniques truly understood
high-fidelity audio. A few music industry executives were quick to
point out that watermarking was optional.
On July 5, Sony clouded the optical disc waters further with the
announcement of a new format that was halfway between CD and DVD.
Double-density CD (DDCD) versions of CD, CD-R, and CD-RW reduced
track pitch and pit length to increase capacity from 650 million bytes to 1.3
billion bytes. The CIRC error correction and addressing information (ATIP)
were tweaked slightly to accommodate the higher density of data, and a
copy protection scheme was added. The new specification, “Purple Book,”
was supposed to be finalized by September 2000. New DDCD discs were not
compatible with existing players.
The convergence process took another step forward when EchoStar Communications
demonstrated the first satellite television receiver combined
with a DVD player. The entire system, complete with satellite dish, and
receiver/DVD player was priced at only $400.
Pioneer released software to upgrade version 1.9 DVD-R drives to version
2.0. New version 2.0 discs, with CPRM copy-protection features, could
only be written in 2.0 drives. Older 1.9 and 1.0 discs could still be written
in 2.0 drives, although 1.9 media was no longer being made.
On August 1, 2000, Warner Home Video announced that The Matrix
DVD was the first disc to sell over three million copies in the U.S.
On August 17, Judge Kaplan, presiding over the DeCSS suit in New
York, granted the requested injunction against the Web site maintained by
2600: The Hacker Quarterly. 2600 had long since removed the DeCSS code,
but it maintained that it had a right to link to Web sites containing DeCSS
or information about DeCSS—thus the suit. The district court granted a
permanent injunction against (1) posting on any Internet site, or in any
other way manufacturing, importing or offering to the public, providing, or
otherwise trafficking in DeCSS or any other technology primarily designed
to circumvent CSS, and (2) linking any Internet web site, either directly or
through a series of links, to any other Internet web site containing DeCSS.
In response to the injunction, 2600 revised its list of some 450 Web sites so
that the URLs were listed without embedded links. Users interested in
going to any of the sites had to copy and paste the URLs into their Web
browser. This was the sole tangible outcome of the MPAA’s suit. In an
inspired bit of irony, the 2600 Web site also directed visitors to the Web
search engine at Disney’s Go.com, which provided hundreds of links to sites
such as the DeCSS Distribution Center. In theory, all Internet search
engines were in violation of DMCA as long as a single copy of DeCSS