DVD Demystified

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playback device that is sanctioned by a licensing entity, you may not be able
to play it. If the copyright owner chooses to not allow any copying of the disc,
then reasonable copying is denied for educational use or for personal use,
such as compiling a disc of favorite songs or making a copy to play in the
car. Access to content is being tied to a monopolistic cabal of copyright owners
and player manufacturers.
Effect of Copy Protection on Computers DVD-ROM drives and computers,
including DVD-ROM upgrade kits, are required to support Macrovision,
CGMS, and CSS. Computers that play DVD-Audio discs or record
video onto writable DVDs must support CPPM and CPRM, respectively. PC
video cards with TV outputs that do not support Macrovision will not work
with CSS-encrypted movies. Computers with IEEE 1394/FireWire connections
must support the DTCP standard in order to work with other DTCP
devices. New computers with DVI outputs must support HDCP. Every
DVD-ROM drive includes CSS/CPPM circuitry to establish a secure conntection
to the decoder hardware or software in the computer, although CSS
can only be used on DVD-Video content and CPPM can only be used on
DVD-Audio content. Writable DVD drives must include support for CPRM.
The various protection systems are only used for audio and video data, not
for other types of computer data. Of course, since DVD-ROM can hold any
form of data, any desired encryption scheme can be implemented beyond
those which are part of CPSA.
Operating systems such as Windows and Mac OS are beginning to integrate
security and copy protection measures into the core of the system.
More robust hardware-based security, such as encryption/decryption chips
proposed by Intel, is also on the horizon. This kind of support from the computer
industry makes content owners more willing to trust their content to
computer and Internet environments, but it also makes playback much
more complicated and often interferes with the use and creation of nonprotected
content. See Chapter 11 for additional discussion of copy protection
on computers.
Licensing
Chapter 4
No single company “owns” DVD. The official format specification was
developed initially by a consortium of ten companies: Hitachi, JVC, Matsushita,
Mitsubishi, Philips, Pioneer, Sony, Thomson, Time Warner, and
Toshiba. Various working groups within the DVD Forum are responsible
for different parts of the DVD specification, and representatives from
many other companies have contributed in various working groups since