A Clever End Run Around the Movie-Streaming Gremlins | Hacker News Reader

A Clever End Run Around the Movie-Streaming Gremlins

nytimes.com

81 pointsJ3L240443 comments

Not necessarily a new idea. Just an old idea repurposed to fit a legal loophole instead of a technical need.

From Wired Sept 1994, Fran-On-Demand: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.09/cable.labs.html

"When an order for, say, Coneheads, comes in, she rushes to the giant videotape library on the far wall, retrieves the correct title, and hurries to insert it into the appropriate place in a gleaming bank of VCRs. During prime-time hours, two people share this job. But right now, on a Wednesday afternoon, it's all Fran.

Fran may or may not realize that her job category will soon be phased out. Her employer, cable colossus Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), is conducting this market test with AT&T and US West. But all the other interactive television trials just getting underway are powered by computers, not by people like her."

The article ends in a chowderish claim:

"Watching any movie, any time - video-on-demand - is supposed to be the killer app that propels dozens of new interactive TV services into American homes by the end of the century. The home shopping, the custom news programs, the play-along game shows, the dozen or so simultaneous football games, the home banking, the on-demand Roseanne, the whole 500-channel scenario that cable companies have been hyping - all of this is supposed to piggyback on the raging success of movies-on-demand. But there's one glitch: there's not much demand for movies-on-demand"

TV's problem has ended up not being lack of demand, but disaggregation. People want movies on demand, and they can get them better and cheaper from companies that aren't in the traditional "TV business".

The same is happening all around. Newspapers' incomes are not down due to lack of demand for classifieds. It just happens that people who used to pay newspapers to print classifieds now post them somewhere else.

Although this is a kinda clever solution, part of the problem's premise is false.

Subtitles, directors commentary, alternate languages and the like aren't magical DVD only features. There's no technical reason that streaming solutions can't offer all these extra content streams except that they... don't. It's like arguing that, because you can ask HJ's to put extra onions on your burger and you can't at MickyD's, that MickyD's has flaws. They don't, they just don't offer that option YET.

I think their solution is clever, but it's a strawman problem.

True streaming solutions could equally easily offer day-and-date streaming of new DVD releases. It's not a technical problem, but it is a real problem that needs solving.

but it's a strawman problem.

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I think you're missing the point ... by doing it this way ... it allows them stream DVDs that netflix simply can't.

Make no mistake about it ... streaming movies is where the money is.

I disagree. There are actual non-technical issues here that prevent streaming services from offering those options, that this company completely avoids. Language dubs and subtitle tracks are separately copyrighted works and the streaming services would have to negotiate separately for every possible combination. Sometimes the French dub of a movie is owned by a different company than the English one; the English subtitles for a Japanese TV series are owned by a different company than the Japanese one, etc. The DVD publisher already negotiated the rights for the language and subtitle tracks on the disc, so streaming a physical DVD gets you access to them, where Netflix might never be able to negotiate rights to the same combinations.

Meanwhile, their home page:

"Zediva.com is temporarily down for maintenance.

"We experienced some exceptional customer growth this week as we officially launched Zediva to the public. We're delighted by the attention from the media, and the overwhelming enthusiasm of our new and prospective customers. We are, however, very disappointed that the resulting surge of customers has negatively impacted your experience.

"We do hope that you forgive us, and that you try back another time soon. We're working diligently to build capacity to serve America's hungry appetite for new release movies.

"In the meantime....please follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook where we'll update our status. "

Want to get around all those silly restrictions? Pirate the film. Eventually the law will give up, in the same way to gave up about, porn, condoms, and men having sex with each other.

The amount of effort put into inconveniencing the user is really incredible.

Furthermore, the lawyers have viciously clipped the wings of the streaming-movie era. You have to start watching a movie within 30 days of renting it and finish it within 24 hours.

Which streaming service does this describe?

The author paints "streaming" with an overly broad brush. Having only experience with Netflix, this quoted sentence describes a system I've never heard of - and saying Netflix's selection is from the Carter era is a gross simplification.

Playstation Network rentals have those time restrictions.

Do other services as well or is this the only one? If it's the latter then this article paints with an even broader brush than I imagined.

Amazon video on demand has the same restrictions, I think.

AppleTV rentals have the same restrictions

Amazon, Apple, Zune, Vudu, CinemaNow. Netflix is unique, though Amazon Prime is just getting around to trying a similar model.

The real problem with online rentals isn't the rental period, though; it's the ridiculous price. In a world where Redbox rents new releases for $1 who would pay $4 each to stream crappy catalog titles?

Well, the price is ridiculous in relation to the 24hr viewing period. $5 for a 5 day viewing window would be more reasonable.

Honestly, don't any of these people have children? Kids don't always go for something in one take.

Some MIT students tried this with music CDs in a project called LAMP (the Library Access to Music Project) back in the early 2000s. Kids could use the internet to select and listen to CDs played automatically via jukeboxes over one of 16 dedicated cable channels, which was hooked up to the audio for their chosen CD.

As far as I know, it's still running over there on campus, perfectly legal (though a current student could tell us for sure - I haven't tried to use it since 2006.) So there's some precedent for this sort of scheme working without lawyers descending on it. Of course, suing students would have been far more uncouth than suing a for-profit organization.

http://lamp.mit.edu/lamp-qa.html

The article doesn't mention it, but this would also seem like the solution for streaming outside the US. Services like iTunes and Netflix are only available to a small part of the internet (US + a few other countries), citing legal issues for not being available anywhere else. This would give Zediva a huge potential market to themselves.

I'm in Europe and signing up as soon as they'll let me to see if it works here. Perhaps, finally, video on demand for the rest of us.

When I first read about Zediva and how they planned to work it, I laughed. Are they going to have tons of people going around changing dvd machines. I pictured a huge warehouse with people running around putting dvds in machines.

I'm taking the wild guess that there are towers with DVD readers, sending the signal. The question of how these logistics all come together though is puzzling.

"Are they going to have tons of people going around changing dvd machines[?]"

In the short term, maybe. In the longterm, this can be automated with robotics, and not even very difficult ones. Certainly feasible today, if not something a startup can quite just run out and buy.

And of course, if they buy a hundred DVDs, why not shortcut the entire process and send a "cached" stream? What's the difference between a "cached" DVD and a DVD?

This is one particular manifestation of something I've been saying for a decade now, which is that like it or not and regardless of the challenges sooner or later the law is going to have to give up the idea that the mechanical source of content has any meaning, because whatever rules you draw can be gamed. The only question you'll ultimately be able to ask is whether you have the rights to view a movie or not.

And let me just underline the one particular manifestation bit one more time. Once the kind of people who frequent this site start really thinking about how to game the system in this style you can generate a dozen ideas in an hour, each of which the law really has no current answer to. One immediately obvious example is that if this is legal for DVDs it obviously ought to be legal for CDs, right? Why not a library that takes video of a book two thousand miles away and physically turns pages? (It wouldn't take much post-processing of a video stream to make that feasible.) Why not add caching of the streams to any of those things? If caching in general is wrong, is it OK for me to go ahead and advance the book one page while letting the reader read the previous page, so they don't have to wait for the robot to turn the page laboriously? What if I mix in some P2P, can I stream my neighbor's copy of something? And so on and so on for dozens of questions resulting in hundreds of lawsuits and brutally conflicting and downright gibberish precedents for decades, until someone finally manages to sit down and really straighten this out somewhere around 2050.

Why not use late model computers or DVD players with some sort of digital input to control playback without mechanical input? It's not the player that's limited by the law, right?

If they're going to stick strictly to playing a DVD disk in a machine as a legal end run I would imagine they would purchase large "tower" external drive cases holding 10 Bays or more and slave them to servers. Then they would write some custom software to handle managing the streams / playback, compression.

However, they may claim they are "backing up" or "caching" the drives by just mounting ISO images of them and doing the actual reading and serving of them from there relying on a 1:1 ISO to Disk ratio to hold the lawyers at bay.

DVD drives (IDE/SATA) are under $20 each retail. If they're not running things virtually using ISOs, it's cheap enough to buy a few thousand, hook them up to various systems, and keep the most popular ones in there, only having to swap out when a movie is requested that isn't already in a drive.

No sillier than warehouses of people stuffing DVD envelopes, and an army of postal workers delivering them.

Also: http://www.amazon.com/Sony-DVPCX995V-400-Disc-Changer-Player...

From the article: At its California data center, Zediva has set up hundreds of DVD players. They’re automated, jukebox-style.

There is no clean-cut loophole here. People have tried similar services before (e.g., VHS, in a smaller area, such as a single video store or hotel building) and the Courts found a violation of the public performance right. See Redd Horne (749 F.2d 154, http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/749_F2d_154.htm).

More precisely, the question is this: are they transmitting a performance of the DVD to the public? This gets a little convoluted thanks to the circular definition of "public" in § 101. There is an argument that the transmission is only to private homes, if Zediva puts restrictions on how/where their service can be used.

Sometimes people forget that reproduction isn't the only way to infringe. Depending on how their technology works, there may also be infringing reproduction in the buffer.

Can't imagine this is going to last.

CSS authorizes digital output of video content when one in a limited set of copy protection systems is in place on the digital output. IP streaming video is obviously a digital output and though Zediva may be using copy protection within Flash, I highly doubt that specific type of copy protection is authorized by the CSS license. Additionally, CSS may only authorize specific digital outputs, in which case IP streaming through Flash is unlikely to be one of them.

Therefore, Zediva is very likely circumventing CSS, which is a DMCA violation.

Aren't you allowed to circumvent for interoperability? If the "these are just really long video cables" argument would hold up on its own, and the CSS-circumvention issue were the only thing standing in the way, then it seems like they could argue that they were circumventing CSS for the purpose of interoperating with their fancy software video cable. And if that argument doesn't hold up, then their rental/streaming business is probably not legal anyway for licensing reasons, even without the circumventing-CSS issue.

Disclaimer: my knowledge of this area of law is somewhat spotty, so I could be wrong.

Not legal for licensing reasons how? If I buy a video from the store, I'm legally able to rent it out to others without the permission of the studios. Most large chains cut profit-sharing deals with the studios to get better-than-wholesale prices on DVDs. I won't comment on Redbox b/c it cuts too close to my day-job and don't want my comments coming back to bite me.

There have been articles about Redbox that stated that it will buy retail copies of DVD's for rental, if it has to, to achieve parity with other rental companies. You're right, the studios don't like it, but there is nothing that they can do about it.

First sale doctrine. You buy it you can rent, sell or destroy. Can't edit or change. Argument would be if you are "changing" by encoding, I would assume that's why they are stressing the DVD player solution. If you look at some of the case law, the entertainment companies used to make arguments that playing a dvd in your computer violated first sale because you were sending a digital signal to a monitor. They lost those cases.

First sale doctrine does not allow circumvention of DRM.

I don't have the CSS license in front of me, but the AACS and CPPM licenses (created by many of the same lawyers) specify exactly which types of digital outputs are allowed and what types of security are required if those digital outputs are used. IP streaming is a digital output. Assuming the CSS license is similar, if IP streaming is not listed in the CSS license, and if the security Zediva uses (assuming they use any) isn't listed, then Zediva is circumventing CSS.

Actually you are stating a hypothesis as a fact. Exactly what DRM is under First Sale Doctrine is to my (somewhat rusty) knowledge, still unclear.

Whatever licenses you do or don't have in front of you don't matter. That's the whole point of First Sale - you are not subject to any contract or license, it defines what you can do WITHOUT PERMISSION when you purchase a particular item.

So case law is unclear enough that I can create a CSS circumvention tool and sell it to you? No. How about if I create a CSS circumvention tool and then rent you access to that tool on a per-movie basis?

That's Zediva.

This is such a clever and world changing idea. Forever services like blockbuster depended on your not being able to share your movie with everyone you know in the two days you rent it. But now that you can, companies like this one are sending a wake up call to producers holding new licenses and telling them that the old model just won't work. Maybe the music and book industries can take a hint (and much of everything else once we all have fabbers in our offices and studies). Maybe movies should only come out as downloadable non sharable files, for a third of the price. They'd need excellent security, but I can't imagine the world pointing in any other direction. I say, ditch the disks, and work on creating files that can only work on the computer which bought them. That, or bring back the VHS's.

I don't need better movie selections as much as I need better streaming performance.

At this point, I stick to downloads, whether it's from Amazon or iTunes, because nothing ruins a good movie like stutters, freezes, or the dreaded Netflix "this movie cannot be played" error.

Cute idea, but I surely wouldn't invest in it. At some point in the future the licensing scheme that favors physical DVDs over digital copies will come into line with reality and they're going to be stuck holding a lot of pointless hardware.

Not in our lifetime.

Well, if this idea of "streaming" physical DVDs ever actually caught on, I'm confident the movie companies would sign a deal with e.g. Netflix to offer those same movies for streaming with a per-view fee. They'd have nothing to lose and would make more money.

You really think there won't be rational movie streaming licensing in our lifetime? I'll take that long bet.

Lots of money has been made by the lack of rationality of those who control movies (Hollywood). I exaggerate to make a point, but if it is in my lifetime, it might be just barely.

I can't resist chiming in and reiterating how stunningly stupid the MPAA is. People have fistfuls of cash that they're ready to hand over to watch content, and these cartel cavemen refuse to allow it. Then they wonder why people pirate.

Maybe this is for novelty protest or subterfuge. It can't be profitable to stream DVD's individually, can it?

Sure it can ... netflix is cool, but watching movies is usually a spontaneous thing ... you have no idea how many netflix movies I've had sent over and then let sit for months because I didn't really feel like watching them when I actually had time to.

With regards to money ... a dvd costs what? Like 10 bucks ...

If they have just 5 people watch one at $2 a pop ...They've made their money back ... and these are top 100 titles (another clever move btw) ... so they are guaranteed to beat that in their first week every time.

Of course there is overhead to think about etc etc ... but I think its clear that they can be pretty profitable pretty fast, even though it seems rather awkward at first glance.

I'd give them my money if I were an investor.

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