DVD copy news
03:00 AM Aug. 24, 2000 PT
There are two competing groups vying to have their watermarking technology adopted
in the DVD video standard: the "Millennium" group, consisting of DigiMarc,
Macrovision, and Philips, and the "Galaxy" group, which consists of
IBM, NEC, Hitachi, Pioneer, and Sony.
Selection of a DVD watermarking technology was supposed to be completed last year but has been bogged down by failure to agree by the two opposing groups. "What can content owners do?" asked Bell. "Knock some heads together so they come together and work things out."
The moderator of the panel, Phil Pictaggi, a Hollywood industry veteran, now retired, agreed its adoption needs to be driven by the top management of the movie studios."It's got to take people high up on the content ownership food chain to take an interest for this to be solved," he said. "Watermarking is the best available solution. If it was available to content owners now, they would be using it."
The conference is primarily a vehicle for DVD authoring and development companies, so studio presence was minimal and they were unavailable to comment.
The studios certainly have an incentive. MPAA senior vice president of worldwide anti-piracy, Ken Jacobson, was among the panelists. He had a number of movies from China that were perfect duplicates of legitimate DVD movies, made with the help of DeCSS.
Jacobson said in many cases the only way to tell a pirated movie from the original is to take it to a lab and examine the disc. The average viewer would never know the difference.
Despite attempts by Chinese authorities to put a stop to it, piracy continues
rampant in the country and is spreading, he said.