MPAA Enforces DRM Infection:RealDVD Dead

We all, or most of us, know DRM is a disrespectful slap at consumers by members of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). We're all criminals. Therefore we naughty, mere customers have to be CONTROLLED and prevented from our mischievous ways by having our video DVDs locked up as unable to be copied, no matter what. If the source disc gets scratched, get screwed! Dumbass customer trash.

This is what I call the 'Marketing Moron' attitude and it's a brilliant way to destroy your reputation with the people who pay you money to keep your biznizz running, the customers. Screw thy customers at thine own peril! Marketing Mavens on the other hand insist upon treating customers with deserved respect.

In a fit of idealism, RealNetworks released a program called RealDVD that stripped out DRM from movie DVDs and allowed customers to exercise the 'fair use' of their purchased and owned movie media. In other words, the program allowed customers to perform the #1 Rule of Computing: Make a Backup. And what are Movie DVDs but digital computer data!


Therefore, sensing such terrible good intentions toward movie DVD owners, the MPAA sued RealNetworks in order to kill off RealDVD. Wednesday a settlement in the case was announced whereby RealDVD is no longer sold, RealNetworks pays MPAA members $4.5 MILLION, owners of RealDVD are refunded and the MPAA in return drops their legal action.

It's a LOSE/LOSE/WIN solution where YOU LOSE, RealNetworks LOSE and the MPAA WINS, at least from their point of view.


Score another one for the biznizz oligarchy that rules the USA. However...

The outcome from treating your customers as criminals has weathered the test of time: Good respectable customers turn on disrespectful companies and burn them, one way or another. It is one of the most sick and sad calamities of the Internet that DRM actually PROMOTES and INSPIRES movie piracy. I dare anyone to reliably prove otherwise. Thus the term 'Marketing Morons'. Smooth move there MPAA. It's called self-destructive behavior. The actual result of DRM is Lose/Lose/Lose all the way round.

Blu-ray Ripping For Mac Hits The Net

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For a couple years now there have been tools on the Windows side of the computer community for ripping Blu-ray discs to your computer, then turning them into whatever you like for whatever purpose you like. As of this month, those tools have begun arriving for Macintosh. I am most pleased.

Here is a starter (IOW incomplete) article over at MacWorld:

Blu-ray ripping on the Mac


WARNING NOTE: If you have a Blu-ray writer, it is CRITICAL to be aware of Sony's Blu-ray DRM schemes. Here's why:

On Blu-ray burners that both read and write Blu-ray movie discs, Sony, who invented Blu-ray, have perpetrated 3 (THREE) forms of DRM, aka Digital Rights Manglement. One of the three requires an Internet connection to Sony whereby Sony perpetrates surveillance on your Blu-ray movie burner/player. If at any time Sony deem that you are performing anything questionable with your Blu-ray movie burner/player, Sony will BRICK your burner. It will NEVER work again. Sony will NEVER unbrick it. At least that is the consistent story I read on the net.

Then add to that the fact that Sony are terrible software writers, resulting in Sony's brick-job more than occasionally bricking YOUR ENTIRE COMPUTER! I wish this was an urban legend, but it's not. Sony can brick an entire Windows PC, by accident of course. Big oops. I have no idea what you do to solve this idiotic catastrophe, apart from reinstall your system and restore the rest from backup. As for your Blu-ray movie burner/player, toss it in the garbage, get another one, be smarter next time.

Remember that I am talking Windows here. Bricking has never yet happened on a Mac because there has not been, up until now, any way to use a Blu-ray movie burner/reader on a Mac. Also let me reiterate that this problem does NOT apply to just burners that are incapable of also reading Blu-ray movie discs. I hope that is entirely clear. Blu-ray burners that do NOT have Blu-ray movie disc reading ability do NOT have any DRM at all. None. Let me know if I am being too vague here. Get the distinction?

THEREFORE! Whenever you are dealing with Blu-ray movie burner/reader drives, you must at all times cover your butt against DRM killing your device forever.


Why I despise DRM and champion hacking around it and eventually destroying it all together:

Because DRM, certainly in this case, prevents you from making a backup of your media.

For me that is the sum total of the problem. What is the #1 Rule of Computing. If you read my stuff you know. So repeat after me: Make A Backup.

Therefore, DRM in the case of DVDs and Blu-ray is EVIL and IMHO illegal. If you are prevented from backing up your computer media, and that's what Blu-Ray movie discs are, then your rights to use your media are being broken. Needless to say, never share commercial media you own with anyone else. That's piracy, which is illegal as well. Follow the license that comes with your media, except when it comes to making a backup. IMHO no one ever has the right to prevent you from making a backup. Hopefully this fact will be proven in a court of law very soon.

(Well, except of course I expect the current democracy-dementing US Supreme Court will kiss the ass of media corporations and provide them with yet-another, anti-constitutional, anti-citizen, special right to hurt their customers. Such is the corrupt political/marketing-moron era we live in).

Now get out there and backup your Blu-ray movies! And don't pirate. It's very naughty.





[***BTW: All Mac user group members are able to receive a discount on MacWorld magazine. Talk to your MUG leaders about how to obtain this discount from IDG. I'm also happy to report that you no longer have to receive a tree version of MacWorld! Hurray! You can download it and read it in Zinio Reader instead. I've been doing it for months and love it. MacWorld is my very favorite Mac magazine, very useful for both novice and professional users.]
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The Number 1 Rule Of Computing: MAKE A BACKUP

Now that the manifesto is behind us, here come the Smarticles:

What is the Number 1 rule of computing?

MAKE A BACKUP.

If nobody told you that, for shame. The first words out of any computer guru's mouth to a newbie should be: Make a backup.

Now you are a smarty. You know that deep secret knowledge of computing that was hidden behind all the cultist rhetoric and vagary. There is no ritual, there is no secret handshake, there is no little red book, there is no hidden room behind a secret panel that only the upper echelon of our holy order can enter. You've already been initiated. You bought a Mac (I hope). The secret is yours: Make a backup.

How to make a backup. OK, this is where things get complicated. In the future I will analyze a bunch of backup options. Happily my local Mac User Group did a review of some basic applications and methods last week (relative to this post date). I'll provide a summary in a later post. Meanwhile, I will simply toss you the names of some applications and some brief comments. You can look up all these applications at the great and wonderful VersionTracker.com (now owned by CNET). The entries there for each application have the price, if any, for the software as well as links to the developer where you can find out more.

Applications:

• Retrospect - This was once considered das wunderkind der welt. But EMC, the company who bought the original developer Dantz, has essentially buried the product in its Insignia division for medium and small businesses. If you go to EMC's own website it is literally impossible to find Retrospect listed. Visit www.dantz.com instead, which still works. A happy sign that Retrospect may have a future appeared last year when ECM updated the client portion of the server version of the software to 6.2, a Universal Binary, capable of running natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. Hopefully an updated version of the server portion of the software will be provided as well, one of these years. The program itself is very complicated but very powerful. It easily provides you with the most backup options of any program I know for Macintosh. It is 100% optical and tape drive savvy with very regular compatibility updates. It is easily the most professional of the current options. Bug: Apparently this now olde, dilapidating version 6.1 of Retrospect is messing up BSD flags, HFS+ extended attributes, permissions, modification dates and ACLs. Conclusion: Wait (possibly forever) for a better, UB version to appear.
• Time Machine - It comes with every current Mac as part of Mac OS 10.5 'Leopard.' It is super fun and easy to work and play with. It also still has a few bugs and remains somewhat incomplete. Hopefully the 10.5.2 update will complete the program. We shall see. If you've got it, us it! It does require you have an external drive. It is optical media clueless.
• Backup - This is also from Apple. You can only get it and use it while you are a .Mac member. (.Mac is Apple's niffy kewl online service for Mac users. I love it. I'll have mine with extra SPAM! Actually it has a very good SPAM filtering system. Buy a year's subscription of .Mac via Amazon [CLUE!] as it only costs $80. Otherwise it will cost you $100). The latest version is the first respectable version. It was rubbish in the past. It works great for making daily backups of your most crucial files to your .Mac iDisk space. Apple provide 10 GB. Set it and forget it. It just works.
• Carbon Copy Cloner - Thank you Mike Bombich! It's free, it's free! Thank gawd allmighty, it's free! This is the single most powerful freeware backup application you can find. Its most famous attribute is the ability to make a bootable backup, meaning that if you use it to back up to an external hard drive, you can boot your Mac from that hard drive. The vast majority of backup programs for Mac, sadly including Apple's own, do NOT provide a real life full complete backup that is bootable, which sucks. CCC is now a Universal Binary. Praise the lawd.
• SuperDuper - Following in the footsteps of Mike Bombich, this application also makes bootable backups. In 'unregistered mode' it is a rather minimal but effective backup program to an external hard drive. Pay up the $30 for registration and you get bells and whistles well beyond CCC, well worth the cost. This program is beloved among the Mac cognoscenti.
• iBackup - This is a great little donationware program for backing up files to drive space connected to your computer. It does NOT make bootable backups, it is totally clueless about optical drives. For what it costs, I like it. Use it as a substitute for Apple's own Backup program from .Mac.
• SilverKeeper - This is about as minimal as you get. But it's free from LaCie. It only backs up to connected drives.
• Data Backup - Well respected and rated, powerful backup program, a not-quite replacement for Retrospect. Fab! It can make bootable backups. It can write to optical media as well as connected drives. The only things missing are tape archiving ability and unmounted network client capability. It has a decent interface that is less confusing that Retrospect. 30 day trial. Costs $59.
• Toast - Great for a quick DIY backup to connected drives or optical media. The current version allows spanning a backup across multiple optical discs. Way kewl. I use it a lot. It's biggest failing: You can't make bootable disc images. Don't argue with me. Read the manual. See? You can't. Don't even try.
• DiskUtility - It comes with Mac OS X! It is a bit less capable than Toast, but does the job for a quick DIY to a connected drive or optical disc. Again, no bootable backup capability.
• Sync - There are three versions: Backup, Standard and Pro, costing respectively $25, $35 and $45. Each has a 30 day trial. I have never tried them. Previous versions had bugs that dropped metadata from files. Apparently the latest versions are much better. Folks like the interface. It is limited to connected drives. It does not make bootable backups (as far as I know).

There are piles of other backup programs for Mac. If you search for 'backup' at VersionTracker.com you'll get a list of 205 sort-of-related programs, usually yawners or very old. But I have left out a few gems for particular niches. These include the 'Synchronize!' series, Deja Vu (which comes with Toast), SmartBackup, AASync, MimMac, FolderSynchronizer, and BRU (which may well be a reasonable replacement for Retrospect).

VERY IMPORTANT: I suggest you check out the article linked HERE to review the potential bugs in a variety of Mac backup programs, including several I mention above. When you read this article, take note of the version they are talking about. This article is now OLD (April 2006), and many of the applications have since been updated with solutions to these bugs.

Use your knowledge. Ancient Techno Geek Proverb: He whose hard drive crashes and has no backup, gets what he deserves. --Sad but true.

Share and Enjoy,

:-Derek