The DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) is an organization primarily responsible for the
copy protection
Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy prevention and copy restriction, describes measures to enforce copyright by preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media.
Copy protection is most commonly found o ...
of
DVD
The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind ...
s. The
Content Scramble System
The Content Scramble System (CSS) is a digital rights management (DRM) and encryption system employed on many commercially produced DVD-Video discs. CSS utilizes a proprietary 40-bit stream cipher algorithm. The system was introduced around 1996 ...
(CSS) was devised for this purpose to make
copyright infringement
Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, s ...
difficult, but also presents obstacles to some
legitimate uses of the media. The association is also responsible for the controversial
Regional Playback Control (RPC), the region encoding scheme which gives movie studios geographic control over DVD distribution.
As of 2001, members included film distributors such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros.
They filed the much publicized case versus
Jon Johansen who they alleged wrote
DeCSS
DeCSS is one of the first free computer programs capable of decrypting content on a commercially produced DVD video disc. Before the release of DeCSS, open source operating systems (such as BSD and Linux) could not play encrypted video DVDs.
...
. The case was dropped in January 2004. CSS decrypting software (such as
DVD Decrypter,
AnyDVD, and
DVD Shrink) allows a region-specific DVD to be copied as an all-region DVD. It also removes
Macrovision
TiVo Corporation, formerly known as the Rovi Corporation and Macrovision Solutions Corporation, was an American technology company. Headquartered in San Jose, California, the company is primarily involved in licensing its intellectual property ...
, CSS,
region codes, and
user operation prohibitions. They also filed the suit ''
DVD CCA v. Bunner'' against people who distributed DeCSS, seeking injunctions to stop further distribution based on trade secret claims. The injunction was eventually denied because CSS was no longer a secret by the time litigation occurred.
Features restricted by manufacturers
All hardware manufacturers (especially DVD player/burner manufacturers) implement DVD CCA-mandated enforcement features on their products as RPC (which is one of three restrictions in the Content Scramble System); some even go beyond that and implement additional features to restrict
ripping
Ripping is extracting all or parts of digital content from a container. Originally, it meant to rip music out of Commodore 64 games. Later, the term was used to extract WAV or MP3 format files from digital audio CDs, but got applied as well to e ...
, for example:
*
RIPLOCK: many manufacturers put an artificial limit, or lock, on ripping speeds. Some of these drives have alternative 3rd-party firmware that have this removed to enable faster ripping. See the RPC-1 Firmware Site for example.
* Bitsetting/Booktyping: this is a feature which makes DVD+Rs readable by older DVD players that can play DVD-ROMS only. Some manufacturers disable this feature on their drives. Again, some alternative 3rd-party firmware can enable this so that burned DVDs appear as DVD-ROMs and are playable by older DVD players.
See also
*
Blu-ray region code
*
Blu-ray
The Blu-ray Disc (BD), often known simply as Blu-ray, is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released on June 20, 2006 worldwide. It is designed to supersede the DVD format, and capable of st ...
, the successor of DVD
* ''
DVD Copy Control Ass'n, Inc. v. Bunner''
* ''
Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes
''Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley'' (originally known as ''Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes'')'','' 273 F.3d 429 (2nd Cir., 2001), was a court ruling at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.''Universal City S ...
''
* ''
DVD Copy Control Ass'n, Inc. v. Kaleidescape, Inc.''
* ''
RealNetworks, Inc. v. DVD Copy Control Ass'n, Inc.''
References
External links
DVD CCA
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dvd Copy Control Association
Arts and media trade groups
Technology trade associations
Hardware restrictions
Compact Disc and DVD copy protection