Personal Freedoms - Sony ARccOS Posted by Jeff

Okay, so this post isn't even quasi-religious. Unless basic ideas of Freedom of Information can be considered such. I'm pretty irked because I spent a few hours (maybe 5) this evening in frustration over Sony ARccOS protection on a DVD. We accepted a free trial of Blockbuster's new mail-out system competing with Netflix. It was NOT impressive. Poor queue management, poor selection, and a couple of the disks wouldn't even play. Well, they gave us a couple coupons for in-store rentals too, and we wanted to use them before they expired. Since I've gotten several scratched disks from Blockbuster already, I am wary of getting deep into a movie for fear that it will suddenly stop and leave me without an ending, or a middle as the case may be. So I've taken up the habit of copying the disc first to look for error blocks. I put it onto a small hard drive on my laptop, and I don't care about encryption, just sector readability. If there were no errors I watch it. If there were errors, I can go complain that the disk doesn't play, without having to be left in suspense. As it turns out, I waited until the due date on this flic: The Grudge. It looks like a pretty new disc, but there are a couple minor scratches. To cut a long story short, I spent a good hour or two trying to find a DVD drive that would read it, and cleaning the disc to eliminate the scratches, before I decided there is nothing physically wrong with the disc at all, but that it must be some sort of weird copy protection scheme. After much research I learned about Sony ARccOS. They use decidedly evil techniques to make a 1:1 copy of the disc nearly impossible to make. Not only that, but nightfall came and I missed getting the disc in by the due date. After all this, I don't have time to watch it, and I look forward to getting scammed by the Blockbuster "no late-fees" policy which I'm sure has some strings attached.

In closing, it is a good thing that Sony did not start using ARccOS a bit earlier, when "The Ring" was released on DVD, or we'd all be dead.