Story and background
Guardian Unlimited has sniffed out a sad and rather ironic tale about how digital-rights-management cock-ups may have killed any chance of Steven Spielberg's film Munich winning awards in this year's Oscars after 5,000 members of Bafta - the British Academy of Film and Television Arts - found themselves unable to watch the preview DVDs they'd been sent.
Their Munich preview discs - delivered only a few days before the final-round voting deadline - were unplayable because they were encoded for Region 1 (USA and Canada), rather than for Region 2 (Europe, Turkey, Egypt, Arabia, Japan and South Africa).
Had these been ordinary Region 1 DVDs, there might have been no big issue. There are plenty of DVD players about that can handle discs for any region. Trouble is, each Oscar-preview disc that's sent out to voters in the USA and around the world is encrypted using the the Cinea S-VIEW system so that it will only work in a single DVD player - each voter uses his or her own special Cinea S-VIEW player. So there was no chance for Bafta members simply to watch the discs in other multi-region DVD players they might own already or could buy for a just few quid in the High Street, over the net or at a local supermarket.
But why, you might ask, are these preview DVDs so massively protected? Well - and this really is hugely ironic - the Oscars, which are one of Hollywood's most cost-effective promotional tools for movies, have very often resulted in the early pirating of many blockbusters. That's because some of the people entitled to vote in the awards had been allowing pirates to copy the preview DVDs they'd been sent.
To combat this problem, Cinea - a Dolby company - came up with the S-VIEW system. This looks to us to be one of the few genuinely valid reasons for using tough DRM and, understandably, all parties concerned (except perhaps the rogues who'd been flogging off their preview DVDs) thought it a mighty fine idea, even if it did involve providing every single Oscar voter with a special DVD player.
Check out Guardian Unlimited's original story but not before diving over to the next page for any updates. Oh, and don't forget to let us hear your thoughts on DRM over in the HEXUS.community.
