I recently rented a DVD from my local gas station since I was too lazy to drive 5 minutes to get to Blockbuster. When I got home and opened the DVD case, there was a business card sized note in it. The note read “Tracking software has been installed and applied to this disk to prevent illegal copyrighting. If this DVD is illegally copied, the owner of the DVD will be able to trace the violation.”
After much lolling, I decided to post a question about this. I’ve never made “an illegal copy” of a disk, since I’m too lazy, and it’s easier to just go rent a movie.
However, my question is, is it really possible to see that a DVD has been copied? I thought you only “read” a DVD when you made a back-up copy of it. So how would you be able to trace this? I smell BS.
Big BS
It is possible that the original writer of the disk has included a programme that would activate on any attempt to copy it. This could easily pass information about the machine through the internet.
Some disks contain digital rights management(DRM) which can install itself and “call home” when the DVD or CD is inserted in the computer – without your knowledge. For the most part though, the threats are nonsense.
Ripping copyrighted DVD’s IS illegal, and morally wrong. If you spent XXX dollars to produce a movie, you would expect people to pay for the privilege of watching it, right?
However you have a good nose for BS.
DVD’s are READ only. I suppose it would be possible to write a small program that could “phone home” and report currently running processes on one’s computer (another svchost.exe anyone?…) looking for any instances of the 1000 different well known ripping / decoding software programs…However the privacy implications of such a program would produce public outcry and probable lawsuits in short order. Remember Sony’s infamous rootkit?
Short of writing files to the hard drive, this program would have to reside in memory only, so simply right click, open network connections and disable the network adapter, or pull the ethernet cable, reboot later and you’re good…
Or if you really wanted to see if someone would be unintelligent enough to attempt such brazen tatics, just fire up a packet sniffer prior to inserting the DVD, and look for unusual traffic…Or have some fun with them and set your network adapter to use a proxy in China ; )
The other even remoter possibility would involve leaving a thin band of the disk as writable, explore the disk and try to write to differnt areas and see what you get…If you do find a writable area, have some fun and copy over a self extracting instance of fdisk at dos level
> : )