Legal bittorrent DVDs

[Lite]

A new Swedish company, Headweb.com, is about to launch a service where you can download legal, burnable DVD isos - without any DRM protection. There was a big interview with the brain behind the company in a big Swedish newspaper today. Here’s a quick and dirty translation from Swedish to English.

He’s going to save Hollywood.

A small company on Tomtebogatan in Stockholm believe that they have the solution to Hollywoods greatest problem. Headweb and it’s founder Peter Alvarsson uses the same methods as the pirates to sell downloadable dvd movies on the net.

Within a few weeks Headweb will launch a Swedish movie service where they will sell downloadable dvd movies completely without any copy protection schemes or digital rights management protection. All movies will be distributed via the popular file sharing protocol bittorrent, a technique that is often connected to pirate sites.

“There’s no other market where you don’t listen to the consumers. Until now everything has been done according to the rules set by the big movie companies. We take another approach and give the consumers what they want and distribute them the same way as the pirates are doing it today” says the lead person Peter Alvarsson.

The service use a client that is a combined client, payment system, media player and DVD burner. The customer pays for a movie and download it via bittorrent and can either play the movie in the computer or burn it to a DVD.

The files that can be downloaded are full dvd-movies, with the same content as the one you can buy in the store. Peter Alvarsson calls them ‘electronic dvds’. But without copy protection.

“We have removed it completely. Copy protectin schemes have such a short life span, they always get cracked. I think that all kind of lock in is the wrong way to go“, says Peter Alvarsson.

To be able to sell the movies without protection they use another type of protection - water marks. All downloads get their unique water mark and can be tracked down to the original buyer. The pattern is invisible for the eye and you have to know what to look for to be able to read the water mark. The same technology has been used in cinemas to prevent people from record movies using standard camcorders.

“The technique isn’t new, but it hasn’t been used in this large scale before. We’re the first ones in the world doing that“, says Peter Alvarsson.

Water marks is about to scare people from re-distributing the movies they have bought. As bittorrent is a technique that is dependent on that users of the service actually share their bandwidth with total strangers, they get points for doing just that. The points can be converted into new movies.

Source

[LoKz]

hhhhmmm... legal... huh.. and they are ok because they in sweden like TPB

[honkbish]

Errr... if it's bittorrent, then everyone will just end up with the -exact- same data, and thus the exact same watermark.

If it's some kind of modified torrent protocol then several people can just download the same movie and compare data to easily find out how the watermark is downloaded and injected into their movie/iso.

This is a dumb but yet great idea. Get rid of the watermarking and it's gold.

[TomCC]

If you get rid of the watermarking, no-one will make money. It's communism :)

[dock98]

i dont even watch dvds on my tv, including the ones i have downloaded.the movies just dont seem as interesting as in the cinema.the bridwe and myself go to the movies at least once a week,pig out on popcorn and soda pop.

[Newgen]

LoL, DVD2PC ! or blockbuster $3.50 a Disc ?

[paradajz]

Messages like that just make me mad. First they say no protection. Then they say watermark. ?! Watermark is stil protection, so in my opinion this is just an attempt to stir some noise in order to get the attention and customers with it. A smart marketing technique. I bet Hollywood is waiting in lines to give them discounts just to sell their movies and perhaps it will pay up. Just being a new thig without crack and with such a large market makes it a gold mine. But I dont see whats in there that would make customers so happy to buy it? They say people want to download stuff via Bittorrent? Yeah, coz its free and because 90% of the world cant afford to buy it!

I dont like it, I think they are full of it. They found a whole in the market, a way to get lots of money, and thats it. Everything else is there just to sound pretty.

At least that is what I think.