This has been floating around in my mind the last couple of days, since DVDShrink’s site was shut down.
Let’s say you are a sales manager at Macrovision. You have a new technology that your company has been developing for some time, let’s call it Ripguard. Unfortunately for you, no one wants it. The movie studios point out that your protection schemes in the past have been less than effective, and you’ve already admitted that this new one won’t be 100% effective either. What to do?
Let’s say you’ve done some research and found the two most popular programs for ripping and converting commercial dvd’s to dvdr are: DVDDecrypter and DVDShrink. Why are they so popular? They work, and they’re free! So as part of your sales pitch to the studios, you tell them—we’ve taken steps to curtail casual copying of your movies. STOPPED development of Decrypter, shut down the DVDShrink site and are now in the process of removing links to Shrink and Decrypter in all countries with DMCA type laws. Combined with our new handy dandy Ripguard, this will reduce casual copying tenfold. (not saying they will mind you, gotta remember this is a sales pitch) Since people won’t have many free tools, the tide will turn, and Ripguard will prevail.
I think it is a plausible, though paranoid interpretation of recent events. If the mirror sites in DMCA land start receiving notifications, I’ll be a little more convinced.
Comments welcome
Edit—Whoa! The CDFreaks site went down as I tried to submit this post. Now I am getting paranoid!