DVD Copy Control Association
From Free net encyclopedia
The DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) is an organization primarily responsible for the copy prevention of DVDs. The content scrambling system (CSS) was devised for this purpose to make copyright infringement difficult. The association is also responsible for the much criticised regional playback control (RPC), the region encoding scheme which gives movie studios geographic control over DVD release dates to maximize their investments and also help thwart copyright infringement.
They filed the much publicized case versus Jon Johansen whom they alleged wrote DeCSS. The case was dropped in January of 2004.
All hardware manufacturers (specially DVD player/burner manufacturers) implement DVD CCA-mandated enforcement features on their products; Some even go beyond that and implement additional features to restrict ripping, for example:
- RIPLOCK: many manufacturers (e.g., NEC) put an artificial limit, or lock, on ripping speeds. Some of these drives have alternative 3rd-party firmwares that have this removed to enable faster ripping. See RPC-1 Firmware Site for example.
- RPC-2: many manufacturers (e.g., NEC) put a limit on the number of times you can "change the region" of a drive, usually 5 times or less; after these number of changes, the drive becomes "locked" on the last region you set and you can't change it anymore. Some alternative 3rd-party firmwares have this limit removed to enable unlimited region changes like moving from the USA to Germany and back more than 5 times.
- RPC-1: There is a region code present on the drive, and it will be changed if a DVD from another region is read. Usually, there is no limit on the number of changes that can be done to the DVD region.
- Bitsetting/Booktyping: this is a feature which makes DVD+Rs readable by older DVD players that can play DVD-ROMS only. Some manufacturers (e.g, NEC) disable this feature on their drives; Again, some alternative 3rd-party firmwares can enable this so that burned DVDs appear as DVD-ROMs and are playable by older DVD players.