Apple's new G4 Macs will contain something called the
SuperDrive. No, not the old
3.5" floppy drive which could read and write any disk format, but rather a
DVD recorder, with software for making your own movies. So can those
scurrilous scurvy dog hax0rs find it useful for pirating DVDs? Yes and no.
No, because, firstly, recordable DVDs cannot contain CSS encrypted content (the
session key area is pre-burned with zeroes), so copying an encrypted DVD disc
image would yield garbage. They could always find a copy of DeCSS (possession
a criminal offense in most WIPO treaty signatory nations, and given the USDOJ's
new
computer
search guidelines, you don't want to be caught with a copy of DeCSS when
you take your laptop through U.S. Customs; I've heard federal prisons are
pretty nasty places to be) and decrypt the disc
into a nice, unprotected, easily copied format, but then they would come up
against the slight problem that recordable discs can only hold 4.7Gb,
less than many feature films. Having said that, one could imagine some
nefarious fiends starting a business pirating music videos or TV show
episodes (once recordable DVDs come down in price considerably, that is).
More positively, 4.7Gb would be enough space for a not-overbearingly-long
indie film (I suspect something on the level of Clerks would fit
with room to spare); so once we see DVD pressing plants that can duplicate
from DVD-ROM discs, we may see a new wave of independent movies in a
convenient, inexpensive format (as DVDs should not be much more expensive
to duplicate than CDs).