Radio Frequency identification (RFID) tags are already in use in several products, including employee badges and some state licenses, but of interest to the UCLA team, headed by engineering professor Rajit Gadh, is the tags’ ability to be written to and encoded with more information.
A DVD comes pre-encoded and, since there are hack programs widely available to descramble DVD encryption, an RFID tag imprinted with the consumer’s biomatric data at the point of purchase seemed a likely Digital Rights Management solution.
According to Gadh, customers might supply a fingerprint or an iris scan at a retail outlet. That information would be immediately encoded on a DVD. Then the consumer would have to resupply the bio-data when he played the DVD on a specially-outfitted machine. This would prevent the DVD from being used anywhere the original purchaser wasn’t.
“It’s a total disincentive to ever buy anything,” PurePlay Media Manager Mark Thaler told XBiz, remarking that the plan seemed too restrictive for consumers but could perhaps work for limited releases like Academy screeners. “But no one is going to buy ‘Wet Teen Bitches #7’ and submit to an eye scan.”
As noted around the web this morning, the bio-data plan would require cooperation among studios, retailers and, most importantly, consumers, who might find submitting to an iris scan at their local Best Buy invasive. In addition, the process doesn’t address DVDs purchased as gifts, in bulk or online.
Privacy advocates like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, bankrollers of Tor, a program that allows anonymous web surfing and messaging, further claim that the UCLA plan, like previous attempts to quell piracy, just require one effective hack to compromise the system.
"It only requires one person to break it," EFF technologist Seth Schoen said.
“It would be a burden on the consumer to deal with the process,” PurePlay’s Thaler said. “And no one purchasing adult material would want his information taken in such a way.”
