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 | A Shining Disc Ups The Stakes |  |
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| A Shining Disc Ups The Stakes | |
The "Digital Zone" could well become a Twilight Zone where rights-holders lose the value of their intellectual properties. While long a threat to computer programs on floppy disks, conversion of audio and film/video to digital formats has increased the peril. The ease of making exact copies is the main advantage of digital data. This is still more true when digital data is stored on optical media (such as laserdisc, audio CD, CD-ROM, CD-I, Photo-CD, DVD, etc.)
No medium has ever presented such cost and manufacturing advantages. In 1996, DVD is still too young to realize the same low unit prices, but as a general rule it may be said that optical discs are cheap enough to give away. Up to half the orders taken by CD replication houses are for promotional give-away discs or those included in the back of magazines or books (without significantly raising the price for these published materials). While compact disc formats are a dream for manufacturers, their criminal manufacture has more-than-nightmarish potential.
Counterfeiters are already able to produce clean masters from optical discs so that the degradation associated with bootleg3 phonographic LP's, videocassettes and film prints is largely a thing of the past. For quality knocks, there is no degradation from generation to generation.
Because the optical disc is so durable, the shelf-life of contraband can outlast the demand for classic catalog titles. As shown in the ILLUSTRATION below, one production line can produce one million DVD's in less than seventy days (or one million standard CDs in less than two months). And unlike the manufacture of most other counterfeit items, only the nickel stamping plate needs to be changed to convert from one title to another title to another title. The changeover takes about ten minutes. Also, many pirate CD factories are kept semi-portable despite their tonnage. Overnight, equipment can be loaded on trucks to be reconfigured in a new location.
Today, a hit CD can be "nuked". The international market can be flooded with hundreds of thousands of illicit copies of a single title just days after the counterfeiters lay their hands on the digital data. Indeed, counterfeiting the associated booklets and inlay cards is likely to take longer than replicating the discs themselves. When it comes to optical discs, this harsh new fact of life must end complacency toward piracy as a "cost-of-business." Getting hit by a few punches is indeed part of the game, but it's different from getting knocked out! The "Digital Zone" and optical media are now a permanent fact of life and it behooves content providers to take a vigorous, zero-tolerance attitude toward all forms of illegal copying.
QUICK-TAKE
In a matter of seconds, polycarbonate is injection molded into a 120 mm x 1.2 mm wafer mirroring the microscopic pattern of bumps ("pits") on the stamper plate. The indented side is then metallized with aluminum or some other reflective metal. The exposed metal surface is then coated with a quick-drying protective lacquer onto which label art may be printed. The flat, bottom surface of polycarbonate then exists at two different heights. Everywhere there is a pit, the height is shorter by a quarter-wavelength. Each pit scatters incoming laser light, but the more distant "lands" (absence of a pit) reflect a laser back to its source. This pulsating pattern of reflectivity is translated by the playback drive into a stream of digital data.
The standard CD-ROM holds over 650 megabytes, is injection molded with about a 5 second cycle, and costs under one dollar per unit to manufacture. New pressing equipment costs over one million dollars, but used equipment costs less. The new Super-Density format, or Digital Versatile Disc - DVD, is still being finalized but will hold 4.7 to 8.5 gigabytes of data. While costs per unit have not been reliably priced yet, the injection molding cycle time is estimated here at 6 seconds (longer cycles may improve quality).4
ILLUSTRATION
Rate of Replication (for DVD estimated cycle time = 6 seconds)
written April 1996 -- please send comments to veyr@primenet.com |  |
© ZOOM TELEVISION, INC. 1996, all rights reserved |