Give Your DVD Player the Finger

Researchers in Los Angeles are developing a new form of piracy protection for DVDs that could make common practices like loaning a movie to a friend impossible.

University of California at Los Angeles engineering professor Rajit Gadh is leading research to turn radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags into an extremely restrictive form of digital rights management to protect DVD movies.

RFID tags have been called “wireless bar codes” — though they hold more data — and are commonly used for things like ID badges or keeping track of inventory in a retail store or hospital.

Though RFID tags are usually read by a wireless data reader, the proposed DVD-protection scheme would make no use of RFID’s wireless capabilities.

Rather, the researchers are interested in the ability to write data to the tags, which can’t be done on a DVD once it’s been burned.

Here’s how the system might work:

At the store, someone buying a new DVD would have to provide a password or some kind of biometric data, like a fingerprint or iris scan, which would be added to the DVD’s RFID tag.

Then, when the DVD was popped into a specially equipped DVD player, the viewer would be required to re-enter his or her password or fingerprint. The system would require consumers to buy new DVD players with RFID readers.

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