More and more people are discovering how the Cinavia Blu-ray copy protection prevents them from playing their Blu-ray backups. Those who stumble upon the Cinavia messages are outing themselves on Twitter and they aren't exactly using nice words.
Below you can find a picture of some tweets from the last couple of days. We've been monitoring the Cinavia keyword on Twitter the last couple months to to bring our Cinavia article to the attention of people that encounter Cinavia, hoping they can learn something from it. Recently we've seen an increase in the amount of Tweets about Cinavia, the image shows only Cinavia swearing in English, in other languages there are similar messages.
While the Cinavia developers and the movie studios might be happy to read these Tweets, it underlines an important issue. While some of the Tweeters might have illegally downloaded a movie from the internet, it's also possible they've created a backup of their Blu-ray movie and found out after 20 minutes the audio was muted. This means that people who have bought a physical item, have lost the control over something they think they own. While the content industry will tell you that you've licensed their content, that doesn't mean it should only be playable from a relatively expensive disc.
The solution to this issue is becoming available to more and people in the form of movie streaming for a decent price. However there are still lots of countries where internet speeds are too slow to stream in decent quality. Also new technology like Ultra HD / 4K will require even faster connections and in some countries these services are simply not available yet. That means (optical) discs continue to be carriers for movies and it's important that people are aware of ways the movie industry limits something they own, or think they own.
Cinavia is a copy protection for Blu-ray that is mandatory on Blu-ray players since 2012. The protection is based on a watermark that is embedded in the audio stream of a Blu-ray movie. Blu-ray players, both hardware and software contain a Cinavia detector that checks for a valid watermark. If not found because e.g. someone tries to playback a backup of a movie, the audio is muted after 20 minutes and a Cinavia message will appear. Recent versions of the protection might also prompt the user to purchase a legitimate version online.
Discuss this in our Movie Copy Forum.
