Studios Sue Samsung Over 'Hacker Friendly' DVD Players

Five major US studios are suing Samsung for developing and briefly selling at least one DVD player which they allege was not properly secured to protect the contents of encrypted DVDs.


Th Samsung DVD-HD841

While neither the studios nor Samsung have revealed the contents of the suit, Samsung has admitted that they believe that their DVD-HD841 DVD player is at the center of all of this.

A brief investigation into the matter suggests that Disney, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, Time Warner and and Universal Studios are pursuing the company for being "hacker-friendly," inasmuch as the company has developed products that allow savvy users to bypass the limitations imposed by content owners.

"In fact, we do not exactly know the contents of the lawsuit and the intention of the plaintiffs. We have yet to receive the complaint,’’ a Samsung spokesman said, guessing that the DVD-HD841 player is at the center of the lawsuit. "If so, I do not know why the movie studios are complaining about the products, of which production was brought to an end more than 15 months ago.... We stopped manufacturing the model after concerns erupted that its copy-protection features can be circumvented by sophisticated users,’’ he said.

The fact that Samsung is so willing to speculate on the cause of the lawsuit publicly piqued my interest, so I began looking into the situation over the last couple of days. Here's what my digging has turned up.

The DVD-HD841 player was sold for only a few months in 2004, and the unit was not well received by consumers. Aimed at budget-conscious consumers looking for an upscaling DVD player, the DVD-HD841 failed to deliver, and Samsung pulled it from the market.

The units can still be purchased on many sites catering to used electronics, but new units have been missing from retail shelves for about a year.

Why would such an unremarkable player be at the center of a lawsuit? As it turns out, the DVD-HD841 player allows users to circumvent both region encoding and HDCP.

It has been known for some time that the major studios are unhappy with the number of DVD players that allow users to circumvent region encoding practices, either by allowing too many "resets" of a unit's geographic location, or allowing users to turn off compliance altogether.

Samsung's player allows users to completely disable region encoding compliance, meaning that the player can handle any DVD without the need for resetting geographical locations, or other such inconveniences. While Samsung does not provide a menu option or instructions on how to do this, news quickly spread that a code entered by remote control under the right settings would rid users of this annoyance.

But Samsung's offenses did not stop there. Similar codes could also be used to turn off HDCP compliance, making it possible to use DVI-D interfaces with non-HDCP compliant sources.

In short, users could output high-quality digital HD content (including upscaled DVD content, no less) to any interface they wanted, completely stripped of encryption. The upshot of this is that Samsung released a player that would be ideal for pirates (although pirates already have myriad ways around these protections, anyway).

Additional investigation has revealed that while the DVD-HD841 player did not last long on the market, the design was partially used in other DVD players, including the DVD-HD747 and the DVD-HD941. I was also able to determine that similar hacks work on other Samsung players, although I was not able to verify in all instances whether or not a player was based on the DVD-HD841 main board.

I did locate a number of resellers who were hacking various Samsung players and reselling them. Without a doubt, Samsung appears to have produced a bevy of products that can be exploited in this way.

"In fact, we do not exactly know the contents of the lawsuit and the intention of the plaintiffs. We have yet to receive the complaint. If so (cause of trial is the DVD-HD841), I do not know why the movie studios are complaining about the products, of which production was brought to an end more than 15 months ago.... We stopped manufacturing the model after concerns erupted that its copy-protection features can be circumvented by sophisticated users."

The DVD-HD841 DVD-player can allow region encoding and HDCP bypassing, provided a code is entered by remote control.

Although pulled off shelves, its genes appear to have been transmitted to the DVD-HD747 and DVD-HD941.

Samsung's DVD-HD841 specifications:

General: Width 16.9 in; Depth 9.8 in; Height 1.9 in; Weight 4.6 lbs; Operational power consumption 14 Watt

DVD specs: Media type CD, DVD, CD-R, SACD, CD-RW, DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, Video CD, DVD-Audio; Video converter 10bit / 27MHz; Audio converter 24bit / 96kHz; Search speed 2x, 4x, 8x, 32x, 128x; Slow motion speed 1/2, 1/4, 1/8<

DVD Features: Picture zoom 2x, 4x

Input/Output connections: 1 x SPDIF output (RCA phono) - Rear, 1 x SPDIF output (TOS Link) - Rear, 1 x S-Video output (4 pin mini-DIN) - Rear, 1 x DVI-Digital - Rear, 1 x Component video output (RCA phono x 3) - Rear, 1 x Composite video output (RCA phono) - Rear, 1 x Audio line-out (RCA phono x 2) - Rear, 1 x 5.1 channel audio line-out (RCA phono x 6) - Rear

Story source: arstechnica.com.