Scientists tackling devices to prevent DVD bootlegging

Los Angeles Business Journal,  June 6, 2005  by Hilary Potkewitz

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Researchers at UCLA are trying to find a way to individualize DVDs in order to prevent them from being shared, swapped or pirated.

The project is being led by engineering professor Rajit Gadh, part of a consortium at the school working on various applications using radio frequency identification, or RFID. These electronic tags can store more data than a bar code, and they carry a transponder that allows them to transmit information over a long distance. They're being used for an expanding set of jobs, from tracking warehouse inventory to "smart" shelves that let retailers know when they need restocking.

Gadh's team is working on attaching the tags to DVDs and DVD players--so that only legally purchased discs would play. The project is in its very early stages, cautions Gadh, who says it's too early to predict when it might work.

"Right now we are in the throes of a research project: how to imbed it, where to put it, where to install the reader, and how to make it all work together," he said.

Potentially, the RFID tag could be programmed at the checkout stand with personal information such as the buyer's fingerprint or a password. Once at home, the buyer's DVD player would authenticate the disc as legal. Pirated or borrowed discs would not play.

Intellectual property and piracy cost the film industry billions of dollars each year. Gadh said his lab is "bootstrapping" the research in a way that makes it sound more like a science experiment than part of an industry campaign against piracy.

"There is a very big difference in the way we do work at a university compared to industry," he said. "It's quite ad hoc, it's spontaneous, it's trial and error. We try different things out and we publish the results."

Gadh said one engineering challenge is that RFID technology suffers from interference from metal and from other electronic devices. A person's living room--complete with entertainment center, phones, computers and other electronics--presents a lot of interference. That will require creative technologies, which make it a valuable student project. "The actual use of such technology in the real world, those are business issues far outside our control," he said.

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(1) Reflects circulation in time period six month prior to
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(3) Specific profit and loss figures for the paper are
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Source: Los Angeles Times, Audit Bureau of Circulations,
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