The Enemy Strikes Back

摘要

Tucked behind the cafeteria at macrovision's Santa Clara, Calif. headquarters is a monument to the frustrating war on music and video piracy. Employees call it the Cage. Some 1,900 of the latest PC products and DVD players are stacked 8 feet high in a 1,250-square-foot locked area. They're waiting to be tested to ensure that Macrovision's copy-protection process is working. The Macrovision system inserts tiny imperfections into tapes and discs in such a way that the original runs well on any player, but unauthorized copies come out as gobbledygook. At a lab down the hall from the Cage, a dozen engineers check the analog signals and color mixes coming out of every machine to make sure that the Macrovision technology doesn't interfere with the image or sound. Once a year Macrovision staffers double-check their work by showing up after hours at a Good Guys or Circuit City with a protected DVD and try to record it to VHS tapes in each of the store's VCRs. The tapes go back to Macro-vision and are played on 6,000 combinations of VCRs and televisions. If one of the screens shows a perfectly fine copy of the movie when it wasn't supposed to, Macrovision contacts the hardware manufacturer to plug the gap.