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SlySoft, the creator of the AnyDVD DVD/Blu-ray ripping software, has shut down following Hollywood pressure:
The Antigua-based software company SlySoft has shut down its website and ceased sales of the popular Blu-ray ripping software AnyDVD. The action comes several days after a group of Hollywood studios and technology partners asked the U.S. Government to intervene.
Earlier this month AACS LA, the decryption licensing outfit founded by a group of movie studios and technology partners including Warner Bros, Disney, Microsoft and Intel, reminded the U.S. Government about the unauthorized activities of SlySoft. SlySoft is known for selling various copyright protection circumvention tools including the popular AnyDVD software, of which it sold tens of thousands of copies over the years.
In 2014 AACS-LA won a court case against the software manufacturer in Antigua, where a local court found SlySoft owner Giancarla Bettini guilty of six charges under the 2003 Copyright Act and ordered him to pay a fine of $5,000 per offense. Failure to pay would result in six months in jail for each offense. However, despite the win for AACS not much changed. SlySoft's owner immediately filed an appeal which effectively put the convictions on hold. Meanwhile, AnyDVD remained widely available.
This changed yesterday when the site suddenly went blank as the domain's main nameservers were removed. Initially it was unclear what triggered the downtime, but a few hours ago SlySoft put up a brief statement confirming an early Myce report that legal problems are the cause.
From the above Wikipedia link:
AnyDVD is a device driver for Microsoft Windows which allows decryption of DVDs on the fly, as well as targeted removal of copy preventions and user operation prohibitions (UOPs). With an upgrade, it will also do the same for HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. The AnyDVD program runs in the background, making discs unrestricted and region-free. In addition to removing digital restrictions, AnyDVD will also defeat Macrovision analog copy prevention. Analog prevention distorts the video signal to prevent high quality copying from the output. AnyDVD is also able to remove copy-prevention from audio CDs.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday February 26 2016, @05:17PM
Sorry, I don't understand. What happens if you do
mkdir /tmp/dvd; mount -t iso9660 -v /dev/sr0 /tmp/dvd
?
Does it show the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directory?
And can't you then just do a cp -pr of the /tmp/dvd to somewhere with a lot of disk space?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Friday February 26 2016, @05:58PM
As far as I can tell, the drive won't even read it. It just gets an I/O error when I do that, but when I use a disc that's from the appropriate region, that's not a problem.
As a result, the only way around that is a region-free DVD drive or a cracked driver that lies about the region encoding on the drive and reads it that way. It's really annoying as most non-English DVDs are never released in the US, which means you're stuck buying multiple drives to deal with the various regions.