Sony Copy Protection Taking Heat Again: Now DVDs Won’t Play

Reports continue to filter in about DVDs that refuse to play on standard players from Toshiba, LG, Pioneer, Sony and others. The culprit is titles that utilise Sony’s ARccOS copy protection scheme, such as Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, The Weinstein Company’s Lucky Number Slevin, and Sony’s Casino Royale, The Holiday, and Stranger Than Fiction. ARccOS artificially scrambles sectors on the disc in an attempt to keep users from ripping the disc to a drive. Many older (or less sophisticated) players simply skip these corrupted areas as unreadable and continue on. Computers — and unfortunately, some newer players — try to perform error correction on these areas and fail playback