Research into holographic copyright protection reported in New Scientist
The New Scientist magazine has published a short article outlining Martin Richardson’s research into holographic techniques to prevent piracy of DVDs.
Printed in the March 2004 edition, the story focuses on Martin’s idea of embossing a holographic image onto the data side of a DVD. The image would not affect the playback of the disk, but would be visible to the human eye from a distance, thus allowing the consumer to verify that they had bought an authorised copy.
The next generation of DVD players could also be designed to detect if a hologram was present on any disk inserted, thus making piracy even harder.
The holographic image is embossed onto the disc of metal film that creates the reflective surface of the DVD before data is burnt. When a laser reads the disc, the reflection from the data burn is far stronger than the reflection from the holographic image, thus preventing it from interfering with playback.