yet another, What would you do?

[Nicholas de Kock]

Stop selling DVD's & sell advertising space to local businesses then give everyone free DVD's which include ads and make enough money via the advertising. No more selling your soul to ungrateful parents & you get to make a living, you also charge to film the actual ads that you include. Local businesses get life-time exposure & parents are happy to get a "free" copy.

[Gerald Webb]

Originally Posted by Roger Gunkel

Make sure that your DVDs come with a full copyright notice, then get someone you know to order a copy from the offending school, saying that they are an uncle or what have you . If the school sells them one, immediately instruct a solicitor/attorney to threaten legal action for breach of copyright. that should frighten the s**t out of them and stop them trying it again.

Roger

Made up a copyright notice for the start of each disc.
As for trying to buy one, still trying to get that done, seems unlikely though, I dont think they advertise that they do it and its a pretty close knit group.

Originally Posted by John Estcourt

Burn the discs onto Dual layer discs. It obviously wont stop copying but makes it slightly harder and you can fill up the disc with a copy write notice that appears on the screen after the video.
Having moved to dual layer discs my sales have gone up.

Doing this, great idea. One dance then 15min of black. They go through the chapter markers just fine but will have to re edit and re render if they want to fit onto a smaller DVD.

Originally Posted by Nicholas de Kock

Stop selling DVD's & sell advertising space to local businesses then give everyone free DVD's which include ads and make enough money via the advertising. No more selling your soul to ungrateful parents & you get to make a living, you also charge to film the actual ads that you include. Local businesses get life-time exposure & parents are happy to get a "free" copy.

This is the most intriguing idea I have heard for a long time. Do you have this business model in place Nicholas?
Could prove to be the way to get out of this pirating circus.

Thanks for the input guys.

[Paul Mailath]

Hi Gerald - that sucks. I shot a dance concert some time ago and got the school head to do a quick piece to camera introducing the concert and talking about piracy. I was contracted to shoot the video and hand over a master disc so I didn't have the problem but maybe it's something that could work for you.

I would suspect you're well on your way to solving the problem by incolving the organisers but don't just wear it! fight them all the way - it's one school run my one teacher who is trying to capitalise on your work - it's got nothing to do with selling it cheaper to parents (unless she's selling them for $2 each)

I don't know that a copyright notice does much but if you make it local and personal the message will get through.

Another option might be to get the organisers to announce that because of the problem, DVD's must be ordered and paid for on the day, they will not be available later and they will have copyright protection. If parents feel that they might miss out you might end up with more sales.

[Darren Levine]

Interesting topic with great replies.

another option is to add a message somewhere, maybe next to the copywright notice or maybe in the middle somewhere, that tells the viewer that if they did not purchase their DVD from "XXXXX XXXXXX" then they are watching an illegally copied and sold product, and can report it anonymously to 555-555-5555 or whatnot.

now, that can do two things, the less likely of which is someone reporting it. the more likely effect is to be a deterrent to the copier, because now there's a message staring at them in the face that poses the possibility of them being reported, and the more people they sell it to, the more possibilities of that happening. so now they'll either likely be scared away from doing it, or have to find someone who knows how to rip the DVD into an editable file and remove that message.

You can make it harder to remove that message by having it scroll under parts of the dances, but that of course might be seen as a nuisance to the viewers.

[Matthew Chambers]

Can you not implement some form of encryption on the disc?