Cracked and blue
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
The seemingly endless waiting period is over. The much-vaunted AACS scheme of copy protection used by both Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs has finally been cracked a couple of weeks ago by a hacker named arnezami; the result is the string of hexadecimal characters at the top of this post. These high density DVD formats are so new even I don't have one yet and I'm a sucker for new, untested and sometimes dangerous technologies.
There was a lesser crack a couple of months ago that broke a couple of dozen DVDs, but the importance of this one is that it has compromised the whole system because what it reveals is the master processing key for the encryption...that plus the volume ID specific to each disk breaks the AACS protection. This crack enables one to read all of the disks.
Blu-Ray has other untested, probably equally vulnerable protection schemes, of course. There are things that the industry can do to recover from this, but they're not pleasant ones. They can change the key of course, but that will make all existing players unable to play new movies (see, you knew being an early adopter was dangerous). They can, and undoubtedly will, change the scheme used to generate the volume IDs
I have often written about the dim future prospects of DRM. My belief is that the focus in the digital world should be on attribution not retribution. It's a far bigger crime to plagiarize than it is to steal. The proliferation of shared movies (and music) does not necessarily hurt the studios because the kid willing to watch a movie in a 6 inch window on his PC was not likely to watch the movie anyway.
Even the PT Barnum of his generation, Steve Jobs, is shrewdly advocating that music companies stop using DRMs for onine music sales. I expect that this will happen, maybe this year, maybe next. Movies a year or two later.
The unfortunate part of this from a consumer viewpoint is that in an attempt to make up for perceived lost revenue, the studios will almost certainly get more aggressive with compulsory advertising on DVDs, which I hate already. If a couple million people download American Pie X and are force-fed commercials, why is that so financially bad?
Here's the irony--The studios are going to start looking a lot more like broadcast television, providing low-cost entertainment and making their money off of the ads. At the same time, conventional television is morphing in many strange ways, with cable companies like HBO leading the way with business models whereby they make all of their money on the back end of DVD sales.
Posted on February 14, 2007
