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Blu-Ray to Include New Copy Protection
Lord Haha writes "In an announcement (warning: links to a PDF) last night, the Blu-ray Disc Association, led by Sony, representing one of two competing high-definition DVD formats (the other being HD-DVD, led by Toshiba), stated it will simultaneously embrace digital watermarking, programmable cryptography, and a self-destruct code for Blu-ray disc players. Will this be the continuation of the trend into more and more restrictive DRM? Or something that will fade away like Betamax Tapes? Two articles on the topic can be found at Tom's Hardware and PC World."
It is sad to see a company like Sony Electronics hobble itself in this manner just to please Sony Studios.
All-in-all, it seems that Mike Fidler (recently Sony exec in charge of Blu-Ray, now CEO of digeo) chose a very opportune moment to abandon ship.
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There's no such thing as a "violation of fair use". "Fair Use" isn't a right guaranteed to you. It's a principle that exonerates you, under specific circumstances, from what would otherwise be a violation of someone else's copyright.
Betamax may have been a failure, but Betacam SP was a big hit and is a defacto standard for professionals.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
Reminds me of the old Divx players that they tried to foist on us several years back, when DVD players were just starting to become popular. They had to be connected to a phone jack so they could phone home and let their masters know what you were up to. Ok, they didn't self-destruct, but the potential was there. I was elated to see that crappy technology flop. I remember a Circuit City sales guy trying to sell me one. He failed miserably when trying to explain how it was better for me to have discs that would expire and a player that would inform on me.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The HD-DVD peoples published the specs on their DRM scheme months and months ago.
Meanwhile to counterpart Blu-Ray's "interesting" copy control features, at least as the standard stands, HD-DVD discs MUST CONTAIN DRM in order to be played in an HD-DVD player AT ALL. This is not like DVD, where CSS was an option which disc creators could choose to follow or not follow and you could just freely stick into a DVD player a DVD-R you burned. An HD-DVD drive is not allowed, by the current compliance rules, to play ANY HD-DVD disc which doesn't have a digital watermark granted directly by the central HD-DVD authority. Interestingly these watermarks include a "banned" list-- HD-DVDs keep an internal list of watermarks that have been "revoked", and every new HD-DVD printed will contain an up-to-date copy of that "revoked" list which the HD-DVD player must update every time you put in an HD-DVD. If the HD-DVD player sees a disc whose watermark has been placed on the "banned" list, it refuses to play it.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
That's called SPDC. It's pretty interesting in an evil sort of way.
Just to answer the question (not to defend the stupidity of DRM systems) they'll encrypt the entire phone-home channel. The players are not going to even spin up the discs unless they're online to the mothership, and have an "approval to play" ticket in their hands. As an outsider without access to the contents of the encrypted stream, you won't be able to tell a good packet from one with the evil bit set. They might not even be "individual packet" based in that they could require a complete, continuous stream. A simplistic way to look at it would be to give them numbered packets, meaning don't process packet #38 until you've received and processed packet #37. Even if you killed off the "evil bit" packet (say you somehow knew that #37 was the self-destruct packet), the protocol would have your player re-requesting #37 before it would proceed to #38 to authorize your new BLU-RAY of "Star Wars Episode 10: Venegance of the Billionaires." And when #37 arrives it turns your machine into landfill.
This is going to take some tricky secure hardware to pull all this off. The guys who used to decrypt satellite TV used some pretty fancy equipment to read the firmware in the smart cards so they could reverse engineer the protocols. I expect these players are likely to be eggshell fragile, destroying themselves at the drop of a pin rather than let some hacker have his way with a logic probe. And that means Joe Sixpack is going to have a lot of dead players initially, meaning these things will get a crap reputation right out of the blocks. Viva DivX!
John
Why cant people read. I see many posts saying this will kill hd-dvd and they are getting blue ray. Read the article. THis is blue ray that is doing this.
No, it was Spock in Let That Be Your Last Battlefield; episode of TOS. In Star Trek III it was Checkov and it went like this:
:)
KIRK: Sequence one. Code one, one-A.
CHEKOV: Sequence two. Code one, one-A, two-B.
SCOTT: Sequence three. Code one-B, two-B, three.
KIRK: Code zero, zero, zero, destruct zero.
You would think that between the two times they would have changed the password.
No, like licenses on software. I've bought copies of Windows and OSX, but I don't own either. I just get to use them forever (or in the case of Windows, until my computer dies, since it's OEM software that is tied to the hardware).
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.