Work Around for New DVD Format Protections

An anonymous reader writes "For the new Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats, Hollywood implemented a complete copy protection scheme; almost everything has to be encrypted and authenticated. Despite the crypto-stuff in Advanced Access Content System and High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection, they left the backdoor wide open — they forgot about the PrintScreen button. Using this function you can create exact digital copies of a film picture-by-picture and reassemble them into a stream."

Comments

Re:hrmm

[Anonymous Coward]

If you really want to copy a blue-ray movie, there are easier ways, such as decrypting HDCP.

Re:hrmm

[Kadin2048]

I'm surprised that they haven't disabled the print-screen functionality in some way so that it's not possible to do this.

For example, in OS X, taking screenshots is disabled whenever DVD Player is running. It's not particularly hard to get around (actually, it's almost trivially easy; yet another situation where I feel like Apple did just the bare minimum required to look like they care) using the Terminal or a third-party applet that calls the screen grab, but the normal hotkey is disabled.

I assume that if this method becomes a popular way of ripping movies, that the ability to take screenshots on Windows will simply be similarly crippled (probably more thoroughly), or removed altogether under certain situations. ('Printscreen doesn't function unless conditions x, y, and z exist...')

That's not to say that I ever think it will be impossible for a sufficiently motivated person to rip a movie (or indeed, circumvent any level of DRM), but that a simple-but-useful historical feature like Print Screen could easily become a casualty of the DRM war.