Claim of a Blu-ray BD+ Crack

Google85 writes in with a brief Enquirer piece reporting on an announcement on a German site that SlySoft claims to have cracked BD+, the extra copy-protection layer in Blu-ray. Here is the German original.

Comments

Problems

[king-manic]

Well DRM is a pretty hefty mountain to climb. How do you:

1- Protect media with lock
2- ensure customer can open lock with key to use
3- ensure customer can't copy content with the same key

Given enough time clever customers will always find your keys and always figure a way to copy your media. Isn't it better to stop trying and just offer products not licenses. The alternate route is to simply make copying hard enough to deter most people (console games + mod chips) or dial home to get some nifty extra features (MMORPG's).

Re:Problems

[Sneftel]

That was a great idea when casual copying was the norm; that is, when sneakernet's bandwidth was several orders of magnitude greater than any other link. But now that P2P is a fact of life, "casual copying" is unimportant. What's important is "casual acquisition", and as long as even one guy can crack the protection there is no significant barrier possible to casual acquisition.

Re:Problems

[Sloppy]

So ... if you were a big media company what would you do?

Never fuck over a paying customer. Never do anything that causes my product to be inferior to a pirated copy. Never ever send the message, "We don't want your moneyl you might want to consider looking for a pirated copy instead." Ergo: no DRM. Don't try to prevent copying through technical means; don't do anything that prevents interoperability; don't do anything that restricts the availability of players, since that restricts my market.

Go ahead and prosecute copyright infringers when it's easy to do so, but don't fixate on them. Keep existing customers, try to gain customers, but don't worry too much about people who aren't customers, except in terms of luring them.

In other words, try to think of revenue as a desirable thing, rather than as something to snicker about when the stockholders aren't watching me.

Re:t-shirt

[legoman666]

Slysoft is safeguarding their decryption method. So you won't see any t-shirts this time around. They worked hard to get here first, and they want to make their money off of it before others crack it also. Well deserved in my opinion.

Re:How to translate MPAA claims.

[feepness]

The amount of time the MPAA claims it will take to crack something (in this case, 10 years) is inversely related to how long it will actually take (in this case, a few weeks). As further proof of your theory, DRM-free media will never be cracked.

They're sometimes not that bright...

[tkrotchko]

I looked in my DVD collection the other day and I realized had purchased well over 300 DVD's. It just sorta happened. And I realized it's a tremendous waste of money and space for discs that, for the most part, are watched once and done. But the price point is low enough that they're an impulse buy every time we go to the warehouse club, and so everybody throws one in. I should probably sell them on ebay.

Anyway, to my point. When I go to the store, new releases are $13-15, and 2-3 year old releases are typically under $10. I can't believe anybody copies for that price, particularly when you only watch once.

So DVD piracy is effectively solved by lowering the price so it's just not worth it to the vast majority of people. If they get high definition disks down to under $15, this is really a moot point.

The only reasons I can think spending this much time and effort by the record companies is either (a) They think that they'll eventually drive piracy out of the market allowing them to raise prices or (b) they're crazy control freaks who aren't completely rational. Or maybe both.

Re:So i guess if true

[devjj]

I honestly think the only reason people are cracking this stuff is the same reason that people climb Mt. Everest: Because it's there.

Ah, no. People are cracking these because they enforce usage controls that many - myself included - believe go too far. Some of us like to use media centers that play video that's been ripped (not necessarily pirated). I've got a nice collection of video files that I've ripped from DVDs that I own that I stream to my living room media center. It's extremely convenient and the video quality is quite good. I'm not out there distributing the ripped versions of these films, and I'm not out there downloading pirated versions of them, either. I'm doing nothing more than utilizing an alternative method to view content I paid for in the privacy of my own home. At present, I cannot do this with Blu-Ray or HD-DVD.

To be fair, commercial DVDs contain copy protections designed to thwart this kind of activity, but thanks to the diligent efforts by the very same kind of people (and likely the same people in many cases) who are working to crack the new schemes, the process is convenient and effectively one-click. Until I can do the same thing with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs, I won't be buying any of either, and I'll continue to recommend to the people who ask my opinion that they stay away.

In short, people aren't just doing it because they can. They're doing it because there are legitimate reasons for doing so. Not everyone who rips discs is a pirate, but this DRM punishes all equally.