BD+ Successfully Resealed

IamTheRealMike writes "A month on from the story that BD+ had been completely broken, it appears a new generation of BD+ programs has re-secured the system. A SlySoft developer now estimates February 2009 until support is available. There's a list of unrippable movies on the SlySoft forums; currently there are 16. Meanwhile, one of the open source VM developers seems to have given up on direct emulation attacks, and is now attempting to break the RSA algorithm itself. Back in March SlySoft confidently proclaimed BD+ was finished and said the worst case scenario was 3 months' work: apparently they underestimated the BD+ developers."

Comments

Getting Old

[Thyamine]

I can tell I must be getting old when one of my first responses is 'Cmon, just go buy the movie already'.

Re:Getting Old

[Darkness404]

The problem isn't that people aren't buying the movie, its because when I buy the movie I can't convert it to use on several devices. For example, say I have 3 desktops and one has a Blu-Ray drive. I don't want to spend ~$400 on Blu-Ray drives for the other 2 of my desktops so it makes more sense to rip the movie, stream it across the network or put it on a high-capacity external hard drive and read it from there.

Re:Getting Old

[Retric]

I thought the BR DRM prevented you from streaming the movies in full quality over the network from an external drive. If it works then there is a fairly major hole in there DRM system.

Re:Getting Old

[unlametheweak]

I would presume that most people who buy a movie would be more interested in watching it than cracking it. That said, they would also prefer the options of making backups and storing it on hard disks, or whatever devices they may choose without having to worry about DRM issues.

Re:Getting Old

[schon]

That's the entire point - I *want* to buy the movie, but I won't until it plays on my hardware.

I have hardware that is capable of playing HD content, but the content providers are erecting artifical barriers to prevent me from doing it. Once the stupid DRM is cracked, I'll buy it.

Re:Getting Old

[earthforce_1]

The problem is I can't watch the damned thing under Linux, until BD+ is forever broken.

Re:Getting Old

[kkwst2]

The player runs a type of virtual machine, but the actual code is contained on the disc itself. This code executes on the VM running on the player and authenticates the player/environment before it will allow the disk to play.

I'm not completely familiar with the crack of BD+, but I think they didn't complete crack the algorithm, just found a work around. Apparently they were able to change the coding slightly such that it breaks the work-around while still running in players.

Re:Getting Old

[Lumpy]

I do buy the movie already. but putting in a Disc is so arcane it's not funny. I have a high end media server system that will play HD very well. I want that movie on my system so I can pick the film and watch it WITHOUT all the useless crap and menu garbage.

So I BREAK and rip every disc.

Re:Getting Old

[Elder Lane Hour]

You know what's really getting old? DRM, and it's not getting old gracefully. DRM doesn't work. It never did work, it probably never will work. Maybe it's about time that big movie execs started thinking along the lines of satisfying customers, rather than forcing them to bend over with every purchase. Fuck Bluray. They obviously don't want our money.

Re:Getting Old

[BorgDrone]

Why do I have to buy movies again if I already own the DVD ? What is it exactly that I'm buying when I purchase a DVD or CD ?

Do I pay for a license for the movie/album/etc. meaning I can get a replacement copy for just the production costs of the disc if it breaks or a new format is introduced ? Or am I buying a physical object that I'm free to do with as I please ?

Re:Getting Old

[RalphSleigh]

From my understanding the crack was to emulate the VM to the point it could run existing programs, these new disks come with a more complex program their emulated VM can't handle.

Re:Getting Old

[Anonymous Coward]

I own about 300 movies on DVD, and a number of TV series on DVD. I've probably purchased about half of them, and the other half were given as gifts. Several of these were replacements for VHS tapes of movies. Every one of them is ripped to DVD and stored in h.264 on a large network drive. That means that I can watch it on my TV using my HTPC, or on my laptop wherever I am in the house, or on my desktop in my office while I'm doing something else. I can stream it to work if it's a slow day, and when we're on vacation, we don't have to plan on what we may want to watch and bring a lot of extra clutter. When I'm at home and watching a movie, searching through the list on the HTPC is much more convenient than looking through a bookshelf, and it also means that I don't have to keep all of my DVDs physically accessible. More space in the house, less clutter, and less obvious temptation for thieves.

I hadn't yet made the jump to Blu-ray because of the DRM. I want the same convenience that I have now, and with DRM, I can't get it. My record shows that I'm pretty willing to spend money on my media, and even replace movies I already own with higher-quality versions. All I want is to be able to exercise what I consider to be my fair use rights over the copies of the movies I've purchased.

Technology is progressing at an amazing rate. It's supposed to make our lives easier and more convenient. Everyone should be able to have a box of movies which lets them watch their media wherever they want. It's really fantastic. But for me, it won't be based upon Blu-ray.

Re:Getting Old

[johnsonav]

DRM doesn't work. It never did work, it probably never will work.

I'm pretty sure this story is about how DRM does work. It keeps people from copying the movie in full HD resolution, without getting in the way of 90% of consumers, and stays within the bounds of the law. That's pretty much the definition of successful DRM, from the industry's perspective. Until there is a crack available, BD+ is the current and best example of working DRM.

You know what would change the movie company attitudes about DRM? Massive public outrage, something that just hasn't happened yet for movies (for games, on the other hand, it has, somewhat). Most people never run up against the limitations imposed by DRM. I think we have to wait until people become more accustomed to the potential of ubiquitous media sharing before they care widely about movie DRM.

Re:Getting Old

[Dun Malg]

why the fuck would he buy a reader he knows won't work in his machine? That's a stupid fucking question, even if it was rhetorical.

Re:Getting Old

[swillden]

And do you even have a bluray reader in your Linux machine? If not get a dedicated player and stop making excuses.

Nice solution. I really want to drag yet another piece of hardware with me while traveling.

A dedicated player has another problem, even when I'm at home: My younger kids tend to destroy optical disks. A video server has been a great solution for DVDs, and until it will work for Blu-Ray, I have no interest in buying Blu-Ray movies for them.

Yet another issue is that I like watching movies on my laptop screen, in bed. Can't do that until Blu-Ray is broken. My kids often watch movies on their computers, too, which also run Linux. Can't do that until Blu-Ray is broken.

The bottom line is that while some people -- maybe even most -- have no problem with the studios' idea of how we should watch movies, it doesn't work for others.

I don't pirate anything. Every movie and every song in my house was legitimately purchased, but EVERYTHING is ripped and the original optical disks are rarely used. When I can watch Blu-Ray content the way I want to watch it, then I'll buy it. Until then, I'll stick with DVD.

Re:Getting Old

[Animaether]

Your reply is exactly why Thyamine is 'getting old'.

Rewind to the 80's, if you will. There were no DVD players - you'd be lucky to have a CD player - and certainly no computers that would be playing back high quality video (exceptions aside, I know the Archimedes did some pretty nice things, but I wouldn't quite call it 'high quality'.).

So if you had 2 TVs in the house - say, 1 in the living room and 1 in the bedroom - and 1 VCR (let's not ponder where). So you buy a VHS (or beta or Video2000.. 'tis the 80's, after all), get home, and then curse the heavens that The Corporate Man is keeping you down by not allowing you to magically play back that same video on both TVs, just for the pathetic excuse they bring forth that you would need a 2nd VCR? .. probably not. You'd just eventually get another VCR.

If you purchased a CD, would you kick up a shitstorm about not being able to play that back on your walkman? .. probably not. You'd just get your tapedeck and record the CD straight to tape.

Fast forward to 'now'.. instead of you saying "well, I guess I'll just get a blu-ray drive for that machine as well" or "I guess I'll just have to record the video with a capture card / my computer's video-out"... you realize it's well past the 90's, everything is digital, and by jove that means you have the right to duplicate and format shift the media's content as you damn well please, and screw the corporations for making this difficult for you.

I'm not saying that that is a wrong stance on things... but the change to digital has changed how we all view these things as well. The old ways (getting a second drive, or recording to a different media - yes, you may get quality loss) still work, but now we resist due to the changed mindset that came with going digital.

Re:Getting Old

[mweather]

I can easily tell the difference between 480p and 1080p on my 15" laptop. If you can't, you need glasses.

Re:Getting Old

[TheFlamingoKing]

The Digital Copy versions on these discs are often DRM laced Windows Media files, or iPod formatted. My preferred format is neither.

If I can't use it on my devices in a way I want, then I don't own it. How hard is that to understand?

Re:Getting Old

[prisoner-of-enigma]

What is it exactly that I'm buying when I purchase a DVD or CD ?

In the case of a DVD, you're buying the right to watch the movie in standard definition when playing off the physical disc. Legally, you have no right to copy the disc, rip it, or duplicate its content in any way.

Why should you pay for a Blu-ray movie when you already own a DVD? Perhaps you think high-def remastering is done for free by beneficial elves? Or how about Blu-ray menu programming, which I assure you is no cake walk?

The price of a DVD, Blu-ray, or even a CD is not just the price of the content recorded or stamped on it. It's also the price of everyone who mastered the disc, the facility that stamped it, the art department that designed the disc and jacket label, the shipping, the warehousing...and a small profit for the retailer who sold it to you so they can keep people employed and the lights on (or the website up as the case may be).

The problem with a crusade against "Big Media" is it's going to hurt a lot more people than just the big boy fat cats people loathe so much. There are plenty of working stiffs out there who don't make millions of dollars a year. For that matter, I'm sure there's a sizable geek presence throughout the industry maintaining the production networks, storage, and compute clusters. Care to see them unemployed? It could just as easily be you.

Re:Getting Old

[schon]

The part where you have 19 MegaBYTES per second of bandwidth...(full 1080p stream from disc)

No.

Besides the fact that a stream's bandwidth is *never* defined in bytes per second (because 'byte' in the context of a stream isn't well-defined - ie. does it include error correction bits, transmission overhead, etc.), the bluray association itself says that BD-ROM video streams are 54Mbps.

Re:Getting Old

[Ucklak]

Since when is 'piracy' removing DRM for personal use?

Am I a pirate because I rip my DVDs for portability so that my children can't break the original DVD?
Am I a pirate becuase I ripped Transformers and removed all the adult crap to where it's just a movie of transforming giant robots for my kids to watch?

I paid for my copies. I have a legal right to do whatever I want to the media as long as it doesn't leave my home.

Re:Getting Old

[IamTheRealMike]

BD+ isn't an algorithm so there's no global crack unless the designers made a serious mistake in their implementation. A movie protected by BD+ is partly damaged ... elements of the video stream are deliberately corrupted, making it unwatchable. The BD+ program runs and checks out the environment it's in. If it's happy it spits out a patch table, which tells the player how to repair the movie. Note that the patch table can alter the movie in arbitrary ways - theoretically, things could change depending on what player you use. This allows the developers to discover which player is leaking video.

Early BluRay discs weren't protected by BD+ at all, and the first titles that were barely used the features BD+ provides. They existed only to detect a buggy software player but otherwise didn't do much. This was deliberate - the BD+ people are playing a long game, and don't want to play all their cards at once. The idea is to reveal their tricks slowly, such that it takes a few months to unravel each time. Because most sales of the movies are soon after they come out, it doesn't matter if a 6-12 month old program is broken.

In theory every title could have a unique BD+ program that takes time to crack, but that's pretty expensive, so they seem to come in waves. Probably there are only a few people in the world who know how to write BD+ programs and then their work is used on lots of discs.

The first round in this game was easy - the BD+ titles simply relied on obscurity to protect them. If they ran at all, they spat out the patch table. After SlySoft and later the doom9 guys figured out how BD+ worked, there were confident predictions that the system was broken, but of course that was never the case. The second round is the one we're on now and it's apparently quite the smackdown ... nobody knows what they've done, but making the new programs think they're in a licensed player is tough.

FWIW I don't buy nor download BluRay movies, I just find BD+ a fascinating battle of wits. I'm sure there'll be a lot of back and forth over the lifetime of the system.

Re:Getting Old

[m.ducharme]

Where was the license agreement that he agreed to, when he purchased the movie player, and the disc? You actually have to "sign" an agreement to purchase a license, hence the click-through agreements on software (that are questionable anyway, as you have to make the agreement before you purchase the license, but that's another question).

When you buy a DVD and/or player (and presumably the same is true for Blu-Ray, never bought one) nobody asks you to sign an agreement, the dvd player doesn't make you click through an EULA before you can watch the disc. As far as I can tell, no licensing contract exists. The only contract that exists is the one made when money was exchanged for a good, which is a transfer of ownership. If that's the only contract, then the buyer owns the dvd and player, and can do what he damn well pleases with it.

Re:Getting Old

[Ihmhi]

No, you're not. According to the DMCA however, you're still a criminal. Isn't it wonderful?

Re:Getting Old

[Tikkun]

Since when is 'piracy' removing DRM for personal use?

If it were up to the movie studios, you'd be a pirate for not paying for content each time you consume it.

Re:Getting Old

[Belial6]

And worse yet, the ads say 'Own X Movie'. They don't say 'Own a license to watch X movie from a disk'. They advertise the PURCHASE of the movie. The store has a big sign that says SALE. If the movie studios are only licensing you to watch that movie using the disk, they are committing massive fraud, and should have to pay the price for that.

Re:Getting Old

[Free the Cowards]

You didn't purchase a movie. You purchased a license to watch that movie using that disk.

Wrong.

If you think you're right, then prove it. Produce the text of the license.

Re:Getting Old

[marcansoft]

The problem here is that apparently there's public key crypto stuff in the way. This means that you can "easily" make your emulator emulate a certain player with a certain keyset, but it'll get revoked. Theoretically, they can use the patch table to make the leaked video identify the player that produced it.

Re:Getting Old

[Free the Cowards]

There's no such thing as an implicit license granted under copyright law. Where does this idea come from? It simply has no similarity with reality.

When you purchase an object which contains copyrighted content, you purchased that object. Full stop, end of story. No license is involved.

You don't need a license to use an object which contains copyrighted content. That's why there is no license in the picture. Not implicit, not explicit. You can do anything you want with that object and with that content so long as it is not forbidden by copyright. You can burn it. You can watch it 50 times in a row while eating hot dogs. You can make seven different copies, one for each day of the week. You can shift it to a different format so you can watch it elsewhere.

What you cannot do is distribute copies on a large scale or carry out a public performance of this content. Unless the copyright holder gives you permission, of course. But all the rest is simply permitted by default, because it's not forbidden. No licenses in sight.

Re:Getting Old

[Anonymous Coward]

Rewind to the 1780s, if you will. There were no CD players, or tape players, or LP players, or even phonographs. So if you wanted to listen to music on demand, you'd have to hire musicians to play it, or maybe have a little sing-song with your friends and family.

If you hired a string quartet, would you kick up a shitstorm about not being able to get them to come back and play an encore whenever you wanted? ...probably not. You'd just hum the tune to yourself instead, or maybe buy another harpsichord.

Okay, I think you can fill the rest in for yourself. My point, insofar as I have one? Technology does advance, and the whole reason why we bother to encourage technology to advance is that it makes our lives better. So it is not only reasonable for us to expect to be able to stream video around our houses -- that expectation is exactly the right attitude to have. Our distant ancestors didn't put all that effort into evolving opposable thumbs and bipedal posture just to have us slouch back in our sofas and let corporations stifle innovation to protect their business models.

Re:Getting Old

[Renraku]

Well, someone has to make the first step.

Buy the movie, then return it to the store demanding a refund because the product did not provide what the store advertised. If they don't take it back, I'd file a lawsuit for false advertising against both the store and the movie company. Since this has been going on for 10+ years now, I'd ask for several million. Since they've been rattling off this bullshit for so long and using whichever side fits best for their current situation..for example..if you own the license you should be able to rip it and play it on other devices, right? Wrong. But you also aren't allowed to show it at a public exhibition, even though you have the physical copy.

So they're trying to tell you that you bought the physical copy AND a license that restricts its usage. So you don't own the data on the DVD, the movie companies do. However, they restrict your rights to watch said data down to the devices that can physically support it, and have the disc physically present.

If other companies did this, you wouldn't be allowed to run your Goodyear sport tires in winter, but instead would have to buy Goodyear winter tires. You'd have to replace both every year, as the company would only supply one-time-use lugnuts that you couldn't buy anywhere else. Failure to do so would result in your tires flying off the side of your car.

Re:Getting Old

[Toonol]

Your 15" laptop that you sit (15 x 8 / 5) 24" away from? You're actually agreeing with the parent post.

Re:Getting Old

[LackThereof]

So you buy a VHS (or beta or Video2000.. 'tis the 80's, after all), get home, and then curse the heavens that The Corporate Man is keeping you down by not allowing you to magically play back that same video on both TVs, just for the pathetic excuse they bring forth that you would need a 2nd VCR? .. probably not. You'd just eventually get another VCR.

Actually, back in those days, it would be trivial to split the video signal coming out of the VCR and run cables across the house to the second TV(or lazier/cheaper yet, use the RF output for 1 tv, and the composite output for the second TV). I know many people who did just this to avoid buying a second VCR, back when they were still expensive enough for it to matter. The major difficulty was that you couldn't control the VCR from the other room, but the FBI warning and previews gave you plenty of time to press play and walk across the house, get some popcorn, etc.

Now, with modern consumer electronics, it is equally trivially possible to copy your entire movie library onto some networked storage, and play them back from a device anywhere on the network, thus only needing 1 Bluray drive for the house. The only thing in the way are the artificial limitations imposed by DRM.

I guess my point is that how we view these things has not truly changed. There is no "changed mindset that came with going digital"; what can be trivially done with inexpensive consumer electronics is all that has changed.

Re:Getting Old

[arkhan_jg]

There's no such thing as an implicit licence for copyright.

There is however the doctrine of first sale, which *does* apply to the sale of copyrighted works.

Specifically, once a contract for the sale of a copy of a copyrighted work is complete (here's some money for that book/DVD/photo - thank you, sale complete), no further restrictions to the use of that work can be applied by the copyright holder, other than those that apply through copyright law itself - i.e. no public performances or making your own copies (depending upon jurisdiction, some places let you make infinite copies for personal use, some, like the UK, allow for none except for those needed to use the work itself)

They tried shrinkwrap licences with books, back in the day. Publishers put extra limits on what you could do with the book, such as preventing your reselling it after you'd bought it. Doctrine of first sale killed that in court. The contract terms are up front, written down and agreed to prior to the sale, or they're completely unenforceable. Literally, the copyright holder only gets to require extra terms against the first sale of the work, up front and before the sale. After that, assuming no such actual contract exists, any further sales of the same copy are governed only by copyright itself. Thus the second-hand market is a fundamental right of copyrighted goods purchasers, which is why I get really peeved at software companies whining about lost sales and trying to kill it. It's a fundamental safety margin and customer balance of copyright.

Notice how you have to agree to the contract for mobile phones, cable TV or MMO's before you start, and before you exchange money? Well, that applies to the sale of copyrighted works too. Implied licences and post-sale click-wrap licences are just a massive con. Did you sign a contract at the till, last you bought a DVD or book?

The one exception I know of is US UCITA-signing states, with regards post-sale click-wrap licences for software. There is an extra law there to make those binding, even after the sale.
Corporate to corporate contracts are also obviously a different beast.

Re:Getting Old

[arkhan_jg]

Equally, the corporations didn't put in restrictions to stop us making copies. Oh, wait, they did. Sony tried to stop betamax players having record buttons. They lost, and making your own tapes of TV shows (timeshifting) became a new fair use right.

Well, it's 1984 all over again, and the media companies are trying their damndest to stop us using our own property in our own houses as we wish. They lost using copyright law. It's perfectly legal to transcode your films to hard-disk under copyright law, so they went and got a new law, the DMCA, to make it illegal to even talk about breaking the crappy locks on the products they sold us.

He's not complaining about the convenience, or the digital nature of it. He's complaining that the media companies are deliberately putting new technical and legal restrictions to take away the rights we've had for 20 years, and make him use his own discs in the limited time and method of THEIR choosing. And we shouldn't let the tight-fisted bastards get away with it.

Re:Getting Old

[mdmkolbe]

You are not granted a licence. The author is granted exlusivity on certain rights (see 17 USC 106). These rights are the right to copy, to make derivative works, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, and digital audio transmission.

These are rights exclusive to the author. If someone other than the other does them, they have committed copyright infringement. But you can do anything else you want with them. You have the right to read, burn, soak, get laminated, use as toiletpaper, or do anything else you want to a copy of a copyrighted work.

Now the act of using a computer program usually involves making a copy of that computer program which is one of the rights reserved to the author. But 17 USC 117 grants a special exception. Under that section it is not an infringement to make a copy of a computer program if that copy is essential to using the computer program. This means you don't need any sort of license in order to install a program. You just need to own a legal copy (and since a copy is defined in 17 USC 101 to be the physical artifact not some abstraction of the data, owning a CD means owning a copy of the work on the CD.)

(Given the above EULA's on off the shelf software shouldn't be enforceable since the only "consideration" they give you is the right to install the software, which is a right you already have. Without a "consideration" there is no contract. Without a contract, they can't claim breach of contract and they can't claim copyright infringement either because of 17 USC 117. I never can figure out why they think EULA's are legal. (EULA's on online services and network installs are completely different since those don't trigger 17 USC 117, and thus they should be enforceable.))

Of course IANAL and TINLA.

Re:Getting Old

[mr_matticus]

Ripping a DVD is exactly interacting with a physical object.

Not in any appreciable sense--you're not after the parts and pieces, you're after the intangible expression embodied in it. Your interest has nothing to do with the object, in other words.

Taken to pedantic extremism, anything is problematic--photons emitted by your cat down the street would be trespassing on Mr. Jones' property. Thoughts are the product of the electrical impulses of the brain and thus physical. Speech, as a propagation of a mechanical process producing measurable, physical shock waves in a medium, becomes tangible.

My problem is that it becomes increasingly legal for copyright holders to break my stuff and keep secrets from me

A problem in search of harm, really, since it's their stuff you're trying to get. They're just increasingly disinclined to give as much as they did in the past, having, in their view, suffered for it. They're entitled to the secrets, as you're entitled to yours when you produce something.

becomes increasingly illegal for me to tell people various numbers

A bold reductionist argument that has relatively little to do with reality. There is no meaningful expression blocked by those "various numbers". Perhaps more to the point, it is simply impossible for anyone to be in a position to store and recite all of the "numbers" and have someone receive them and comprehend. 'Increasingly' also implies a vector not borne out by historical example. It is not as though you had an expressive purpose to the mechanized reproduction.

Re:Getting Old

[Rayban]

They've been secretly stealing all the cameras. Go ahead and check - I bet yours is missing. Bastards got mine last week.

Re:Getting Old

[m.ducharme]

There are many other products that have limitations to their use after you buy it, even though you do not sign a contract for that.

For example, your car. You are limited to certain roads/areas to drive it, limited in speed, sometimes even in direction. Some places you are allowed to drive by but not stop.

These are limitations imposed by local laws, customs, and physics, but not by an agreement with the manufacturer of the car.

Or the house you own, even when the mortgage is over there are limitations on it's use. Maybe you are not allowed to run certain businesses their (brothels being an easy example), and more of those limitations. You can not just start expanding it for example, that you will have to apply for.

Again, these are not limitations placed on you by the seller of the house, but other branches of the law. You still own your house, even if you can't run a brothel in it. You can sell it, take it down, build a replica of it somewhere else.

So no I don't think there is the need for an explicit licence agreement to be signed when you buy the DVD to make the restrictions valid. Unless you want special liberties (e.g. republishing, showing it to an open audience, etc) in which you will have to open special negotiations with the copyright holder.

Well, no. If you don't have a license with the seller, then the seller cannot limit what you do with it; it's yours. There may be other laws governing the use (criminal laws preventing piracy, public viewings, etc) but these have nothing to do with the original seller.

The parent to my post was arguing that a buyer of DVD's is limited by license, which is patently false. No license applies.

So, though public viewings may be illegal, there is no law saying you can't resell the copy you own for example. You can show the movie to as many people as you want, in your own home. This wouldn't be true for licensed software, or presumably for licensed DVDs, if they existed.

The key distinction here is this: with a license, you have a contract with the rights-holder, that grants you privileges for a price. The contract is usually conditional; those rights can be taken away from you later, if you violate a term of the agreement.

A sale is a contract where the whole contract is done at the time of the purchase. The seller can't revoke the sale later.

Criminal or regulatory law (which is what you're talking about) is a "contract" between a government and the members of society being governed. If you break this contract (copying a DVD for example), the original seller doesn't necessarily have any direct recourse against you. The movie company doesn't generally get compensated when a commercial pirate gets busted (unless, of course, his lobbyist has purchased the necessary laws to enable that).

The movie distributor could sue you for damages, but they can't come and take the movie that you bought away from you, it's yours. They can't stop you from playing it. It's yours. For keeps. This is the difference between a sale of a good and a licensing scheme.

Re:Getting Old

[Ironica]

There are many other products that have limitations to their use after you buy it, even though you do not sign a contract for that.

For example, your car. You are limited to certain roads/areas to drive it, limited in speed, sometimes even in direction. Some places you are allowed to drive by but not stop.

Or the house you own, even when the mortgage is over there are limitations on it's use. Maybe you are not allowed to run certain businesses their (brothels being an easy example), and more of those limitations. You can not just start expanding it for example, that you will have to apply for.

So no I don't think there is the need for an explicit licence agreement to be signed when you buy the DVD to make the restrictions valid. Unless you want special liberties (e.g. republishing, showing it to an open audience, etc) in which you will have to open special negotiations with the copyright holder.

The restrictions on how you may use your car or your house are laws duly enacted for the public good. The restrictions on how you may use your Blu-Ray movie are contracts between you and the publisher, which are subject to certain laws. The laws that exist are to protect either buyers (fair use doctrine) or sellers (the rest of copyright). None of those laws exist for the public good.

If someone drives their car 100 miles an hour down my sidewalk, that threatens my own safety. If someone next door to me rips a million hours of movies, that doesn't threaten my safety one bit. It also doesn't even threaten the profits of the movie studios, *unless* the person then copies the ripped movies and distributes them.

Bad comparison. Try again.

Give it some time.

[sinserve]

The fact that it's well done makes it all the more attractive to crack.

Re:Give it some time.

[unlametheweak]

Yes, and I'm very disappointed that I can't get put an uncracked HD version of Space Chimps on a movie server.

Futurama and Firefly?

[Samschnooks]

That sounds like a direct challenge! If it weren't, Sense and Sensibility, Desperate Housewives, and other chick flicks would be on the list, but no! It's Futurama and Firefly! Two of the geeks Holiest series!

Next, as a double dare to the Geek community, they'll make Star Trek and Star Wars unrippable! This is war!

Re:Futurama and Firefly?

[jamei]

Futurama in HD! Because cartoons look so much better at 1080p?

Re:BD+

[freddy_dreddy]

instead of making decent movies to begin with

Learn a second language, you'll see there's no shortage of quality movies.

Re:BD+

[richy freeway]

Is the welsh language film industry really that active?

I guess I can't count

[tkrotchko]

"and said the worst case scenario was 3 months work: apparently they underestimated the BD+ developers"

Okay, so they said worst case scenario was 3 months work [presumably in case BD+ was changed in some way]. And the developer said February 2009 was their date for "fixing" things. Let me do the math slowly:

December 2008 - 0.5 month (half-way through)
January 2009 - 1.0 month
February 2009 - 1.0 month
TOTAL - 2.5 months

So since 2.5 months is less than 3 months, how did they "underestimate" anything?

Re:I guess I can't count

[Zironic]

As you all know, journalism and reading comprehension don't mix.

Re:I guess I can't count

[Zironic]

Read the source of that sentence:

Future releases will undoubtedly have a modified
and more polished BD+ protection, but we are well prepared for this
and await the coming developments rather relaxed". Van Heuen adds
jokingly: "The worst-case scenario then is our boss locks us up with
only bread and water in the company dungeon for three months until we
are successful again".

Re:I guess I can't count

[IamTheRealMike]

If you had read the linked articles, you would have seen that SlySoft ran into problems at the start of November, that was actually before the open source VM was released. Just because I didn't spell out everything for you in the summary doesn't mean you have to be sarcastic.

Re:No thanks!

[Anonymous Coward]

This type of shit (is why I won't *EVER* buy a Blu-Ray drive. I'll just keep downloading the rips off of newsgroups. Thanks MPAA for making me not want to buy your garbage.

Nice justification. If it truly were "garbage", you wouldn't want it at all.

Re:You kids and your newfangled slide rules

[Ada_Rules]

I can tell I must be getting old when one of my first responses is 'Cmon, just go buy the movie already'.

Yes you are getting old but not for the reason you think.

I don't have any movies/songs that I did not buy but I also won't buy any BlueRay players or Disks until they are broken.

While I am not a huge purchaser of DVDs (I probably own less than 200 counting a few TV series that come on multiple disks) I do buy the movies/shows that I really like but I hate having to go through the cabinet, find the disk, remember to have the kids put away theirs when done, etc.

I want my movies on a central server in my house for easy access. This is not practical with stand-alone disks. I'd even be willing to pay a few dollars more for a version where the license specifically allows me to transfer the item to a server like this.

Re:BD+

[freddy_dreddy]

before 2008 they made a movie for every Welsh-speaking community per year, after that they went into Welsh porn and the whole thing kinda got commercial.

Re:No thanks!

[loonycyborg]

He was referring to disks themselves as garbage, not to their content. You can only buy/sell disks, buying/selling movies just plain doesn't make sense.

Open source devs have not given up

[bugnotme]

The open source dev has not given up. He, and others, are looking *concurrently* at weaknesses in the RSA implementation. "BD+ Successfully Resealed" is an overstatement. Although some movies currently aren't rippable the prevailing attitude is that it is only a short matter of time to fix defects in the open source VM.

Break the RSA algorithm?

[Sockatume]

I'm no cryptographer, but isn't this like realising you can't crack a safe, and deciding it'd be easier to invent a machine that will undo the metallic bonds that hold its constituent atoms together?

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[mikelieman]

How *else* are we going to get matter disintegrators?

Isn't that how Science makes progress?

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[johnsonav]

Yeah, its pretty much like that. If I were one of the BD+ developers, I'd be pretty proud of the fact that the DRM-hackers thought that RSA was most vulnerable part of my DRM scheme.

But seriously, if real advances are made in integer factorization because of attempts to crack BD+, I'm going to laugh my ass off.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[devman]

The key phrase is "their implementation". RSA the algorithm is sound as far as anyone can tell right now, but that doesn't mean they (BD+) didn't introduce a subtle flaw in their particular implementation of it.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it would be deliciously ironic if it got cracked by something like BD+@home running exclusively on modded PS3s... :-)

Make. It. So.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[Free the Cowards]

It would be respectable (probably) but not very surprising. RSA implementations have been broken many times before, by holes ranging from exotica like power-consumption attacks (figure out the secret key by watching how much electricity the system consumes at any given moment) to utter foolishness like the Debian random seeding fiasco. One advantage the hackers have going for them is that there's huge cost pressure on these consumer electronics and this can cause the hardware manufacturers to skimp on good implementations. For example, the way you protect against timing or power-consumption attacks is to deliberately waste time and power while performing the algorithm, and a hardware manufacturer may not want to do that.

Re:Break the RSA algorithm?

[this great guy]

One potential flaw I just noticed in the way BD+ uses RSA is that they use the public exponent e = 3. This low value is known to open up multiple theoretical attacks as described in section 4 of this paper. Too lazy to register a Doom9 account to post that info on their forums...

Re:BD+

[TheLink]

I'm sure they all started feeling sheepish after that.

Re:Achieved their goal

[Bert64]

Assuming you believe the lie about DRM being to prevent piracy...

That's not what it's about at all, pirates will just watch a lower quality version (DVD, even a camera rip) or wait for the drm to be cracked, they're not gonna suddenly go out and buy an expensive drm'd version just because it hasn't been cracked yet.

The only people hurt by DRM are legitimate consumers, who want to do perfectly reasonable things like put the movie on a media server, make a backup copy so that their kids don't scratch the original and convert the media to play on a portable device like an ipod. The purpose of DRM is to force these people into buying multiple copies of the same media, ie screwing more money out of existing paying customers.

For the obligatory car analogy, consider the codes common on car stereos, if the battery power is lost you have to enter a code... Thieves already know how to bypass or reset these codes, but a law abiding user who lets his battery drain or disconnects it, now has to go to the dealer and pay money to have the code reset. I have been in this situation myself, but luckily i knew a "thief" who would unlock the radio for half as much as the dealer.

Re:You kids and your newfangled slide rules

[Sponge Bath]

I want my movies on a central server in my house for easy access.

The studios made their views on this pretty clear when they sued a company that designed and installed such setups. They prefer you to pay once for a fragile disc and then pay again after your kids use it as a frisbee. The slog back and forth to a shelf of discs is just a daily affirmation of whose bitch you are.

A list of movies NOT to buy

[KingSkippus]

I *want* to buy the movie, but I won't until it plays on my hardware.

That's truth right there. After being burned a few times and wasting a lot of money, I decided a while back never to buy music or movies on a medium that I can't transfer. I've lost too many CDs, scratched up too many DVDs, had too many things go mysteriously bad to continue wasting money on such an archaic concept as DRM.

It's a really simple rule. If a company treats me like a criminal from the outset, even though I have done absolutely nothing wrong and they have no reason to believe that I might, then I won't do business with them. Until I'm confident that I can copy these movies for my own personal use to back them up and play them on whatever devices I own, I consider any list of movies like this as a "do not buy" list.

Re:A list of movies NOT to buy

[TheRaven64]

Want to know why Blu-Ray is failing in the marketplace? Because those critical early adopters tend to be people like us, and without that early adopter base, there aren't sufficient manufacturing quantities for economies of scale to bring disc prices down into a price range suitable for ordinary consumers

Absolute rubbish. Compare it to DVD-A, a format with similar advantages, which succeeded to displace CDs. Because it used DVDs people could play and rip them on their laptops, and because it was higher quality people favoured them over CDs. It only took a few years for them to completely displace CD. And, just like BD, it had a format war (with Super Audio CD) when it launched.

Oh, wait. DVD-A had draconian copy protection and was never widely adopted. Carry on...

Re:A list of movies NOT to buy

[Soldrinero]

I don't think "draconian copy protection" was the reason either SACD or DVD-A didn't catch on. I think the reason they didn't catch on is that they're more expensive than CDs, they can't be played in a regular CD player (or, in the case of SACD, can only be played as an ordinary CD in such a drive), and the improvement in audio is undetectable to most people. I am certainly happy with CD-quality and have no burning desire to switch. Why would you pay more when you don't see any discernible benefit?

Similarly, most people are quite happy with the quality and resolution of DVD. To get the benefit of BD you also need a large HDTV, which not everyone has yet. Of course, considering how often people watch 4:3 content stretched to fill their 16:9 screen, it wouldn't surprise me if most wouldn't notice the resolution improvement even if they have HDTV.

I mostly watch video on my laptop, and only occasionally watch HD content online. I do notice the improvement over regular DVD, but it's still not something I think about if I'm watching something that I enjoy in standard definition. I certainly don't see why I should pay significantly inflated prices for BD discs when I just don't care about the improvement very much.

Slysoft DRM-breaking has legitimate uses!

[ceemeister]

Yes the problem is that purchased BluRay discs simply won't play unless your computer system is 100% compliant, at every point in the chain. I have an older rear-projection television which only has composite analog video inputs for HDTV. With Slysoft's AnyDVD-HD I can play BluRay movies on my Home Theater PC since the DRM is bypassed, otherwise no BluRay for me. The fact that I can archive my BD movies on the hard drive is gravy, but it's certainly something many people are interested in doing with a home theater PC. Some may insist that defeating DRM only facilitates "Rent, Rip, and Return" where you can get your movies via Netflix, but except for the fact that you can watch the movie again after returning it, you're still breaking the DRM just so you can watch the darn thing in the first place. I have little interest in re-watching movies over and over again anyway, so I'm not depriving the license holders of anything by postponing when I watch the thing. And I'm so sick of DRM I'm not disappointed if it does upset the producers, sooner or later they'll have to just give up on the DRM nonsense -- it's not like it will ever really stop download piracy, but it does make it hard to make it work like it's supposed to. How is that going to help BluRay succeed? The alternative is just to download everything, legitimate or not.

Re:BD+

[stabiesoft]

If they are so bad, why is everyone so keen on breaking them? Seems like no one would care.

Not necessarily

[Anonymous Coward]

In college I found out about something called MUDs. You know, Multi User Dungeons.

They were against the university's policy though. Play a mud and get caught, they'd shut off your access. Well, that pissed me off. I'm paying for access with my general course fee. I should be allowed to do whatever I want with the bandwidth I've purchased. Right?

So I played them anyways. And got stern warnings from sysadmins. So I started to learn how to cover my tracks. Don't use telnet. Compile some other application that does the same thing.

Eventually they caught on to that by checking netstat. So I moved to the next thing - hacking accounts. I'd snag up on expired lab accounts and use those.

Eventually the bigger and better game wound up being trying to beat the sysadmins. Much more satisfying than the stupid MUD. This was chess. Live and real, pitting my wits against theirs. Way more fun.

The same reason is why people do stuff like hack BD+. Their side has made a move. "Bet you can't beat this."

It's terribly satisfying when you can counter with "I beat it. You didn't allow for X. Try again."

Hacking is one of the best games of wits there is. I'll bet 99% of the people trying to break this don't even watch movies. They just enjoy the challenge.

Re:Not necessarily

[Sir_Lewk]

Just curious, but why did they hate MUDs so much? It's not like they are traffic intensive or anything? Was it because it wasn't academic?

Re:Not necessarily

[Valdrax]

Resource intensive is such a relative thing. I think the parent poster is showing his age. Back in the day when you had a few main servers shared for the whole campus's business & acadmemic use with less computing power than a modern graphing calculator at a cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, even the few percentage points of CPU dedicated to text-only games was enough to raise ire.

Linux fortune files are rife with references to old, primitive games like xtrek that used to draw the wrath of sysadmins that are almost impossible to find now.

Re:Not necessarily

[wrook]

You're absolutely right. It doesn't matter if most people don't want to crack things. If your audience numbers in the hundreds of millions, the odds that there will be a few brilliant people who love to crack things in it approaches 100%.

What's even worse is that there's almost no way to hire someone more brilliant than the crackers. Your talent pool for hiring is vastly smaller than the pool of potential crackers (everyone watches, or is exposed to movies -- how many people submit resumes to work at Sony?).

No right != illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have the right, but since copyright is a civil tort and it also only talks about damages, personal copying is not a right but there is no illegality over it.

Re:What you do when you buy a SLR McLaren Mercedes

[SanityInAnarchy]

How in the world you gonna *COPY / BACKUP* your brand new 2008 SLR McLaren Roadster Mercedes Benz ??

Insurance.

But how is that in any way relevant? The technology doesn't yet exist to backup a car. The technology does exist to backup a DVD, and we are prevented from using it for no good reason.

A more relevant question: How do you feel about your brand-new Benz coming with exactly one key? Lose it, and you're SOL -- better buy a new car. Is that reasonable, when it costs them nothing to let you duplicate it?

Re:What you do when you buy a SLR McLaren Mercedes

[IHC Navistar]

"The technology doesn't yet exist to backup a car."

-The technology does, in fact, exist. It's called a Reverse Gear.

How do you do that ?!? DRM stops this.

[DrYak]

In any case, after you transcode to h.264 at a reasonable bitrate, which you're going to want to do anyway to avoid using 30 gigs of hard drive space per movie

And exactly, how would you do that ?
That's the main problem currently : to shift format (for example to convert the movie so you can have it on your laptop or on your multimedia hard-disk enclosure to take it with you on a trip), you need to access the content of the movie.
Format shifting is a perfectly legal procedure in lots of countries around the world. But DRM completely forbids exercising this right.
Without BD+ being bypassed, there are no way to legally play legally bought discs on lots of your legal machine.

Currently, it's much simpler to just download the movie from the pirate bay. And as a bonus, the 54mbps BD VC-1 (or H264) film has already been recoded into a smaller 8GB H264 file, ready to upload on your laptop or multimedia hard disk enclosure.

DRM doesn't stop piracy (it takes just one single pirate team to just break one single copy and make it available on P2P and no matter how much the DRM is restrictive for the rest of the population the thing is already available).

DRM just fucks up normal customer rights, to the point where it is actually more convenient to *download a version from TPB* than to try buying the legal disc and do anything more complicated than playing the disc on a PS3.

As a Linux user, I want to be able to play a disc I've bought on my opensource software players. DRM completely stops me from doing this. Hence I'm not buying BD. I'm boycotting HD formats until there's an acceptable solution for me.

---

NOTE:
Format shifting is allowed where I leave (and lots of other countries).
Circumventing DRM for legal usage is allowed too.
In the USA, YMMV.