HDCP Master Key Revealed

solafide writes "The HDCP Master Key has allegedly been revealed. If true, this information will allow anyone to create their own source or sink keys, essentially making HDCP useless for content protection permanently. No word yet on how it was obtained, but if true, this is a great day for content freedom around the world!"

Comments

Hooray for freedom

[fnj]

And hooray for common sense. You knew it was hopeless.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[jedidiah]

> how many years, now?

How many years of being obscure overpriced early adopter stuff, or how many years of actually being relevant to most consumers?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[bieber]

I wouldn't say hooray for freedom. If this is a win for freedom, it's only in the sense of breaking out of jail for as long as it takes them to catch you and toss you back in. The answer isn't to keep cracking these "protection" schemes, it's to stop buying into them at all until the companies behind them realize that customers are tired of paying for hardware that actively works against their interests. There seems to be a really dominant mentality among people in the know about these things that it's alright to keep supporting this nonsense monetarily because we'll always find a way to break it. That's all fine and dandy for now, but what happens when they start to get really serious about "protecting their content," and start introducing devices that can't be so easily broken?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[JanneM]

"Because it's always good to make it easier to break the law and steal movies."

Most places explicitly allow backups and format shifting, in addition to excerpting and other fair use exceptions. All of which now become possible where it was not before. No stealing or anything immoral involved.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[sycodon]

A DVD is a tangible good, no different than a book.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[captainpanic]

The more permanent freedom is a matter of time. At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums, that downloaded mp3's when they were younger (or still do), and that watched 2 or 3 movies illegally when they were students.

The current lawmakers and judges are of a different generation altogether. they paid the equivalent of a good night out (bar / club) for just 10 songs on a piece of plastic that wouldn't last for more than 10 years of you use it frequently.

So, anything that postpones or reverses silly laws and technology is worth a "hooray", as it brings the solution closer.

-- At least, that's the future I hope for. Don't sue me if it turns out differently! ;-)

Re:Hooray for freedom

[drinkypoo]

What other for profit industries can we attack? Maybe someone could come up with a universal electronic key so you can drive any car you want.

Electronic unlock devices already exist. They can be used by locksmiths or other authorized personnel for good. You can buy a variety of security-defeating devices on dealextreme. Have a nice day.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Albert Sandberg]

And when you stop buing them they start blaming piracy instead...

Re:Hooray for freedom

[vekrander]

And it's never been a crime to quote Shakespeare or Stephen King, but it's much more difficult to show your friends a clip from a movie that you don't own.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Also the 'crimes' being committed are merely civil offenses.

Ah, the classic slashdot myth, repeated so many times that most people here actually believe it. However, the United States criminal code would beg to differ. Ever download $1,000 worth of material in 6 months? Guess what, you committed a crime.

  506. Criminal offenses6

(a) Criminal Infringement. —

(1) In general. — Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed —

(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;

(B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or

(C) by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution.

(2) Evidence. — For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement of a copyright.

(3) Definition. — In this subsection, the term “work being prepared for commercial distribution” means —

(A) a computer program, a musical work, a motion picture or other audiovisual work, or a sound recording, if, at the time of unauthorized distribution —

(i) the copyright owner has a reasonable expectation of commercial distribution; and

(ii) the copies or phonorecords of the work have not been commercially distributed; or

(B) a motion picture, if, at the time of unauthorized distribution, the motion picture —

(i) has been made available for viewing in a motion picture exhibition facility; and

(ii) has not been made available in copies for sale to the general public in the United States in a format intended to permit viewing outside a motion picture exhibition facility.

(b)(b) Forfeiture, Destruction, and Restitution.—Forfeiture, destruction, and restitution relating to this section shall be subject to section 2323 of title 18, to the extent provided in that section, in addition to any other similar remedies provided by law.

(c) Fraudulent Copyright Notice. — Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500.

(d) Fraudulent Removal of Copyright Notice. — Any person who, with fraudulent intent, removes or alters any notice of copyright appearing on a copy of a copyrighted work shall be fined not more than $2,500.

(e) False Representation. — Any person who knowingly makes a false representation of a material fact in the application for copyright registration provided for by section 409, or in any written statement filed in connection with the application, shall be fined not more than $2,500.

(f) Rights of Attribution and Integrity. — Nothing in this section applies to infringement of the rights conferred by section 106A(a).

Re:Hooray for freedom

[dunezone]

The answer isn't to keep cracking these "protection" schemes, it's to stop buying into them at all until the companies behind them realize that customers are tired of paying for hardware that actively works against their interests.

Let them make stronger protection, let them put the hundreds of millions into the R&D to make something they think is nearly unbreakable. Then when its cracked and a top manager is called into explain why they spent all that capital on R&D to have it rendered useless they might reconsider their business strategy.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[sycodon]

Yeah, Bonded and authorized.

If I remember correctly, in many states, illegal possession of lock picks is generally prosecuted as a felony under the category of possession of burglary tools or similar statutes.

How is this not anything but a lock pick for DVDs?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[jamesh]

he more permanent freedom is a matter of time. At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums, that downloaded mp3's when they were younger (or still do), and that watched 2 or 3 movies illegally when they were students.

I'm from that generation, more or less, and still think it's pretty rude to download stuff that you didn't pay for. I'm against supporting broken business models that don't let you store the media in the format that's most useful to you (eg on a media center) but that still doesn't mean that you get to download stuff illegally.

The smart thing to do would be to concentrate less on prevention - people are always going to copy stuff no matter what - and focus more on detection. Find the people who are downloading your stuff and get them, rather than making stuff harder for the rest of us.

And it doesn't matter what generation you are from. There will always be someone who's willing to take the media empires money to tow their agenda through the lawmaking process.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ArsenneLupin]

At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums, that downloaded mp3's when they were younger (or still do), and that watched 2 or 3 movies illegally when they were students.

Current lawmakers all smoked dope when they were students. That doesn't mean that they are all in favor of legalizing marihuana.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll never be able to convince the general population (i.e the big buying power) to not buy into these products when these products are the only thing they can buy into. If some companies aren't offering a viable alternative the mass population will buy whatever they can. The answer is not "to stop buying into them at all until the companies behind them realize that customers are tired of paying for hardware that actively works against their interests". Yea, customers are tired of that, but if they have nothing else to buy... What you say sounds like a good solution in theory. In practice it simply won't work.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[poetmatt]

really?

There are plenty of people who have legitimate movies but are fucked by HDCP. Such scenarios have zero to do with HDCP.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Mr. Slippery]

A DVD is a tangible good, no different than a book.

Have they implemented a region scheme for books? Can a book be rendered illegible by a scratch? Is there some scheme in place to prevent you from quoting an except from a book verbatim?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[The Grassy Knoll]

At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that []

Is this why marijuana is now legal in most western countries, the lawmakers being from the generation that first started widely using it...?

.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[MightyYar]

Right, and if I steal an actual DVD, I've stolen a tangible good. Whomever I steal it from will have to cope with a tangible loss. I think what we are talking about is making an unauthorized copy, which may or may not affect the income of the person who holds the government rights to the work.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[supersloshy]

The answer isn't to keep cracking these "protection" schemes, it's to stop buying into them at all until the companies behind them realize that customers are tired of paying for hardware that actively works against their interests.

I agree with your post except for this sentence. The problem with that argument is that most people, quite frankly and quite unfortunately, don't care whether or not something has "DRM or GPL or whatever crap you're trying to convince me to have or not have" (in the paraphrased words of everyone else). Most people don't care about region-lockout, SecuROM-style DRM, HDCP or any of that so long as it "works" for the time being. Most people, instead of caring whether or not their media will play on some out-there FOSS player, just buy whatever player can so they can watch it right then without caring or even thinking about whether or not that DRM will be around long enough for them to not have to re-buy all of their media. I'm almost as anti-DRM as you can get, and it's the depressing truth from what I've found.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Bert64]

By the time the current generation are making laws, there will already be a new generation that finds the laws outdated...

Re:Hooray for freedom

[mcvos]

A DVD is a tangible good, no different than a book.

But DRM doesn't prevent anyone from shoplifting DVDs.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ByOhTek]

Your reply was almost as pointless as his original post.

The parallel would be handing your friends an act (or a few lines) from a playbook of Shakespeare you don't own.

Or maybe quoting a movie?

The former can still be done illegally or legally. The latter isn't prevented by DRM.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[somersault]

I think your problem here should be with people who choose to buy pirated copies of movies, not the technology that allows for copying. Might as well make pen and paper illegal if you want to go down that route. Quit whining.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[blincoln]

Yeah, Bonded and authorized.

A lot of good that actually does. It's easy to make DIY lockpicks from the pieces of spring steel that come off of the metal brushes that street-cleaning vehicles use. Once someone has those, they can make an electric lockpick out of them and a $10 (or less) electric flossing tool.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[putaro]

In general anyone can buy and use lockpicks for legitimate purposes. It's when you possess them with the intent to commit a crime that they are classed as "burglary tools" and get you some extra time.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[armanox]

I think you're picking the wrong analogy here. This is letting you get your keep duplicated at the hardware store instead of the dealership.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[IndustrialComplex]

At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums,

Same generation, different culture.

The Democrat looks at the Republican and wonders how he could believe that. The New Yorker takes a look at the rural farmer and wonders why he would subject himself to that sort of life. The rural citizen wonders how anyone could deal with so much noise. And DC elects Marion Barry. Again.

But if you want the real reason: The people who care about a subject will get their way. Just because some people would vote for/against an issue doesn't mean that they actually care enough about that issue to do anything about it.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[jedidiah]

> A DVD is a tangible good, no different than a book.

Yes it is. I should be able to dispose of that "tangible good" in any manner as I see fit as the owner of that good.

That includes copying it for my own use.

MY individual property rights should not be nullified for the benefit of some corporation or for the sake of some non-right.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[c0lo]

At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums, that downloaded mp3's when they were younger (or still do), and that watched 2 or 3 movies illegally when they were students.

Current lawmakers all smoked dope when they were students. That doesn't mean that they are all in favor of legalizing marihuana.

And the "flower power" generation had, during 60-ies - 70-ies, some pretty liberal idea about sex ... FF 40 years (they should be in their 60 now) and... try singing that in public, you'll see it's almost as illegal as marijuana.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Kjella]

People want content, the hardware is just a means to that end. As long as the copyright holder can exclusively decide what DRM will be applied you have no possibility to vote with your wallet short of doing completely without it. Also it's practically impossible to avoid DRM-capable hardware, 99% of all computers today have a DVD drive and thus pay a CSS license and thus support DRM. All graphics cards from Intel, AMD and nVidia support HDCP. Same with any modern TV or monitor.

The only way people win is when DRM is broken, but they are committed to continue selling it. That is the only reason you can still buy DVDs, otherwise they would have moved to DVD 2.0 with new and better DRM long ago. I just hope the combined mass of cable boxes, TVs, recievers, graphics cards, monitors and so on now is big enough they will not be able to implement a new standard. That is how DRM dies, not trying to make them go for a DRM free platform. That we already know they won't.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Zeek40]

No, it's becoming legal because people are finally realizing that it's less harmful than alcohol and fighting the 'war on drugs' is a losing proposition for everyone involved.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Bert64]

The problem is a lack of user education, the average end user doesn't understand how their freedoms are being restricted by such products...
The only way to educate those users, is through the mass media, and unfortunately that mass media is controlled by the very people who are trying to enforce restrictions upon them.

I would much rather media companies work on more competitive pricing and superior products, rather than actively spending their time and money to make their product inferior to the pirate copies. Look at asia, where the cinemas are nicer and companies like nokia are offering much cheaper music services than we get elsewhere, all thanks to the competition from piracy.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[jedidiah]

> or any of that so long as it "works" for the time being

Well. That's the problem with all of this nonsense.

IT DOESN'T and it's only getting worse.

The n00bs won't care why something breaks. They will just get upset when it
does and blame the most convenient target available. This may be the studios
or the hardware vendor depending on the individual.

However, they won't need to understand the situation to lay blame.

Although Big Content might get lucky and get away with stuff like Microsoft did.

No. DRM makes it much more likely that it won't "just work".

The whole "need to patch BD player to play new movie" nonsense is one of the reasons I won't touch that technology yet.

As geeky as I am, I just don't believe that a consumer appliance should be in constant need of patches.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[dk90406]

And you think that the cost of that R&D isn't passed on to customers? The price other companies pay to License the DRM protected technologies (in order to build devices, TV's etv) is meant to help cover R&D expenses - including DRM.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Vintermann]

it's much more difficult to show your friends a clip from a movie that you don't own.

Especially when George Lucas sues you for making lightsaber noises.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[flink]

The more permanent freedom is a matter of time. At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums, that downloaded mp3's when they were younger (or still do), and that watched 2 or 3 movies illegally when they were students.

Right, because all those hippies from the baby boomer generation that are in power now have shutdown the military, ended the war on drugs, and prevented racial discrimination in all its forms. Or more likely, 99% of those who make it into power had to sell most of their ideals to the highest bidder or never had any in the first place.

The law makers we have in 20 years will be the same assholes we have now with different faces. Real change comes when the people force the government to take action, not the other way around.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[multisync]

If I remember correctly, in many states, illegal possession of lock picks is generally prosecuted as a felony under the category of possession of burglary tools or similar statutes.

How is this not anything but a lock pick for DVDs?

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that only applies if you use them for, or are in possession of them while, committing a crime. Hammers can be used to gain illegal entry to someone's property, just like lock picks. If you're advocating for outlawing anything that *can* be used to commit a crime, you'd better be willing to give up a lot.

Regardless, as others have pointed out there are plenty of good, legitimate reasons I might want to "pick the locks" on the DVDs I own. Outlawing the ability of citizens to pick the digital locks on the media they own effectively negates Fair Use, and prevents copyrighted works from entering the Public Domain at the expiration of the term (lolz ... like that would ever happen).

That is why DRM is incompatible with copyright law. Encumberring a work with DRM should result in forfeiture of its copyright.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Vintermann]

There's a very good one, actually. It's possible to install a program to enable you to read books written for another language region, but it takes several years and a lot of hard work.

Some people are working on automatic cracking tools, but they're not very good.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[metiscus]

You are right, excepting of course the fact that in the section you cited, it clearly states
the copies or phonorecords of the work have not been commercially distributed
has not been made available in copies for sale to the general public

Okay, so before we play internet lawyers, let's at least have a factual basis to our comments.

Mind you, working in a movie theater, copying the film to your laptop and then putting it on the pirate bay falls under this section. However, by virtue of the content being protected by HDCP, it pretty much invalidates the use of this particular section of law due to the content having already been sold.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Posting=!Working]

Not all of them, but enough of them that it is now legal medicinally in many states and California has legalization for recreational use on the ballot this November. This represents a massive shift in views in the electorate and made it acceptable for politicians to advance these bills.

These things take time. 40 years of telling people that marijuana will make you jump out of a window after stabbing someone in your crazy drug-induced rage backfired when pretty much everyone has either been high or seen enough people high to know that's not what happens. It'll take a while, but a few decades of companies bitching that illegal downloading will cause people to stop making music or movies will eventually have the same effect. It'll be a lot tougher, since there's money behind the **AA lobbying groups, whereas legal marijuana doesn't directly effect any large legitimate financial group negatively.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[L4t3r4lu5]

According to the RIAA, at 20Mb you can download $1000 worth of copyrighted media in a little over 0.3 seconds.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[theJML]

Exactly! Because Oxygen, Food, Shelter, DVD's, BluRay's and CD's are required to live.

Sounds to me like someone is a bit full of themselves.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Haffner]

I think most of slashdot is pretty clear on the fact that it's against the law - the general consensus here though is that the law is wrong.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Digital Vomit]

This is for you.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Chrisq]

> A DVD is a tangible good, no different than a book.

Yes it is. I should be able to dispose of that "tangible good" in any manner as I see fit as the owner of that good.

I choose shoving it up the RIAA's arse.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Dog-Cow]

But there are now two or three (I am only certain of California and Michigan) States which have legalized it (to some extent). It wouldn't be realistic to expect an overnight turnaround.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[somersault]

Would you have an ethical problem with someone using one of these devices to access their own car if they lost the key? Do you have any idea how ridiculous that is?

I'm not talking about the law here (which often has little relation to ethics), I'm just talking about what you think is right and wrong. I've always hated the sound of devices which won't let you setup your AV equipment the way you want without paying for a HDCP licensed device. I hate how Apple devices use proprietary connectors and DRM formats to make it awkward to play the movie you rented or purchased on any device you want without doing something illegal. I hate lock-in. I buy all my music, movies and books legally, but I'll only buy from sources that allow me to consume my media in a way that I consider reasonable and convenient.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[L4t3r4lu5]

I'm from that generation, more or less, and still think it's pretty rude to download stuff that you didn't pay for.

We do do. We wish they'd give us a reasonable alternative which didn't cost exactly the same as a physically pressed media. Because it sure doesn't cost the same to make.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true. Most people I know think that when they get a new computer they have to re-buy all their tracks from iTunes again. It doens't even register on their minds that there is a discrete file that could theoretically be moved onto another device (other than their iTunes paired iPod) and that they have the right to do this. So long as it works at *that* moment they don't care. These are mostly the same people who will buy all their movies over again on a new format whenever a new one is released every 5 or so years.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Mikkeles]

'... whereas legal marijuana doesn't directly effect any large legitimate financial group negatively.'

Well, not legitimate, but organised crime is heavily dependent financially on drugs being illegal, so they would probably try and finance resistance to legalisation.
Also, police like having drugs be illegal as it helps prop up their power structure.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[DrgnDancer]

I don't think that's actually accurate in most jurisdictions. Possession of "Burglary Tools" is what I call (I don't know the real name) a "rider offense" It's the kind of thing you get charged with to pump up the prosecution's case when you've already committed a real crime. Since they usually have to prove intent with things like "possession with intent to use" it's nearly impossible to charge people with these crimes unless they've already been caught using or attempting to use whatever it is.

The military has the greatest "rider offense" ever: "Conduct Unbecoming a(n) [Officer,Soldier,Marine,Sailor,Airman]". Since by definition nearly every crime is conduct unbecoming, they can tack this charge onto almost anything.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[srussia]

The more permanent freedom is a matter of time. At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums, that downloaded mp3's when they were younger (or still do), and that watched 2 or 3 movies illegally when they were students.

Let's run through that last phrase a couple more times: "watched 2 or 3 movies illegally... watched 2 or 3 movies illegally".

It sounds strangely archaic (or dystopian) when said with a straight face like that.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[VShael]

Forget dope. Most lawyers *today* have coke habits, with hookers on the side.
They aren't in favour of legalising them either. What's the point in being rich and powerful, if you can't readily obtain illegal pleasures denied to the common man?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[EasyTarget]

That gets tricky.. what with their heads getting in the way etc..

Re:Hooray for freedom

[sycodon]

And in a large number of states, you will go to jail for it.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[sycodon]

In some states, in others, the mere possession without an obvious reason to have them such as being a licensed and bonded locksmith, is a felony.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[DrgnDancer]

Though there's a reasonable argument that many more of them are in favor of it. Witness widespread legalization in many Western countries, and near legalization in several US states (though the Federal Government is still trying to fight this of course). The issue is by no means decided, but trends seem to indicate legalization or de facto legalization by the end of the decade.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ultranova]

If this is a win for freedom, it's only in the sense of breaking out of jail for as long as it takes them to catch you and toss you back in.

That's the only kind of victory you can ever get. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, for you don't ever run out of people trying to imprison you.

The answer isn't to keep cracking these "protection" schemes, it's to stop buying into them at all until the companies behind them realize that customers are tired of paying for hardware that actively works against their interests.

Every time a restriction scheme gets broken, the effort it took to develop and establish it goes down the drain. Eventually the bean-counters will decide it's simply not worth it.

That's all fine and dandy for now, but what happens when they start to get really serious about "protecting their content," and start introducing devices that can't be so easily broken?

Seeing how an effective DRM scheme would require absolute omnipotence - superceding the laws of logic, rather than mere physics - I wouldn't worry too much about that.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[starfishsystems]

Current lawmakers all smoked dope when they were students.

Probably not. But many did.

That doesn't mean that they are all in favor of legalizing marihuana.

Probably not. But many are.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Archimagus]

except the physical DVD itself is worth about $0.25 that $15.00 - $20.00 that it cost is not for the physical disc, it's for the content on that disc, and for all the time and money that went into making it. Stealing a movie/song/game whatever, is the same as if you hired a mechanic to fix your car and the drove off and stiffed him for the payment. Sure, you didn't steal anything "physical" but you did steal the mans time, and that is just as valuable as something physical.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[rpresser]

Get this through your head: The cost of maintaining a distribution network -- be it servers in a data center, theaters in malls across the country, or warehouses and trucks -- far exceeds the cost of manufacturing a physical article in bulk. And the cost of CREATING content exceeds them both.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[uglyduckling]

Well, uh... for starters, it's nothing to do with DVDs. HDCP is the copy protection mechanism for display interfaces. The copy protection for DVDs is CSS, which was broken over a decade ago. HDCP is a ridiculous system which makes a display authenticate itself against the playback device before a high definition picture will be displayed. This is purportedly to prevent piracy, however most piracy takes place by decrypting the information on the disk before it's ever output to the display, and copying the raw data.

All HDCP does is limit the freedom of the end user in choosing their display device(s) and creates the risk that a device's key might be revoked. Traditional uses of display equipment, e.g. multiple displays in bars, places of worship, retail etc., is made much more difficult because of the handshaking and key exchanging involved. All HDCP really does is placate ignorant studio bosses whilst making things more costly for the consumer. The 'professional' pirates don't care about it at all.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Current lawmakers all smoked dope when they were students. That doesn't mean that they are all in favor of legalizing marihuana.

Because the alcohol and tobacco lobbies, collectively known as "The partnership for a drug-free America", pay damn good money to buy the lawmakers opinions.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[605dave]

Really, been following the news lately? 15 states have medical marijuana laws now, and more are considering them. California may very well legalize it this year. I think the pot smoking generation is having an effect.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[retroStick]

(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;
(B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or
(C) by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution.

So as long as I do not gain financially, infringe copies of works woth more than $1000 per 6 months or make my infringing copy available to others, it's not illegal?
For instance, watching videos of copyrighted TV shows on YouTube is legal? (whereas uploading, of course, is not)

Re:Hooray for freedom

[daveime]

Well that is interesting, but you seem to have some problem with the fact that ALL the criteria have to be met, and not just the one that suits you (Section 1, Clause B).

1) In general. -- Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed --

(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;

Now this isn't a "piracy ring", so I'm not going to be stamping out 1000 copies on DVD and selling them on street corners. So I have NO commercial advantage or private financial gain. This is personal use, no further distribution occurs.

And before you start arguing I have deprived the producer of a "sale", ergo I made a financial gain, you might just as well argue that by reading a book borrowed from a library, I am suddenly richer by the cover price !

Troll must try harder, personal downloading via torrents etc is ALWAYS a civil matter. Mass producing pirate DVDs and selling them for profit is a criminal matter. Like everything else in life, it's all about following the money.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ultranova]

Exactly! Because Oxygen, Food, Shelter, DVD's, BluRay's and CD's are required to live.

To be fair, entertainment is a need. People who aren't getting any will start doing unbelievable stupid things just for fun, quite likely getting themselves and bystanders hurt. Boredom might not seem like much a threat, but it is.

Of course, making movies would likely be far more interesting than just watching them, and with computing power increasing, it's becoming available to a more and more common person. The biggest obstacle right now is the lack of a suitable program; we need some kind of digital actor system to take out the drudgery of 3D animation.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[kimvette]

So, all those crappy copies of DVDs coming from China will NOT become perfect copies, because the Chinese pirates will obviously only use this technology to create excerpts and backups.

The Chinese won't bother with that - they run the DVD and Blu-Ray replication houses, so all they need to do is run off a bunch of copies and sell them on the side, or use their gear to make DRM-free copies or rip it and make stamped rather than DVD or CD-R copies of those movies.. I've bought one such DVD off of Amazon (it was listed as used, only available from one seller since the DVD was long discontinued) and was pissed. The DVD menus and everything were intact, it was a stamped DVD (as in not WORM/DVD-R) but the silkscreened label was offset, there was no CSS present, and the DVD jacket was offset as well. it came in an envelope originating from China. Why am I pissed even though it was a perfect copy (in fact superior to the original technically since it is DRM-free)? For this reason: DRM obviously did not deter the "pirates" in the least. I have to contend with DeCSS, not having a Blu-Ray player for Linux, blue-screens when putting AV receivers between cable boxes and monitors/television panels, and so on, and the "pirates" are completely unaffected and undeterred in the least.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Antisyzygy]

Except those in the DEA. They are quick to try to dismiss arguments that are anti-drug war. Why wouldn't they be? Thats the only reason they exist.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[vadim_t]

I don't download stuff I didn't pay for. However, I also think it's very rude to sneak crap like this into my hardware, movies, game and music.

As a result, I don't have an HDCP compliant monitor or Blu-Ray drive. I haven't bought any DRMed games or music in the last 5 years or so. I don't have any Apple products or a Steam account. I intentionally avoided laptops with BluRay drives and TPM. The few videos I bought were DVD, which is utterly broken, and as soon as I find a source of DRM-free downloads, I'm switching to that.

I won't pirate it, but it disgusts me so much, I won't touch the legal stuff with a 10 foot pole. My money now goes instead to the EFF, FSF, pirate party, and initiatives like Musopen and the Humble Bundle.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Joce640k]

...which is stupid, because using them takes a lot of skill and practice. The only reason to prefer them over, say, a large crowbar (which will get you inside much faster) is they leave no trace of entry.

Most thieves aren't worried about leaving no trace of entry when they enter a house. The trashed rooms and missing TV usually gives the game away.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[obarthelemy]

it's always good to be able to follow the law and make backup copies.

what other profit industry can we create ? maybe someone could invent universal copyright, so we've got to pay royalties on all the food we cook, phrases we utter....

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Zeek40]

I said the people involved, not the jackbooted thugs involved. :)

Re:Hooray for freedom

[CaptainZapp]

Although Big Content might get lucky and get away with stuff like Microsoft did.

Microsoft didn't really get away from anything when trying to peddle their DRM crapped content.

Remeber their Plays For Sure initiative? Well, I'm sure their hardware partners remermber it well and wouldn't touch anything Microsoft related with a ten foot pole, content-wise.

Last I looked the Zune Marketplace also wasn't a roaring success.

One of the huge problems was, of course, that any Microsoft crippled format maybe played on your device, but quite likely it didn't.

Plays for Sure; Yeah, right!

Re:Hooray for freedom

[L4t3r4lu5]

Get this through your head: Centralised distribution networks cost lots to host and run. How they go about monetising P2P isn't my concern. It does, however, take all of the heartache of high cost hosting out of this.

And the cost of creating content is negligible, as Jamendo is proof of. You can achieve near-studio quality with a Powerbook and a lot of patience. Talent doesn't cost a thing, but it can still make you a lot of money.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Xiaran]

Why do you need lots of servers in data centres for a P2P distribution network?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[jd2112]

Not buying it won't work either. Content providers think "did not purchase" == "filthy pirate is stealing from us". Remember that the nex time you *Don't* watch "Far Cry" you are STEALING!

Re:Hooray for freedom

[hawguy]

Get this through your head: The cost of maintaining a distribution network -- be it servers in a data center, theaters in malls across the country, or warehouses and trucks -- far exceeds the cost of manufacturing a physical article in bulk. And the cost of CREATING content exceeds them both.

Uhh...I thought the big advantage of electronic distribution was that it's far cheaper than creating physical articles. I can get a server with 100mbit bandwidth + 10TB monthly transfer for $350/mo -- that will let me distribute 300K albums (at 30MB each). Or, one tenth of a cent each. Even if I hosted on Amazon EC2, my costs would be around 0.6 cents per CD.

I don't think you can press a CD for that little, even if you're buying 10 million of them at a time. I'd bet that the setup fee for a big CD run costs more than hosting the website for 6 months or a year.

Whether or not the cost of creating the content costs more than that depends on who the artist is and why they are creating it and what costs are included -- I have friends that burn CD's and give them out for free because they create music for the fun of it. I think their "recording studio" (including hardware and software) cost less than $500.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, police like having drugs be illegal as it helps prop up their power structure.

I'm not sure how far you are talking about when you say power structure, but it goes much further than just the people employed by pig forces all over the place.

Politicians get a very useful bogeyman with (some) drugs being illegal. The military have something to fight, keeping them busy (ever noticed how one of the biggest welfare systems in many countries is the military? There are places all over the western world where there are next to no jobs available, but the military. Threaten to take away the military, and these people will be as upset as perceived "dole scroungers". The biggest irony is that those who support the existence and use of monstrous militaries often are opposed to any forms of social security!).

The legal system and industry is one of the biggest beneficiary of the prohibition of some drugs. Lawyers write laws against substances, lawyers prosecute those breaking the rules, lawyers defend those breaking the rules, lawyers judge if you have broken the rules or not. And good luck trying to understand the law if you aren't in their club. The legal industry is one of the biggest rackets in the world! You can't call yourself a lawyer or solicitor unless you have a law degree and belong to a bar society, and the gate keepers to both what is a good law degree and who gets into bar societies are all lawyers. I don't see any accountability to the people when it comes to lawyers, yet we have to deal with them if we want to be in anyway successful in this world. And we have to deal with them if we are destined to be unsuccessful (by the usual social-success yard sticks).

Throw in other factors, like for-profit prisons, the legal drug industries (tobacco, drink, caffeinated products, medicine[1]), a press who's business is driven by shouting about the downfall of society, and the pressure to keep some drugs illegal becomes pretty big!

[1] If people could legally grow a plant in their garden that could be used for many, maybe even a majority, of minor ailments the market for paracetamol/Tylenol would shrink massively.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[burroughsj1]

Well that is interesting, but you seem to have some problem with the fact that ALL the criteria have to be met, and not just the one that suits you (Section 1, Clause B). I'm as opposed to modern copyright law as the next slashdotter, but I'm disappointed in the repeated reading comprehension failures in this discussion. You and those replying above you have all failed to grasp that the statute reads a, b, OR c, not a, b, AND c. Only one of those elements needs to be satisfied. Of course, the copying being done must still be outside of fair use to meet the definition.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[__aamnbm3774]

Although most of the good points have been made, I just wanted to zing you for this:

customers are tired of paying for hardware that actively works against their interests

You make it sound like my giant HDTV is a net-negative. Although I'd rather not worry about 'secure links', my TV is still a net-positive. It isn't 'working against my interests', and honestly, I don't think I have a piece of hardware in my house that won't provide a secure link. I don't even know what is being broken by this DRM. So, yes, I am happy to pay for this TV again if need-be.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[evanbd]

As others have mentioned, details vary from state to state within the US. (I have no idea about other countries; I assume there's a lot of variation.) I made myself a set of lockpicks; I know that you're correct where I live.

However, it's worth pointing out that "burglary tools" are just that — any tool used to commit burglary. That includes a screwdriver, if you use it to pry open a window. The only difference between lockpicks and a screwdriver or hammer is that the DA will have an easier time convincing the jury that lockpicks are burglary tools. (Also, the screwdriver example is completely real: I sat on a grand jury that indicted a man for precisely that. I don't know whether it went to trial or what happened, but I suspect the same basic thing.)

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but then again, copyright infringement doesn't cause lung cancer.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ultranova]

And you think that the cost of that R&D isn't passed on to customers?

Let's put this myth down once and for all, shall we? Companies like to perpetrate it to inoculate themselves against taxes or fines, but it's a flat-out lie.

No fixed cost gets passed on to customers. A company will ask for whatever price the market will bear. More accurately, it will ask for a price that maximizes profit in the equation profit = number of units sold * ( price per unit - cost per unit) - cost of development, where the number of units sold inversely depends on price per unit (for consumer products). It's easy to see that price per unit is completely indepdendent from cost of development, at least as far as maximizing profit goes.

In other words, a (rational) company doesn't pass - can't pass - any fixed (independent of number of units sold) overheads to customers, because rising the price per unit would lower sales and thus profits. The same goes to fines and other fixed costs; in fact, the only costs that can be passed on to customers are costs that affect the cost per unit.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Abcd1234]

Get this through your head: The cost of maintaining a distribution network -- be it servers in a data center, theaters in malls across the country, or warehouses and trucks -- far exceeds the cost of manufacturing a physical article in bulk. And the cost of CREATING content exceeds them both.

Well, you're half right: the cost of *both* is actually surprisingly cheap, and is just a small percentage of the total cost of a piece of media.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[icebraining]

The smart thing to do would be to concentrate less on prevention - people are always going to copy stuff no matter what - and focus more on detection. Find the people who are downloading your stuff and get them, rather than making stuff harder for the rest of us.

And how do you propose to implement such "protection" without the constant privacy violations (ISP-wide deep packet inspection, loss of anonymity, etc) we've been hearing about?

While I can perfectly understand that it's "rude to download stuff that you didn't pay for", I don't see any means of prevention/detection that don't violate more important rights.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[johny42]

And things using it kept selling quite well in the interim?

Things using it will keep selling exactly as well as they did before. Maybe even better, now that people will be able to use them with Linux or other non-supported configurations.

This is not about HD movies being available on BitTorrent (they always were), but about people who actually bought them being able to do whatever they want with them.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[MoonBuggy]

HDCP comes alongside HDMI, which has been standard in run of the mill Dell laptops and the like for a while, not to mention games consoles. I see the occasional problem with something as simple as people hooking up a laptop to a projector or TV, simply because there's a handshake and key exchange going on rather than a straightforward connection. I'd say it's been working its way into the offices and living rooms of the average user for three to four years now.

The fact that it's been relatively (but by no means entirely) hassle free so far does not, however, mean that the trend will continue. The companies don't want to go all out with the media restrictions while HDMI is 'new' - it'd just risk causing a backlash and having consumers avoid it. Much more sensible to allow an installed base to build and then bring in the restrictions later. I'm glad to see that yet another piece of useless DRM has (apparently) fallen.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[mikeabbott420]

Americas vast prison system is also a huge industry with a vested interest in marijuana hysteria.
I suspect the alcohol industry may see it as a threat as well. In my experience people who smoke weed abuse alcohol less and that could cause a loss of revenue. Thus the alcohol industry will feed hysteria because they know it is false.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[jgagnon]

The RIAA is skilled at hindsight.

That is, looking at the world from a viewpoint within their ass.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[jedidiah]

>> Although Big Content might get lucky and get away with stuff like Microsoft did.
>
> Microsoft didn't really get away from anything when trying to peddle their DRM crapped content.

I was speaking of how Microsoft got away with degrading people's expectations of technology.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Cinder6]

And hooray for common sense. You knew it was hopeless.

Yeah, hopeless. Despite the fact that it stood for... how many years, now? And things using it kept selling quite well in the interim?

Yep, hooray for freedom. Nobody cared. And nobody's going to care now.

I've always wondered why I should care. I've been using HDMI for years, now, and have had exactly zero problems with it. I've always been able to watch my movies, TV, play games, etc. on my TVs and computer monitors just fine. I think the reason 99.9% of people don't care is because they don't have a problem to begin with. To my understanding, people who do have problems are trying to get outdated hardware to work, have a strange setup, or are trying to pirate. Of those three groups, I only sympathize with the first two.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[CRCulver]

Exactly! Because Oxygen, Food, Shelter, DVD's, BluRay's and CD's are required to live.

Most developed countries do consider the arts necessary for quality of life, which is why they massively fund things like films and music. Nearly every CD and DVD I own acknowledges state arts funding. And if the public paid for it, the public ought to be able to access it as they wish, without struggling with DRM.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Goaway]

Nothing is being stolen. Go lookup the definition

All right, let's.

steal [steel] ,verb, stole, stolen, stealing, noun
–verb (used with object)
1.
to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force: A pickpocket stole his watch.
2.
to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.
3.
to take, get, or win insidiously, surreptitiously, subtly, or by chance: He stole my girlfriend.
4.
to move, bring, convey, or put secretly or quietly; smuggle (usually fol. by away, from, in, into, etc.): They stole the bicycle into the bedroom to surprise the child.
5.
Baseball . (of a base runner) to gain (a base) without the help of a walk or batted ball, as by running to it during the delivery of a pitch.
6.
Games . to gain (a point, advantage, etc.) by strategy, chance, or luck.
7.
to gain or seize more than one's share of attention in, as by giving a superior performance: The comedian stole the show.

Well! Sense 2 sure seems to fit pretty well!

Re:Hooray for freedom

[StuartHankins]

Don't lump "servers in a data center" in with a physical distribution network. The cost of maintaining servers and their associated HR costs is very small in comparison [to all the other costs], and getting smaller. If I can rent a movie for $1 at any RedBox or BlockBuster Express, I expect it to be even less by downloading it directly. And in some cases (NetFlix, Hulu) it IS cheaper.

The old-style physical content distribution model is dead.

And as far as content creation costs go, it appears a lot of popular / decent movies were created without huge budgets. More and more people are creating their own movies on a shoestring. The tables are tipping from "we provide what we want you to see" to amateur-provided content, and guess who doesn't like it? <tiny violins play softly>

Re:Hooray for freedom

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

The answer isn't to keep cracking these "protection" schemes, it's to stop buying into them at all until the companies behind them realize that customers are tired of paying for hardware that actively works against their interests.

I'd put it another way. There are reasons why a person might want HDCP-style secure video playback: for example, classified / company secret videos, or in general, in order to make sure that nobody has snuck a copy line into your video playback. Sounds like a niche market? Bet your ass it is. It's of almost no value to anyone else. Were they thinking we wouldn't notice?

I've said it a couple times before. RIAA/MPAA and member companies: You are ENTERTAINMENT. You do not have the authority necessary to force consumers to jump through hoops to get content. Movies and music may be pretty cool, and some people go nuts for them, but it's discretionary spending. You are who we turn to when we're bored. This does not give you the leverage to completely screw over our lives, no matter how much money you're making.

Seriously, do you know how absolutely fucktarded the whole thing looks from the outside? Does it never strike you, even when you're telling the fucking FBI that they have nothing better to do and should be chasing movie "pirates"? You are lost inside a fantasy world (ironically) in which money means more than paying employees and partners, keeping the business afloat, and investing in the future. Anyone who doesn't understand that shouldn't be managing at all, let alone managing billions of dollars.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[CarpetShark]

You knew it was hopeless.

If it was hopeless, why do we need to acquire masterkey?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[LordKronos]

You are right, excepting of course the fact that in the section you cited, it clearly states
the copies or phonorecords of the work have not been commercially distributed
has not been made available in copies for sale to the general public

Why are you being modded informative? Is it because the mods failed to read the full post as badly as you failed to? If you reread it carefully, the part that says "the copies or phonorecords of the work have not been commercially distributed" is actually a subsection of item a3, which is defining what “work being prepared for commercial distribution”, which is important only in defining if you violate part a1C. If you violate a1A or a1B, then a1C is irrelevant, and the entirety of a3 is therefore irrelevant because it has nothing to do with a1A or a1B.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[RMH101]

More importantly, will the code fit on a T-Shirt, so it can be exported?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[phyrexianshaw.ca]

Not that I'm a big music producer or anything, but this is exactly my distribution model. I make music/video for fun on: an old DSLR, an 8mm video camera, a computer with open source software, a few m-audio products and a few Shure microphones. all said and done, To cover a 4 man band I think the complete setup cost me about $2500, (though it would have been about $5000 had I bought it all new).

to date, I think I've grossed about ~$3000, having done about twenty or so live shows at $150 a night. production quality if a lot better than the bands expect, and for the cost of my internet connection a month, they get a torrent seed to give away a link to for free copies of the production.

in either case, the total production cost for a band to release a private CD of pretty close to record industry quality, would run about $1200 for 500 discs (including the cost of the venue, mastering, discs, burning, printing, and jewel case construction/design/printing.) with additional discs running about $0.65/disc.

even at $5 a disk, that's still a HUGE profit margin. (assuming instruments and any other equipment needed to preform was already paid for. though not often the case, a few shows and a few happy buyers quickly take care of that)

Re:Hooray for freedom

[master0ne]

and while it is illegal to steal a physical copy of a dvd form a retail store (this would clearly be theft) copying the information ON the dvd is not theft as it does not deprive anyone of the orignal. This is the definition of copyright infringment. Theft is physical, copyright infringment involves using the IDEAS (or the resulting work comming from the idea) of others. The point here is that a stealing a car deprives someone else of that physical good they bought and paid for, copying data however does not deprive anyone of what they have, it results in loss of revenue for the creative mind behind the work (or more likely loss of revenue for the greedy corperate overloards that tricked the creative mind into tranfering rights to their work for a small sum of money).

Re:Hooray for freedom

[djrosen]

2 or 3?! There are 14 states and various municipalities that have legalized it, some even for non medicinal use. That's 25% of the states in this union. The turnaround has not been overnight, but its here to stay.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[geminidomino]

A DVD is a tangible good, no different than a book.

Absolutely true.

The contents of said DVD, on the other hand, are not.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Americano]

Have they implemented a region scheme for books?

Sure, it's called "written language". If you hand me a book written in Farsi, I can't read it. If you hand me a book written in English, or to a lesser extent, French, German, or Spanish, I can. There's more written languages out there than there are region codes.

Can a book be rendered illegible by a scratch?

Tear a few random pages out, or scribble inside the book at random with a black permanent marker, and let us know how that affects your reading comprehension.

I'm sympathetic to your argument if you buy a DVD and want to make a backup copy, or format shift the movie for your own private use, but these counter-arguments are pretty weak. :)

Re:Hooray for freedom

[TheRaven64]

legal marijuana doesn't directly effect any large legitimate financial group negatively

You mean, aside from the prison and tobacco industries?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[cyber-vandal]

I'd like my PC to work with my HD TV. HDCP is however preventing me from doing that, despite both devices being HDCP compliant. Nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with technology that doesn't work properly.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[geminidomino]

Nevermind that copper brillo pads are great for scrubbing crap off chrome, like on both our MOTOROCYLES, and that it was found in with my MOTORCYCLE TOOLS, unused!

It doesn't scratch the shit out of the chrome?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[PRMan]

Make your own HD display hardware.

Oops, you can't.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[allawalla]

This thread does a good job of pointing out - state by state differences in lockpicking, as opposed to DMCA which outlaws across the nation.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[geminidomino]

Cell phone companies DO directly pass several overheads: taxes, fees, etc... are directly itemized on the customers' bills.

Granted, you don't get much scummier than cell phone companies, but it CAN be done.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[satoshi1]

One can be held in jail (not prison) before their court date.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[daveime]

I am with you 100% on B OR C, but it seems pretty obvious to me that A is applicable to BOTH.

The applicable clauses are :-

(A + B) OR (A + C)

In both cases, clause A is applicable, thus my point still stands, in that the infringement must be "for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain", which as I have stated above does NOT apply to the casual downloader and personal use.

This criminal law can only ever apply to commercial distribution of pirated PHYSICAL media copies.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Progman3K]

To be fair, entertainment is a need. People who aren't getting any will start doing unbelievable stupid things just for fun, quite likely getting themselves and bystanders hurt.

Darwin wins, Youtube wins, I don't see a problem.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Americano]

And the cost of creating content is negligible, as Jamendo is proof of. You can achieve near-studio quality with a Powerbook and a lot of patience. Talent doesn't cost a thing, but it can still make you a lot of money.

It is only negligible if your time has no value, or the time of the other people involved in making the music has no value. Most people are not born musical savants - they must learn to play their instrument, they must practice their instrument, they must purchase an instrument (or multiple instruments) to play. To record, they must purchase a powerbook (or a cheap dell), they must purchase the recording software, and they must learn how to use the recording software. They must also then actually get around to *writing their own* music. And while you're doing that, you have to earn money to meet the million other obligations of daily existence - food, clothing, shelter, utilities, transportation... all of this costs money and/or time.

To suggest that the process of making music is more or less zero-cost - "cost of creation is negligible" is either willfuly ignorant or absurdly naive. It requires a lot more than patience. And the ultra-rich rock stars are the exception, not the rule. You'll find a lot more musicians that work shitty waiter and retail jobs to pay the bills while they work on their music, and for whom that $100 they could have brought in off 5-10 CD sales would mean one less shitty double-shift.

Production AND distribution are a very small portion of "content creation," whether it be a P2P distribution scheme, or shipping by trucks to hundreds of stores around the country. If you place any sort of value on the work of the musicians whose music you love, then paying them $10-15 to support their work and help them continue to make music is not an unreasonable expectation. Make an effort to find music produced by independent artists, who market directly to their audience, and support those people.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[sycodon]

Well, who am I to argue with a stupid cartoon on youtube?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[sjames]

Where illegal possession is defined to be possession when used to commit a crime. In other words, anyone (except parolees) can own them as long as they don't use them to commit a crime.

Legal uses of the HDCP hack would include hooking up a legacy device that doesn't support it, creating an instant video switch to replace the current select source and wait a few seconds for it to negotiate crap, bypassing the nasty shut down half the capabilities of your PC if you even glance at a protected video DRM crap, etc, etc.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[DavidTC]

Yeah, that whole 'passed on to customers' meme is idiotic.

It's called supply and demand, people. Companies don't base prices on how much it costs them to make, they base prices based on what the market will pay.

I work for a company that sells a few similar products online. Let me generalize and say one of them is $100, one $200, one $250, etc.

We sell all of the things in the product line, because customers are often looking for a specific one. We'd much rather sell the $100 one, as, because of a special deal with the wholeseller, we make like $50 dollars on that, vs. about $45 dollars on the $200.

But we're not idiots and haven't raised the price of the others, because the market won't stand it! The pricing is utterly unrelated to our cost, it's what everyone else is selling for. If we tried to raise the price, people would shop elsewhere. Likewise, we don't lower the cost of the $100, because people buy it at the current price! (We've tried, we don't get statistically more customers. We do use coupons, though, that works to some extent.)

Pricing is entirely based on what people will pay for things, not what it 'costs' to make. (Obviously, companies aren't going to sell things for less than the cost to make them, but that pushes them out of the market entirely, not makes them sell for more.)

And it's the same idiotic concept in the other direction, that lower corporate taxes let them hire more people. Um, companies hire exactly how many people they think they need to do what they're trying to do. Period. They don't hire 'extra' people because they have money laying around.

Them having more money might, if they were already planning on expanding, allow them to expand sooner, but, hell, that could operate just as easily the other way, jobwise...they now might have the cash to shut down their production line for a month to revamp, resulting in no work for a month and less jobs afterward. 'They might expand' is an idiotic hypothesis...they might automate jobs away with that money instead, if we're in hypothetical land. In reality, 99% of the time, the money is just added profit.

The real fun idea is that less taxes on the superrich might result in more jobs...because the superrich, if they take home more money after taxes, ask to have their salaries lowered so a company can hire some pointless workers, which manages to be an idiotic premise twice over.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ac3b0]

Ah, the classic slashdot myth, repeated so many times that most people here actually believe it. However, the United States criminal code would beg to differ. Ever download $1,000 worth of material in 6 months? Guess what, you committed a crime.

You completely missed the boat here. He wasn't implying it's not a crime, he was saying it's a CIVIL offense, not a felony offense. The difference being the former is punishable only by fines whereas the latter is punishable by fines as well as incarceration or, in extreme cases, death.

Thank you for your clarification, though. It reinforces that it is, in fact, civil as the only punishments are fines.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[SCHecklerX]

Then make it as convenient as the illegal stuff. No DRM, for starters. Here's a neat solution: Run your own tracker with client side certificates for people who have paid for a subscription.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[DrPizza]

Yes, because the fact that the current generation of law-makers all smoked dope at university has been instrumental in ending the war on drugs, hasn't it.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Belial6]

In California (and I understand many other states), it is legal. Yes, it hasn't been legalized on the Federal level, but for several months, we actually had one of those roadside 30 foot by 50 foot billboards advertising where to buy your pot in my Northern California town.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ultranova]

As long as the copyright holder can exclusively decide what DRM will be applied you have no possibility to vote with your wallet short of doing completely without it.

He can't.

Seriously, just give it up already, cholders. I'd buy Blu-Rays rather than download if I could be assured I can rip the contents to the hard drive, and the disk was DVD-price (4-6 euros). After all, it would both be faster and I'd get a free back-up media in the bargain.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Mr. Slippery]

Sure, it's called "written language".

Which is nothing at all like region codes. I can always access the content of a book, even if I can't comprehend it. The DVD equivalent would be a film in a foreign language and no subtitles, not region keying. It might be gibberish to me, but I can still access it.

Tear a few random pages out, or scribble inside the book at random with a black permanent marker

Which has nothing to do with the scratch I mentioned. I never said "books are indestructible"; the point is that minor damage does not render them unusable, unlike DVDs. In fact I can tear a book in half, tape it together, and still use it; try that with a DVD.

DVDs are not like books, and the ridiculous mappings you suggest only demonstrate how different they are.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[DavidTC]

Indeed.

We need to make sure that people don't start accepting that they've bought a movie and it doesn't play on the movie player for no obvious reason.

And we need to make sure that they know that when that happens, someone did it deliberately, because, remember how DVDs and CDs used to just work magically? CDs and DVDs were also fancy digital things, but you could just hook them up to your TV and stereo and they magically worked. (It's probably best not to mention DVD CSS, as that did mostly work and will just confuse them.)

Remind people how it used to work.

And point out, technologically, there was nothing stopping companies from just putting more data on the disc, giving a better picture, requiring a new DVD player, but otherwise exactly the same and working exactly as well.

And then mention the reason it's not working is that companies added something to try to keep people from copying the movies, and that thing broke. They added shit, added a bunch of complexity where wires now have encrypted signals and devices have to 'allow' other devices and it's this big complicated mess, and somewhere in there it didn't work and their fancy new BlueRay is playing a sucky resolution because of it.

Make sure they know this isn't some inherent technological problem, companies could have just made 'supersized DVDs', that the brokenness is a 'feature' companies added to stop them from copying, which screws them over some of the time.

Then mention that this entire thing was pointless, as people can still copy movies.

Us slashdot readers, the presumably technologically literate people, have to keep expectations high, or in a decade we'll end up where people have to check all sorts of requirements and nothing works together and people get used to some stuff not working some of the time, like with PCs currently. Don't let them get away with that.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Belial6]

Other than Pederasty, the rest of the "illegal" words in the list you linked to are not "illegal". All of these people would disagree with you. Look up "Gay Pride" on YouTube, and you will find plenty of absolute proof that you are incorrect. The only reason you don't see the same thing for Heterosexuals is that they are just a given.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[marxmarv]

whereas legal marijuana doesn't directly effect any large legitimate financial group negatively.

du Pont's interest in eliminating the competition for their synthetic fibers was a significant force driving the popular campaign for the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, similar to how the TEA Party's "drill here, drill now" position suspiciously coincides with the fossil energy interests of the Party's backers, the Koch brothers. Today we have several vendors of at most mildly stigmatized and gently regulated medicinal and recreational substances fighting for their own continued relevance against cannabis, never mind the various enforcement agencies who consider marijuana busts one of the easiest, most exciting and (for the agency) most lucrative parts of their jobs. So there certainly are billions of dollars to which "legitimate" interests believe they're entitled that might be shifted to other, smaller business interests were cannabis legalized.

If there is a change coming, it's only because other scapegoats are shinier right now.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ultranova]

Because it's always good to make it easier to break the law and steal movies.

Yes, it is. Except it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. And copyright law should be considered an anathema to human spirit and stamped out wherever it rises its ugly head.

It's not Disney using old fairy tales to make their movies that annoys me. It's not even Disney ripping off Stamboat Bill that annoys me, nor is it Disney's failure to give credit to Lee De Forest. It's Disney trying to co-opt ownership of those fairy tales that annoys me.

Copyright law serves no purpose expcept to bring all law to shame.

What other for profit industries can we attack? Maybe someone could come up with a universal electronic key so you can drive any car you want.

If you can come up with a universal electronic key that unlocks any car - including mine - then I want to talk to my car manufacturer. There's no reason whatsoever that car keys shouldn't be completely random rather than derived from a particular master key.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[suutar]

Bad news. That last word in clause B is 'or'. That means that it's going to get read as 'matches A or matches B or matches C', which toasts your "ALL the criteria" assertion.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[dk90406]

While your explanation is informative, I still think that fails if licensed IP is involved in the equation.

If a company has to license a given technology from a vendor (e.g. HDCP from Intel) and pay fees per unit sold (HDCP fees for keys are quite low - in the cent range) that fee is part of the cost of the unit.

The same goes for a lot of licensed IP. Lite-On pays Sony (and others) for Blu-ray rights, Philips (and others) for DVD IP. That increases the cost of the unit.

So at least, in some cases, R&D costs is passed directly to the user in form if IP license costs.

IBM makes more than 1 Billion USD a year in license agreements.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[backslashdot]

I agree, but I wish this was released after Star Wars for Blu Ray was released. Now George Lucas either won't release it or will release it with some updated key making existing Blu RAy players obsolete.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

"When _my_ generation is in charge ..."

That made no difference for grass. Music will be no different. When your generation is in charge they will be as greedy as mine.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Kielistic]

If the DVD was translated into Farsi and released in that region I somehow doubt the GP would be offended. Language is not the same as region encoding.
They have however created a region scheme for books but it relies entirely on legal threats. Most textbooks you see in University are "region locked".

Re:Hooray for freedom

[DavidTC]

No one who is complaining about HDCP is trying to pirate. Cracking HDCP is utterly useless for pirates, and HDCP doesn't stop anything they're trying to do.

The HDCP 'protection' was a delusional attempt by the content providers to get a step ahead of pirate-copy-makers. They fantasized that their current media protection was 'perfect', so figured pirates would start copying from the video connection.

Of course, their protection wasn't perfect, so copier have continued to just strip the DRM off the provided media instead of rigging weird setups to copy from a monitor cable.

Which copiers could do anyway, as HDCP decoders have existed forever. This crack was the master key...before that, you had to buy a 'licensed' piece of hardware that could strip HDCP, which is fairly easy to get, although you have to order from overseas. With this crack, now, you can simply record the encrypted signal and decode it, I guess. (Maybe not, though.)

But no copier did that, or will start doing that. They'll just remove the BlueRay or cable encryption instead, like they've been doing.

In short, HDCP was 'second-level' DRM, which required, as a base assumption, that no one would be able to decode DRM before it get outputted, so HDCP was an attempt to protect the output. As people can decode the DRM before output, it's, um, utterly pointless to crack.

Even if copiers were copying from there, none of that has anything to do with 99.9999% of pirates, who download copied movies,and thus could give a flying fuck where the copy came from. Any HDCP connections will display a pirated video as well anything else.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[supersloshy]

Hence why I used quotes; I completely agree.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Americano]

DVDs are not like books, and the ridiculous mappings you suggest only demonstrate how different they are.

Ridiculous? How much sense can you make out of a book written in Mandarin, if you don't read Mandarin? It's nothing but squiggles on the page. foreign-language DVDs with no subtitles are not an appropriate comparison - you can make out the story, because a lot of the story can be heard just in tone of voice, body language, and scenery. Language of publication is absolutely akin to a region code on a DVD, unless you consider staring at squiggles on a page that you don't comprehend to be a valuable "access" of the information.

As far as scratches on a DVD, that is localized destruction of some data on the disc, rendering parts unreadable to the player. Depending on the severity of the scratch, the DVD may not load, scenes may not work, or you may just see weird artifacts displayed due to the corrupted data in the video. In much the same way, if you rip random pages out of a book, you are destroying random bits of information from inside the book, rendering the book less-valuable, or completely useless if you rip out enough pages, or black out enough with a permanent marker.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Mister Whirly]

At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums, that downloaded mp3's when they were younger (or still do), and that watched 2 or 3 movies illegally when they were students.
The current lawmakers and judges are of a different generation altogether.

I heard the same thing said about the legalization of marijuana in the US, and can't help but notice it has still not been legalized by the federal government.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[PybusJ]

When i was young it was considered rude to take sweets from the local shops without paying, yet some proportion of the shops stock was stolen. Shopkeepers have reacted (and technology has moved on) and it is now standard for shops to be recording CCTV, as well as implementing policies such limiting the number of school age kids in the shop at one time. This is not without privacy implications, but society has in general accepted it.

Copyright infringement is not an exact analogy with theft, as is regularly pointed out on /. , but there are some valid comparisons to be made.

I'm not at all convinced that society in general agrees that you have fundamental rights in the are of network packet inspection and online anonymity. I'm sorry if that's news to you.

For myself, I'm not a fan of DRM: it gets in the way of what I consider legitimate use of content I pay for (such as playing it on a variety of hardware, including my linux machines, and being able to access it in the future), and I'm not prepared to pay for content which is locked behind DRM. This does limit my access to a variety of culture in digital form, but at least for now, it's a limitation I can live with. But that doesn't mean I believe I should be given something for nothing, or that just because I can now pay for clean mp3s, that entitles me to spread them as widely as I like.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[geekoid]

What you, and the content distributors, don't get is that you can copy a disk bit by bit and not have to worry about copy protection.

That's a problem that will cause a revenue decrease. Not people who want to watch movie and several different devices.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[geekoid]

Just so you know

section 1 violation is A AND(B or C)

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Mad Leper]

Does making a copy of someone else's content and distributing it for free without license or permission count as theft? You deliberately reduce the value of their work to zero and deprive them of an income, while at the same time gaining the benefit of their work and effort.

Sounds like theft to me.

And the "greed corporate overlords" meme is really just a proxy. It's easier to justify your actions by reasoning that your actually hurting the big bad corporation and not the little guy. Whatever lets you sleep better at night I guess...

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Any law that is on the books solely because the RIAA, MPAA, etc threw enough money at politicians somewhere isn't a just law, and isn't one we as a people should be following. This is called civil disobedience. The law is there for nothing more then to protect the outdated business model of hollywood and the record industries.

Seriously, the law says I can be charged $10,000 for distributing a picture of Mickey Mouse, a fucking cartoon character created 80 years ago. Really? REALLY? Quite honestly, they can take all of these laws and stick them where the sun doesn't shine. If ever there was a good reason for a revolution, we have one. This stopped being a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" long, long ago. It should be a government "Of the biggest lobbying group, by the people, for the special interests" to be more accurate. Most of the sheep just haven't realized it yet. Once they do, America will go through another revolution.

As far as I am concerned, it can't happen soon enough.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[balbus000]

Think of it as paying for the ability to listen to the songs on any device you wish, at any time. That's what it should be.

The format it is delivered through should not affect the price.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[orgelspieler]

You think that's bad? In Austin, TX it's illegal to carry wire cutters in your pocket.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Pentium100]

Stealing a movie/song/game whatever, is the same as if you hired a mechanic to fix your car and the drove off and stiffed him for the payment.

Actually, no. While the guy was fixing your car, he could not fix someones car (who would have paid him) or just do what he wanted (free time). On the other hand, let's say that I saw what he did to fix my car and fixed it myself the next time. Or fixed the same problem with my other car/my friend's car etc. The mechanic did not get more money, but more cars are fixed. OTOH, he did not spend time fixing them.

Same thing happens with movies. I did not go to the studio and ask them to make a unique copy of a movie for me. They made the movie before I even expressed my interest in it (in some cases before I was even born), so the fact that I made myself a copy does not cost the studio anything. Nobody in the studio had to spend even a microsecond to make my copy.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[MoriT]

Yep. In Massachusetts the police hate that they can't arrest people over tiny amounts of pot anymore, because it removed a loophole around people asking "am I free to go?" Used to be the cops could pick people up they thought had committed worse crimes and book them on pot; now they have to actually find evidence of whatever they think they are guilty of.

Of course, that probably just means they'll continue to beat the crap out of people for jaywalking, completely legally. Until cops are held individually responsible for misconduct, and citizens allowed to sue them, the power imbalance will remain no matter how many stupid laws we finally get rid of.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Lord Ender]

The smart thing to do is to add a "mass media" addendum to the copyright law, so that all works licensed by it can be freely copied. Then the producers of those works would be compensated by the government according to the popularity of their works.

This keeps content creation profitable while ending artificial restrictions on copying.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[geekoid]

Throwing a stone through my wind so I can get into my house is also my prerogative.

Plus I don't understand why if I am interested in locks I can't have tools to pick my own locks.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ToasterMonkey]

But pirating and blaming the seller is OK.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[sycodon]

You'll have to talk to the state legislature about that I guess.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[HTH NE1]

Especially if they think you can start World War III by whistling into a telephone.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Eivind Eklund]

When I bring my books to the US, I can read them fine with the light bulbs that are there. When I bring my DVDs to the US, I cannot play them on the DVD player that's installed in the room there. The protection is very dissimilar.

Eivind, who was last hit by this three weeks ago, but fortunately had his laptop.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Archimagus]

I don't understand how some people feel that others don't deserve to be paid for their work if it doesn't result in a physical product. Movies and Games take several years of many peoples time to make. You don't believe that time is worth anything? Sure they don't "lose" anything by you making a copy, but they don't make anything either. Thats the point, they invested years of their time to make the product, they should get something out of it.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[geekoid]

I thought the same thing about marijuana laws.

By now, everyone in office should be from a generation of people that understand the actual effects of pot...but no.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[geekoid]

"And the cost of CREATING content exceeds them both."

No, it doesn't. With a very few notable exception creating isn't that expensive.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Pentium100]

Yet ThePirateBay seems to manage to maintain their distribution network quite well, even though a lot of movies/games/music/etc is available there. Physical DVD would take up much more space and making them would cost much more than the servers do. And still, they survive by using ads and getting donations.

If legitimate distribution costs more than TPB model, maybe the studio is doing something wrong...

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Pentium100]

Just because you invested time and money does not mean that you will get anything in return. You can make a crap game (ET for Atari 2600, Big Rigs Over the Road Racing to name a few) that nobody buys. Also, in general, piracy of a particular game etc is dependent on its popularity and so is buying. Usually the most popular games are both bought and pirated the most, so the creators still make money.

Also, musicians can make money from performances, and not just doing some work for a few hours (recording the song) and get paid for the rest of their lives and some years after death.

However, I was replying to your analogy that copying is the same as stealing time, which it isn't (a person has finite time, while the copies are infinite).

Re:Hooray for freedom

[JesseMcDonald]

Pricing is entirely based on what people will pay for things, not what it 'costs' to make. (Obviously, companies aren't going to sell things for less than the cost to make them, but that pushes them out of the market entirely, not makes them sell for more.)

Exactly. The marginal producers are driven out of the market, which lowers the supply. The same demand combined with a lower supply results in an increase in the price of the good. The actual increase depends on a number of factors, and can be anywhere from zero to the full increase in cost (but is generally somewhere in between). Part of the cost increase is thus born by the producers, and part by the consumers. Similarly, lower production costs allow marginal producers to enter the market, increasing the supply and driving down the price.

To say that the entire change in cost will necessarily be passed on to consumers is obviously false. However, it is just as false to claim that "pricing is utterly unrelated to ... cost". Cost controls supply, which in turn controls pricing.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Khyber]

"And the cost of CREATING content exceeds them both."

Speaking as a musician, you're full of it.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ultranova]

While your explanation is informative, I still think that fails if licensed IP is involved in the equation.

No; as you noted, it's part of the cost per unit thing. In other words, the licensee is the consumer, as far as the licenser is concerned.

So at least, in some cases, R&D costs is passed directly to the user in form if IP license costs.

No; the licenser will ask whatever they think will maximize their profit, and the licensee will ask whatever they think will maximize their profit. The end result is equal to the licenser and licensee being departments within a same corporation.

IBM makes more than 1 Billion USD a year in license agreements.

And it would make more by rising it's license costs unless such increased costs would mean that the licensees would need to rise their price, thus driving down total sales and thus IBM license costs.

There's no way around this fact: business charges whatever maximizes their profit, unless it's run by an idiot. And I doubt IBM is.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Palshife]

The old-style physical content distribution model is dead.

So where do I go to buy 1080p content online?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Mister_Stoopid]

Your store analogy is a little off. In reality the copyright-analogy-store would gladly sell you the merchandise; the problem comes up when you try to carry the items you've purchased out of the store :)

Re:Hooray for freedom

[muridae]

Off topic, but where do you get 8mm film developed at and turn a profit at 150 a night? If you do it in house, I have a ton of questions for you.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[david_thornley]

Good luck on that.

The current lawmakers and judges are of the generation that grew up with drugs, including marijuana. A lot of them used illegal drugs back then. While some laws have been made more lenient, in most of the country it's still a criminal offense to be caught with a little pot.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[godIsaDJ]

You think that's bad? In Austin, TX it's illegal to carry wire cutters in your pocket.

But guns are fine, right? Even in a bar unless they have a sign saying otherwise?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[hawguy]

I think he's talking about 8mm video tape, not film.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[mikechant]

Yet ThePirateBay seems to manage to maintain their distribution network quite well, even though a lot of movies/games/music/etc is available there.

I find it hard to believe that you don't know that TPB stores *no* 'content' on their servers (and that none passes through their network).

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Archimagus]

Ok, I should have phrased it so that people should get paid for good work. Of course, if no one buys it because it's shoddy work then that is entirely the sellers problem (though stealing it is still wrong). But the excuse that "other people bought it so they still make money" is not a good excuse for stealing it. If everyone thought that way then no one would buy it, and they would quit making things. And the analogy works. It is the same as stealing their time. They spent years working on it, just as the mechanic spent hours fixing your car. And as far as watching him and learning how to fix it. No one is stopping you, just as no one is stopping you from learning how to write and sell your own Movies/Songs/Games.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[fyngyrz]

Agreed. Speaking as a musician who owns a full traditional recording studio, if it costs you much to make your music available to the public right now, you're doing it wrong. The gear I had to buy 20 years ago, is *not* what you need to buy today.

The Beatles created all manner of good stuff with 4-track recording. You can buy a standalone four track recorder for about $100 right now. Or you can use your PC, which you (probably) already have; the Mac comes with GarageBand at no extra charge, which can create excellent results. Or you can spend a whopping $500 or so and get something like Logic Pro, and have more power than you know what to do with.

Frankly, if you can't get your music out to people today, it may well be because your music sucks. If that's not the case, then your ability to use the tools available to you sucks. Or you aren't really trying.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[pthisis]

Because the alcohol and tobacco lobbies, collectively known as "The partnership for a drug-free America", pay damn good money to buy the lawmakers opinions.

You can criticize the PDFA in a lot of ways, but this isn't one of them in recent years; they don't accept money from tobacco or alcohol companies (they quit allowing that over a decade ago) and they certainly run anti-alcohol campaigns--see, for instance, http://www.drugfree.org/Portal/Drug_Guide/Alcohol

Re:Hooray for freedom

[frank_adrian314159]

At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums, that downloaded mp3's when they were younger (or still do), and that watched 2 or 3 movies illegally when they were students.

And then, just like the current generation with drug use, they will call it "youthful indiscretion" and pass another law to lock up people doing the same things they did when they were young.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Pentium100]

And as far as watching him and learning how to fix it. No one is stopping you, just as no one is stopping you from learning how to write and sell your own Movies/Songs/Games.

Yes, the mechanic would not stop me from replacing him (at least for that particular problem) for my friends. I think some people would object to me creating my own Star Wars.

Also, copying is not stealing. Stealing implies taking something away so the original owner no longer has it. However, this is called "copyright infringement" or "piracy" because even though the creator does not get anything from me copying his work, he does not lose anything either. So, I can steal a CD from a store or a master tape from a studio, but I only pirate a movie on the internet.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ultranova]

What on earth are you talking about?

Business.

Price is driven by cost of development - of course it is. If it weren't, then companies would be selling a product for a price floated on the market as you suggest, and then finding themselves out of capital b/c their total income would be *less than* their total expenditures.

No. Cost of development is a sunk cost. Once it's paid, there's nothing to do but to try and maximize your income. If the total income - number of units sold * (price per unit - cost per unit) - is less than price of development, then yes, the company will be running a deficit rather than profit on that product. That's precisely why they often conduct market surveys before investing in R&D.

How they recoup their dev costs depends on the business model, but to suggest that dev costs don't impact pricing is just nonsense.

It's math, and unless and until you understand it - and I mean really understand it - you better not try to run a company, for your own sake, because you will fail miserably.

To recap: profit = number_of_units_sold * (price_per_unit - cost_per_unit) - cost_of_development, where number_of_units_sold is a function of price_per_unit, benefit per unit to the buyer and human psychology.

Seriously, all aspiring businessmen: read this and understand it. If you can't, you can't succeed. There is no way around this.

If one company has lower dev costs than another, they have what's known as "competitive advantage" -- they can create new products with equal value to the consumer at a lower cost. That company now has a viable option (not available to their competitor) to float their product to the market at a price lower than their competitor, and still make positive net revenue.

Of course they do. That's perfectly in agreement with the equation and its implications. After all, they make the same profit with less (price_per_unit - cost_per_unit), since their cost_of_development is lower.

However, in the long run, for long-selling goods, the cost_per_unit is the dominating factor. That's why it's often a good idea to spend some extra R&D to make sure your manufacturing processes are as efficient as possible. Experience shows that this is especially true of goods with low cost_per_unit. In the bottom end are Internet-downlodable games, where all of the costs are in cost_of_development, and cost_per_unit is for all practical purposes zero; in such items, it's almost always beneficial to decrease the price, since it increases the sales a lot - a hundred times as many people pay for a $1 game than $10 one, adding up to 10-time profits.

In the very extreme end of this, Girl Genius, Dwarf Fortress and The Freenet Project seem to survive entirely on donations/auxiliary sells. But then again, they are bringing something valuable and wonderful to the Internet, unlike most corporations.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[spitzak]

2. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.

Well! Sense 2 sure seems to fit pretty well!

Yea, except for that pesky "or acknowledgment" part.

You are confusing plagiarism with copyright infringement.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[SanityInAnarchy]

HDCP comes alongside HDMI,

Not necessarily. In fact, HDCP is independent of HDMI, and works just fine over DVI-D. The reverse is also true -- HDMI can work as essentially DVI + audio, without HDCP at all.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[node 3]

How many years of being obscure overpriced early adopter stuff

If you think HDMI and DVI have been overpriced, maybe you should stop shopping at Best Buy.

or how many years of actually being relevant to most consumers?

What are you trying to say here? That HDMI and DVI are some sort of obscure connector that is rarely used? Or are you trying to say that if people are now having problems with those connectors?

Your questions just don't seem to have any point to them. I'm glad to see HDCP go down, but it was never much of a problem, and even had it lasted for decades to come, it would not have likely become one.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Pentium100]

I know that TPB stores no content and I know quite well how BitTorrent works.

However, TPB not storing any content does not prevent anybody from downloading the content using TPBs services. So why do legitimate distributors hang on the "everything is stored in our servers" model, when they can use BT or similar P2P protocol to distribute the content. And it is possible to control BT somewhat, private trackers are doing it.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ivan256]

The chances of you being caught with an illegal lock pick are, for all practical purposes, zero, unless you're using the lockpick to break some other law.

All bets are off if you decide to keep them in your car on a public road though.

So, yes it may be illegal, but no, you won't go to jail.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ivan256]

He's talking about Austin, not about sane parts of Texas.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[node 3]

And things using it kept selling quite well in the interim?

Things using it will keep selling exactly as well as they did before. Maybe even better, now that people will be able to use them with Linux or other non-supported

Can you cite any problems Linux has had due to HDCP?

configurations.

This is not about HD movies being available on BitTorrent (they always were), but about people who actually bought them being able to do whatever they want with them.

Which is exactly his point. People have been able to do whatever they want with them for the most part. Very few people have encountered problems caused by HDCP.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Copyright infringement is not an exact analogy with theft, as is regularly pointed out on /. , but there are some valid comparisons to be made.

None of which are comparisons to rivalrous and excludable goods.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[node 3]

A DVD is a tangible good, no different than a book.

Um... HDCP has nothing to do with stealing the tangible, physical DVD. No one here is saying that taking a physical DVD without permission from the owner isn't stealing. We're saying that copying a DVD isn't stealing.

And it's not. Just like a book, when you copy it you are potentially engaging in copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is not stealing. Pretending that it is has led to making the wrong laws that protect the wrong things in the wrong ways.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Archimagus]

No, the mechanic wouldn't stop you, new people become mechanics all the time. People make their own version of star wars all the time, usually fan tributes or parodies. But, there are other laws to try and stop you from making your own exact version of the original film. (good luck at that anyway) Finally, whatever word you want to put on it, it's still wrong.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Lord Ender]

They are already being compensated by taxpayers. Taxpayers are granting them rights: copyrights. These have a monetary value. Doing it honestly is an improvement. Doing it without artificial scarcity is a HUGE improvement.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[k8mnstr]

Downloading for the purpose of viewing != Infringement.

You are only "infringing" if you are redistributing the works; i.e. seeding while torrenting or using a P2P network where users can also download from you. Merely acquiring the content in and of itself does not constitute "infringement" per the title you quoted. Ergo, even if you acquire $100,000 worth of content from say, Usenet or another newsgroup (where it's an HTTP download only), you are not guilty of any such crime.

Just because a method for acquiring digital content is common doesn't mean it's the only avenue, so to assume that everyone who downloads a movie or an mp3 has done so in a manner which also redistributes the content and is thus guilty of any form of infringement (criminal or otherwise), is somewhat myopic.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[rpresser]

Why did I get 10 scornful responses from musicians? Is all content music? Do you musicians honestly believe that it is as easy to write a game or novel or screenplay, or produce a TV show or a movie, as it is to lay down some tracks? Music is EASY compared to the rest. Music comes from your highly trained muscle memory and your limbic system. There's practically no thinking involved at all.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[cayenne8]

Do you have any links to your site?

I've thought about trying to get into something like that, would be interested in seeing what you do...

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Mr. Slippery]

How much sense can you make out of a book written in Mandarin, if you don't read Mandarin?

But the question is whether I read Mandarin, not whether some device will let me access the text.

foreign-language DVDs with no subtitles are not an appropriate comparison - you can make out the story, because a lot of the story can be heard just in tone of voice, body language, and scenery.

Never seen a picture book? A graphic novel?

Language of publication is absolutely akin to a region code on a DVD, unless you consider staring at squiggles on a page that you don't comprehend to be a valuable "access" of the information.

How do you think you learn to read a foreign language? You stare at squiggles on a page that you don't comprehend, and use a second book to look them up, until the memories start to stick.

Language of publication is absolutely nothing like a region code on a DVD. The comparison continues to fail.

As far as scratches on a DVD, that is localized destruction of some data on the disc, rendering parts unreadable to the player. Depending on the severity of the scratch, the DVD may not load, scenes may not work, or you may just see weird artifacts displayed due to the corrupted data in the video. In much the same way, if you rip random pages out of a book...

DVDs get scratched in the normal course of operation. Books do not have random pages ripped out in the normal course of operation. The comparison continues to fail.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ultranova]

Darwin wins, Youtube wins, I don't see a problem.

Until the bored attack you for entertainment.

This is precisely why we need to get to Singularity and match our biological development to our cultural development fast, before this kind of short-sighted stupidity kills us all.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Pentium100]

But, there are other laws to try and stop you from making your own exact version of the original film.

So, why can I ^C ^V the mechanic's work, but can't do the same with Star Wars? Maybe because the mechanic actually works for a living so he does not care if somebody else is dong the same thing he is doing, while people who created Star Wars want to get paid for the work they did 33 years ago over and over again until 70 years after death.

Also, movies are not replaceable, that is:

If I want to get the carburetor in my car (yes, my car has it) retuned, I can do it myself or go to any mechanic that can do it for me. The result is that the engine in my car now works better. However, it largely does not depend on who I go to, assuming they all know what they are doing. OTOH, it would do me no good to go to a mechanic that only fixes newer cars that have computers in them. Or one that fixes the electrical system.

If I want to watch Star Wars, I cannot make it myself or go to some guy and ask him to make the movie for me. I pretty much have to watch that Star Wars. So, the only way for me to make my own Star wars is to copy the VHS tape or whatever.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Patch86]

Are you really trying to tell me that running a data centre (and I'm going to purposefully ignore P2P here, despite it being a perfectly valid distribution model for software-linked media shops like iTunes) costs the same as:
1) Procuring materials
2) Building/maintaining/staffing a factory
3) Owning or paying for a global network of lorries, ships, planes, etc., including staff costs
4) The rental of shop space, the costs to maintain and run shops, the cost of staff again.

Please bear in mind that a fair portion of the the digital distribution is already being paid for by the customer, in terms of their ISP subscription and bandwidth costs.

It's not free, sure. It still has an associated non-trivial cost. But I struggle to believe that the cost is in any way on par with the end-to-end cost of physical production and distribution.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Khyber]

"Music comes from your highly trained muscle memory and your limbic system. There's practically no thinking involved at all."

And that is where you're full of shit. Go take some music theory classes.

The response is scornful because WE'VE BEEN IN THIS INDUSTRY where it is entirely apparent that you have not stepped foot into it, and you opened your mouth upon a subject in which you have no real training.

Highly trained muscle memory. Yea, right, that's why the best guitarists and violinists still stare at their instrument now and then while they play, eh?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Patch86]

I don't think you can press a CD for that little, even if you're buying 10 million of them at a time. I'd bet that the setup fee for a big CD run costs more than hosting the website for 6 months or a year.

And you're not even thinking about the whole cost of physical media. Not only do you have to pay for the cost of physically manufacturing the things, but then there's the cost of shipping it to your retailers, and the cost of the retailer owning and maintaining a warehouse, and a shop. All that sort of thing gets absorbed into the final retail price too.

Digital distribution should be miles upon miles cheaper.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[shakuni]

Not so fast my friend. Video breaks this assumption especially when you consider increase in broadband penetration rates over next few years. Last mile, which has been the bottleneck for the first 20 years of internet will find that the other parts of the network backbone, peering points etc will need costly upgrades to carry all the video traffic. Especially as the video content on the internet moves from a measly 320x240 largely to HD, 4K and beyond. The increase in resolution and increase the demand for higher resolution (broadband penetration) can possibly change the economics to a physical media based distribution model especially for high resolution video. Even mobile video can consume a lot of bandwidth if it has interactivity. In many ways, relatively low penetration of braodband has been the reason that has kept the internet from collapsing under its owne weight.

Network based content distribution technologies are evolving to help address this. But my point is that the outcome is not as certain as you make it sound.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Patch86]

Plenty of 1080p content is available at your nearest torrent site.I know you said "buy", not "illegally download", but if it is easily doable for free, it can't be impossible to do for money. If legitimate sites are running that far behind illegitimate ones, it certainly isn't for purely technical reasons.

Incidentally, I don't generally buy video content online (or steal it, before you say), but of the many free-to-view services I use (iPlayer, 4OD, You Tube), HD video is becoming increasingly (and infuriatingly, if your laptop can't cope) common.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[EvilRyry]

Can you cite any problems Linux has had due to HDCP?

I want to capture digital output from my cable box to my computer. The cable box refuses to talk to my computer because it won't do the HDCP handshake.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Progman3K]

Hopefully the Singularity will include an augmented sense of humour.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[WNight]

No, it sounds like negating a monopoly grant. I don't like copyright and the monopoly control the government grants. By copying a copyrighted work I reduce the value of that grant - ideally to zero, where it should have been.

If our society wants to reward authors or inventors it needs to simply do so. Without a registration process, or bureaucratic hoops to jump though, simply reward people who have spent their time enriching society. Don't grant patents, reward the people the industry agrees are responsible for the most advancement. Don't grant a copyright holder monopoly rights that would only restrict distribution of their work, simply directly reward them. The worst part is that these current grants aren't actual directly valuable and only enable a savvy creator to run a licensing business - in reality most creators get bilked out of these rights which then are used not to enrich creators but to create a perpetual income for a company that functions only as a gatekeeper - slowing society down merely to collect enable collecting a toll.

When systems like this are proposed it's easy to see how little anyone cares about actually rewarding society's helpers and how much we're simply willing to sell our neighbors' rights, such as to repeat something they heard or build something they see, without any thought for how much those restrictions hurt others.

Also, your simplistic idea "it's theft and it hurts the little guy" is nonsense. If you want to reward the little guy you've got a lot more to do than just paying for something - you've got to see where that money goes. Very likely it's mostly being siphoned off by some gate-keeper (like a record label) who he's paying merely because they exert anti-competitive pressure on the industry - BECAUSE we created these grants for them to leach off of in the first place. Trying to actually reward a creator is far harder than buying something - it involves figuring out which side-products (concerts, t-shirts) their label doesn't collect the majority of the profits from and buying those, which are often only tangential to the thing of theirs that you enjoy.

Sure, money for copyright licensing goes somewhere and if you stop paying it stops, but how much of that helps and how much just rewards bridge trolls, demanding tolls to use the resources they've co-opted? If you're trying to support the creators aren't you pretty much obligated to go around the system already?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Deluge]

Better yet, run your own servers to serve up your content, a la Steam. Ensure that unlike P2P, download speeds are always fast, and in these days of shrinking bandwidth caps, you don't cost your customer more bits than necessary.

Make it reasonably priced and *MORE* convenient than the illegal stuff.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[WNight]

Yes, but we only punish sense 1. To appropriate your ideas without credit is reasonable. If I'm eating plain cheesecake and I see you dumping blueberries on yours I'm free to do the same next time, without having to either ask your permission or attribute the innovation to you.

Violations of sense 2 & 3 are usually punished as lies/fraud if at all. It's not the using of your words that's the problem, it's the implicit promise on an exam that they are originally mine that is the problem. It's not ending up with your girlfriend that's the crime - it's any lies I tell her that unfairly ruin her view of you.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Unequivocal]

Thanks. I think I follow both your equation and your argument - but they seem divergent.

Cost of R&D is a sunk cost only once it's made.

In the total scope of running the business you have to decide whether and how much R&D to sink and you know this is going to ultimately affect what you have to charge for your product to make a buck. I would most definitely call this passing R&D costs on to the customer. If I don't invest R&D, my price can be lower, but maybe my product quality or long-term viability as a company is sacrificed as a result. Decisions, decisions.. Life running a company.

If I'm following along, your equations support this way of thinking. R&D is only a sunk cost once you make it. But deciding whether and how much investment (and in what) to make is a key aspect of running a successful business, and is a key driver of price in many industries (big pharma for example).

And regarding my background, I helped design, start and manage a business which is now a publicly traded company, so I think I'm reasonably qualified to offer an opinion on this.

Interesting discussion anyway..

Re:Hooray for freedom

[vertinox]

And the cost of CREATING content exceeds them both.

Have you seen "Human Centipede"?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[somersault]

Yeah, because pirating movies is just like killing thousands of people and making the local environment unhospitable for decades. And playing your content on a non approved display is not like using an otherwise useful object as a paperweight.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Chowderbags]

At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums, that downloaded mp3's when they were younger (or still do), and that watched 2 or 3 movies illegally when they were students.

No, they'll be the people that didn't do that (or didn't get caught), so they look squeaky clean to all the voters who would rather have the clean cut person hiding massive corruption and hypocrisy than the politician that openly admits to smoking dope, having premarital sex, and living like an average person (Your grandparents probably didn't only have sex after marriage, underneath blankets, in the dark, in the missionary position. Blowjobs were not invented in the last 40 years.).

If we stop electing the kind of people that are boring enough to appeal to everyone, maybe we'll stop getting laws that suck all the fun out of life.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[houghi]

I'm from that generation, more or less, and still think it's pretty rude to download stuff that you didn't pay for.

Not sure what generation that is. I am from one before Internet. I learned in school that copyright violations are only bad if you intend to make money from it.

Otherwise they would not told us to copy the books. The first thing I always did was making a copy of the page that the copyright was on. When shown to others, they did not understand the irony. Sure some will say "But it is for educational purposes, so then it is allowed." Well, I learn with everything I read, see and/or do.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[erroneus]

You know, that's not necessarily true. Some people, like me for example, just want to be able to connect devices through my home stereo equipment. I am the unfortunate owner of a NewEgg.com-sold Yamaha AV receiver that sports HDMI 1.0 in and out. I am not trying to be a pirate. I just want to connect my stuff through my amplifier.

This is great news for me because this will enable the creation of inexpensive [read: Unlicensed] conversion devices that will enable me to make use of my AV receiver as intended.

I really don't appreciate that copyright interests have decision-making ability to determine how I can connect my home AV system. They did it with Macrovision which disabled my ability to connect my DVD player through my VCR. (I had a cheap TV with only channel 3/4 as the input method and my VCR was using that... the VCR had RCA audio and video in, though, and I could use that to connect my very first-ever DVD player to my TV via the VCR... but no... I "might" copy a DVD to a VHS tape, so they decided to break it.) They tried to do the same thing with "broadcast flag" legislation to force all devices in the U.S. to respect the broadcast flag and not record programs from over the air. (What ever became of that? Did it fade away or return silently?)

I am a copyright violator. I'm not denying that. But my first experience with HDCP was by trying to connect my XBox360 to my TV through my AV amp which is, in my opinion, a perfectly legitimate use... before that time, as with my first experience with Macrovision, I didn't even know what HDCP was! HDCP is part of a paranoid market's desire to control how and where content is accessed. It shouldn't be their right to dictate this. They shouldn't even be able to prevent me from copying things as "fair use" is a legally acceptable reason for doing so... and yet they are allowed to attempt to block it.

I don't like it when legitimate purposes and uses are blocked because someone might use those methods for illegitimate purposes and uses.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[node 3]

Now can you indicate how widespread a problem this is? Because the whole point of this subthread is that it has had a minimal, if any, impact on adoption of HDCP enabled devices.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[MozeeToby]

How about a legal distribution system using bittorrent where you get discounts of up to some percentage point if your share ratio is high enough. Yeah, there'd probably be ways to game the system, but if someone is willing to do that then they are probably willing to just download it illegally in the first place. The idea is to put forth a model that is as convenient as illegal downloads for those of us who would prefer to pay the content owners, while still reducing distribution costs to near 0.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Translation Error]

It's true boredom may be a threat that's taken out some people over the years, but you can't ignore how many more lives it's created throughout history. ;)

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ArsenneLupin]

Actually, sex in senior citizen homes is now rampant, as are std's!

And here is the link

Re:Hooray for freedom

[AK Marc]

I disagree on all points. Do you have any actual numbers, or did you just make up numbers in your head that proved your assumptions right? I've worked with content creation, hosting, and distribution, and my personal experience is the exact opposite of your assertion.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[BitterOak]

In some states, in others, the mere possession without an obvious reason to have them such as being a licensed and bonded locksmith, is a felony.

Which states?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[hawguy]

And you're not even thinking about the whole cost of physical media. Not only do you have to pay for the cost of physically manufacturing the things, but then there's the cost of shipping it to your retailers, and the cost of the retailer owning and maintaining a warehouse, and a shop. All that sort of thing gets absorbed into the final retail price too.

Digital distribution should be miles upon miles cheaper.

The poster I was replying to already made that distinction - he was comparing the cost of the distribution network to physical product creation:

The cost of maintaining a distribution network -- be it servers in a data center, theaters in malls across the country, or warehouses and trucks -- far exceeds the cost of manufacturing a physical article in bulk

So I was comparing the cost of electronic distribution only to the cost of creating the physical media. Which, even ignoring the costs associated with physical product, makes the point that electronic distribution is orders of magnitude cheaper than physical product.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[hawguy]

Netflix already claims to stream 720p content over a 5mbps connection. I don't think most consumers are as picky about TV resolution as the typical Slashdot reader. I regularly stream Netflix movies to my 37" 1080i capable TV and have no complaints about the picture quality. My parents (who I use an indicator of mainstream demand) are quite happy with the 480i content they get on their pre-HD tv. They even thought they were getting HD because they kept seeing all of the HD ads from their cable company even though their TV is not capable of HD. I'd bet that most people are like that -- if Netflix tells them it's HD, they'll believe it regardless of how compressed the video is or what the actual resolution is -- 480i 720p 1080i 1080p is just a mismatch of numbers and letters for most people, they don't *really* understand it. And there's nothing to stop a provider from taking a 480i stream and upconverting to 1080p and claiming it's HD -- many people will "see" the increased picture quality even if it's not there.

I have a blu-ray player but use it for streaming Netflix 80% of the time, another 15% I use it for DVD's that aren't available on streaming and the remaining 5% I watch Blu-rays. I just don't see any big advantage in Blu-ray. Slightly better picture quality yes, but at the expense of slower load times, and even more previews and other "features" that are harder to skip over than on DVD.

Maybe 2K or 4K will be more compelling, but since a 4K TV costs around $50K - $500K today, 4K in the home is at least 5 - 10 years away. Especially considering that I'd want a much bigger TV so I could take advantage of the 4K resolution. I doubt that even a 50" TV is big enough to take advantage of 4K at normal viewing distances.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[DinDaddy]

I intentionally avoided laptops with BluRay drives and TPM.

Lots of people don't like the prequels, but that's not really relevant.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[penguinchris]

Regarding your last paragraph, please no. I've stumbled across Second Life "movies" and other machinima enough to know this is not a good idea ;)

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Posting=!Working]

Pretty much anyone who wants marijuana can get it anywhere in this country. This will not change the availability by much. This will be kinda like having ATM's at gas stations now instead of just at banks as it used to be. It's more convenient, but was by no means impossible before.

Prisons are overcrowded now, this will just bring them back to crowded.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[AK Marc]

I have a simpler view. The law states that copyrights are for a limited time and exist solely for getting the most possible valuable content into the Public Domain. Anything else is unconstitutional. If the laws are unconstitutional, they are invalid, so it isn't illegal to download. Rude, maybe. But then, the US is good about having the philosophy that if someone is rude to you, you act rudely back.

What needs to be done is to require, by law, all DRM will automatically disable itself if the enabling server is offline or the maximum time the copyright could be valid for is reached. Yes, I know that will make it virtually useless, but anything less and the DRM violates copyright by preventing the material from entering the Public Domain upon its expiration. The only possible exception I see to that is if a completely DRM-free copy, along with all source code, were to be submitted to the Library of Congress. Then, upon expiration, that copy would be made publicly available. If suhc registration isn't taken, then any item sold with DRM shouldn't be covered by copyright, patent, or any other IP law, as it isn't conforming to the Constitutional requirements of copyright. Oh, and I'd require the company submitting the DRM-free copy of the software so they can sell DRM versions also pay the storage fees and such for the LOC to store and distribute it. If you don't want to pay the fees, then don't use DRM.

DRM is a broken means of treating public data like a trade secret. You can't sell a trade secret on the open market and have it still be a trade secret. But that's what the companies want. They want trade secret status when it's best for them, copyright status when that's best, patents when those are best, and so on. But those are all mutually exclusive. Just like they want it to be both a sale and a license at the same time, with the features of each they choose to the exclusion of all others. It's unfair and illegal. Bu, unfortunately, the power behind the corporations greatly exceeds the power behind the consumers (despite there being a 100% overlap between the two groups), so the laws are not enforced as written and intended.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[DinDaddy]

Exactly. This is why the word "or" appears in B.

For GP to be correct it would read A) . . . or; B). . . or; C)

Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to explain why the RIAA have not had criminal charges brought against a single downloader.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[AK Marc]

It is not legal for medicine in California. The FBI could arrest every doctor and patient. It's a currently non-enforced law at the federal level, but still quite illegal. I get into the same discussions with people about Alaska. It's "decriminalized." That's not legal. It's still illegal. If they catch you with a roll of toilet paper, that's legal. They'll give it back. If they catch you with a small amount of marijuana, they'll take it. They'll not give it back. They will report the crime to the federal government. They could, but don't, press charges for state or local violations. It is illegal under multiple laws and multiple jurisdictions, and you will lose your confiscated illegal drugs and be referred to another jurisdiction (and that will show up on your criminal record). But you won't go to jail. That's not "legal." That's "illegal but mostly unprosecuted" AKA "decriminalized." Still 100% illegal, just like medical marijuana in CA, or even recreational if the ballot initiative passes. But the state won't be enforcing the law, just the feds, and they currently don't bother.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[DinDaddy]

So if I download an MP3 of a song, it's not stealing as long as I acknowledge I did not create the song?

Sense 2 pretty plainly applies to taking credit for the work of another. Appropriate is not the same thing as "make a copy of".

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Books, yes, I believe so. I only found this out beacuse I was shopping around on Amazon the other day, looking for books from a particular author. I live in Australia, and have downloaded heaps of books from Amazon, no troubles. Then I came across a book I wanted to read, went to buy it, and Amazon kindly informed me that this book was not for sale in my region! Sucks if you ask me.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[AK Marc]

And cotton, and political parties. And alcohol.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[cheekyjohnson]

Wait, someone is stealing a DVD from someone else? If so, then yes, that would indeed hurt someone because they've lost something. If they're just copying data, then they're not taking anything. That would be called copying.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[cheekyjohnson]

"which may or may not affect the income of the person who holds the government rights to the work."

Everyone is guilty of "stealing potential profit." Saying that it hurts someone is just idiotic (not that you did say that, though).

Re:Hooray for freedom

[blarkon]

Hope you don't like stuff like BattleStar Galactica, Stargate, Warehouse 13, Star Trek or basically any Sci Fi. That's the stuff that's expensive to make. That's the stuff that you and your mates download and never pay for by watching advertisements and that's the first stuff that will go when cheap and nasty is all that's left.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[petermgreen]

No one who is complaining about HDCP is trying to pirate. Cracking HDCP is utterly useless for pirates, and HDCP doesn't stop anything they're trying to do.
What HDCP does (and thanks to the DMCA and it's clones will continue to do to a large extent even now it's cracked) is prevent the open sale of devices that can capture and record the stream from a protected device.

Cracking the encryption on the source directly also falls foul of various laws and so you won't see consumer devices that can do that either.

The result of HDCP along with the dropping of component (already happened for sky TV here, planned for blu-ray in the not too distant future) is that people who want to make copies for thier friends or record stuff from cable/sat and keep more of it than thier box can store will be largely limited to doing it in SD.

P.S. since there is no real way to measure "casual copying" I doubt anyone knows what proportion of piracy happens through that method.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Sparr0]

I have HDMI hardware without HDCP. I refuse to buy HDCP-enabled hardware (or any other sort of hardware DRM that isn't broken). Until now, that is, since if this is true then HDCP is broken and I don't have to worry about it any more.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[thunderclap]

Get this through your head: The cost of maintaining a distribution network -- be it servers in a data center, theaters in malls across the country, or warehouses and trucks -- far exceeds the cost of manufacturing a physical article in bulk. And the cost of CREATING content exceeds them both.

Thats not the problem, and never was. Its the management who insists on a 500% increase for the sole purpose of feeding their own bloated sense of entitlement.If they were paid for what they actually contribute things would be back to 1930s prices.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[thunderclap]

A DVD is a tangible good, no different than a book.

Have they implemented a region scheme for books? Can a book be rendered illegible by a scratch? Is there some scheme in place to prevent you from quoting an except from a book verbatim?

Yes, yes and yes. Does any of this affect its use? No.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[petermgreen]

All HDCP really does is placate ignorant studio bosses whilst making things more costly for the consumer.
The other thing HDCP does is push casual copying to SD only. Why can't you just go out and buy an uncrippled HDMI to HDD/bluray recorder for your AV stack? because to make one that was actually useful would require making it decrypt HDCP. Add in the DMCA (and DMCA-alike laws that have popped up around the developed world) and even with HDCP cracked it would almost certainly be illegal to use it to make such a product. If you want to keep a HD copy of something longer than your locked down DVR has space to keep it and/or past the life of your locked down DVR your options are very limited (and at least here in the UK component is no longer being fitted on new sky+ HHD boxes so that doesn't provide a workaround either for many peopel).

The serious pirates currently rip the media direct onto computers because it's quick and gives the best quality copies and currently the pirates are mostly ahead in the arms race of blu-ray protection vs it's crackers but ultimately i'd expect them to use whatever avenue is open to them.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ngg]

I wouldn't say that the cost of creating content is negligible. A friend of mine is currently trying raise money to produce a high-production-values science fiction miniseries. (shameless plug) From what I understand, $10k per episode (which I wouldn't call negligible) is a pretty shoestring budget for that sort of thing, even without paying the talent while it gets off the ground.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[muphin]

you do realise if you bought a legitimate copy, you are allowed to crack the CSS for fair use, such as buying a pirated copy to play on devices not supported by the original DVD, aslong as you have the original DVD.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[burroughsj1]

I can certainly understand how you might look at it that way, but that simply isn't how to read a statute. This is a list of disjunctive elements, any of which can suffice to fulfill the statute. It would be constructed very differently if it meant "a and b or c." You need only look a little farther down to (3) see an example of this. If you still aren't convinced, you might look at the history of the statute. 2005 Amendments. Subsec. (a). Pub.L. 109-9, 103(a), rewrote subsec. (a), which formerly read:

"(a) Criminal Infringement.--Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either--
"(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
"(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000,

shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement."

This makes it clear that meeting any of the conditions is enough. When you see a list like this, the word joining the final two items shows the relationship of all. This makes sense, since it's the same way in ordinary speech and writing. Another illustration from Title 17:

For purposes of section 411, a work is a "United States work" only if--
(1) in the case of a published work, the work is first published--
(A) in the United States;
(B) simultaneously in the United States and another treaty party or parties, whose law grants a term of copyright protection that is the same as or longer than the term provided in the United States;
(C) simultaneously in the United States and a foreign nation that is not a treaty party; or
(D) in a foreign nation that is not a treaty party, and all of the authors of the work are nationals, domiciliaries, or habitual residents of, or in the case of an audiovisual work legal entities with headquarters in, the United States;

If we follow your principle here, something is only a "United States work" if it is either "a, b, and c," or "d". Clearly, this would be wrong.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[GWRedDragon]

What about composing music?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[RocketRabbit]

Actually creating music is the cheapest part of the equation.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[sg_oneill]

You clearly are not watching the sort of money being spent on creating movies or games these days.

100mil or even more for some. Thats not trivial.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[MichaelSmith]

Its more like the set of security screw driver bits in my tool box. I can use them to open devices which I own, which have been secured against tampering. In this case the security was in place to protect the warranty provider.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[MichaelSmith]

I don't think that's actually accurate in most jurisdictions. Possession of "Burglary Tools" is what I call (I don't know the real name) a "rider offense"

Here in Australia possesion of child pornography seems to get added on a lot, though it is often dropped at a later stage, once they actually go through the pictures.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[burroughsj1]

Not so; see my reply below.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[DaleSwanson]

"The average age of a House Member is now 56 years and for a Senator, 61.7 years."

Today's average Senator was 22 in 1970. The average congressman was 16. The current generation of lawmakers are from the hippie generation (or younger), which had very liberal attitudes towards drugs. Notice that we still have very draconian drug laws.

Perhaps those who pursue a political career are far removed from the general population. Perhaps no one wants to be the first to propose some liberal idea, and thus activly vote against how they actually feel. Whatever the reason, the prevailing attitude of a generation in their youth is no indicator of how they will act when they are in power.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[kimvette]

Yes, I do realize that as I have read the exclusion clauses in the DMCA. However, that doesn't mean that when I buy a Blu-Ray disc, that I can play the movie in Linux without first loading up DVD Fab, ripping the Blu-Ray disc to hard drive, and THEN play the decrypted files. Yeah, that's convenient, and SO superior to the genuine product (NOT).

It's pretty pathetic when the counterfeit product (identical apart from DRM) is superior to the real thing. One should not have to contend with bypassing CSS or any other DRM mechanism for the purpose of exercising one's guaranteed right of first sale.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Twinbee]

Exactly. I'd say that was more important.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[uglyduckling]

My Sky+ box that I got 4 months ago included written instructions (from Sky, just to be clear) on how to connect a VCR to the Sky box to archive recordings. It seems some media companies are only hampered technically by this and not in principle - ideally HDCP would never have been developed and implemented in the first place, but having it cracked is second best.

I see what you're saying, but my observation in the UK has been that since the roll-out of Freeview (DVB-T) most people just don't manually time-shift programs any more, even though it's always been possible to connect a VCR to a digibox. I think we will hopefully see a proliferation of grey market boxes that remove HDCP for those who do want an option to archive material. Personally I can't be bothered to spend the time it takes to do that - my time is too valuable to waste a weekend copying recordings in real time - I'd rather just by the DVD.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[somersault]

Irony much?

I didn't suggest what direction things should take, I said it's stupid suggesting that being able to use non-licensed or buggy AV equipment in your home is anything like killing thousands of people. It's not even remotely morally wrong. So it's not a reductio ad absurdum analogy. It's not an analogy at all. It's just bullshit.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[dave420]

Yes, but making a copy of the DVD's contents doesn't deprive anyone of any property.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[petermgreen]

My Sky+ box that I got 4 months ago included written instructions (from Sky, just to be clear) on how to connect a VCR to the Sky box to archive recordings
It does indeed, it seems they are prepared to let you archive over an analog SD connection (they even put in menu items to let you queue up programs for it) but with HDCP on the HDMI port and removal of component they are leaving no "legit" way to archive your recordings in HD.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[Xamataca]

We should be lobotomized too; the bloody brain's ability to store music, images, stories...

Re:Hooray for freedom

[squiggleslash]

FWIW, I'm pretty sure that most of the lawmakers currently in office are from "the generation" that grew up with cassette tapes and 3.5mm stereo-to-stereo connecting cables. They, unlike "our generation" (whatever that is) grew up in an environment in which technical controls on copying were virtually non-existent.

Also virtually every lawmaker lived during a "generation" that supposedly spent its college years smoking dope, but the latter is still illegal.

So, no, I don't think that twenty years from now us being in a situation where many lawmakers knew people who freeloaded off of Napster back in the olden days before we all started buying music compressed using 16kbps AAAC++ Protected By MacroVision(tm) HDCD(tm) (Disclaimer: the words Macrovision, HDCD, and "Protected by" are registered trademarks of Disney Trademark Lawyers Corp. All rights reserved.) will make any difference.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[TheRaven64]

But big tobacco would be the primary beneficiary of fully-legalized Marijuana. They have the infrastructure and distribution in place to produce marijuana cigarettes for less than anyone else.

And yet they lead the lobbying effort to get it banned in the first place. Why? Because growing pot is really easy, while growing tobacco is really hard. Anyone can grow it in their garden or even living room, so tobacco can't come close to competing on price, and the big tobacco companies would get a lot of competition from small growers.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[BLKMGK]

It would seem that you don't understand how DVD works if you think this allows them to make copies where they couldn't before. To make a copy all they need to do is... copy it. Crypto and all, it will play just fine on any legit BD or DVD player. HDCP has done NOTHING to hamper the professional pirates but has been no end of trouble to many home theater enthusiasts and even video professionals who have to jump through hoops to get around it doing their work.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ultranova]

In the total scope of running the business you have to decide whether and how much R&D to sink and you know this is going to ultimately affect what you have to charge for your product to make a buck.

No, it affects how much total income you need to get for that particular product to cover the R&D. You charge whatever will maximize the income, regardless of R&D costs. If even maximum expected income isn't sufficient to cover R&D, then it's not worth it to invest on developing that product.

In other words, if companies could make more money by rising their prices, they already would had done just that.

I would most definitely call this passing R&D costs on to the customer.

It isn't, since it's a fixed cost and doesn't affect the price that maximizes company's income. Per-unit cost, however, does get passed on to customer, since it affects profit per unit at particular price.

If I'm following along, your equations support this way of thinking. R&D is only a sunk cost once you make it. But deciding whether and how much investment (and in what) to make is a key aspect of running a successful business, and is a key driver of price in many industries (big pharma for example).

Obviously making correct investment decisions is the key aspect of running a succesful business. However, the R&D cost doesn't directly drive up prices for pharma; it simply acts as a barrier of entry and thus limits supply, which - combined with the extreme strong negotiation position of "you have a deadly illness and I have the only cure" - means that the maximum-income price is very high.

And regarding my background, I helped design, start and manage a business which is now a publicly traded company, so I think I'm reasonably qualified to offer an opinion on this.

So... how did you set prices? Did you try to maximize income, or did you settle for some reasonable profit?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[sycodon]

If you are selling a book,CD, DVD, etc. and someone buys one, then copies it and gives it to their friend, then they both are stealing from you, are they not?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ultranova]

However, that doesn't mean that when I buy a Blu-Ray disc, that I can play the movie in Linux without first loading up DVD Fab, ripping the Blu-Ray disc to hard drive, and THEN play the decrypted files. Yeah, that's convenient, and SO superior to the genuine product (NOT).

So ask if the guy who sold you the disinfected DVD could import some disinfected Blu-Rays as well. Or get your HD content from the Swedish supplier at 100% discount. What's the problem?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[shakuni]

I think you missed 2 points. First of all the total video content over the network is really low due to the fact that the broadband penetration is at around 20% globally. Secondly most of the content is still not HD. You and I are benefitting from this in terms of the last mile being the bottleneck. So even if just consider HD resolution, the backbone will start to get clogged as more content becomes HD and more people get on broadband. To reiterate last mile will not be the bottleneck the backbone will be. There are many more points around why 4K makes sense which have to do with interactivity (think digital zoom) and projection displays but we dont even need to go there to see why networks will be unable to keep up as they stand today.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[matmota]

Your grocery store CCTV analogy to network packet inspection would be more accurate if the store demanded to put cameras in your home, not just in their premises.

The in-store measures you mention are analogous to inspecting the packets my computer interchanges with their servers and limiting the amount of concurrent users, which they can do without bugging my communications with other people.

(I realize that you say that "society in general" might not care about it anyway, not necessarily that you would agree with it.)

Re:Hooray for freedom

[ConceptJunkie]

And the cost of creating content is negligible, as Jamendo is proof of.

There is a lot of cool stuff on Jamendo, but I know those artists put a lot of time, effort and investment of equipment into their work. It may be negligible for creating some kinds of music, but for most music, movies, software, and any other content, this is simply not so. Also you're making the same mistake a lot of businesses and all of the government make: That people's time has little or no value. And frankly, at least for the kind of music I enjoy, I would not expect to find much worthwhile content created by people who don't have a huge amount of experience... years or even decades. That's not only a tremendous financial investment (or I should say risk, since "starving artist" is a common term for a good reason), but a tremendous investment in energy as well. Real art is not cheap.

If I, as a software developer, were to take off three months to write a book, something I would dearly love to do, you're talking tens of thousands of dollars of cost. Would I have a reasonable expectation of recouping that in sales, assuming I could even take an extended unpaid leave from my job which is probably not possible? Not without prior experience in publishing, and even then, I would never bet on it.

I've also composed, recorded and produced music in the past and it's very time-consuming to do it right, and time (as well as energy) is not something I have a lot of, so the cost would be prohibitive to me to do anything of any amount of ambition.

So I would not consider the cost of creating anything to be negligible and I fully sympathize with, and support, content creators wanting their due remuneration.

The cost of content might be negligible for a large company but for the individuals who actually do the work, the cost is enormous, and individuals, or small groups of them, are who we care about because that's where real innovation and creativity come from.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[DavidTC]

Uh, sorta.

There might be a short-term price increase, but if demand is constant, the supply will correct itself as non-marginal producers will produce more. Increased costs don't magically lower the supply forever. If the market is feasible for companies to operate in at all, it's feasible for more companies to operate in.

Granted, this can take rather a long time. Of course, it can take a rather long time to start, too! It takes companies a while to get out of manufacturing that has become less profitable, so it will take a long time for supply to go down...and usually someone's figured that out and stepped in with a new supply. (Hell, half the time, the latter just bought the former's factory.)

And, in the broader sense, everything is passed on to the consumer. And businesses. And the government. We don't have some magical economy where parts of it don't affect other parts.

'Costs will be passed on to the consumer' is one of those statements that is true, false, and meaningless.

But the people repeating 'passed on to consumers' always seem to have this image of companies going 'Oh, we've decided our profits should be 20%, so if it costs us 5% more to operate, we should raise all prices by 5% to make sure our profits are the same', which is a totally delusional way about thinking how companies operate. If they could raise prices by 5%, they already would have.

At most, after a tax increase on them, six months down the road there will be a slightly diminished supply because the tax increase put other people out of business and they can slightly raise the price. They are not, in any real sense, 'passing on' what was done to them. They are reacting to what was done to some other company.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[DavidTC]

The result of HDCP along with the dropping of component (already happened for sky TV here, planned for blu-ray in the not too distant future) is that people who want to make copies for thier friends or record stuff from cable/sat and keep more of it than thier box can store will be largely limited to doing it in SD.

Uh, no. Read what I wrote.

No copier is using HDMI streamed, encoded or decoded, to make rips. None of them.

They are ripping straight from digital cable, or satellite, or from DVD or Blueray. Yes, all those are encrypted, but, heh, whatever. HDCP is an attempt to stop a form of copying that doesn't exist, because they believed they'd already stopped copying at the source, which they had not.

For an analogy, HDCP is like welding metal on the bottom of a car, because they believed people would soon be stealing cars by crawling under them because they'd made it impossible to hotwire them from the inside. This is, um, an incorrect belief about how cars are stolen, and thus a rather pointless security measure. (With the added bonus of people figuring out a way around the metal plate for fun.)

And, thanks to current technology making it so hard, there's almost no 'casual copying' of television already. There are dedicated copiers, who rip a specific set of shows, and then hand them off to a release group, where they get to the world fairly quickly. Practically no one's ripping and trading TV shows with their friends.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[DavidTC]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'not necessarily true'.

The grandparent seemed to think that people complaining about HDCP were people who wanted to make illegal copies, which he called 'trying to pirate'. ('pirate' is a bit confusing in this context, as means producing or consuming copyright violations, which is why I tend to use the word 'copier' to mean 'producing'.)

Those copiers don't care about HDCP, as they've got some cable tuner that produces what they need in their computer. Tapping into an encrypted HDMI stream, decoding it, and capturing it that way is just silly.

You, OTOH, don't sound like you're trying to make illegal copies at all. You're just trying to play stuff on television.

That stuff might, sometimes, be illegal copies, but, as I mentioned, HDCP has no idea of the source of videos you're playing on your computer. It isn't some 'copyright violation detector'...HDMI is supposed to work for you, and it's not.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[cheekyjohnson]

No, because the first person bought it from you (you willingly sold it to him), and then the second person merely received a copy that the first person made (meaning he didn't steal an extra copy, he made a new one). Where's did anyone take anything in this situation?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[sycodon]

The second person should have bought it from me. That's revenue lost to me.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[cheekyjohnson]

Oh, a "potential profit" argument, huh? You can't take something someone doesn't have. You can't take something that only exists in the future of an alternate reality where your product was bought.

Let's say that a potential customer of two businesses decides to go to one business instead of going to the other business to buy one or more products. If that person had gone to the second business instead of going to the first business to buy product(s), the second business would have had more money. They should have bought the product(s) from the second business. That's revenue lost to them. Therefore, both the customer of the first business and the first business itself stole potential profit from the second business.

Let's say that a customer who bought a product from a business decides that he/she doesn't like it, and decides to tell all of his/her friends that were considering buying this product not to buy it. Hearing his/her pleas, they ultimately decide not to buy it. If he/she hadn't decided to tell his/her friends not to buy this product, they likely would have bought the product. That's revenue lost to the business. Therefore, the informant who told his/her friends not to buy the product and the friends themselves (if they bought the product, the business would have had more money) stole potential profit away from the business.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[sycodon]

The recording on the CD (is) YOUR intellectual property.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[cheekyjohnson]

What? This still doesn't explain how someone copying data hurts you in the slightest. The fact that you think that it's your "intellectual property" doesn't change anything.

"YOU are out all that money"

So were the people in my examples. Your "potential profit" argument doesn't make any sense. If it were illegal to "steal" potential profit, everyone would be guilty of this. You can't steal something that someone doesn't originally have. Especially things that only exist in a future of an alternate dimension where they received more profits.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[sycodon]

Just so I'm clear on this.

If you wrote a book and someone bought it. And then if they had some machine that would duplicate the book and they just gave it away, you'd be OK with that?

Al those people just got YOUR book for free and you received no income for it.

It's no different copying a CD, just a bit harder without the magic machine

Re:Hooray for freedom

[cheekyjohnson]

I won't defend illogical arguments for personal gain. The "potential profit" argument really doesn't make any sense. I don't have any problem with people who buy software, but people need to recognize that nothing is actually being taken and the author isn't actually hurt, as they lost nothing that they already had. If you like the software, it's always nice to support the author by giving them money.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[sycodon]

I'm sure that Microsoft, Apple, IBM.HP, etc. etc. would disagree with you. As would any reasonable person who understands markets and intellectual property rights.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[cheekyjohnson]

"I'm just going to state that you don't understand the world and not even bother trying to refute your argument!"

Well done. Not surprising, however. You still didn't explain how it's possible to steal from something that only exists in the future of an alternate dimension where the person that owned that object received more money for their product.

"I'm sure that Microsoft, Apple, IBM.HP, etc. etc. would disagree with you."

They're giant corporations whose sole intent is to make money. Of course they would disagree with me!

"As would any reasonable person who understands markets and intellectual property rights."

I'm sure you've stolen plenty of potential profit from many, many businesses just by not giving them your money. To avoid this, you'd have to visit every business in the world and give them all of your money, or else you're obviously 'stealing' their potential profit.

Any "reasonable" person would understand that pirates are merely a symptom of an illogical capitalistic society. The pirates, in reality, haven't taken anything. You can keep repeating that the software is the intellectual property of the author(s), but that won't change the fact that they weren't actually hurt by the pirates.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[cheekyjohnson]

Are you going to respond to my argument or not? All you're doing is attacking me without strengthening your own argument.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[petermgreen]

And, thanks to current technology making it so hard
Casual copying (or just making archival copies for youself) of TV in SD is pretty trivial, press play on your DVR and press record on your VCR or DVD recorder. If your TV provider is mean enough to use macrovision you will need a box to remove that but at least round here they don't afaict. It's a bit time consuming but you can do it while you are watching the programs anyway.

In HD otoh it is indeed a nightmare and HDCP (thanks to the DMCA an similar laws even a cracked protection scheme is usefull against equipment manufacturers) along with the gradual killing off of component will help keep it that way.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[DavidTC]

Casual copying (or just making archival copies for youself) of TV in SD is pretty trivial, press play on your DVR and press record on your VCR or DVD recorder.

...at which point you will give the copy to a single other person.

Casual copying of television by physical media is so small as to functionally not exist, statistically speaking.

Casual copying of television by electronic means is, OTOH, so 'difficult' that it's much easier to just tell the other person to download the TV show from some other source. Or download it yourself and give that to the other person. (And by 'difficult', it's not actually that hard. It's just much easier to do it the other way.)

In HD otoh it is indeed a nightmare

Pirating in HD is just as easy as in SD. You just check a different checkbox.

It doesn't matter if component gets 'phased out' or what hardware is illegal in America. The copiers are like two dozen guys, with specialized hardware, and they'll just keep their old, working stuff, or buy from overseas.

Only they need the ability to copy. Everyone else just needs to know how to download a file.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[schlick]

A DVD is a tangible good, no different than a book.

Have they implemented a region scheme for books?

Yes, it is called 'language'.

Can a book be rendered illegible by a scratch?

Water can ruin most books, and water covers 78% of the planet.

Is there some scheme in place to prevent you from quoting an except from a book verbatim?

no, and why should there be?

Re:Hooray for freedom

[schlick]

Because it's always good to make it easier to break the law and steal movies.

The short answer is yes, it is better to make it easier to "break the law" and "steal movies."

By "breaking the law" you are actually just diminishing the artificial right that has been temporarily granted to the copyright holder.

That right (copyright) was never intended to be more important than an individuals natural right to share ideas and information.

Copyright's purpose is to give additional incentive to people who create, to share that creation, by allowing them an artificially stronger (than it would normally be) right to decide who to share the creation with.

That right directly conflicts every individuals natural rights to communicate and share ideas. There needs to be a balance.

I think there are things we need to reconsider.

In the case of music, what has this type of incentive provided us? Has copyright actually given us better music? What kind of musician (composer, player, singer etc.) has this form of copyright favored evolutionarily? I would argue that over all the quality of musician has gotten worse as copyright has grown in scope and strength.

Thus we need to reconsider how music is protected by copyright.

Other media needs to be subject to the same scrutiny as well.

To simply chant the mantra that "it's the law" is basically an appeal to tradition, and not a valid argument for why it is wrong to copy things. It is a valid argument in favor of not copying things, but that is not the same as saying copying things is "wrong."

I would hope that most Americans, while not always willing to exercise it, would still recognize that civil disobedience is not immoral and that blind faith in "the law" is not something one should be proud of.

Re:Hooray for freedom

[sycodon]

What crap.

Chew on this clueless: If a composer or performer doesn't get paid for their music, then they won't compose or perform. Same for writers, actors, etc.

If you invested a year writing a program that performed wonderful and needed functions, would you sell it or just give it away?

Because after the first person bought it, they could just copy it and hand it out to everyone else for free according to your logic.

Odd

[DavidR1991]

On twitter, the original link to the pastebin is from 'IntelGlobalPR'. Is that a fake account, hacked, or is this actually a publicity stunt from Intel for something?

Re:Odd

[bsDaemon]

Some one had made a similarly named account with regards to BP during the height of the oil spill issue and used it to basically be a dick about various things, or so I heard on NPR. I quit using twitter months ago. I would expect its a fake account name. That doesn't sound like the sort of name that the "official" Intel twitter account would use.

Re:Odd

[Kjella]

Do you seriously have to ask? Does the moderators really think this interesting? Hello, Intel is a HDCP licensee. That typically means you've signed one of the most anal contracts that make your standard EULA look like a saint. Intel would be sued for about a kazillion dollars for breach of contract if they ever did anything like that. No, they're not certifiably insane.

Re:Odd

[JHromadka]

On twitter, the original link to the pastebin is from 'IntelGlobalPR'. Is that a fake account, hacked, or is this actually a publicity stunt from Intel for something? Probably an homage to the @BPGlobalPR satire twitter account.

Man

[The MAZZTer]

I can't wait for THIS number to be turned into a song!

Re:Man

[xtracto]

Nah, I can not wait to see Tshirts with this number... or someone's Slashdot signature ;)

Proof?

[miaDWZ]

screenshot or it didn't happen

Re:Proof?

[guruevi]

1. HDCP MASTER KEY (MIRROR THIS TEXT!)
2.
3. This is a forty times forty element matrix of fifty-six bit
4. hexadecimal numbers.
5.
6. To generate a source key, take a forty-bit number that (in
7. binary) consists of twenty ones and twenty zeroes; this is
8. the source KSV. Add together those twenty rows of the matrix
9. that correspond to the ones in the KSV (with the lowest bit
10. in the KSV corresponding to the first row), taking all elements
11. modulo two to the power of fifty-six; this is the source
12. private key.
13.
14. To generate a sink key, do the same, but with the transposed
15. matrix.
16.
17.
18. 6692d179032205 b4116a96425a7f ecc2ef51af1740 959d3b6d07bce4 fa9f2af29814d9
19. 82592e77a204a8 146a6970e3c4a1 f43a81dc36eff7 568b44f60c79f5 bb606d7fe87dd6
20. 1b91b9b73c68f9 f31c6aeef81de6 9a9cc14469a037 a480bc978970a6 997f729d0a1a39
21. b3b9accda43860 f9d45a5bf64a1d 180a1013ba5023 42b73df2d33112 851f2c4d21b05e
22. 2901308bbd685c 9fde452d3328f5 4cc518f97414a8 8fca1f7e2a0a14 dc8bdbb12e2378
23. 672f11cedf36c5 f45a2a00da1c1d 5a3e82c124129a 084a707eadd972 cb45c81b64808d
24. 07ebd2779e3e71 9663e2beeee6e5 25078568d83de8 28027d5c0c4e65 ec3f0fc32c7e63
25. 1d6b501ae0f003 f5a8fcecb28092 854349337aa99e 9c669367e08bf1 d9c23474e09f70
26.
27. 3c901d46bada9a 40981ffcfa376f a4b686ca8fb039 63f2ce16b91863 1bade89cc52ca2
28. 4552921af8efd2 fe8ac96a02a6f9 9248b8894b23bd 17535dbff93d56 94bdc32a095df2
29. cd247c6d30286e d2212f9d8ce80a dc55bdc2a6962c bcabf9b5fcbe6f c2cfc78f5fdafa
30. 80e32223b9feab f1fa23f5b0bf0d ab6bf4b5b698ae d960315753d36f 424701e5a944ed
31. 10f61245ebe788 f57a17fc53a314 00e22e88911d9e 76575e18c7956e c1ef4eee022e38
32. f5459f177591d9 08748f861098ef 287d2c63bd809e e6a28a6f5d000c 7ae5964a663c1b
33. 0f15f7167f56c6 d6c05b2bbe8800 544a49be026410 d9f3f08602517f 74878dc02827f7
34. d72ef3ea24b7c8 717c7afc0b55a5 0be2a582516d08 202ded173a5428 9b71e35e45943f
35.
36. 9e7cd2c8789c99 1b590a91f1cffd 903dca7c36d298 52ad58ddcc1861 56dd3acba0d9c5
37. c76254c1be9ed1 06ecb6ae8ff373 cfcc1afcbc80a4 30eba7ac19308c d6e20ae760c986
38. c0d1e59db1075f 8933d5d8284b92 9280d9a3faa716 8386984f92bfd6 be56cd7c4bfa59
39. 16593d2aa598a6 d62534326a40ee 0c1f1919936667 acbaf0eefdd395 36dbfdbf9e1439
40. 0bd7c7e683d280 54759e16cfd9ea cac9029104bd51 436d1dca1371d3 ca2f808654cdb2
41. 7d6923e47f97b5 70e256b741910c 7dd466ed5fff2e 26bec4a28e8cc4 5754ea7219d4eb
42. 75270aa4d3cc8d e0ae1d1897b7f4 4fe5663e8cb342 05a80e4a1a950d 66b4eb6ed4c99e
43. 3d7e9d469c6165 81677af04a2e15 ada4be60bc348d dfdfbbad739248 98ad5986f3ca1f
44.
45. 971d02ad

Re:Proof?

[xtracto]

Cryptome has an interesting reading on the weakness of the key

Re:Proof?

[troll8901]

I propose mirroring this text onto the following websites:

• SCO
• RIAA

Anyone has better ideas?

Re:Proof?

[imakemusic]

377. ???
378. Loss of profits.

Re:Proof?

[Z00L00K]

379. Implement something new that's so complex that only one or two hardware manufacturers are able to build it at an incredible cost to the consumers.

Re:Proof?

[NotPeteMcCabe]

376. d66279737bc807 4dd946eb19d81b 4e9c473b5e9846 5a016f7ca86f9d d02c2b7dca744a

377. ???

378. Profit!

Re:Proof?

[CyberDragon777]

Whoa, an ASCII screenshot!.

Re:Proof?

[TangoMargarine]

380. No one manages to hack it for the next five years. They blame piracy anyway.

Isn't this like AACS

[jeffmeden]

Is there really just one master key? Or is this merely one of the keys a vendor would use to create compatible equipment, meaning the next "critical firmware update" to any HDCP hardware will include a blacklist entry for this key...

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[jdong]

No, this is actually the master key that you can use to generate vendor keys -- changing this key would break compatibility with existing HDCP equipment!

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[leuk_he]

If i look at the pastbin post this is just a complex way to publish 40 keys, not ONE master key

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[the_other_chewey]

If i look at the pastbin post this is just a complex way to publish 40 keys, not ONE master key

It's the master key matrix - not an HDCP key by itself, but THE key to generate all valid HDCP keys.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[chefmonkey]

No, it's a complex way to publish 147,846,528,820 keys ( http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=40+C+20 ).

  The initial input to the algorithm is a 40-bit random integer, selected so that the binary representation contains exactly 20 zeros and 20 ones. These bits are then used to select rows in the matrix.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[AmiMoJo]

It is the master key from which all others are generated.

You can already record HDCP protected video via a USB converter that uses a legit manufacturer's key, but in theory they can ban that key on future discs. With the master key that isn't a problem, you just generate a new device key and issue a firmware update.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[goodmanj]

... but since the source matrix is 40x40, if you know 40 linearly independent identifier/key pairs, you can deduce the entire matrix.

As I understand it, the only way to avoid disclosure of the entire matrix is to avoid releasing more than 40 keys ... so of those 147,846,528,820 possible keys, only 40 are useable. So it really is a complex way to publish 40 keys.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[scsirob]

As if that would surprize anyone.. I have bought a Sony blue-ray player with a Sony home theatre receiver and a Sony TV and they were incompatible. Simply would not handshake. Manufacturers go to such an extent to protect Hollywood's precious content that they no longer give a rats a** what implications this has for their customers.

We must be all thieves, or else no sane inductry would do this to their customers.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[chefmonkey]

I haven't looked at the algorithm they use to combine the rows. If the resulting keys can be "unmixed" to find the original rows, then the system was designed by someone too incompetent to take home a paycheck for cryptography work in good conscience.

I'm not sympathizing with the designers of the system, but -- c'mon, guys. This is easy to avoid. If you want to use the "one key to bind them all" model, simply issue RSA key pairs signed by a single authority.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[ultranova]

Is there really just one master key?

This is the Master Key. Forged by the RIAA in the fires of Mount Doom. Taken by an unknown hacker from the hand of RIAA itself.

Jeffmede, the RIAA must never find it.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[sexconker]

Said devices are legit and use legit keys.
They do not give you the full, unaltered, digital stream.

They give you a fucked digital stream or an analog stream at a gimped resolution.

See HDFury.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[owlstead]

They were probably afraid that SHA-1 was going to be broken so badly that you cannot use any normal key derivation method. I'm currently researching this topic (key derivation), and although there are almost no real standards to speak of, this must be the idiots way to do it.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[AmiMoJo]

You are thinking of something else. I don't remember the name of the product but it was available for sale in Japan when I was there back in March. The USB connection allowed you to save a digital copy of the video onto your PC. Presumably there was some kind of video encoder in there as USB is not fast enough to capture the raw video, but they are nothing special and can be found in HD video cameras and of course normal HDMI capture devices that are used for recording things like video game footage.

It was quite expensive, IIRC about 50,000 yen.

Not entirely sure what you would use it for as all BluRay movie discs can be ripped on a PC.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[DinDaddy]

It is the master key from which all others are generated.

So if we drop this into Mount Doom, the evil of HDCP will be banished forever?

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[AmiMoJo]

It depends how ACTA works out. Say a Chinese manufacturer makes a device that decodes HDCP content but does not pay the license fee for a key. They can sell it cheaper than anyone else because the cost of the license is taken out. The US has been trying to add a clause to ACTA that would prevent that kind of product being imported.

Fortunately it looks like the EU has killed it. In the EU such a product would be perfectly legal in many countries (maybe all, not 100% sure) because circumventing copy protection for the purposes of interoperability is allowed.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[AK Marc]

When you add on the assumption that there is no communication to that authority, then what do you do? Having them all signed by a single authority is useless if you can't then check that single authority. This was a method of self-signing in such a manner that all authorized devices will be able to verify themselves against your key without you having to contact anyone else. They just didn't pay any attention to the fact that the keyspace was logarithmic (every doubling of the number of keys possible results in one more usable key, so to have 1,000,000 usable keys, they'd have to store a key that was 2^1,000,000 long and that could cause some issues). It was a great plan. With just one little flaw, and that's all it ever takes.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[mjwx]

No, this is actually the master key that you can use to generate vendor keys -- changing this key would break compatibility with existing HDCP equipment!

But you make it sound as if the content lords are afraid to do that in exchange for lengthening their false sense of security.

PEON: but the new discs wont work with the old player.
LORD: buy a new player, its all the fault of those filthy pirates.
LORD: oh, and the old discs wont work in the new player ether, so you'll have to re-buy them.
PEON: well I guess so.

Yes I know it includes TV's as well. So if this is to fall it will fall via the middleman, for example if Samsung decided to stop or not implement the new version of HDCP. This is a reason I will never buy AV equipment from Sony, Sony is also a copyright holder so they've got a vested interest in keeping DRM up to date.

As many others have pointed out, this does not affect the pirates one iota as the content is cracked before it even gets to the HDCP part.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[sexconker]

The devices you are thinking of do not output the original stream. This is useless to anyone wanting to illicitly copy something.

The devices are fully HDCP compliant and legit.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[AmiMoJo]

They were not primarily aimed at copying movies, rather you can capture footage from games consoles or other protected sources.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[sexconker]

They were not primarily aimed at copying movies, rather you can capture footage from games consoles or other protected sources.

Please stop making things up.
They are NOT intended to capture footage from game consoles or other "protected" devices.

1: Devices using HDCP do so in order to prevent the full resolution, digital stream from being copied. Preventing people from capturing footage from "protected" devices is exactly what HDCP is designed to PREVENT, thus any device doing this would not be sanctioned.
Devices do exist that strip HDCP and give you a digital output (either via a file or via a live signal), but these devices are degrading the signal - through compression or resizing (down). Again, these devices do not "beat" HDCP in any fashion. These devices are also pointless, because you get the same exact quality stream via component cables!

2: All game consoles to date that are HDCP capable do NOT use HDCP for games. They are HDCP compliant for their various media modes, but they do NOT wrap their output stream with HDCP when playing games.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[AmiMoJo]

It would really help if you bothered to read what I was posting.

I never said these devices were sanctioned. They are in fact unsanctioned, hence the high price and limited availability.

Many games do use HDCP on their output. Normally only game developers can produce full resolution screenshots and videos of their games and magazines/websites have to rely on what the press department provides them. They are unwilling to give up that control.

Now anyone with one of these devices can produce their own unsanctioned material, including glitches, bugs and other stuff that the publisher would rather you didn't see.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[sexconker]

Again, you're making things up.

The devices you claim to exist do NOT exist, in any quantity other than "lol, I took apart my monitor and broke it".

Game consoles do not use HDCP in game mode.
You are a liar, and you have been called out as such. Accept it.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[AmiMoJo]

I can't find a web page for that particular device, but here is an unlicensed HDCP remover:

http://www.curtpalme.com/MUX-HD.shtm

Here is a /. article, a forum post and a YouTube video about HDCP on the PS3:

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/18/197212
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zde1YxJ1YJ4
http://n4g.com/news/512474/first-ever-video-of-xcm-vbox-2/com#c-3567382

10 seconds with Google could have saved you from being proven to be a complete retard. But no, you decided to remove any doubt, and now it will be preserved for all time on the internets. I bookmarked the page just in case I need to remind you of it next time you post some bullshit.

Enjoy.

Re:Isn't this like AACS

[sexconker]

Said device takes the DEGRADED stream and upconverts it.
Derp!

You are 100% wrong in everything you ever say.

So can someone answer this:

[ihatewinXP]

How will this actually become practical?

From my understanding this breaks the HDMI cable protection, more than anything re-opening 'the analog hole' except with full digital goodness if someone hacks the firmware on a player they can then use the signal freely. Expect many more downloads from 'the usual sources' of HD content....

Will be interesting to see how the industry reacts to this. As all these machines today have upgradeable firmwares and internet connection that wont be able to totally close this break in the hardware spec itself but may cause problems for those seeking to exploit this leak. As we know these companies are more than used to harassing customers for their own interests.

I for one welcome the new freedoms that come with this. Too many devices out now based on the standard for the industry to change overnight - the cat is out of the proverbial bag.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[klingens]

Will be interesting to see how the industry reacts to this. As all these machines today have upgradeable firmwares and internet connection that wont be able to totally close this break in the hardware spec itself but may cause problems for those seeking to exploit this leak.

TFT-LCD monitors or TVs don't have upgradeable encryption firmware. Even if they had, Joe Consumer cannot upgrade his new TV so he can continue to watch HD movies. And he will be really really cranky towards Hollywood, Sony, LG, Samsung, etc if he has to pay $50 to someone who can do it for him.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[jeffmeden]

There are plenty of picture-perfect copies of digital media out there already, that's the bitterly ironic thing about DRM as it sits today; the people just trying to play by the rules are getting stuck buying more expensive, less compatible equipment while the pirates use software techniques to get whatever content they want, however they want it, with relative ease.

If HDCP didn't exist, there would still be legal battles over what kind of hardware was legal to sell (like bluray copiers, "open" DVRs, etc). If it were to go away tomorrow, the possible upside would be more software tools available to do things like media backups, software DVR of "protected" content, and more choices when it comes to what kind of TV/monitor you can use with a media source like a bluray player or cable box. Again, ironically, I wouldn't expect genuine piracy to be helped at all by this, and by and large people buying gear off the shelf at Best Buy will never know what happened.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[Haedrian]

And he will be really really cranky towards Hollywood, Sony, LG, Samsung, etc if he has to pay $50 to someone who can do it for him.

Why am I not feeling as optimistic as you?

Re:So can someone answer this:

[Coopjust]

From what I understand,the leak makes revocation useless:

"The master key allows you to recover every other key in the system and lets you decrypt [HDCP video content], impersonate a device, or create new displays and start selling HDCP compatible devices."

While [Intel and content providers] are spending millions on HDCP, he says, they will be denied the benefits of research that can help fix the technology. Ferguson predicts that a year from now, someone will post a HDCP master key on the Internet, and the money spent on the system will be wasted.

Upgrading the firmware of players to disable HDMI altogether isn't possible at this point. I'm not sure of the exact process, but since you can make new displays, you can create a device that just makes up a random one if it doesn't handshake in five seconds. Also, you can impersonate any existing device- and blocking every existing monitor on the market isn't feasible either.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[Coopjust]

Having the master key = impersonating whatever display you want or creating new ones. It would be a game of cat and mouse if hackers could only impersonate, and since hackers can also make new displays, firmware upgrading isn't a solution at all.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[Vertana]

If you hooked your HTPC to your non-HDCP compliant display, you could possibly modify your device driver to decode the HDCP encryption and be able to view content at full 1080p on your non-HDCP compliant display. Alternatively, someone might be able to implement it in hardware and provide a cheap device to lay in between your device and non-HDCP display to decode the stream on the fly. All of this... just so people can watch content at full HD on the monitor they legally paid for.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[ArsenneLupin]

Ferguson predicts that a year from now, someone will post a HDCP master key on the Internet, and the money spent on the system will be wasted.

Except it took 9 years. Yeah, but that slowness is actually a good thing, so the companies behind HDCP actually wasted nine years worth of research and marketing money instead of just one, hehe.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[JSBiff]

Let's say I have an older monitor without HDMI/HDCP (in fact, I do have a flat panel that is about 4 years old, which uses VGA and DVI inputs, and I believe does not support HDCP). Let's say I have a perfectly legit Blu-Ray movie, and a BD-ROM/RW drive, and wish to watch my movie, but I don't want to spend 500-600 to get a new monitor. Potentially, someone might be able to create a hacked driver which would allow the decoded digital video to be sent out on the DVI out of my vid card, so I could watch the movie in full HD on my older monitor, something the idiots who created the HDCP spec decided I have no right to do even if I haven't ripped off their movie.

I think the Blu-Ray people don't realize how much HDCP has actually hurt Blu-Ray sales. If a)Blu-Ray drives were a bit cheaper 2 or 3 years ago, and b) I could actually use my *perfectly good high res* monitor, I would have been buying/renting, and watching Blu-Ray movies years ago, but I'm not and won't. The Blu-Ray people seem pretty desperate to get people to buy Blu-Ray, but as far as I can tell, the industry has been having a somewhat hard time getting the public to buy. While HDCP certainly isn't the only reason, I bet it's a not insignificant reason - it makes it harder for honest, paying customers to make completely legitimate use of what the industry wants them to buy.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[Arker]

The links in the summary were useless but I dug back in Ed Feltons blog and found the relevant posts which are still possibly the best explanation around of what this means. Search for DRM and go back to page 5 on the search results or click this. Scan from the bottom up for HDCP.

In a nutshell, this key is all you need to generate every valid key, whether assigned or not. They could revoke every key but then none of the existing hardware would work. Otherwise whenever they kill your key you can just generate a new one with this data.

Seriously, though, who rips 1080dpi raw? Most pirates dont bother, even when it's easily doable. This was never about piracy.

This encryption wasnt designed to hold up against attack. It was simply designed to activate clauses of statute. Judges arent quite as technically illiterate as they were a few years ago, and XOR might be hard to defend today, but this was still designed from the get-go simply to qualify as a 'technical measure' under the DMCA rather than to actually work. Making it work would have cost too many pennies/unit. This lets them call out US Customs to bar consumer-friendly competition at the port, and the US Dept. of State to lobby (bribe/threaten) China into 'cracking down' on such businesses there.

Why bother actually 'protecting' your systems when you can do a half-assed job of it and then call in the power of the state to make it work?

Re:So can someone answer this:

[Lobachevsky]

You're forgetting that with the Master Key now revealed, it's possible to impersonate devices. You can impersonate a graphics card.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[Pentium100]

If I wanted to watch a Bluray movie legally, I would have to buy the player. However, I would want to watch the movie on my computer monitor, since it has higher resolution than SDTV. My monitor is CRT and accepts only VGA input (up to 2048x1536@80Hz, supports 1080i 60Hz and 1080p 50-60Hz), so I would also have to buy a device that cracks HDCP and converts HDMI to VGA (for example HDFury). If HDCP was not required, the player would probably have a full resolution VGA output.

Or I can just download the movie for free and watch it using my PC.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[jandrese]

Wouldn't this be useful for someone who bought a piece of hardware that subsequently had the keys revoked? You could decrypt the stream on the fly so you could still use the hardware you bought.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[h4rr4r]

There are already devices for sale that do what you want. They turn HDMI into component.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[JSBiff]

Are you sure they can unencrypt HDCP content? I thought those converters will work fine, as long as you had an unencrypted signal, but didn't work for the HDCP 'protected' content? Also, those convertors are like $250 I think. I'd rather have something in software which just spits out an unencrypted signal on the DVI-out port. Much simpler, much cheaper.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[Locke2005]

Or you could just install a BluRay reader in your PC, and BluRay watch movies in 1080p on your 27" 1920x1080 Samsung TV/monitor like I do. Much less work, really. My video card and monitor support HDMI, but I'm using DVI because it seems to be a better picture.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[Pentium100]

The fact that I would watch the Bluray movie on my computer does not change the fact that my monitor can only accept VGA signal and as such, does not support HDCP.

I assume that software Bluray players would still require HDCP and not allow VGA output.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[midicase]

Parent pretty much sums it up. As it stands now you have to buy a license to decrypt HDCP, and you get a key to do so. If you do not abide by the terms of the license, your key can get revoked and these revoked keys can be embedded in a content stream to block usage by the offending hardware. Though I am unaware of any that have been at this time.

I have in front of me a piece of hardware (that I have been developing on), that actually has a HDMI input and "may" be capable of decrypting that stream. I could then convert that stream into an IP stream, QAM, or even record to disk. However, the HDCP license forbids re-transmitting that stream over long distances in the clear or storing as such. So now this box is legally only capable of handling un-encrypted HDMI signals. I'm wondering if this information may allow devices to masquerade as a device from another manufacturer. Not that I would do that myself, but it seems that it could make "software" HDCP decryption systems more common. The software description is used loosely since much of this is currently handled in hardware or FPGA sub-systems.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[Locke2005]

It allows playback over DVI. I don't see any reason it wouldn't allow it over the VGA connector, but I haven't tried that yet. I do see your point; if it allowed playback over VGA out, that would be a gaping hole in their DRM scheme. But then, there is always an analog hole in any DRM scheme. -- what can be seen or heard by people can also be seen or heard by recording devices.

Re:So can someone answer this:

[Pentium100]

If you can get unencrypted video from the DVI connector, then HDCP is entirely pointless - why bother with standalone Bluray players and HDCP when you can get unencrypted digital video using a computer?

Re:So can someone answer this:

[Locke2005]

Maybe not as big as hole as I oreginally thought. Nobody makes a recording device with DVI input, and DVI supports HDCP just like HDMI does. In fact, the digital video for HDMI is supposed to be electrically the same as DVI-D, hence the availability of cables that convert between the two. Yeah, I'm going to have to try it with the VGA output now...

Re:So can someone answer this:

[h4rr4r]

Yes. Look for HDCP stripper.

yup

[Pojut]

Further proof that DRM is, for all intents and purposes, completely useless other than pissing off "honest" consumers.

Re:yup

[ToasterMonkey]

Further proof that DRM is, for all intents and purposes

as secure as the underlying cryptography.

Clever idea to slashdot the site with the key...

[Eunuchswear]

... so nobody can get hold of it.

Maybe a manufacturer gets my money now

[tonique]

Let's see... I have been postponing buying a blu-ray player or drive until the protection is broken. Maybe a manufacturer will get my money if this is true!

Re:Maybe a manufacturer gets my money now

[jimicus]

Unless you have the time/inclination to develop your own tools, I wouldn't rush.

CSS was broken for some time before the break went from "algorithm that we know works, here's the source" to "library for decrypting CSS and application that can use that library".

Re:Maybe a manufacturer gets my money now

[Yvan256]

CSS was broken the day IE5 became available for download.

Re:Maybe a manufacturer gets my money now

[Ultra64]

You're remembering wrong, DeCSS was released first, then the source code a month or so later.

Who revealed it

[iONiUM]

There's just one key, and they never expected this to happen? "But.. but, well, we just never expected someone to give it out. It was umpossible."

What kind of security is that? Quite frankly I hope corporations continue to be stupid, so we can continue to break their stupidity with our key mastering abilities.

Re:Who revealed it

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody had to give it out. The encryption is weak, and it has been known for a long time that it would be possible to derive the master key given data from a sufficient number of devices. I'm surprised it took this long for someone to actually do it.

Re:Who revealed it

[Kjella]

This is not the key as much as it is the key generation matrix. I'm guessing it has been reverse engineered, otherwise it'd be the biggest leak ever as only the people issuing HDCP keys should have this - not even any of the HDCP-compliant device manufacturers. This is not the same as one device key that can be revoked, it is totally and irrecoverably broken. Now is only the question if they have the balls to try getting rid of all HDCP ports and push a new standard or not.

Re:Who revealed it

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Actually the master key doesn't exist on all devices. The master key is theoretically kept private and managed by the consortium that oversees HDCP. When a new vendor comes along then the HDCP consortium generates a sub-key from the master key and assigns it to that vendor. The vendor then uses that sub-key to create "sub-sub-keys" for each device they manufacture.

If a device key is compromised then the vendor can revoke it and issue a new sub-sub-key for the device. The HDCP consortium could also revoke the sub-key for the vendor, thereby invalidating all the vendor devices, if necessary.

The problem with the HDCP encryption is that if you have enough of those device keys (50 or so according to reports) then with a bit of grunt work you can reverse-engineer the HDCP consortium master key. That's apparently what happened in this case.

Re:Who revealed it

[leuk_he]

The strange thing in Public key encryption is that you can give out a public part of a key, and it will be arithmetically very hard to get the private key for it. But i am not sure about HDCP since both parties (source and sink) need a public key.

Re:Who revealed it

[tsotha]

Assuming this is real, I'm curious to know exactly where it came from. When I worked with crypto stuff they drilled into our heads the notion that, yes, the data can be decrypted by cleverness or brute force, but almost all actual cases of security breach involved people and not algorithms.

Re:Who revealed it

[TaoPhoenix]

Pre-Net mentality at work.

1984 Called. They want their locked Whammy pattern back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_EjKKGSXus

Re:Who revealed it

[Twinbee]

Why did they bother to use weak encryption? Is it not trivial to make longer formulas etc. ?

Re:Who revealed it

[Zygamorph]

All public key encryption systems practically require both parties to have both public and private keys. Its true that you could send a "secret" message by using a public key and only someone with the matching private key could decrypt it. The problem is that in that scenario the receiver can't authenticate who the sender is. The way around this is to first encrypt the message with the sender's private key and then with the receiver's private key. Only someone with the receiver's private key can decrypt the outer "envelope" of the message and get the message still encrypted with the sender's private key. They then use the sender's public key to get the clear text. The receiver therefore "knows" that only the sender could have sent the message. Its generally used as part of a digital signature for the message.

Since public encryption/decryption is computationally intensive most systems use a private key system to encrypt the message and a public key system to encrypt the one time use private key.

Lookup symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic systems for more info.

Re:Who revealed it

[atamido]

Why did they bother to use weak encryption? Is it not trivial to make longer formulas etc. ?

There are two possible answers.

1. They didn't get smart enough people to design the system (see DVD CSS).

2. The complexity of the key system was limited so as to allow small/cheap/embedded devices to implement it with limited processing power and speed.

I'd say option 2 is more likely, but wouldn't be surprised with option 1.

Re:Who revealed it

[CBravo]

Option 3: The engineers really hated to create a good encryption scheme so they faked #1 or #2. All you have to do is sell it to a marketeer (i.e. *AA): they buy anything.

Re:Who revealed it

[Chowderbags]

3. They wanted it to be broken so they can complain to $Government that the filthy pirates keep breaking their perfectly legitimate defensive measures to protect their intellectual property. Expect stricter laws, more criminalization of even talking about breaking DRM, and a push for more "trusted computing" (trusted by big money).

Re:Who revealed it

[DragonWriter]

The way around this is to first encrypt the message with the sender's private key and then with the receiver's private key.

Minor correction: the sender encrypts with the sender's private key and the receiver's public key. The sender has no reason to have the receiver's private key. (And, in fact, if they do, then there is a serious problem, since the sender can then impersonate the sender.)

Re:Who revealed it

[AK Marc]

CSS was cracked without a person security breach. For this, there had to be a master key. Alice talks to Bob and doesn't want Charlie to know. The problem is Bob and Alice have never met before. So they go to HDCP and get a personal key that gives them two things. They now have the ability to authenticate that Bob has permission and they have a number that lets Bob know they have permission. IF that step wasn't in there, there could be no new equipment authorized for HDCP. The problem is that (from what I've read) after somewhere around 40 of the Bob/Alice keys, you can derive the master key used. With the master key, you can generate your own keys to put on unauthorized hardware. Thus, the intention of blocking Charlie (the evil copier) can no longer be fulfilled because he can generate a personal key that Alice and Bob are programmed to believe. And the system is broken, and no one had to tell anyone else a single thing.

It was a known fault with these types of systems. I don't know if they hoped no one would notice, or if the people that put HDCP together didn't care. Either way, it looks very much like an algorithmic breach, much like CSS was broken by breaching the hardware, rather than people.

Re:Who revealed it

[marcosdumay]

Number 2 requires the development of new, specialized hardware, while using common, know good crypto would make them able to use stock chips. I'd go with number 1.

Re:Who revealed it

[tsotha]

CSS was cracked without a person security breach.

That's true. However, as I understand it the reason they were able to crack it so easily was the Xing player stored its keys in plaintext in violation of its CSS license. I didn't mean to imply that every breach was malicious.

Re:Who revealed it

[toddestan]

3) As far as the DMCA is concerned it doesn't matter how good or bad the encryption is, breaking it is still illegal. And the plan all along is to use the DMCA as the weapon, not the encryption itself.

Content Freedom?

[wilsone8]

Why is I when I read "content freedom", I have a feeling you mean your ability to copy movies from torrent and avoid having to pay anyone for the huge investment and hard work they put into making movies. Sure, that's not what everyone will use it for, but it seems like most will. That's not something to cheer about in my book, but to each his own.

Re:Content Freedom?

[Cyberax]

How come movie industry hasn't died after the invention of VHS tapes?

Re:Content Freedom?

[ThatMegathronDude]

Hint: home players gave the movie industry a huge boost, despite their whining about people pirating everything under the sun with easy home recorders.

Re:Content Freedom?

[Joe U]

No, it is something to cheer about.

The day is coming where I can finally hook up my media center to my TV without having the sound or video go out because HDCP decided it didn't like the fact the computer goes to sleep.

I'm sick of restrictions on what I paid for. If I want to watch a movie on my computer instead of on my TV, I should not have to jump through hoops to do it.

DRM is about having me buy multiple copies of things I already have, it's not just about protection, it's about additional profits.

Re:Content Freedom?

[ledow]

Because, as in all things, most people are honest.

If I want a movie, I buy it. That might mean buying it second-hand, or buying it from a friend, but I don't do the shady deals in pubs with strangers. Most people are like me, and most people actually pay for stuff. VCR's and DVD-R's are, of course, used for piracy - because they are recording devices. But if you didn't have those, people have camcorders, or webcams, or any one of a million and one recording devices.

The recording device, or the technology built into any recorded media, does not stop anything, at all, ever, except genuine, honest customers doing something quite reasonable. Anyone who wants an illegal copy can get one in any one of a million different ways. Hell, the early DVD rippers basically screenshotted the screen of a DVD player so many times a second and recorded the audio. It's not hard at all, because of the "analog hole". But the only people who bother to go to that amount of effort are established pirates and those who genuinely believe they are doing something quite reasonable and should be allowed to do it.

Despite popular opinion, that's NOT the majority of people.

Re:Content Freedom?

[Spatial]

Haha. That freedom is one we already have.

Re:Content Freedom?

[size1one]

A 2-pass 1080p x264 rip+encode takes much longer than the runtime of the movie, unless you have a very nice computer. You could rent any movie you wanted from a video store. but those things are irrelevant, the movie industry hasn't died. It's making as much money as ever.

Re:Content Freedom?

[jedidiah]

> VHS movies took a long time to copy, the blank tapes were fairly expensive and
> you had to pay to rent or know someone with a movie collection. not like BT
> where it's like the Quest TV ad from 10 years ago. "we have every movie ever made
> in every language"

VHS movies took as long to copy as to watch them.

Blank tapes were infact CHEAP.

The only person you had to know for a source of tapes was BLOCKBUSTER.

All of your arguments are completely bogus and a weak attempt to try and make it like anything has really changed. NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

Media still costs money. It still takes time to copy it.

Perhaps the collections are a little more absurd now (or not). However, this should more than anything a good clue that perhaps the pirating situation doesn't actually reflect real demand and that it's time for publishers to stop stroking their egos over some kid with a free copy.

There is nothing to be gained from preventing the kid his big pile o media.

Letting granny do the iTunes thing with DVDs might be of some benefit though.

Re:Content Freedom?

[leromarinvit]

Why is I when I read "content freedom", I have a feeling you mean your ability to copy movies from torrent and avoid having to pay anyone for the huge investment and hard work they put into making movies.

You mean like everybody who wanted to has been doing for how long now?

The pirates don't care. Blu-Ray rips have been available for a long time now. This is news for people who want to play the discs they bought on hardware/software that wasn't blessed by the MAFIAA.

Re:Content Freedom?

[aesiamun]

It only takes one person to rip and encode to distribute millions of copies. It took millions of people with two VHS players to "rip" a million copies of a movie on VHS...and they had to be local to the original source.

Re:Content Freedom?

[gnasher719]

The day is coming where I can finally hook up my media center to my TV without having the sound or video go out because HDCP decided it didn't like the fact the computer goes to sleep.

Wrong. It means someone can build a connector that lets you connect your video card to a TV without HDCP support. But if that connector doesn't like your computer going to sleep, then you are just as stuffed as you are now.

On a properly working HDCP system, the computer would check about 64 times per second whether the encryption is still working and that graphics card and TV are in sync. Not to keep you from turning encryption off, but to make sure that the signal is properly decrypted because otherwise you see just snow. If the graphics card comes back from sleep, it should realise very quickly that something is wrong. In that case it should turn off the signal for a second, reset the HDCP connectors on the graphics card and on the TV, and turn encryption on again. So the worst you should get is snow for a tenth of a second, black screen for a second, and then a correct signal. What you see is either the graphics card or the TV connector not working correctly. If that connector that could now be built doesn't work better than the TV connector, or if it is the fault of the graphics card in the first place, there will be no improvement.

Re:Content Freedom?

[denmarkw00t]

Speaking as someone who has partaken in piracy from time to time, I see your argument a lot. While piracy may be bad in the sense that you're stealing from hard working individuals, supposedly, I can guarantee to you that almost every show I've seen in the last 6 years, every CD I have purchased, every movie I paid to see or own or rent, would not have seen my hard earned cash without piracy first. It's the truth. I wouldn't have listened to nearly any of the artists I do now without piracy as I would have heard one or two tracks and not bought the CD - the Big Music industry ruined that for me when I paid for CDs because of singles on the radio to find that the whole CD was crap, save for that one song. Now I can know if a CD is good or not before devoting my money to it. I pay to go see bands that need my money and otherwise wouldn't have seen it because of piracy. I paid for videogames I may have been apprehensive about buying because of piracy. Piracy is almost the wrong word for it, really.

As another quick example - this past weekend I ran across some blog posts talking about an iPhone app called TouchOSC. Cost: $4.99. I pirated it with Installulous and gave it a test drive. At first I didn't know how I was going to make good use of this app. Then I ran across a program for OSX called OSCulator. Cost: Minimum $19, Preferred: $39. Also, they distribute a trial. After playing with the two, I've decided that tomorrow's paycheck is going to pay for a copy of both. While I could pirate both, I believe the developers deserve my money because they have created quality products, and no matter how many videos or demos of the two you could show me online, if I hadn't been able to run them in my setup and know how they are relevant to MY work flow, I wouldn't dream of forking over $35 (I plan to pay $30 for OSCulator).

Re:Content Freedom?

[Bazouel]

"Because, as in all things, most people are honest."

But most companies are not.

One easy example: How many times do I have to pay to listen to the same song/movie in a different format?
Another: How much artists get from each sale?

Need I go on?

Re:Content Freedom?

[urulokion]

I doubt the movie industry would have died regardless of what form copy devices took. But to address the VHS/Betamax question, the answer is copy degradation. Video tape is an analog media. A copy loses a bit of definition. Every generation of copy from a master gets worse and worse nosier and grainier. The movie industry did like video to be copyable, but after the Sony Betmax SCOTUS decision, they could live with it.

That all changed when "they" introduced the CD and DVD formats. Those are digital. Unlike analog mediea every copy of a digital data is perfect. It doesn't matter how many generation a copy is removed from the source master. It's just as pristine as the original source.

At first it wasn't any problems so they though. Initial costs of the equipment players and especially duplicators may them limited their spread. But when duplicators/copies/burners became prevently, "they" throught their control of the copy media was enough. The sector of a CD which determined their type (i.e. Audio or Data CD) wasn't accessible via a CD burner. Burn an Audio CD, you have to pay "us". And the DVD keys section which video DVDs depend on was off limits as well. So no duplicated DVDs won't play on a player. And their draconian licensing terms ensured that the critical keys are kept off limits. And their walled garden was supposed to keep things looked away. But their wall garden had a dual weaknesses:. their lousy encryption scheme and PC CD/DVD burners and software players.

Technology kept advancing and even traveled around the CD Audio wall. Read the audio tracks as data and play back the data via software. And we all know the story about DVD Videos. A sloppy software player left their key inside. First new software players used that key. The it was found the encryption scheme was weak and it was eventually broken. and ultimately DeCSS.

As others have pointed out. the ultimate problem with copy protection is that it eventually has to be read/viewed/heard by us humans in the analog realm. And things can't be tied to having 'Net access all of the time. So that means they they have to give out the keys that go with the locks they have. It doesn't matter, as this HDCP kerfluffle illustrates, how convoluted you make the unlock process. The end users have the keys. And if I have the keys, I can easily open the locks.

In the end, the downfall of the music industry giants is them failing to adapted to the new reality, and them trying to enforce the old regimes. They days as the gateways of music is over. Technology and the Internet has open the world to budding musicians.

And I think that the movie industry gaints are coming to a similar reality as well. Technology especially in the realm of CGI is advancing at a breakneck pace. It's getting better and cheaper all of the time. The tools are available to everyone. And even the renders are becoming photorealistic. I've seen CGI people that make me think they are real. I've have to second look to make sure they are CGI. And huge studios and sets no longer needed. Bluescreen/greenscreening can put actors into any place imaginable. A lot of fan films are making huge strides in their production values. They are reaching the levels of exceeding the B movies I've seen.

Re:Content Freedom?

[gravis777]

Um, wow, are you late to the show. This is already being done. Has been since the first Blu-Ray and HD-DVD came out. HDCP had done NOTIHNG to stop piracy. Don't believe me? http://thepiratebay.org/ Absolutely nothing. The only thing it has done is limited component cables to 1080i, and limit upconversions on HDMI only cables, forcing people to upgrade televisions, cables, and other components in their Home Theaters. It prevented HD audio over Toslink (claiming that it didn't have enough bandwidth, which is BS) and other digital cables except HDMI. It causes handshake problems in cheaper equipment, causing audio or video dropouts, or resolution suddenly dropping, or other weird oddities on cheaper equipment.

No, HDCP did nothing to stop piracy, and breaking HDCP will not increase piracy. In fact, there will probably be no practical apps to this. If someone trys to build a device that circumvents HDCP, they will probably endure court costs that will drive them out of business.

About the only practical app that may come from this is software Blu-Ray players for Linux, if they don't already exist.

So please don't bring piracy into this. It really has nothing to do with this.

Re:Content Freedom?

[X0563511]

It is. More like herpes. You'll never get rid of it, though it might appear to go away or get better from time to time.

But nothing will change the fact that it's slowly but surely doing permanent neural damage.

Re:Content Freedom?

[trickyD1ck]

It's making as much money as ever.

It is not.

A number of earlier potential buyers valued Miramax at only $550 million to $600 million, so the $660 million value is seen as top of the market. Investor Ron Burkle, working with brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who first created Miramax and built it into a force in film, earlier this year lost out on Miramax when a bid of $565 million was rejected by Disney, which had indicated that it wanted $700 million.

Source: http://whiskeys-place.blogspot.com/2010/08/more-hollywood-economics-folly-of-world.html

As the author of the blog post concludes, this amounts to under a million per movie and $7 million per TV season.

Re:Content Freedom?

[sjames]

Not only did it not die, but it became more profitable than ever. The VHS aftermarket for movies even gave them an effective "do-over" on a few movies that bombed at the box office but eventually turned a modest profit due to home video sales.

The small losses from people copying VHS tapes turned out to be a spit in the ocean in comparison to the win.

Re:Content Freedom?

[WarlockD]

While I agree that most people are honest, I think its also that most people, who have money to spend, are lazy.

Hell, I am a perfect example of that. I will buy games on Steam NOT because they are better deals, but because I like having all my games organized with it. The alt tab into a chat/simple web interface in full screen is an excellent plus as well as having all the games auto updated. Its even hard for me to save just 10 bucks to buy it at frys than downloaded from stream and I get annoyed when there is a game I DO want but can't get though the service.

Ever since I got a "real job" and got old enough, I haven't pirated a new release game in more than 3 years. Well, I take that back. I recently downloaded Simon the Sorcerer 4 because I could not find ANY USA digital download for it. Can't even find it in the stores. Five is out but even that one is imposable to find. One link appears on Impulse but doesn't add it to the cart! I will buy it NOW but the one place I can get it doesn't exist. Oh well, off to Pirate bay then.

If I have to build a device, using a 100 dollar FPGA to record a football game off the cable box, I will do it. IF, however, I can buy a 200 dollar device to do the same thing, I would do that instead.

Re:Content Freedom?

[sexconker]

It only takes one person to rip and encode to distribute millions of copies. It took millions of people with two VHS players to "rip" a million copies of a movie on VHS...and they had to be local to the original source.

And each copy degraded the quality considerably!

Re:Content Freedom?

[ledow]

Er... rental places pay special licenses and have special "rental" versions made by the official distributor. Go buy any ex-rental DVD and you can see it's specially made for the rental market by the original distributor. I now, because the only time I ever rented a video myself (and yes, I mean video), the rental place had to put up a big sign saying that they didn't have something like Shrek because it was not available to rental shops at all because of a change in distribution license.

Renting is *not* just some guy renting out ordinary DVD's illicitly (you'll notice that the copyright warnings on your DVD's prohibit that) - they have a special arrangement and special rental-only material that only rental shops can use, and they no doubt pay a percentage of each rental to the relevant company. There is nothing "dishonest" about renting a movie - damn, it was nearly £5 for 24 hours last time I looked at it, and modern things like LoveFilm.com aren't any better.

Re:Content Freedom?

[spitzak]

If that connector that could now be built doesn't work better than the TV connector

I would suspect a "pirate" HDCP decoder using this will be a lot more reliable and faster than the commercial ones, due to the source code likely being open or at least looked at by a lot more intelligent people.

Re:Content Freedom?

[Pentium100]

But still new movies are being made even though BitTorrent and the pirate bay exist for a long time (9 and 6 years respectively) now. And before them there were Kazaa, Limewire, ed2k and others.

Music was killed by home taping soon after the invention of high quality cassette decks, but for some reason movies refuse to die.

Re:Content Freedom?

[wilsone8]

The only person you had to know for a source of tapes was BLOCKBUSTER.

It cost money to rent the videos and at least some of that money went to the movie studios. There were happy with that deal. With BT, I don't see how anyone gets paid.

Re:Content Freedom?

[wilsone8]

Very admirable. But somehow the high morals of everyone on slashdot doesn't mesh with what I see in the real world.

Let me be clear: I don't have a problem with breaking DRM because you want to listen/watch something on another device. That's fine (and mostly legal these days).

My problem is EVERYONE who pirates seems to say this same thing: I would never have paid for this! And yet they keep what they downloaded and keep listening/watching it. No one I know at least ever paid for any song once they had downloaded it for free. Sorry, but that is copyright infringement and morally wrong to me at least.

Re:Content Freedom?

[bit01]

Very admirable. But somehow the high morals of everyone on slashdot doesn't mesh with what I see in the real world.

You have a parochial view of the real world.

Let me be clear: I don't have a problem with breaking DRM because you want to listen/watch something on another device. That's fine

Good

(and mostly legal these days).

Not in the real world since such technical fixes usually cannot be done by most people and cannot be advertised and distributed freely.

My problem is EVERYONE who pirates seems to say this same thing: I would never have paid for this!

No, "EVERYBODY" is just your distorted view of the world. For the majority of pirates, time rich and money poor people, it's true however.

And yet they keep what they downloaded and keep listening/watching it.

Which is not in the slightest incompatible with the previous statement.

No one I know at least ever paid for any song once they had downloaded it for free.

Some do but the majority simply pay for other media when the opportunity arises. People have fixed entertainment budgets but use piracy to get better bang for their buck at no cost to anyone. A perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Sorry, but that is copyright infringement and morally wrong to me at least.

I'd suggest you expand your horizons.

The problem with your viewpoint is your automatic assumptions about the ownership of creative works and the automatic assumption that artificial scarcity is the only way to reward creators.

Ownership by definition is the right to control. Any ethical, not legal, argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.

---

Copyright rewards distributors (copiers) far more than creators.

Re:Clever idea to slashdot the site with the key..

[betterunixthanunix]

I tell you, this is an MPAA plot!

Re:Clever idea to slashdot the site with the key..

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go:

HDCP MASTER KEY (MIRROR THIS TEXT!)

This is a forty times forty element matrix of fifty-six bit
hexadecimal numbers.

To generate a source key, take a forty-bit number that (in
binary) consists of twenty ones and twenty zeroes; this is
the source KSV. Add together those twenty rows of the matrix
that correspond to the ones in the KSV (with the lowest bit
in the KSV corresponding to the first row), taking all elements
modulo two to the power of fifty-six; this is the source
private key.

To generate a sink key, do the same, but with the transposed
matrix.

6692d179032205 b4116a96425a7f ecc2ef51af1740 959d3b6d07bce4 fa9f2af29814d9
82592e77a204a8 146a6970e3c4a1 f43a81dc36eff7 568b44f60c79f5 bb606d7fe87dd6
1b91b9b73c68f9 f31c6aeef81de6 9a9cc14469a037 a480bc978970a6 997f729d0a1a39
b3b9accda43860 f9d45a5bf64a1d 180a1013ba5023 42b73df2d33112 851f2c4d21b05e
2901308bbd685c 9fde452d3328f5 4cc518f97414a8 8fca1f7e2a0a14 dc8bdbb12e2378
672f11cedf36c5 f45a2a00da1c1d 5a3e82c124129a 084a707eadd972 cb45c81b64808d
07ebd2779e3e71 9663e2beeee6e5 25078568d83de8 28027d5c0c4e65 ec3f0fc32c7e63
1d6b501ae0f003 f5a8fcecb28092 854349337aa99e 9c669367e08bf1 d9c23474e09f70

3c901d46bada9a 40981ffcfa376f a4b686ca8fb039 63f2ce16b91863 1bade89cc52ca2
4552921af8efd2 fe8ac96a02a6f9 9248b8894b23bd 17535dbff93d56 94bdc32a095df2
cd247c6d30286e d2212f9d8ce80a dc55bdc2a6962c bcabf9b5fcbe6f c2cfc78f5fdafa
80e32223b9feab f1fa23f5b0bf0d ab6bf4b5b698ae d960315753d36f 424701e5a944ed
10f61245ebe788 f57a17fc53a314 00e22e88911d9e 76575e18c7956e c1ef4eee022e38
f5459f177591d9 08748f861098ef 287d2c63bd809e e6a28a6f5d000c 7ae5964a663c1b
0f15f7167f56c6 d6c05b2bbe8800 544a49be026410 d9f3f08602517f 74878dc02827f7
d72ef3ea24b7c8 717c7afc0b55a5 0be2a582516d08 202ded173a5428 9b71e35e45943f

9e7cd2c8789c99 1b590a91f1cffd 903dca7c36d298 52ad58ddcc1861 56dd3acba0d9c5
c76254c1be9ed1 06ecb6ae8ff373 cfcc1afcbc80a4 30eba7ac19308c d6e20ae760c986
c0d1e59db1075f 8933d5d8284b92 9280d9a3faa716 8386984f92bfd6 be56cd7c4bfa59
16593d2aa598a6 d62534326a40ee 0c1f1919936667 acbaf0eefdd395 36dbfdbf9e1439
0bd7c7e683d280 54759e16cfd9ea cac9029104bd51 436d1dca1371d3 ca2f808654cdb2
7d6923e47f97b5 70e256b741910c 7dd466ed5fff2e 26bec4a28e8cc4 5754ea7219d4eb
75270aa4d3cc8d e0ae1d1897b7f4 4fe5663e8cb342 05a80e4a1a950d 66b4eb6ed4c99e
3d7e9d469c6165 81677af04a2e15 ada4be60bc348d dfdfbbad739248 98ad5986f3ca1f

971d02ada31b46 2adab96f7b15da 9855f01b9b7b94 6cef0f65663fbf eb328e8a3c6c5d
e29f0f0b1ef2bf e4a30b29047d31 52250e7ae3a4ac fe3efc3b8c2df1 8c997d15d6078b
49da8b4611ff9f b1e061bc9be995 31fd68c4ad6dc6 fd8974f0c506dd 90421c1cd2b26c
53eec84c91ed17 5159ba3711173b 25e318ddceea6a 98a14125755955 2bb97fd341cea2
3f8404769a0a8e bce5c7a45fb5d4 9608307b43f785 2a98e5856afe75 b4dbead4815cac
d1118af62c964a 3142667a5b0d14 6c6f90933acd3d 6b14a0052e2be4 1b1811fda0f554
12300aa7f10405 1919ca0bff56ea d3e2f3aad5250c 4aeeea5101d2ec 377fc499c07057
6cb1a90cdb7b11 3c839d47a4b814 25c5ac14b5ec28 4ef18646d5b9c2 95a98cc51ebd3b

310e98028e24de 092ffc76b79f44 0740a1ca2d4737 b9f38966257c99 a75afc7454abe4
a6dd815be8ccbf ec2cac2df0c675 41f7636aa4080f 30e87b712520fd d5dfdc6d3266ac
ee28f5479f836f 0bf8ee2112173f 43ae802fa8d52d 4e0dffd36c1eac 3cbda974bb7585
fb60a4700470e3 d9f6b6083ef13d 4a5840f02d0130 6c20ef5e35e2bf dad2f85c745b5b
61c5ddc65d3fc9 7f6ec395d4ae22 2b8906fb3996e2 e4110f59eb92ac 1cb212b44128bb
545afda80a4fd1 b1ffea547eab6b fac3d9166afce8 3fe35fe17586f2 9d082667026a4c
17ffaf1cb50145 24f27b316acfff b6bb758ec4ad60 995e8726359ef7 c44952cb424035
5ec53461dbd248 40a1586f04aee7 49ea3fa4474e52 c13e8f52c51562 30a1a70162cfb8

ccbada27b91c33 33661064d05759 3388bb6315b036 0380a6b43851fb 0228dadb44ad3d
b732565bc37841 993c0d383cfaae 0bea49476758ac accc69dbfcde8b f416ab0474f022
2b7dbcc3002502 20dc4e67289e50 0068424fde9515 64806d59eb0c18 9cf08fb2abc362
8d0ee78a6cace9 b6781bd504d105 af65fab8ee6252 64a8f8dd8e2d14 cb9d3354e06b5b
53082840d3c011 8e08

Monetization != bulletproof protection

[Bruce Perens]

Monetize your content all you want. Prosecute illegal distribution. Just let me play it with my own device and software.

Re:Monetization != bulletproof protection

[jedidiah]

The MAFIAA/RIAA doesn't prosecute illegal distribution.

They use grossly inappropriate laws intended for professional pirates on housewives.

They bully people with barratry suits.

The seem to ignore the real commercial pirates that might actually be "stealing" paying customers from the industry.

Instead they engage in the sort of thing they tell you to avoid the first day of law school (suing non-solvent parties).

Re:Monetization != bulletproof protection

[Lunix Nutcase]

The seem to ignore the real commercial pirates that might actually be "stealing" paying customers from the industry.

They only "seem" to be ignoring these people because either the stories don't make a frontpage headline or you are just being willfully ignorant. The MPAA/RIAA go after commercial pirates, such as Hong Kong and Russian bootleggers, on a regular basis.

Re:Monetization != bulletproof protection

[Mike Kristopeit]

since when is the law prejudicial?

i live in the USA, and this country's laws apply to everyone equally.

Re:Monetization != bulletproof protection

[satoshi1]

Because they're going after the house wife, the downloader, as if she was the original distributor of the content, as if she was the one that ripped the DVD or filmed the movie screen.

Re:Monetization != bulletproof protection

[sjames]

Not to mention the extortion letters that calculatedly ask for a bit less than it will cost to defend yourself against a lawsuit. When it does go to court, they make sure it's a long drawn out process where they also fight tooth and nail against paying the defendant's legal fees,k mush less the reasonable value of the massive amount of time they are forced to dedicate to their defense. The effect is to extort money from the recipient guilty or not. They have sent such letters to people who were DEAD at the time of the alleged infringement.

Meanwhile, as you say, they are ignoring the people who run off more copies in a single day than the P2P users share in a lifetime and then sell them as counterfeits on street corners.

Re:Monetization != bulletproof protection

[e4g4]

In principal, the laws of the USA apply to everyone equally. In practice, the laws of the USA are not applied to everyone equally.

Re:Monetization != bulletproof protection

[ToasterMonkey]

Monetize your content all you want. Prosecute illegal distribution. Just let me play it with my own device and software.

I'm confused, did the moderators just assign points to a single sentence of a post or did /. readership get hit with a clue bat all of a sudden?

Re:Monetization != bulletproof protection

[Mike Kristopeit]

the laws of the USA are certainly applied to everyone equally.

you're an idiot.

Re:Monetization != bulletproof protection

[Mike Kristopeit]

is it not illegal to download ripped DVDs? i never got that memo.

Re:Monetization != bulletproof protection

[owlstead]

Scare tactics seem to be a good way of making money; you act like there are not other "benefits" than making money directly from the person that is being sued.

Re:Monetization != bulletproof protection

[e4g4]

Within a given socioeconomic group, yes the laws are generally applied equally. Between disparate socioeconomic groups, however, this is simply not the case. Butthead.

Re:Monetization != bulletproof protection

[e4g4]

We will have to agree to disagree, as neither of us can provide sufficient evidence to back up our claims. Go ad hominem yourself.

I AM THE GOD OF HELLFILE AND I BRING YOU ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The HDCP Master key !! so now you can burn, Burn, BURN !!

Re:I AM THE GOD OF HELLFILE AND I BRING YOU ...

[ScrewMaster]

fire?

Well, whether he meant Fire or File, it's still a pretty funny use of Arthur Brown's FIRE.

The viewpoint from two worlds

[Bruce Perens]

I paid for my home with my share of Pixar's IPO. And I'm an Open Source evangelist. So, I'm in both worlds where this is concerned.

What I think is fair is for infringing redistribution of copyrighted content to be prosecuted as necessary. You really don't have the right to give all of the internet a copy of that Hannah Montana song. But when I have paid or done whatever is appropriate to gain the right to view that media on my LG TV, I should have the right to view it on my Linux system too.

So, basically I am for content creators having the right to monetize their work and against having an electronic cop in my TV room. And I'm against having Free Software locked out of being a player.

I hope the key is real and that it's really this simple. I am not equipped to test it today but I'm sure someone here is.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[KingDaveRa]

I agree. The trouble is - people. If people can get something for nothing, they will. I can fully understand the reason why content producers will wrap things in DRM, but by the same token I want to do with my media what I want. A CD can play in any CD player. A DVD and play in any DVD player. If a universal DRM container could be created that was a light touch (i.e. stopped people casually copying files) then it would be great. But the infrastructure to do that would be huge IMHO, hence why nobody has yet bothered to do it. If a content producer can make somebody buy something twice, then it's in their shareholder's best interests to do so.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[guruevi]

It gets worse actually, with HDCP you cannot use signal splitters or other devices like scalers or converters that are frequently used in professional projection and scientific setups. If you do, you will get snow (not immediately, just sometime down the road when somebody has loaded HDCP protected content) on the whole display (not just the content) making those things useless. If you use a splitter for example, you have to go out of your way and buy another device ($80) to sit on the primary channel to make sure it can't negotiate the HDCP encryption. But HD content will still play even if you don't have an HDCP-compatible setup (as there is no content I know off yet that forcefully locks people out of their Chinese/Wal-Mart TV/Blu-Ray el-cheapo knockoff setup), it's just that if you do have an HDCP-compatible setup (and you paid good money for eg. Dual-DVI KVM, splitter, displays and projectors with high-res 120Hz signals for scientific research), it will malfunction.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[Nyder]

I agree. The trouble is - people. If people can get something for nothing, they will. I can fully understand the reason why content producers will wrap things in DRM, but by the same token I want to do with my media what I want. A CD can play in any CD player. A DVD and play in any DVD player. If a universal DRM container could be created that was a light touch (i.e. stopped people casually copying files) then it would be great. But the infrastructure to do that would be huge IMHO, hence why nobody has yet bothered to do it. If a content producer can make somebody buy something twice, then it's in their shareholder's best interests to do so.

That isn't true. I know a shitload of people who buy DVD's (new), Blurays, music CD's. They like having the actually copy of it, instead of a download.

Not to mention it lacks real class to give someone a download copy of a movie for a gift, instead of an actually bought DVD or BD.

You know who pirates crap? People who are cheap and weren't going to buy it in the first place. People who would of bought used, or not at all.

Sure, there are some people who might get a game for free, or a movie, instead of buying it. Just as there are people who pirate stuff to see if it's worth buying. And of course, there is the people who buy everything used, so their money never goes to the studios anyways.

So, don't generalize, mainly over a subject you are apparently not that familiar with.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[LWATCDR]

But DRM can never really work.
You can not give someone the ability to decode a digital source but not the ability to copy it.
And you must decode it to play it.

DRM only hurts paying customers. Right now I can get a program that will rip Bluerays right of the internet.
http://www.blurayripper.org/#decrypt

What good is HDCP at this point?
What good is the DRM on Bluerays. It will only stop any pirate that is too dumb to google BlueRay ripper.

What harm does it do to a paying customer? It makes it hard for me to rip a DVD I OWN and put it on my personal media player.
It makes it hard to rip a DVD I OWN and put it on my Laptop.
It makes it hard for me to play a DVD I OWN on my Linux box.

My wife is an extremely ethical and honest person. We download a Japanese anime to watch because the US channel carrying it is way behind. Plus we like the subs better than the dubs.
When those episodes come to DVD my wife buys them.
It is fair to pay for what you want and just not take it. It is stupid to punish your paying customers.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[arivanov]

Not necessarily. For example I am happy to pay for content and I do so and I do it knowingly that some of it goes to whoever made it.

However when I buy it I want it to play on all of my devices - on my phone, on my laptop, on my Linux based HTPC, on the portable also linux based HTPC made out of an old laptop in the car and so on.

That is why I am happy to give Amazon money for MP3s while there is no way in hell I will pay for "online film rental". Same goes for refusing to be spoon fed mandatorily bundled crap produced by synthetic spoiled brats commanded by Simon the FreakMonger.

As far as the free-for-all crowd, the XXAA should simply accept that there is a demographic out there which is not willing to pay and will _NOT_ pay. Same as there is a demographic that will pay even if it can get it for free from an illegal source. Behaving so that the second demographic starts to sympathise with the cause of the first is not just counterproductive, it is plain stupid.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[KingDaveRa]

I prefer to buy physical media. I agree with you. And most people I know seem to work on the basis that because they can copy it, they will, whether they know it's right or not. These are all sorts of people from all walks of life. Besides, I was talking about DRM, not physical versus download.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[xtracto]

The problem I see is that the content industry is inflating the prices of their products by spending in all these copy protection mechanisms which do not work.

If what this key claims to be is true, it means that every BluRay Disc and BD player sold will have to include a set of mechanisms to be compatible with this "copy protection" even though it is broken.

Media production industry should save all the money they are spending in DRM mechanisms and spend it in the education of people; a *very strong* education campaign so that people realize the wrongs of distributing media without consent.

And even after that, media creators should have in mind that there will *always* be people who illegaly copy content.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[devent]

> You really don't have the right to give all of the internet a copy of that Hannah Montana song.

Why not? Really, why not? The people who like to buy the Hannah Montana song will buy it anyway and the people who don't know what it is will maybe download it but they are certainly not going to go to the shop and buy it. Also the people who know who Hannah Montana is will either spend the money or not. Me putting a copy of the songs in the internet will not change their behavior in any way.

For ages we had copied songs, books, art, ideas. But because now we have the technology to copy it for free someone like you come and tell me it's somewhat immoral to do it.

Yes, I'm all for content creators having the right to monetize their work, too. But once I bought a copy of the work nobody can say me it's immoral to give copies of the copy to other people. As long as I don't tell that's my work, as long as I give credit to the original creator there is nothing immoral to it. And I'm not sorry, but the time where you can just create one work and get rich by selling copies of it is over. Like the train made the horse chariot obsolete, so made the internet this business model obsolete. Why should I pay you for something which costs you next to nothing? Here is the government that acts immoral and criminalize a whole population class just to please the 1% that are famous and making some cash out of copyright. If anything, the government should act on the behalf of the 99% of the creators, who don't ever sell 1000 CDs or more then 5000 books and on the millions of torrent users which are only trying to utilize the new technology.

Copyright is only 200 years old and it was the big publisher who invented the copyright, not the content creators. In addition, there is no proof that a copyright actually benefit the creation of works. If anything, the opposite is true. A society where works and ideas are freely usable, which out the tax of the copyright monopoly, will have far more creativity and welfare. Music, art and ideas are never born out of itself, music, art and ideas are always build on top of older music, art and ideas.

We have invented the perfect copy machine, why shouldn't we use it? It's like in Star Trek someone invents the Replicator but the government outlaws it to protect obsolete business models.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[Anonymous Coward]

It's even more basic than that. You don't have to want to do anything geeky at all to be hobbled by HDCP. Here's an example...

Let's say you have a bluray player connected to your 60" 1080p TV with an HDMI connection so that you can enjoy that awesome high-def picture. Now let's say you have your TV connected to your Dolby Digital capable receiver/amplifier with an optical (toslink) cable.

Do you think you are going to get to enjoy that rich 5.1 sound track to go along with your nice high-def picture? Think again. You won't. You will get, at most, a stereo (2.0) downmix of the audio.

Does that seem fair? You paid for your legitimate bluray player and the legitimate bluray disc and the legitimate television and the legitimate receiver. Everything you have done is by the book and all legal and above board (the copyright consortium would be tickled pink with you) and yet all you get is a 2.0 version of the soundtrack. Why? Because the copyright consortium just assumes you are going to be a criminal and copy the movie even though all you want to do is watch it, so they make sure that all you get a copy of is a 2.0 downmix of the soundtrack.

Has this crippling of the end-user experience resulted in any less pirating going on? I don't think so. So once again, DRM harms the legitimate users without hindering the illegitimate users.

Having this master HDCP key is going to have no other impact (i.e. it won't actually increase piracy, that's already rampant) other than to provide the capability of some to restore the enjoyment-level of the media that people have legitimately paid for.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[jedidiah]

> I agree. The trouble is - people. If people can get something for nothing, they will.

Nonsense. Most people simply can't be bothered.

Make legitimate use easy and "spiffy" and you undercut piracy for the vast majority of people.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[fermion]

The philosophical question here is there an inalienable right to happiness, or merely the pursuit of it. It is not a subtle point. Is a person who does an honest days work entitled to a livable wage, and who determines that wage. Is the 'content creator' entitled to livable wage, and who determines what that livable wage is. Is there not a point where the wage requested is so outlandish that alternative

This so-called content piracy thing is predicated on the idea that a person is entitled to compensation, as determined by the person, not the market, for doing work. This is a radical idea that has no historical or cultural basis. In the US we are perfectly willing to let people do an honest days work and then let them live in squalor. Why should the rules change just because a person has a popular crafts project?

OTOH, we are not entitled to any unlicensed content we wish. I do agree with either side calling out the national guard to enforce a sense of entitlement. What is true is that, in a free market, if a demand is created, and the product is not offered at market value, which could be free, then alternative products or avenues of acquisition will be created.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[rasjani]

OMG! Who's this guy putting himself on the pedestal and calling himself an Evangelist. Yeah! Im evangelist alrite! Such a big man, thats what i am! =)

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[gnasher719]

What harm does it do to a paying customer? It makes it hard for me to rip a DVD I OWN and put it on my personal media player.

No, HDCP doesn't make ripping your DVDs any harder. It has nothing to do with that. HDCP encrypts the signal between the output of your graphics card and the input of the monitor. HDCP doesn't affect you in any way - except when you don't have an HDCP compatible monitor, and then it doesn't stop you only from ripping your DVD, it stops you from displaying that DVD at all.

There is of course copy protection on your DVD that makes life hard for honest people - but that is not HDCP.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[Bruce Perens]

You have perfect freedom to create new works of content which can operate under the economic paradigm you prefer, as do all artists. The fact is, only a minority are currently engaged in creating content that they place under an attribution, share-alike license. If we held a vote on how the overall paradigm should operate, today, unfortunately the share-alike folks would lose.

We're doing better with software, but not perfect.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[radish]

This so-called content piracy thing is predicated on the idea that a person is entitled to compensation, as determined by the person, not the market, for doing work.

No, it's predicated on the idea that a person is entitled to ask for compensation, as determined by the person, for doing work. That in itself creates a market - because those who wish to benefit from the work decide whether the asked-for price is fair or not. It's the equivalent of a contract worker setting their hourly rate and allowing employers to choose whether or not to hire them - in other words perfectly normal.

Where it breaks down is where people decide they're entitled to benefit from that work without paying the asked-for compensation. In the case of the contract worker you could argue that assuming they got their asked-for rate from the actual employer, then what does it matter if some other unrelated people also got the benefit of the work - that reflects back to the old days of artists being essentially sponsored by the rich. However with things like music and film these days that's not how it works - we don't have benefactors paying the artists, they rely on many small payments to add up to the required total. To me that's a good thing - it democratizes the process of paying for art - it means what gets rewarded (and, therefore, created) is what the majority of people want rather that what some specific rich guy likes. I don't want to live in a world where the only music is what Donald Trump likes to listen to :)

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[Dr_Barnowl]

... the perfect copy machine, why shouldn't we use it? ... Star Trek ... Replicator

In a "Replicator" society, there are only two commodities ; matter and energy.

Matter you can get from most places, with the right tools and a variable amount of energy. Energy you can collect for yourself with the right arrangements of matter.

In such a society, there is no excuse for everyone not to be physically wealthy. I'm not talking about gold toilet seats and yachts, I'm talking about there being no excuse for anyone lacking food, water, and shelter.

But we don't live in such a society yet (I'm optimistic that it's possible within my lifetime). We still have an economy of scarcity (whether you believe that's artificial or not). Perhaps if and when we solve this problem, we will have collectives of people, who because they are freed up from the constraints of having to struggle to survive, who can just get together and make movies because it's freaking awesome. But until then, artists need to eat. I'm not saying that the current means of achieving that is equitable or fair, but it sorta-kinda works, in that works of art are produced and that you don't see masses of dying artists on the 9 o'clock news.

Why should I pay you for something that costs you next to nothing?

The first answer is there in your question ; it doesn't cost nothing - even if you concede that it's "next to nothing", zero is not the same thing as more-than-zero.

The second answer is that it costs a lot more than next to nothing. Did you ever see the credits for a Pixar movie? They roll on for a looong time. Sure, the marginal cost of duplication is small, but the up front cost is huge. Yes, Hollywood accounting is bent and evil. Yes, they'll claim that the movie didn't make any money while rolling in piles of greenbacks. Yes, I disapprove of that. No, I don't think that all those people should entertain me for nothing but kudos and job satisfaction - unless they are all independently wealthy, just like everyone on Earth should be in a Replicator economy.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[piotru]

I do not agree. It is fair pay for a performance, as for a work of an actor in the theather.
Demanding recurrent payments for the record of a singular performance brings all sort of troubles, with policing (-->corruption of political process), taxation (device levies), inflated costs of entertainment industry products (I am not calling it "art") etc.

Also, I have troubles with the Orwellian transformation of the "pirate" from for-profit copier to anybody sharing the content.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[LWATCDR]

HDCP is required to play HD content at 1080p on a display
AKA Blueray. It's function was to "close" the analog hole. You know so you couldn't just record your 1080P video output.

So yes HDCP is now useless because digital copying of BlueRay disks is now common.

What HDCP does accomplish is that it punishes honest users.

It is impossible for me to play the BlueRay DVD I own on my PC at 1080p because my monitor only has DVI.
But I can download it and play it on my computer from a Torrent.
There now you might understand.
HDCP only use is to punish honest users.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[Bruce Perens]

There's also space, and space has the quality of locality, thus the three important things about real estate: "location, location, location".

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[anUnhandledException]

That has nothing to do with HDCP.

It simply is a limit of toslink (optical digital connection).
Essentially toslink standard definies what your receiver "expects" to come down the pipe.

It expects (and thus can property handle)
DTS
Dolby Digital
2 channel stereo uncompressed

If something else (DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD, 7.1 channel uncompressed) came down the pipe your receiver would simply not "understand" the data.

If you took the movie, stripped all the encryption off of it and played it on hardware without HDCP you would have the exact same limitation.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[ToasterMonkey]

Now let's say you have your TV connected to your Dolby Digital capable receiver/amplifier with an optical (toslink) cable. Do you think you are going to get to enjoy that rich 5.1 sound track to go along with your nice high-def picture? Think again. You won't. You will get, at most, a stereo (2.0) downmix of the audio.

No, you can get 5.1, but not high resolution or uncompressed 7.1.
BTW, I don't think you can play 7.1 over toslink anyway.

You might be thinking of the problem where a BD _only_ has a 7.1 track, like Kingdom of Heaven for example, then over toslink your player might only offer to down convert it to stereo. That's a different problem, AFAIK. Maybe it's a compromise, instead of uncompressed 5.1, they convert to uncompressed stereo. If the BD has a (compressed) 5.1 track included, you're all set.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[Pentium100]

The same deal is with those unskippable antipiracy and regular ads on DVDs. The only people who are forced to watch them are the ones who actually bought the DVD, pirates don't see that stuff.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[Uberbah]

The trouble is - people. If people can get something for nothing, they will.

It's only "free" if your time is "worthless". In reality, it's not about price, it's about convenience. Paying for Netflix is convenient because you can start instantly streaming their videos - no hunting for torrents, no spending hours to download rars from alt.binaries.movies.h264...

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[thunderclap]

I have to disagree with this. 'You really don't have the right to give all of the internet a copy of that Hannah Montana song' Actually if I do, it decelerates her faux career. Beside aren't we the ones in the US who decide where that is a right at all? I think its more of this: .'You really don't have the consent of the corrupt politicians who were bought off by the greedy media conglomerate whose greed convinced an moderately talented daughter of a one hit wonder country singer that she could be rich if she sold her given rights to them, to give all of the internet a copy of that song".I think that the concept of 'infringing' needs to be changed as well as copyright law. But I also think a giant Mural of the Bomb turban Mohammad should be painted on the side of the RIAA headquarters building.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[mjwx]

So, basically I am for content creators having the right to monetize their work and against having an electronic cop in my TV room.

You make it sound as if these ideas are intrinsically intertwined.

Copyright is a social contract between me (the public) and the creator (artist) via the government that I permit them a time limited monopoly over their works in exchange that the works are released into the public domain after a reasonable amount of time. This was intended to spur creativity by allowing artists to fund their own works in the future.

If copyright actually had a reasonable time limit (no more then 20 years, I'd say 10 this day and age where content ages so quickly) it would be a fantastic thing.

Instead we have copyright as a legal cudgel used against average people and content creators for the profit of third party organisations who take no part in the actual creative process for an ever increasing length of time.

Until copyright is fixed and the content/media market forced to play by the same rules as any other market we will continue to have problems both from piracy and piracy prevention technologies because ultimately they are trying to solve a social problem with a technological solution because the social solution (giving up control) is unpalatable.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[devent]

But until then, artists need to eat. I'm not saying that the current means of achieving that is equitable or fair, but it sorta-kinda works, in that works of art are produced and that you don't see masses of dying artists on the 9 o'clock news.

How does it "sorta-kinda works" if the creator of music get's 1% of the sale of the CD? Right now the vast majority of creators don't see anything from copyright. Sure, if you get famous like the Beatles or Rolling Stones you get rich. But how many bands are actually rich? 1% or 2% of the bands out there. The rest are getting no cent out of copyright.

We have a kind of Replicator now, why 80% to 90% of the worlds population must still starve, because a book is more expensive then what they are making in a month? Why we are not releasing all works, abolish copyright? Only because of the 1% to 2% of creators that are getting rich or because of the RIAA/MPAA/GEMA and other organizations that are making billions without creating new works?

I'm not talking about the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the big bands and not about Hollywood. I'm talking about ever body else, the 99% of the creators out there.

But please, go to your local bands and just ask them how much money they make from selling CDs and if they are worse of if people are downloading their songs for free. Proof me wrong.

Please inform yourself: The Surprising History of Copyright; http://questioncopyright.org/

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[anUnhandledException]

Once again HDCP or HDMI isn't the source of your problems.

There is NOTHING in HDCP which prevents legacy audio (DTS, DD, PCM, analog multi channel) output.

If it "isn't working" then it is an issue w/ you TV, player, receiver, or settings.

You have multiple options:
1) HDMI to HDTV. Then toslink to receiver. This "should" work but depends on your HDTV implementation. On many HDTV the optical out is flawed. Check AVS forums.

2) Bluray player has optical out. Just run that directly to receiver and bypass (the possibly buggy TV).

3) Multi-channel analog out. If your BR player and receiver have that is a third option.

You may never believe it but the reality is your inability to get DTS/DD over toslink has absolutely NOTHING to do w/ HDCP.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[peppepz]

HDCP does not protect content which has already been ripped. HDCP was designed for the sole purpose of preventing people from "ripping" content they paid for, so the GP is right, except for the fact that DVDs do not require HDCP, so he should be talking about blu-ray / hd-dvd / digital downloads instead.

HDCP also makes his hardware more expensive, more power-hungry and more complex, thus more likely to be buggy (I've heard many stories of troubles due to HDCP incompatibilities/bugs).

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[whit3]

>

Copyright is only 200 years old and it was the big publisher who invented the copyright, not the content creators.

The truth is, the publishers weren't paying the content creators anything.
The original intent was to aid the author, so the effect of copyright was to
add a cost burden to the publishers. It didn't HURT the publishers (after
all, they pass those costs to the book buyers), but it was long after the
birth of copyright that the speculative buyers of rights got our legislatures
to extend the period. And to impose confiscatory and punitive unwarranted
judgments on 'violators'.

Re:The viewpoint from two worlds

[devent]

No, the original intent was to keep the state given monopoly to publish books.

The government wanted to abolish the Stationers' Company a relict of the former government that had the monopoly on printing and publishing books (and to censor the books as well). But the publisher lobbied the government under the disguise to protect the authors for a copyright law because they had older works and the money to buy the copyright of new works to publish them. The authors didn't had any choice to sell the copyright because the publisher were the only one with the printing presses, which were quite expensive. This new copyright law was later just taken over in the US constitution.

As I told before, the copyright was invented by the publisher for the publisher. Furthermore, there is no evidence what so ever that a copyright actually promotes the creation of new works. Last, the vast majority of creators don't see any cent out of copyright.

Don't believe me? Go inform yourself.

Dream with numbers

[iscy0]

Wow.. I just finished blogging about a dream I had last night that involved rainbows, colors and numbers... http://blog.invalidip.com/

Hell, yes, hooray for freedom!

[KingSkippus]

Because it's always good to make it easier to break the law and steal movies.

No, because it makes it easier for you to use your content that you paid for with your hard-earned cash the way you want to instead of how some third party who doesn't have your best interest at heart (and who only wants to get their greedy fingers on the aforementioned hard-earned cash, whether they've earned it or not) would like to make you pay for it over and over for making personal copies, displaying on alternate devices, etc.

The ability to infringe copyright is simply a side effect. Yes, some people may use it for that purpose. I won't.

When they invented the car, are you the type that sarcastically would have said, "Because it's always good to make it easier to to get away after robbing a bank. What other law-breaking things can we invent? Maybe someone should add sound to our good ol' silent films so that people can break the law by singing copyrighted songs."

Re:Hell, yes, hooray for freedom!

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

That'd be my pictures, whatever I wrote (and didn't sign away copyright for), music I created...
That's my content

Your pictures or your music are not machines capable of following instructions. My media player is, and since it is my machine it ought to follow my instructions, not yours. If I tell my machine to display your pictures on a screen that wasn't "authorized" by somebody then just that's what it ought to do.

Re:Hell, yes, hooray for freedom!

[jedidiah]

>>> Because it's always good to make it easier to break the law and steal movies.
>>
>> No, because it makes it easier for you to use your content
>
> That'd be my pictures, whatever I wrote (and didn't sign away copyright for), music I created...
> That's my content.

No. They are MY pictures now as soon as you sell them to me.

Interfere with what I do with them an you are MESSING WITH MY INALIENABLE RIGHTS and not just some bogus temporary copyright grant.

You should not be able to mess with MY rights if I do anything short of distributing unauthorized copies.

My right to dispose of my own property as I see fit should not be infringed.

That should include copying for my own use and cracking if necessary.

Publishers should have no more rights then those originally spelled out in the Copyright Act.

Re:Hell, yes, hooray for freedom!

[jedidiah]

Once the "product" enters my house and as long as it remains in my house, no one else should have any power to interfere with what happens.

Re:Hell, yes, hooray for freedom!

[tonekids]

AC smells like a sock puppet.

there is no more excuse to steal movies

[alen]

it's 2010 and we have netflix with it's so so instant streaming. along with a few other buy/rent online stores that offer content at decent prices. we even have blu ray's coming out with a digital copy so you can watch it on your phone, ipad, laptop without an optical drive, etc.

it's not the ideal where any blu ray or DVD should come with a digital copy and iTunes is not the greatest place to buy/rent from but they are all good enough not to steal with the excuse that the media companies aren't offering an easy way to consume media. only excuse you may have is that you're outside the USA and want US content

Re:there is no more excuse to steal movies

[pyite]

only excuse you may have is that you're outside the USA and want US content

Or if I want to use it under my terms and my choice of file format. On my choice of device. Using my choice of "unsupported" operating system.

It's people like you who let us get into this sort of situation in the first place.

Re:there is no more excuse to steal movies

[alen]

Since you're one of the 1% no one cares about you. or buy a Roku or something similar and use that. appleTV, Roku, boxee, iOS, Android and whatever all use linux or some other ^nix

Re:there is no more excuse to steal movies

[xtracto]

It is 2010 and still here in Germany I have to wait about 4 months to see the newly released movie.

And even then, if I want to see it, I must watch it terribly dubbed in German.

It is 2010 and I still cannot choose to see the shows I like (V, FlashForward, 24, ... granted Daily Show I can see, it is nice!) in the language I want... or even in the *original language*.

If I want to see it in the "official" ways, I cannot use my CRT TV (which is the only thing I have, excuse me) and must watch it in the 10'' screen of my netbook (sorry, this is the computer I own); whereas if I use the non-official channels (torrent + Wii + WiiMC) I can download the show, copy it to a hard drive and watch it whenever I want, in my TV... WHY DOESN'T ANYONE SELL ME THAT???

Re:there is no more excuse to steal movies

[ledow]

"Since you're one of the 1% no one cares about you"

Which is exactly why some people decide "fuck it" and go and break people's copy protection schemes. 1% of your customers is a big chunk of your income, especially in a economic slump. And that 1% are likely to be the most tech-savvy, probably quite large consumers of such content and, by strange coincidence, quite capable of destroying your petty copy protection and letting everyone in the world have it, safe in the knowledge that that life in a non-DMCA country.

Just a for-instance. If a company doesn't care about me, I don't care about that company either. I wouldn't break such things myself but hell, if someone comes up with a way to consume their content MILLIONS like me (even if we're only 1%) and millions of others that spot an opportunity will be doing what they can to view your content.

I'm not saying that companies that "play fair" have zero piracy, that would be an insane claim, but it's the act of deliberately excluding customers that WANT to consume your content that creates the majority of the problem in the first place.

Signed,

A happy hacked-get_iplayer user who download iPlayer content that I'm legally entitled to view, via an unofficial channel, because it's the only damn way I can view it properly and in a reasonable manner.

Re:there is no more excuse to steal movies

[Digital Vomit]

It's 2010 and some people *still* think copying is theft. Amazing.

Re:there is no more excuse to steal movies

[MightyYar]

Here are my "excuses" for "stealing":

1. They still play games like releasing the same movie at different times in different places. Thus I can get a DVD or near-DVD quality release from the P2P networks as soon as they start selling region 5 (Russia) DVDs. A paying customer is at a disadvantage to a pirate.
2. While Netflix is nice, not very many recent decent movies are available. Also, you need to buy an add-on box to your TV. It is also subject to the conditions of your twitchy network. With the P2P networks, you can play the file on any device you want.

I've used Hulu. It's great in concept, but the user experience is not as nice as the pirate networks. I can subscribe to a RSS feed and the shows are magically there waiting on my hard drive, ready to watch at my leisure.

I'm not a big fan of infinite copyright laws and the general ownership of the government by the big media companies, so I sleep pretty well at night. If all of this piracy puts them out of business... oh, well. Do we really need $150 million dollar Transformer movies?

Re:there is no more excuse to steal movies

[AltairDusk]

Which one of those options allows me to view the media on any of my devices?

Re:there is no more excuse to steal movies

[barzok]

it's 2010 and we have netflix with it's so so instant streaming. along with a few other buy/rent online stores that offer content at decent prices. we even have blu ray's coming out with a digital copy so you can watch it on your phone, ipad, laptop without an optical drive, etc.

How's that work out for when I need my media away from a broadband connection and I'm not buying into Blu-Ray yet (or what am I buying doesn't have the DRM-restricted digital copy)?

Re:there is no more excuse to steal movies

[Hatta]

Who needs an excuse? Information is not scarce. What excuse is there for prohibiting the free transfer of non-scarce goods? It's sure as hell not to promote the progress of science and useful arts, free copying actually encourages that. Copyright is just government interference in the free market. It's protectionism, and carries no moral force whatsoever. It's no more wrong to make a copy of a blu-ray than it was to make salt from the ocean in 1930s India.

Re:there is no more excuse to steal movies

[pyite]

That may be an excuse to break the encryption, but it isn't an excuse not to purchase a copy.

I agree. Since many people pay for cable TV, one could argue they're well within their rights to break HDCP encryption in order to time/format shift much as one would with a VCR (which we know were affirmatively held up as being legal to record TV shows for one's own use).

Re:there is no more excuse to steal movies

[Just Some Guy]

Since you're one of the 1% no one cares about you.

You'd be surprised how many non-geeks I know who rip their DVDs so their kids can watch them on iPods on car trips.

Re:there is no more excuse to steal movies

[Ash-Fox]

Troll? My post wasn't a troll, I really can view iPlayer videos without any hackery. iPlayer has an Adobe Air application for high definition and Adobe Air is available for Linux.

Re:FYI, see Wikipedia page for HDCP

[leuk_he]

It just repeats the same claim as the title of the pastebin title. That is good enough for wikipedia but wikipedia is not a second source/confirmation. Until someone actually creates a sink with this key this is nothing more than this slashdot article.

Re:Complete fail.

[ledow]

Like all encryption systems - if you learn enough about the keys, you can crack them and recover the original keys. In this case, just 40 devices with HDCP and a lot of mathematics is virtually guaranteed to recover the master key.

Don't use encryption to secure a digital product. It *will* fail because, at some point, you have to give people a key to access that product - thus they have access to the decrypted stream and to a number which is reliant on the private key. Encryption does NOT take account of protecting against an authorised user with a valid decryption key, or numbers of those users working in a concerted effort to crack your encryption. It's a misuse of the technology and any company that claims the opposite (e.g. all DRM companies) are lying to you.

No

[wzinc]

This is not a good day for content freedom. If true, this is a good day for the entertainment industry to try and lock-down media even more, or simply make it unavailable in a way consumers want. Piracy goes up, and they attempt to figure-out what's wrong while honest consumers suffer.

Re:No

[tekrat]

Really? If they lock things down even more, there won't be any "honest consumers". Law changes when enough people break the law. Remember prohibition? Well, maybe you're too young to remember (I know I am), but hey, if you're old enough to drink, look it up as it's important between you and your beer.

The point is: When *everyone* is breaking the law, the law ceases to be useful. There simply aren't enough cops in the world to arrest everyone. And the more media companies attempt to strengthen their grasp, the more consumers will slip through their fingers (apologies to Princess Leia for mangling her quote).

Re:No

[symbolset]

Oh, yeah. And the NEXT DRM scheme will be the one that remains unbreakable - FOREVER!

</sarcasm>

Re:No

[IndustrialComplex]

And the more media companies attempt to strengthen their grasp, the more consumers will slip through their fingers (apologies to Princess Leia for mangling her quote).

The problem with that quote? Didn't they just murder her adoptive family and a billion other people immediately afterward?

Re:No

[wzinc]

Well, I still won't pirate; I'll just quit watching.

Re:No

[Pentium100]

I can think of two DRM schemes that could work very well.

1. Place all copies of the movie in a secure location so that nobody can even look at the disk. If nobody has the disk, they can't copy it. Also, no streaming.

or
2. Make a shitty movie, so nobody would want to watch it, so nobody will copy it.

Your tv manufacture can now get it.

[leuk_he]

The HDCP is for communicating over HDMI links. Blue ray uses ACCS and some other protections. "the" blue ray protection is not broken cryptographically.

But now you can at least create an open source tv that can play HDCP content.

Re:Your tv manufacture can now get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

The HDCP is for communicating over HDMI links. Blue ray uses ACCS and some other protections. "the" blue ray protection is not broken cryptographically.

But now you can at least create an open source tv that can play HDCP content.

and a device that pretends to obey the content restrictions - about sending to unprotected outputs, but doesnt - thus can be recorded from easily.
Your blu-ray player can decode the aacs content and send it over what it thinks is a secure link.

Re:Your tv manufacture can now get it.

[Bruce Perens]

Although ACCS isn't broken this gives you a means to get the cleartext.

Read beyond the summary.

[goodmanj]

In particular, read
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection
and
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blom's_scheme

Some key (heh) facts:
* This key is not stored in high-def devices themselves, nor does any manufacturer possess it. This is the key used to *make* individual manufacturers' keys.
* The generated manufacturers' keys are set up in a way that device A and B can communicate secretly without knowing each others' keys.
* Because of the way this system works, if enough individual manufacturers' keys are known, one can figure out the master key. In this case, "enough" is 40.

Important point: it's not like some random tech at Sony got fired and decided to blow the whole thing wide open. If it's a leak, it's a leak from just one or two specific keyholders at Intel, who developed the system. But it doesn't have to be: any random person with 40 different Blu-Ray players and a whole lot of cleverness could potentially figure this out.

Re:Read beyond the summary.

[xtracto]

So mainly someone at Intel thought "40 should be enough for anybody" uh?.

Re:Read beyond the summary.

[goodmanj]

As far as I can tell, yes. Which is almost mind-bogglingly stupid. Keep in mind that it's not enough to just have 40 HDCP devices, you also have to crack them all, which involves either some really clever known-plaintext attacks or disassembling the firmware on each device. But if you can do it once, you can do it 40 times, so the only way to avoid having the master key leak is to never release that 40th manufacturer's key.

Re:Read beyond the summary.

[radtea]

This is the key used to *make* individual manufacturers' keys.

I haven't paid much attention to the whole HDCP mess as I've seen that movie before, but this simple fact is the most astonishing thing in the whole account.

There are only two possible outcomes to a set-up that depends on a single master key like this:

1) the key gets out. For a technology that is supposed to be around for decades this is as near to inevitable as can be, even if it couldn't be reverse-engineered. Even if 99.99% of the attempts to find or leak it fail, only one has to succeed and the key is out there forever.

2) the key gets lost. Most organizations suck at data management, and if there are few enough copies to be safe there are few enough copies to lose over the course of decades. My only regret now is we'll never see headlines that read, "MPAA asks hacker community to reverse engineer lost secret key".

I'm half-way tempted to go into the DRM business. If you're being paid buckets of money to build something that you know won't work it never matters if you fail. Wouldn't that be nice?

Re:Read beyond the summary.

[Yaa 101]

So It means that open source media players can now generate a usable key to be able to finally show content through the HDMI bus instead of analog only?

Re:Read beyond the summary.

[goodmanj]

1) is clearly a problem, but I don't think you have to worry about 2) losing the master key.

From a mathematical standpoint, if I understand the linear algebra right, the key-generating authority could ask each manufacturer to send back a copy of their individual key: it would be easy to construct a new master key matrix which is compatible with all the manufacturers' keys. It might not be exactly the same as the original, but it wouldn't matter.

From a practical standpoint, bureaucracies are pretty good at not losing important pieces of paper. Keeping them *secret*, on the other hand, is more difficult.

Re:Read beyond the summary.

[gnasher719]

Important point: it's not like some random tech at Sony got fired and decided to blow the whole thing wide open. If it's a leak, it's a leak from just one or two specific keyholders at Intel, who developed the system. But it doesn't have to be: any random person with 40 different Blu-Ray players and a whole lot of cleverness could potentially figure this out.

Back when I cared about HDCP, the number I heard was that you actually needed 77 device keys to crack the master key. Could be that 40 keys give you enough information if you are lucky enough and there is no redundancy in the data, and 77 are needed to guarantee a crack. Back then I thought HDCP is nonsense, because it protects from copying by recording the output of a video card before it goes to the monitor - and the amount of data is just so enormous that nobody would copy that way.

In the end, the same argument says that this is not any kind of victory against evil DRM. It doesn't affect future readability of video data - any graphics device driver could just not turn on HDCP (except there would be large contractual fines), so if the government needed to read a Blu-Ray DVD that is protected with HDCP, they could just ask NVidia to build them a graphics driver to play it without DVD, and ask Microsoft to sign that driver. It doesn't affect anybody in real use - unless your intention was to grab the output of your video card. It used to be a bloody inconvenience because many TVs and monitors didn't support HDCP, but now everybody does, so the user is not inconvenienced anymore.

Re:Read beyond the summary.

[wbav]

They already could display stuff though the HDMI bus, as HDCP isn't required on the broadcast.

What this means is with the right chip, open source programs like MythTV can receive HD, from (for example) a cable box using HDCP.

This is the main reason I haven't paid extra money each month to my cable provider for HD, I can't record it. If I can record HD, (through HDMI) then I'll gladly pay more money. HDCP has actually capped their profits in my case.

Re:Read beyond the summary.

[OverlordQ]

But it doesn't have to be: any random person with 40 different Blu-Ray players and a whole lot of cleverness could potentially figure this out.

Wouldn't it take a random person with 40 different manufacturers keys? Or with 40 devices can you somehow skip the manufactuere key and get the master directly?

Re:Read beyond the summary.

[goodmanj]

I was using shorthand: by "40 different players" I meant 40 different keys.

It's not clear from what I've read whether these keys are distributed 1 per manufacturer, 1 per device model, or god forbid one per device. It is clear that revoked / deleted keys can still be used to help decipher the master key.

Re:Read beyond the summary.

[mzs]

You could get unlucky and have some significant percentage of players with keys that are not all linearly independent. To simplify, say you have the equations x+y=0 and 2x+2y=0 that second one does not help at all. I last looked at HDCP a long time ago, but there was some other aspect like there needed to be the same number of 1 and 0 bits, so even if you got unlucky, had gotten 100 unique keys from hardware and only had 20 basis, that extra fact may have been enough to work it out.

Re:Read beyond the summary.

[goodmanj]

Going by the article I linked on Blom's scheme, the identifiers are deliberately chosen to be linearly independent. If they are not, if, say, Charlie's key is the sum of Alice and Bob's, then if Eve cracks Alice's and Bob's key, she gets Charlie's for free.

So in order to protect the system against small-scale partial compromise, you have to make it as easy as possible to totally compromise. And vice versa.

Re:Read beyond the summary.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I'm half-way tempted to go into the DRM business. If you're being paid buckets of money to build something that you know won't work it never matters if you fail. Wouldn't that be nice?

It's great work, if you can get it. Rovi Corp (formerly Macrovision Corp) has a net worth of well over 3 Billion Dollars.

Re:Read beyond the summary.

[Khopesh]

Keep in mind that it's not enough to just have 40 HDCP devices, you also have to crack them all, which involves either some really clever known-plaintext attacks or disassembling the firmware on each device.

An engineer working for a company that has made (or prototyped) 40+ HDCP devices would probably have access to the needed data, which can then be copied, brought home, and evaluated. (My hasty reading of) Blom's scheme suggests that the calculation given that data isn't terribly complex. Since this puts that techie's job in jeopardy, the results would need to be revealed anonymously. Otherwise, I see little reason for not taking credit. ... unless this is a top-level leak.

Re:FYI, see Wikipedia page for HDCP

[courteaudotbiz]

In fact, here is what you find on Wikipedia:
"In order to prevent legal issues, please do not reproduce the supposed matrix value on Wikipedia. If you wish to view the key, see the External Links section below for a link."

New Prometheus all over again

[tekrat]

I predict Sony will announce Blu-Ray2 tomorrow, and now you have to dump all your existing HD equipment and buy their newfangled crap with a different master key. All your existing investment in HD crap must be tossed in the trash.

Think of the boom to the economy if every American has to buy their movies ALL OVER AGAIN, for the 4th time, as well as replace their player, TV and the expensive cable between them.

Oh yeah, firmware update to PS3's that prevent playing Blu-Ray. Sony changes tagline for PS3 commercials to "It only does nothing".

Either that, or here comes Toshiba with HD-dvd-2... Div-X anyone?

This could signal the end of physical media. My prediction is that media companies will start selling only executable packages that contain player-code, the movie itself, and rootkit, and the player program will erase the movie after it's been watched, leaving the rootkit installed, so they can monitor if the player program is altered by the user, or the movie is watched again.

And then Orrin Hatch will allow Sony to blow up your computer if you tamper with their movie.

Re:New Prometheus all over again

[SmurfButcher Bob]

I believe you are referring to this : http://www.theonion.com/video/sony-releases-new-stupid-piece-of-shit-that-doesnt,14309/

Re:New Prometheus all over again

[Pentium100]

My prediction is that media companies will start selling only executable packages that contain player-code, the movie itself, and rootkit, and the player program will erase the movie after it's been watched, leaving the rootkit installed, so they can monitor if the player program is altered by the user, or the movie is watched again.

That won't work at all.
1. some hard drives can be set to read only.
2. you can record the exe file to a WORM medium or just make a bunch of copies.
3. there's always analog hole.
4. virtual machines can be used.
5. I can make the image of my system drive before playing the movie and restore it after (removing the rootkit).

Also, this does not change the fact, that the exe file will contain: the encrypted content, the decryption algorithm and the key.

DRM for non-interactive media does not work.

This is premature

[gr8_phk]

HDCP has not really become widespread enough for this to be a good thing - in fact it's a bad thing at this time. People don't complain about it yet and with it broken, the manufacturers will simply do something different - and possibly worse. So next time you break an encryption system, please keep quiet until it becomes a widespread problem for people ;-)

Re:This is premature

[L4t3r4lu5]

This just proves people have caught on, and aren't buying overpriced locked-down crap anymore.

iPhone not withstanding.

Re:This is premature

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean with "not widespread enough"? If I'd have to guess than there are easily more than a hundred million devices with HDCP out there. It's in everything that has a HDMI or DVI connector that was released in the last couple of years. Every HD-DVD and Blu-Ray player. Most HD TVs and LCD Computer monitors. Most XBox 360s and every PS3.

The reason people don't currently complain about HDCP is that the complaining phase is already over. Look at any video enthusiast forum about four years ago and you'll find plenty of complaints about incompatibility and things simply not working as they should, but today these problems are largely gone. If you wanted to get rid of HDCP devices stripping the protection have been available for years. They are mainly used to make newer players and consoles work with older displays. They aren't commonly used for ripping or recording since it is usually less of a hassle just to circumvent the DRM on the source.

Apart from that keeping quiet about the break was not an option since again it's been known for years that the master key could be generated out of 39+ device keys. It was just a question of someone investing the time and money to actually do it.

Re:This is premature

[grub]

This just proves people have caught on, and aren't buying overpriced locked-down crap anymore.

I don't recall ever hearing of someone not buying a device because of HDCP.

Re:This is premature

[vadim_t]

Here you have one. I don't own a single HDCP compliant monitor, and that's entirely intentional. I also pass on any laptops with BluRay drives or a TPM.

Re:This is premature

[Andy Dodd]

HDMI is VERY widespread at this point. Attempting to obsolete it now would result in an outrage.

It's not like the old days of early adopters who had component-input-only HDTVs. They got screwed but they were a tiny minority.

Re:This is premature

[L4t3r4lu5]

I don't recall ever hearing of someone not buying a device because of HDCP.

You just replied to one.

No HDMI equipped monitor on my PC, no Blu-Ray player, no PS3, nothing. I really wanted to play God of War too, but hey, PS3 only? No sale.

Re:This is premature

[grub]

I have HDMI on my TV but no BluRay or PS3. Funny enough, it plays 1080p MKV files great off our Popcornhour box :)

Re:This is premature

[Speare]

I have HDMI inputs on my TV, but I own no device that requires HDCP. No BluRay, no PS3, no HD-DVD, etc. A computer with a DVI output can make use of the HDMI TV just fine without encryption or key-exchange.

Re:This is premature

[DinDaddy]

Quite a few DVI equipped monitors/TVs/projectors from 2003 onward were also HDCP compliant. It only became mandatory for HDMI.

Re:This is premature

[marcosdumay]

HDMI != HDCP

Was this a leak or reverse-engineering?

[davidwr]

If it was a leak someone is going to jail.

If it was reverse engineering the next form of copy protection will be less vulnerable to such an attack.

Re:Was this a leak or reverse-engineering?

[ledow]

Copy protection using encryption is inherently insecure, because you have to give genuine customers some way of viewing material, thus some way to break the encryption. The second you do that, you are going against the established design criteria of modern encryption. No encryption specifically guards against multiple genuine recipients having multiple, genuine, valid decryption keys for ever and ever, and preventing *ANYONE* (even the genuine recipients) from ever decrypting that content.

Copy protection requires a WHOLE different design, one which no one has really bothered with, and any copy-protection system that advertises that it "uses AES" or any other such nonsense can possibly be taken seriously. That's *NOT* what it was designed to not and *NOT* what it will do. Hell, even DES, AES, etc. had stated lifetimes which were much shorter than the current copyright extension terms. Encryption and copy-protection try to solve different problems. Their combined use can complicate but not prevent such things from happening.

Re:Inside sources

[InsertWittyNameHere]

Inside sources say that the CEO had it written down on a post-it stuck to his monitor.

Re:short sighted summary author

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares?

There are so many great movies and music that have already been created. I can watch or listen to those if I want to be entertained. Hell, I frequently listen to music over a hundred years old, and it's great. Or I could just go on the internet and do any of a thousand different activities to entertain me or provide me with a creative outlet.

Most of what's coming out now is pure shit.Will Smith recycling Karate Kid so his talentless brat can have a career handed to him? Step up 3D? Hey I've got an idea, fuck off.

"Content creation" dying would actually be a good thing in some ways. It certainly wouldn't be a disaster. Of course, if you're an artist / musician / film maker / actor, you might be out of a job, but hey... nobody owes you a living, no matter how many billions of dollars you think your presence deserves. You can always get a real job instead.

How to stop buying into HDCP?

[tepples]

The answer isn't to keep cracking these "protection" schemes, it's to stop buying into them at all

That's rawther difficult without abandoning computers altogether. Are there any new monitors that don't support HDCP? I thought it was a requirement for the HDMI license, and every TV monitor has an HDCP-capable HDMI port nowadays.

Re:How to stop buying into HDCP?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been broke for a while, but have also become sick of most of the stuff on TV, so have not been and am not in the market for buying a flat panel TV. I have a CRT, and it works, so no need to "upgrade" - but that's the point, is a modern TV actually an improvement when it comes with so many anti features?

I totally reject DRM too, so whilst TVs support DRM systems I will not be buying one. I have thought about the future, and can see myself wanting a new TV somewhere down the line, and I have assumed that professional grade equipment won't have the DRM. I would bet that there are monitors in video production facilities with just simple DVI interfaces, and if I do want a new TV in the future I will try to track down 2nd hand pro-kit.

The choice does suck, but if you can bring yourself to question rampant consumerism then the whole premise of abandoning computers doesn't look so grim. Realising that consumer electronics generally means proprietary software is important, and if you can pick around the consumer junk there is still fun to be had.

Re:How to stop buying into HDCP?

[tepples]

have also become sick of most of the stuff on TV

Most computer monitors above a certain physical size are marketed as TVs, and instead of a DVI-D input, they have an HDMI input intended for use with a DVI-to-HDMI cable.

I have a CRT, and it works

Eventually your monitor will stop working, at which point you will replace it or do without.

Re:How to stop buying into HDCP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most computer monitors above a certain physical size are marketed as TVs, and instead of a DVI-D input, they have an HDMI input intended for use with a DVI-to-HDMI cable.

Oh yeah, I know that. I'm hoping that there are others without DRM features out of the view of the general public. As I'm not in the market for a big flat panel TV/monitor, I haven't looked into what is really in existence.

My rule is that I don't pay for anti-features, so if my imagined monitor isn't out there somewhere, I'll just have to do without. Or come up with a workaround. With DVDs, due to the presence of DRM I will not pay for them. My workaround is piracy. If the anti-feature of CSS weren't there (that doesn't work anyway!), I would be more willing to pay, but to be honest it's too late now: piracy is just too convenient in every way.

Eventually your monitor will stop working, at which point you will replace it or do without.

Or recycle an existing redundant monitor back into use, without the anti-features. It might be smaller, but so what? Just sit closer :)

Re:How to stop buying into HDCP?

[fyngyrz]

is a modern TV actually an improvement when it comes with so many anti features?

Yes. Without any doubt at all.

Re:How to stop buying into HDCP?

[whit3]

That's rawther difficult without abandoning computers altogether. Are there any new monitors that don't support HDCP? I thought it was a requirement for the HDMI license, and every TV monitor has an HDCP-capable HDMI port nowadays.

There's a lot of DVI monitors that plug into my HDTV component box,
that aren't HDCP equipped. The 'every TV monitor' comment omits
these as an option. That is a definite drawback to the consumer.

Re:How to stop buying into HDCP?

[tepples]

It might be smaller, but so what? Just sit closer :)

I'm glad you found a solution for you, but it's not for everyone. Some PC users need to see more of a document than will fit in the 800x600 on which one can rely using a thrift-store monitor. Other people don't live alone and therefore need a TV monitor that more than one person can fit around when watching video or playing local multiplayer games.

Arrr Matey!

[Alcoholist]

Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free / You are a pirate!

I don't care one bit

[L4t3r4lu5]

I have never, and will never, buy anything with HDCP enabled. The only DRM scheme I use is Steam, and that's because it's convenient and unintrusive, and completely compatible with my existing hardware without any modification whatsoever.

HDMI / HDCP can die in a fire. I've had 16:10 1920x1200 better-than-HD for over two years without any of this HDMI crap, and I can go a hell of a lot longer without it. By the way, that includes the next progression, whatever that may be.

Re:I don't care one bit

[L4t3r4lu5]

Apologies, I also have DVD content protected by CSS, and a couple of games with SecuROM on a shelf. They're not installed, though, and haven't been for over a year.

Since I swapped to Linux, actually.

Re:I don't care one bit

[satoshi1]

How.... DARE YOU!

Re:short sighted summary author

[Mike Kristopeit]

it can't get better.

Re:short sighted summary author

[Mike Kristopeit]

My experience is that those who want to "aggressively monetize content creation" are rarely creators.

duh... they enable the creators... WITH MONEY.

But you just gave me the only one I need ;-)

[SqyD]

"only excuse you may have is that you're outside the USA and want US content"

Ok, so for me (as I am living in Europe) this excuse is valid to me?
What about those poor USA citizens who desperately want to access Non-USA content??
I rest my case ;-)

Re:But you just gave me the only one I need ;-)

[alen]

plenty of it here, and there are tons of online streaming services. the cable/SAT TV companies all have options for paid foreign channels. people i know pay the $15 a month for a package of Russian channels. and there are tons of russian owned stores with decent russian DVD selections. there are channels for almost every major ethnicity in the US and anything else like a DVD can be bought on the internet

Re:short sighted summary author

[Mike Kristopeit]

Who cares?

i care that a publisher was irresponsible and published short sighted opinion presented as fact.

HDCP really has no legit reason to exist

[Sycraft-fu]

As you say, there are two separate issues, the issue of respecting copyright and the issue of doing what you want with your devices. Well HDCP does nothing to stop copyright infringement. The pirates just nab a copy earlier in the chain, just rip the disc. Sometimes they do it later in the chain, just record a movie in a theater. Either way the fact that they can't nab a signal from the wire doesn't matter at all, they don't even try.

What this does do is prevent legit uses. I really want to build a HD DVR for my living room. I don't want the one the cable company sells. Not only do you pay a monthly charge, but I don't care for its features or its tiny drive. I want to build my own. The capture card I want is already on the market, the Blackmagic Intensity. Expensive, but worth it. ...

Except HDCP stops all that from working.

So I could go and just download the content online, any and every thing I could want is out there, free for the taking. I cannot legitimately just record it off my expensive ($80/month currently) cable TV connection.

I'm very fed up with copy protection these days because this is what is happening. It isn't protecting anything, it is hurting normal users. It is so overbearing that it interferes with normal usage, and still it does nothing to stop infringement.

Another thing, along those lines, is I can't play Blu-ray movies on my PC. I have a BD-RW drive, 1920x1200 monitor and HDMI soundcard out to a massive home theater system. Seems like the tech is there. However because of the way my system works, the display output is mirrored, one copy via DVI to the screen, the other via HDMI to the soundcard, since it need a video signal to get clock from to send its sound. All devices HDCP enabled, but Blu-ray disallows playback in the event of a mirrored screen.

They've done a great job of protecting me from myself, but nothing to stop me from downloading a program and ripping and uploading their movies, if I so chose.

Re:HDCP really has no legit reason to exist

[radish]

You don't need to get around HDCP to record cable. Many cable boxes have firewire outputs you can use, or better yet, use CableCard (e.g. http://www.cetoncorp.com/products.php).

Re:HDCP really has no legit reason to exist

[wvmarle]

So again pirated content wins on general experience. I bet you can download all those movies in HD, and they will likely play just fine.

While your paid for BD fails.

It is really as if those content producers go out of their way to drive their customers to the torrent sites.

Re:HDCP really has no legit reason to exist

[Sycraft-fu]

Firewire shuts down when copyprotected content is being shown. Already tried that a few years ago. The stream will start, you'll get a few seconds, then it'll shut down. More research revealed that is expected operation from the cable boxes when dealing with copy protected content, and basically everyone but NPR flags all their shows as protected. I'll look in to that Centon card but I expect my cable provider will tell me to pack sand. They only support their own Scientific Atlanta hardware.

Re:HDCP really has no legit reason to exist

[HTH NE1]

Firewire shuts down when copyprotected content is being shown. Already tried that a few years ago. The stream will start, you'll get a few seconds, then it'll shut down.

It could just be failing the HDCP handshake on the Firewire connection. This may enable the ability to make that handshake and get it to provide the stream using keys you generate, which means you can then decrypt the stream.

I'm hoping someone with the skills gets multi-platform drivers written to do this quickly before they send the update to the cable boxes to disable those Firewire ports.

Re:HDCP really has no legit reason to exist

[anUnhandledException]

Firewire doesn't use HDCP. It uses a complete different encryption standard called DTCP (also know as 5C).

If the content is flagged as "do not record" the STB will shutdown/block the firewire port. The HDCP crack will do nothing to change this restriction.

Re:HDCP really has no legit reason to exist

[radish]

Per the FCC, Cable companies have to provide and support CableCards. Certainly all the major ones do so, as do most of the smaller ones (it's required for products like Tivo, so they're pretty good at applying pressure to cablecos who don't want to play ball). My experiences with Cablevision, Comcast and Verizon have always been pretty good - I've been using CCs with Tivo for a number of years now.

Re:HDCP really has no legit reason to exist

[Pentium100]

However because of the way my system works, the display output is mirrored, one copy via DVI to the screen, the other via HDMI to the soundcard, since it need a video signal to get clock from to send its sound.

If only that is the problem, just connect your sound card to your amp using analog cables.

Re:HDCP really has no legit reason to exist

[Sycraft-fu]

No, for a number of reasons:

1) I don't want to fuck with ground loops.

2) My receiver has many advanced functions, but they only function on digital signals since they are done in the DSP. These include things like room correction so I want to have them.

3) The receiver does a better job decoding Dolby Digital and so on, it's levels are calibrated to the reference theater spec.

4) I spent a lot of money on this HDMI soundcard, I'm going to use it.

5) My receiver has superior converters to my soundcard. It, being designed for HDMI, doesn't feature top notch D/A converters. My receiver does.

6) I shouldn't fucking have to.

It isn't a big deal, I don't watch Blu-rays on my computer, just an example of how they fuck over legitimate consumers with stupid restrictions.

Re:HDCP really has no legit reason to exist

[Pentium100]

Oh, OK. Well, my video card (ATI HD2900XT) can output audio to the DVI connector (to which I can attach a DVI to HDMI adapter), so I would not need to buy a separate sound card just for HDMI, but I do not have any devices with HDMI input and all my amps (including a 5.1 receiver) are analog, so I would not think about using HDMI for audio.

Blu Ray Players

[TheNinjaroach]

This will have no difference on Blu Ray players that require HDCP to output their high def content, still spitting in the face of thousands of early adopters.

Why not on Sunday

[Fnord666]

They couldn't have waited until Sunday to release this?

Re:Complete fail.

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Encryption used for things like DVD's, Blu-Ray, HDPC, etc. suffer from two major weaknesses:

1. As ledow pointed out, you need to provide a decryption method and a key to the end user in order for them to view the content. With unencrypted content and a decryption key, it's possible to reverse-engineer the encryption. Given enough samples (eg. dozens of Blu-Ray movies each with different keys) the process becomes easier.

2. The encryption must be weak enough so that the content can be decrypted in real-time. You've got to be able to decrypt roughly 2K of data for every frame displayed. At 30 frames a second that would mean being able to decrypt 60K of data per second. Your average Blu-Ray DVD player doesn't have a high end multi-core CPU in it to aid in decryption, so it requires an algorithm that's relatively light weight and fast.

Blu Ray: Now Ready for the Living Room?

[Blue Stone]

It has other uses too: dissuading casual pirates from ever jumping ship and buying into the medium.

A friend of mine couldn't play a couple of Blu Ray discs he'd bought because of various compatibilty issues to do with updated keys or whatever. It convinced me that Blu Ray just wasn't ready for the living room. Why would I want to give these fools my money when it results in a crapshoot? No Blu Ray player for me, no discs either. I decided to spend my money on something that's not so flaky.

More info here

[supervillian64]

More technical details described here: http://cryptome.org/hdcp-weakness.htm

Re:More info here

[supervillian64]

Edit: Found this on Reddit - http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ddj5f/hdcp_master_key_pirates_1_riaa_0/c0zey2n

The HDCP effect

[BennyB2k4]

HDCP Effect: A preemptive Streisand effect where there is no immediate aggressor but one is implied. Which means the material gets blasted around the internet 'just in case' there are aggressor actions.

Originally cracked in 2001....

[Anonymous Coward]

....but took another 9 years to develop an implementation of it:

http://www.macfergus.com/niels/dmca/cia.html

There is also a repost of this info available @ John Young's Cryptome, that someone else in this thread already posted.

One question: I noticed in the 2001 papers that this was designed against the 1.0 version of HDCP. Will it also work against it's revisions?

Ya

[Sycraft-fu]

I think some forget how hypocritical people can be. This is even easier when you are talking old people being hypocritical with regards to what they did in youth. For one, we tend to remember the past through rose colored glasses. Not only does this mean we think things were better back then, but we kinda white wash our own histories. We forget some of the shit we did, the positions we held, and remember a more idealized version of ourselves. So "I smoked pot daily and loved it," may morph in to "I tried pot a few times socially and don't think it was a good idea."

Also people get overly cautious about what they did in the past. They see things as "stupid" and they are "amazed they survived." Of course you look further and it turns out that most people did that kind of stuff, so maybe it really isn't as dangerous as you think. However that isn't considered, instead the "protect the children" instinct takes over and they want to restrict things for their own good.

So I can perfectly well see people who are currently massive downloader growing up and getting power and then fighting against it. They'll remember it as something they did a bit and what a bad idea it was and how bad it is to do, and be all the more convinced it has to be stopped.

Re:Clever idea to slashdot the site with the key..

[the_other_chewey]

Here you go, compact version:

The key's 22,400 bytes interpreted as raw RGB data, padded
with a single 0 at the and to make it divisible by three:
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/9746/hdcp.png

Re:Complete fail.

[tibit]

Not only that, but the DRM peddlers completely ignore the wetware that's actually implementing this stuff. To a team that develops a player or display firmware, DRM is an annoyance -- it's extra work that adds nothing to the value or functionality of their product, it's only a market enabler. They'll implement it only as far as it takes to get their product blessed by whoever does a 3rd party review/certification (if there's such a thing for DRM). Thus one can't but expect security holes galore and spaghetti code and whatnot. Never mind weaknesses in the algorithms themselves.

Damn right

[Lisandro]

I was sick and tired of my TVs/Monitors deciding by themselves what they would and wouldn't show. I'd like to think maybe this time manufactures will get a clue - i don't see it happening any time soon though.

Forgot a few extra evils

[Mathinker]

> The MAFIAA/RIAA ...

They game governments to get laws passed which enrich themselves at the cost of depriving society of: the use of the public domain, due process, and other privileges like anonymity on the net.

They use their legal muscle to try to prevent independently created content from becoming competitive with their product (e.g.: Veoh).

Re:Fixed

[jedidiah]

> No word yet on how it was obtained, but if true, this is a
> great day for content piracy around the world!"
>
> There, I fixed that for you.....

Content piracy never needed this.

Re:Inside sources

[kimvette]

Inside sources say that the CEO had it written down on a post-it stuck to his monitor.

What you heard is completely wrong and is bordering on libel. No way would he be stupid enough to keep such an important piece of intellectual property on a post-it note on a monitor in clear view. He is far too clever for that, you see.

It was taped under his keyboard. Shows what you know! :-p

Great day for content freedom ...

[BitZtream]

Seriously?

Freedom has seen some great days, the end of WWII in Europe being a shining example that comes to mind, but this really isn't that big of a deal.

I think if this 'day' gets you all excited, you probably need a little perspective in your life. Not that this isn't a good thing, lets just try to keep things in a proper view.

Re:short sighted summary author

[Mike Kristopeit]

no money = NO CREATIVE WORK

about time

[lusid1]

Finally. It was a stupid idea to begin with. I should be able to time-shift all my content without renting a crippleware box from the cableco. 2 months for china to make capture hardware, 6 month for an open source driver to mature, another 6 months for support to stabalize in mythtv, plus some time for it to make it into the distros. Maybe a year and a half before I can refresh my mythboxen. Yeah.

A Won Battle, an Indeterminate War

[Pfhool]

Proponents of open video have potentially won a battle here, but I have to agree with the commenters that say that this may just push the content companies to add new controls elsewhere in the content ecosystem. For example, DTCP (and particular the IP-oriented DTCP-IP) is already widespread in newer "TV Anywhere" style devices. It may also have cryptographic weaknesses, but compared to HDCP it is even more closed and it is controlled by an independent cabal of corporations.

See Engadget's summary of the comments on the FCC's set-top-box competition proceeding for a sense of what is to come.

Meet the new boss.

Re:Clever idea to slashdot the site with the key..

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Too large for a T-Shirt

The movie studios will be ruined!!

[jonaskoelker]

But now that the DRM is broken, the poor movie studios will have no defense against piracy.

Expect them to release numbers and graphs showing how their revenue takes a sharp turn downwards.

(Unless, of course, their claims of connections between piracy and revenue are all lies, but I would never suggest anything like that...)

Re:The movie studios will be ruined!!

[Skapare]

(Unless, of course, their claims of connections between piracy and revenue are all lies, but I would never suggest anything like that...)

Please don't. We hate dupes, here.

So go without.

[Petersko]

"As long as the copyright holder can exclusively decide what DRM will be applied you have no possibility to vote with your wallet short of doing completely without it."

It's not freaking oxygen. Go without it. That's what voting with your wallet means - or should mean.

Re:So go without.

[Kjella]

It's not freaking oxygen. Go without it. That's what voting with your wallet means - or should mean.

That would be the Soviet Russian version "voting with your rubles", either you take the one choice you get from the government or you go without. Want a car? It's Lada or nada. No, voting with your wallet is extremely tightly connected with the American idea of market economy, where many companies offer products and services and you as the consumer choose which of them succeed or fail in the marketplace. To the degree it applied to not buying at all, it would be because there's no product you'd want at a price you could afford. The way bands and movies become hits or flops are examples of a working market, but in how you get it delivered there's no competition at all. It's DRM or nothing.

Voting with your dollar has never been very successful against collusion and monopolies that make all your choices worse. By far the most successful boycotts have been when a competitor's product has been almost similar but differ in some critical aspect like not being from a specific country, not using animal testing, not using child labor or something like that. The difference between a Hollywood blockbuster and the closest independent film is way, way greater than between a real fur coat and an imitation. Of course if enough people boycotted for long enough it might work, but it's like driving in a nail with a screwdriver. It's not the right tool for the job, but if you beat it hard and long enough it might still work. Just don't pretend that's what it's supposed to be used for or what it's good at.

Re:So go without.

[AK Marc]

And if sales decrease, they go to Congress and claim it was piracy. In fact, sales increased and they complained that they didn't increase fast enough, proving piracy was costing them billions.

Re:Clever idea to slashdot the site with the key..

[the_other_chewey]

The key is actually 11200 bytes. It seems you took the hex data instead of the raw bytes?

Ah, damn - yes. That also explains why the picture is so dark, I was already wondering if there was an additional weakness in there...

you are not entirely correct

[Chirs]

Actually, you will get 5.1 over the optical cable. You won't get 7.1, you won't get 96KHz sampling rate, and you won't get lossless bitstream. But basic Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 work just fine.

Re:you are not entirely correct

[adolf]

The issue there was the TV, not any particularly heinous DRM.

My own Samsung set offers the same limitation. Why? Simply: The TV has two speakers. So, to simplify things, it's requesting a stereo mix from the source component.

I worked around problems like this by using the TV as a monitor, not as an audio device, from day 1. As far as I know, the speakers in the TV don't work at all -- I've never heard them.

Haul it back to Fox, sista

[marxmarv]

You are apparently also of the generation that prefers ignorant mob rule and lazy scapegoating to spending even modest effort on understanding copyright law.

Hint: Start by finding the part of copyright law that criminalizes the receipt of information. Then find the section of law that allows an individual or corporation to enforce a contract against someone not a party to it.

Re:Clever idea to slashdot the site with the key..

[YourExperiment]

Not for most Slashdot readers!

Push any agendas lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it does sound strange. Perhaps that's because the parent meant "watched 2 or 3 illegally obtained movies."

But, you were smart enough to figure that out on your own, weren't you? Or, were you relying on your misnomer to push your agenda, you filthy copyright infringer?

yeah yeah blah blah

[marxmarv]

It really doesn't take much at all to turn any person off the street into a jackbooted thug, if they have the slightest inclination for it.

Re:Complete fail.

[farnsworth]

Just curious -- could a similar technique be used to derive the private key of a bank's ssl cert? If not, what's the difference. If so, why hasn't that been done to date? TIA.

Makes you wonder

[ThatsNotPudding]

how long before someone arrested for stealing a DVD is also charged with 'Intent to Distribute'. Off to a Super Max for a hard 20, you society-destroying Kingpin!

Re:short sighted summary author

[Anomalyst]

no money = NO CREATIVE WORK

You are obviously not a creative person.
Money is rarely THE motivating factor. People were creating and performing long before the MAFIAA became the middleman in the process and began searching for their holy grail of control via DRM. Artists of all disciplines will continue to do so long after they are rotting in their graves.

Re:Clever idea to slashdot the site with the key..

[raygundan]

Damn. I was really hoping for something to replace my ancient DeCSS shirt.

(-1, Needs To Get Out More)

[marxmarv]

Your average Blu-Ray DVD player doesn't have a high end multi-core CPU in it to aid in decryption

Says who?

For a million-unit product, it becomes quite economical to design and fab single-purpose accelerators that can decrypt megabytes per second of 1024-bit RSA. It's even more economical for a semiconductor company like Zoran or ST or Toshiba to integrate such an accelerator core into one of their ARM systems-on-chip and sell millions per month as a stock item, complete with development support. After all, they've been doing the same with MPEG-2 video decoders for years.

Re:Clever idea to slashdot the site with the key..

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only 89,600 digits in binary. That can easily be represented as a 300x300 b/w image (or, if you prefer perfect fits, 512x175)...

They can't actually be serious

[SuperKendall]

That's all fine and dandy for now, but what happens when they start to get really serious about "protecting their content," and start introducing devices that can't be so easily broken?

HDCP was about as serious as it gets.

But the fact is that when anyone has physical control over all of the parts of a system, you cannot prevent them from deconstructing to the point where they can do what they want.

If these controls keep being broken, then eventually people will realize it makes no monetary sense to pay for them (as they have with music). We are a ways off from that in video, but it will happen someday - or it won't, but it will not matter for anyone that cares about it because the crackers cannot be stopped.

Re:They can't actually be serious

[marcosdumay]

The master key isn't included on any HDCP product. You simply don't have it at home, so it makes no difference on how hackable was your system. That current news puts light on another more subtile problem with DRM, not even the military (even at war time) can keep secrets for a long time, how do those companies think they will?

Re:They can't actually be serious

[SuperKendall]

The master key isn't included on any HDCP product.

No, but there were still products that worked around it (you could buy an HDCP to VGA adaptor from some places in China). There were always bypass points, in many places...

Re:short sighted summary author

[Mike Kristopeit]

anything that's worth creating costs money

Re:Just make it worse for the honest people

[Pentium100]

HDCP has nothing to do with piracy.

Suppose I want to buy a Bluray movie and watch it. I buy a Bluray player, but most likely it does not have a VGA output. My highest resolution display is my CRT computer monitor (up to 2048x1536@80Hz), but it only accepts VGA input. So, I have to break HDCP in order to convert from DVI or HDMI to VGA (there are devices, like HDFury, that already do that).

Or, I could download a rip using BitTorrent and play it on my computer.

So, HDCP actually would prevent me from watching a movie that I bought on a monitor that I won.

What, why?

[falken0905]

From TFA: "Just as the MPAA is preparing to offer movies to customers at home while they're still in theaters ..."

If I'm still in the theater why would I also want the movie showing at home?

Re:Complete fail.

[anUnhandledException]

No because a bank is a closed key pair. For the bank there exists only a single private key and a single public key. With only a single public key you can't determine the private key.

With HDCP a single device key would have similar immunity but it would also have another larger problem. If the key ever becomes compromised you would have no mechanism to rescind it (every device in whole world would use same key). Thus the "solution" was to make each device key unique but mathematically related. They are related via the master key. Get enough device keys = get enough mathematically related keys = reverse engineer the original.

With a bank website there is no need for multiple keys. There is a public key and private key. If that pair is ever compromised it would simply be replaced (and via key revocation the old key marked as bad forever).

different scenario thus different potential weaknesses.

NSFW

[Don_dumb]

As with many technologies in history, porn leads the way - brazzers for instance gives videos in 1080P, as well as lower quality.

And as usual, if the adult industry can do it why can't the mainstream industries?

Re:Complete fail.

[owlstead]

And this is modded informative? Sure, if you have a secret key you will have to distribute it to use it. That seems to have been the case for DHCP (which is obviously not - yet - suited for asymmetric encryption due to cost/latency constraints). But you'll be famous if you can retrieve a asymmetric private key from encrypted content that you distributed together with the public key. Most standardized encryption systems in are safe from plain text attacks (e.g. 3DES, AES, RSA and Elliptic Curves).

The big problem with DRM is that you need to distribute the key to decrypt the stream in the first place. If that eco-system is not completely airtight (manufacturers of players and players) then you will run into trouble. Because you can retrieve the playing key or the content if it isn't. This becomes worse when you don't have a flexible key management system - the reason why there is one in the Blu-ray spec. But the Blu-ray spec can rely on high end / hardware accelerated processors - I presume DHCP can't.

Local mirror

[AlpineR]

HDCP MASTER KEY (MIRROR THIS TEXT!)

I think they meant mirror this text on other sites. A copy of another comment posted six minutes earlier doesn't really help.

Re:Clever idea to slashdot the site with the key..

[SuricouRaven]

I saw this on Freenet already.

Time to upgrade

[shutdown -p now]

Between this and the fact that local Best Buy has BluRay players on sale for $70, it looks like it's finally time to upgrade, since I can finally get something that's on par with DVD in terms of features other than image quality.

How it works

[DrJimbo]

Someone asked why the matrix wasn't symmetric as per the master matrix in Blom's Scheme.

I figured out the answer by reading the three short articles linked to from HDCP: Why So Weak?. The deal is that they placed severe hardware constraints on themselves. They were only allowed to require devices to do addition, no multiplication. Therefore the implementation in the Wiki article was not acceptable.

The HDCP scheme only allows "sources" to create a shared private key with "sinks", not other sources. Each source (sink) gets a private key that is a sum of 20 rows (columns) of the master matrix mod(P) where P seems to be 2^56 (which is not prime). Their public key is not a vector of integers like in the Wiki article. It is a vector of 40 zeros or ones with a total of 20 zeros and 20 ones. It is the same vector that selected their 20 rows (columns).

If you look at how an arbitrary source's 20 rows overlap with an arbitrary sink's 20 columns in the master matrix, they will intersect at exactly 400 (= 20 x 20) numbers. The shared private key is the sum mod(P) of these 400 numbers. The source's private key is the 40 word vector containing the sum of its 20 rows. So the 400 numbers at the intersections have been summed into 20 numbers out of the 40 numbers of the source's private key. The sink tells the source which of the 20 of the 40 numbers in the source's private key to sum. These correspond to the 20 bits that were set (out of 40 bits) to select the 20 columns that make up the sink's private key. When the sources adds the 20 numbers from its private key it gets the sum of the 400 numbers in the intersection between the source's rows and the sinks columns.

The sink does the same thing. It gets told by the source which 20 of the 40 numbers in it's private key correspond to the sources 20 rows. The sink adds up these 20 numbers and it too gets the sum of the 400 numbers that are in the intersection of the sources rows and the sinks columns. This way each one uses their own private key (the sum of their 20 rows or columns which is a vector of 40 numbers) combined with the public key of the other (which 20 out of 40 numbers to sum) in order to find a shared private key. They both end up with the same number which is called the shared private key. It is the sum of the 400 numbers where the source's rows intersect the sink's columns in the master matrix.

Hell yeah

[DrJimbo]

So, can Linux playback BluRay movies now? Or does that still require Rube Goldberg contortions to get poor quality playback?

I use MakeMKV to stream Bluray content to xbmc. I have an nvidia card that enables hardware decoding via vdpau. The streaming means I don't have to rip Blurays to a hard drive and the hardware decoding means that my cpu is coasting at about 15% usage. The quality is fabulous, xbmc is really slick. I'm planning to use the wonderful Bluray playback to show off my Linux system as a media center to my friends who still use Windows.

I start the streaming from the command line. If you think typing is a Rube Goldberg contortion, you could use the GUI that lets you start the streaming with just a few mouse clicks. It is now very easy and the quality is excellent. The biggest problem I have is that most of the movies I like aren't yet available on Bluray. If you like movies with lots of violence and action, you probably don't have this problem.

As an added bonus, I don't have to screw around with firmware updates to my Bluray drive.

Valid comparisons

[Mr2001]

Copyright infringement is not an exact analogy with theft, as is regularly pointed out on /. , but there are some valid comparisons to be made.

Indeed there are.

One valid comparison is that copyright infringement and theft are both illegal.

Another is that they both involve the actor getting something for free.

However, they fail the most important comparison. Theft is wrong not because it's illegal, or because the thief gets something for free, but because the victim of theft suffers a tangible loss. Before the act of theft, the victim had X; after the act, he no longer has X; he is now poorer than he used to be, thanks to the thief's actions. That's precisely why theft is wrong.

Copyright infringement lacks that quality. You can draw some superficial comparisons to theft, but it's missing the most important aspect of theft, the one that makes theft wrong. The comparison really only serves to cheapen actual theft.

Re:short sighted summary author

[pnewhook]

You're a complete fucking moron if you believe that. I could easily point out hundreds of things that don't cost money to create but are well worth the effort. You are NOTHING idiot.

Re:short sighted summary author

[Mike Kristopeit]

you could easily do something that would take 1 sentence, yet instead of doing it you write 3 sentences, all of which contain nothing but furthering evidence suggesting your intellect is that of a cowardly child.

TIME is money, idiot. SPENDING TIME IS SPENDING MONEY.

straighten your dick, pee hook.

you are NOTHING

Re:short sighted summary author

[pnewhook]

SPENDING TIME IS SPENDING MONEY

So how much does it cost you to sleep at night? Time is only money if you can or want to actually make money during that time.

Re:short sighted summary author

[Mike Kristopeit]

that's 2 more sentences where you could have provided one of the "hundred" proofs by counter examples you claim to have, yet refuse to share.

perhaps because they don't exist and you're a liar or an idiot...

you are NOTHING

Almost perfect answer

[LostMyBeaver]

2 needs a brief revision. It wasn't specifically about cheap embedded devices, it was entirely about small and simple.

The issue was that they wanted to encourage (at pain of death) the vendors to embed the HDCP encoding hardware directly into the video decoding chips. The HDCP encoder needed to be tiny enough that it would take only a minuscule portion of the FPGA/ASIC containing the video decoder. This made it so vendors would agree to do it. If they would have implemented a more complex system similar to ZRTP (one of the more complex, yet secure streaming encryption systems) first of all, there would be tons of compatibility problems. Vendors of video IP would have tons of problems implementing it and the differing interpretations of the spec would guarantee uselessness of the spec.

Additionally, it should be able to be implemented using pure logic, arithmetic is expensive. A full adder adds a huge layer of gate depth into a chip. Each bit adds at least one layer of depth. This adds latency etc... a logical algorithm can perform an entire step in the encoding/decoding chain in one level of depth. Also, logic operations are REALLY simple to route in ASICs and FPGAs. Non-power-of-2 multiplications and divisions would add loss, not only damaging the quality of the signal, but possibly the control codes, rendering the output undecodable.

By placing the HDCP stuff directly within the ASIC/FPGAs of the decoders (the primary goal as earlier noted), it made it so that while the algorithm itself was generally weak to begin with, the keys would be much harder to obtain as they would be coded directly inside the ASIC. Also, it makes it impossible to intercept the decoded signal between the decoder and the encrypter.

DVD CSS is an entirely separate interesting case. I was attempting to license the DVD specs to make a licensed DVD player back before DeCSS was released. I was reading through the requirements for licensing and find it amazing that almost all the interesting bits have disappeared from the face of the planet. Here's some things I vaguely remember from it, they may be imprecise :

1) The spec was made by Intel (a pretty smart group of guys normally)

2) The spec itself cost $5,000 + delivery via a secure physical method.

3) The spec was licensed to a company, but only after meeting certain security requirements.

4) Only "cleared individuals" would be permitted access to the spec.

5) The spec was to exist ONLY within a sealed room, no windows, heavily locked door.

6) The door would only be able to be opened by individuals cleared for access by the DVD consortium.

7) When the cleared individuals were not in the room and at any time the door was open, the spec would have to be stored in a fireproof safe which limited access only to individuals (the ones cleared to be in the room).

8) All source code for implementing the spec would exist ONLY on a removable medium (floppy, removable hard disk, zip disk, this was before thumb drives).

9) All binary implementations of the code would be heavily encrypted and could not be decrypted or deciphered without the use of a multi-million dollar laboratory environment.

Oops! That's where the failure was. So long as code can be run, it has to be in a decrypted form. So once the code is decrypted to be executed, then ANY debugger which can function on an application in memory could be used to read the code in assembler form. The complexity of the algorithm is irrelevant, all that matters is the amount of time a person has to sit and sort it out. The film industry wanted this clause in, but I'm entirely convinced that the guys who made the spec knew before hand it was entirely unrealistic.

You'll note that they focused a great deal of effort on the protection of the physical specification. I'd actually be amazed if the formal specification even exists in electronic form anymore. I'd imagine that it's strictly in print and is photocopied for each new licensee if there are actually any.

There are other reasons

[LostMyBeaver]

I have purchased approximately a thousand DVDs over the past 14 years. I have a room in my house damn near consumed by them. They take tons of space. Before that, I bought tons of VHS (possibly literally, they were heavy)

What I hate is :
  1) buying on VHS then having to pay again when I want DVD, then again when I want Bluray, then again when I want downloadable, etc... I have pirated films that I have already purchased on earlier formats. If the industry wants a proof of purchase for every film in my library and a serial number for it, cool... where do I send it. Then when they release it in a new format, let me download it.

  2) If I can't buy a film downloadable in another country, I simply download it elsewhere. I'm perfectly happy to pay for films I watch. But I sure as shit won't be treated like a 3rd rate citizen because they decided where I live isn't convenient to them to sell in (Norway is too small to interest many companies).

  3) If they are price gouging because of my location (very common, BluRay in U.S. $14, in Norway $45) and they won't let me download it at U.S. prices + Norwegian taxes, then I'll pirate it today and wait for it to land on the $15 rack in clearance down the line.

As I said, I've bought about 1000 DVD's at an average price of $22 (have a spreadsheet) a disc. That's $22,000 U.S., if they want to call me a pirate for trying to give them money but refusing to pay a 200% premium for my location, then send the cops my way :) Oh.. this is Norway, wouldn't matter.

I actually work in the industry as well. Used to develop software at a post production shop that produced DVDs for the Scandinavian market for WB, BV, etc... Disney used to ask me to rip DVDs for them because they couldn't get their hands on their own films due to licensing limitations. So to make local trailers for films, they'd send my pre-release DVDs and ask me to rip them for them.

I often pirate video games, can't find them in the local stores and I won't pay $15 shipping for a $10 disc... I use cracks constantly, I buy games and use cracks so I don't need to leave the disc in.

Oh... I have all 1400 discs ripped to my server so I don't need to screw with finding discs. Also, I'm bloody tired of paying over and over for the same film if my kid scratches the disc. So, both my Wii's are cracked and play from hard disc, my playstation 2 too.

At the moment, I can't hook my DVD player's HDMI up to my projector since it's a cheap projector with only VGA on it. It has RCA also, but when I use it, the speakers in the room start buzzing as the chasis of the DVD player isn't properly grounded. The HDCP crack will solve this. HDFury is a half assed solution, this will allow real solutions instead.

Re:short sighted summary author

[pnewhook]

That was an example, moron. Read what I wrote.

Re:short sighted summary author

[Mike Kristopeit]

sleep is a requirement of continued potential. you're an idiot to think suggesting otherwise was an example of anything but idiocy.

straighten you dick, pee hook.

you're STILL nothing.

Re:Just make it worse for the honest people

[Skapare]

There will always be thieves in the world. It is the nature of some people. The proper question you need to answer is why do the honest people need to suffer?

But there is also the fair use issue. And NO, this is NOT a case of fair use being lost because of the thieves. Fair use is lost because the content producers see taking it away as a form of increasing their revenues. They want to force you to buy more copies of the content. If I want to be able to listen to a good song on my computer while posting on Slashdot, and also listen to the same song on my portable player while jogging, they want me to buy it TWICE. Compare this to places like Magnatune

that, instead, play fair with consumers ... and artists.

If your optical media is damaged, they don't want you to be able to play it from a backup source, even though you have paid for the music or movie. They want you to be forced to buy a new copy from them. A copy in which the artist gets less than 10% for music (it would not be good enough for them if you paid the artist directly for the cost of a replacement ... they want you to buy their piece of media ... again).

They also don't want you to resell their media to someone else just because you bought it to see if you might like it, and discover that you don't like it. If you don't like the content, they want you to be stuck with the full cost, regardless (and as such, they don't want you to even preview the content online, such it could mean lost sales because only people that like it would buy it).

Re:short sighted summary author

[pnewhook]

So sleep costs you money? Don't be an idiot. You know you are wrong making blanket statements like that so just admit it and shut up.

Re:short sighted summary author

[Mike Kristopeit]

in the short term it costs you money because you can't simultaneously do other things to earn money (unless you are paid to sleep). in the long term without sleep your potential to earn goes to zero in a short fixed time. adding in the controversial role of dreaming in regards to future problem solving... you can't be this dumb... you really think that the inability of removing the necessity of sleep in any way invalidates anything i've said or is in any way relevant? AT ALL? you really can't be this stupid.

perhaps you don't understand relativity or the concept of spending money to make money.

you are either an idiot or would have others believe you are.

is your pee hooked because of your crooked dick? STRAIGHTEN IT OUT, PEE HOOK.

you are NOTHING

Re:short sighted summary author

[pnewhook]

You really are incapable of carrying on an adult conversation aren't you?