Tuesday, January 16, 2007

First HD-DVD Disc Torrent - HD-DVD copy protection broken?

Quite quickly, without supercomputers, unencrypted HD-DVD high definition content has been made available for bit-torrent download.

Reference: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070115-8622.html

Usually, if an AACS device has been compromised, there is a key revocation system which revokes the keys, disallowing further playback.

But this has been rendered irrelevant, as the torrent available for download is unencrypted, free of any copy protection system. So any key revocation system will be unable to stop further playback of the file, in this case, Serenity.

A ripper exists: BackupHDDVD, which uses keys separately available from the internet, to rip the contents of a HD-DVD disc. A key was also passed on to the internet recently, which works
with BackupHDDVD. This is a full recipe for a HD-DVD rip, and this presumably resulted in the unencypted file available via torrent.

Reference: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070107-8564.html

So, my speculations:
  1. If all goes well for the content protection camp, the compromised key available on the internet and any connected keys, will be revoked.
  2. So future content will not decrypt using the compromised key, but all current content will still be rippable
  3. AACS' key revocation system is utterly useless in any other respect, because the ripped content is not protected at all. It is naked HD video.
One more point for my call for a blanket license covering all content. Utterly impossible to protect anything which relies on human integrity, honesty and diligence. :)

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