Cracked DRM on Blu-Ray

Right before the New Year, a hacker reported that he’d cracked the DRM used on HD DVD, illustrating the futility of devoting resources to develop copy-protection schemes. Now, the same hacker says he’s cracked the DRM on Blu-ray discs using the same method.

As with the HD DVD discs, there’s supposed to be a dynamic element to the Blu-ray DRM that allows for decryption keys to be updated to react to cracks, and it also uses Self-Protecting Digital Content technology, which can effectively render “bad” playback devices useless as well as change playback methods if one’s found to be weak or flawed. That sounds awfully complex and expensive to develop and implement, with the payback of doing little more than causing compatibility problems for legitimate customers.

All this will do is create a cat-and-mouse game between hackers and the companies supporting the DRM for content owners, and our money’s on the hackers in the long run. This is yet another example of how content companies are misallocating their resources: instead of spending time and effort working on new business models and forgetting about pointless, useless, DRM, they’d rather continue to spend money pursuing ways to frustrate their customers and maintain a business model that’s ill-suited for the modern market.

Source: TechDirt