Cryptography Research wants piracy speed bump on HD DVDs

[Jerrold Leichter]

| To add a postscript to that, yesterday's LAWgram
| reported that $10 DVD *players* are now selling
| in the US.  The economics of player-id-watermarking
| are looking a little wobbly;  we can now buy
| a throwaway player for the same price as a
| throwaway disk.
| 
| http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20371
The new mechanisms aren't for use with current DVD's - already a lost cause 
because of the current installed base - but for next-generation stuff (Blue 
Ray or whatever the other HD standard is called).  On the one hand, the 
players for these will, initially, be much more expensive.  On the other, 
there is no inherent reason why they will *stay* expensive - the cost of 
electronics is driven by implementation and experience and volume, so within a 
couple of years, one can reasonably expect an HD player to have a cost 
comparable to an HD disk.

Besides, all this ignores another reality:  Many DVD's are played on general- 
purpose computers, whether legally (on Windows and Apple boxes) or pseudo- 
legally (on Linux boxes).  Why would one expect the story to be any different 
for HD disks?  The economics of software distribution make it unlikely that 
there will be a unique table of keys for every copy of the software - and even 
if someone does that, the cost of the software is likely to be nominal at 
best: If one copy of the software gets locked out, I can just get another.

In fact, if you follow the logic through, if the threat to be dealt with is 
from file sharing, then necessarily the disks are being read on a general-
purpose machine!  (I suppose we could assume that there is no software codec
and decryptor for these things, and you have to get a hardware codec/decryptor 
for your PC.  Given the popularity of the software-only solution for DVD's, is
this a realistic scenario?  In any case, a internal HD drive would be even 
cheaper than a stand-alone one.)

This whole approach strikes me as a clever solution in search of a problem.

							-- Jerry


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