Was a mistake made in the design of AACS?

[Nicolas Williams]

On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 10:25:34AM -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
> At 03:52 PM 5/2/2007, Ian G wrote:
> >This seems to assume that when a crack is announced, all revenue 
> >stops.  This would appear to be false.  When cracks are announced in such 
> >systems, normally revenues aren't strongly effected.  C.f. DVDs.
> 
> Agreed.  But there is an incremental effect.  In the same way many people 
> now copy DVDs they have rented many will gain access to HD content made 

Wait, are you saying that people copy rented DVDs onto DVD media?  Or
that they _extract_ the content?

There's a big difference: there's no need to crack the DVD DRM system to
do the former, but there is for the latter.

I expect the same to be true for HD-DVDs, unless the readers themselves
perform one-way transformations on the content and the readers are
tamper-resistant enough that DMCA protection for them as access control
devices can be claimed.

> available by those more technically sophisticated.  There a number of Bit 
> Torrent trackers which focus on HD content.  All current released 
> HD-DVD/BluRay movies are available for download. For those with 
> higher-performance PCs for playback, broadband connections and who know how 
> to burn a single- or dual layer DVD, the content is there for the talking.
> 
> A new generation of HD media players (initially from offshore consumer 
> electronics and networking companies, for example, Cisco/LinkSys) are 
> poised to enter the market.  These appliances will allow playback of all 
> the common HD encoded media, including those ripped from the commercial HD 
> discs.  This will place the content from pirates and P2P community in the 
> hands of the less sophisticated Home Theater consumer.

So?  If breaking AACS has nothing to do with disk-to-disk copies then I
don't see how the coming market for HD players/writers is going to
affect that kind of piracy.  Or analog hole piracy.  Let's face it: DRM
only stops anyone from trying to make fair use of content (e.g.,
sampling) -- pirates might as well not even know that DRM is there,
unless you can create scarcity of media for the pirates (blank media
taxes), but that's harder than you think when in a couple of years
someone can be manufacturing blank media in some far off place that's
politically hard to reach.

Well, there's an idea: use different physical media formats for
entertainment and non-entertainment content (meaning, content created by
MPAA members vs. not) and don't sell writable media nor devices capable
of writing it for the former, not to the public, keeping very tight
controls on the specs and supplies.  Then finding, say, a Disney movie
on an HD-DVD of the data format would instantly imply that it's pirated.

Nico
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