[LINK] The impact of DRM on the market for new content [Was: alternate media formats]

[Rick Welykochy]

Tom Koltai wrote:

>> Anyone recall the
>> release of a the DVD DRM cracker on the net in the 90's?
>>
> I think it may have been called:
>
> |==================================|
> | Program Name: | DVD Decrypter    |
> |==================================|
> | Author:       | LIGHTNING UK!    |
> |==================================|
>
> http://www.dvddecrypter.com/

I remember now. It was a REALLY simple program, only a few lines
in Perl, called DeCSS. The file de-css.zip went viral minutes
after being released. The cat was out of the bag and DVDs were
forever more "open".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS>

"In protest against legislation that prohibits publication of copy protection
  circumvention code in countries that implement the WIPO Copyright Treaty
  (such as the United States' Digital Millennium Copyright Act), some have devised
  clever ways of distributing descriptions of the DeCSS algorithm, such as through
  steganography, through various Internet protocols, on t-shirts and in dramatic
  readings, as MIDI files, as a series of haiku poems, and even as a so-called
  illegal prime number. However, the CSS algorithm seems to require more characters
  to describe in a computer programming language than the RC4 algorithm by RSA Data
  Security; one of the shortest implementations of DeCSS (called "efdtt") is 434 bytes.
  Because of this, it has not been distributed by some of the more "inventive" methods
  used to distribute the RSA algorithm during the days of ITAR — it is not suitable
  for tattoos, email signatures, etc."

I like that ... "an illegal prime number".

The same is bound to happen to Blu Ray and similar schemes. And I
see no reason that Apple and Mickeysoft's DRM cannot be easily
cracked, since the keys are either online or on your HDD.


cheers
rickw


-- 
_________________________________
Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services

Hardware n, "The parts of a computer system that can be kicked."
      -- Henri Karrenbeld