Quote:
Originally Posted by
rnowicki 
....Namechamps earlier quote I believe completely misses the point. I use his analogy of the bank vault where the combination was in plain view. While the thieves may not have laboriously picked the lock, they still managed to get away with the money. It is no consolation to the back that the thieves didn't "crack" the lock. Their money is gone, end of story.
....
While I can appreciate the wonderful technical details concerning how the piracy protection hasn't been cracked, and how the system is working as designed, it doesn't change the fact that the raw data for the HD-DVD movies is out on the file sharing sites. The big picture there being that those 150 or whatever movies are essentially out in the public for general consumption. Yes, yes, yes, I know it takes a gazillion hours to download at 1,200 baud, and it costs hellacious amounts of money to store on a hard drive, and I even know that it isn't economical to transfer them to burnable HD-DVD's. All the trends concerning the pricing of all those are working in the wrong direction for the content providers however.
I guess the movies are only playable on a software player, and not on a regular HD-DVD hardware, once they have been burned onto a writable disk? Not sure about that, anyone know? If those burned disks can play on a hardware player without problems, it really is bad news.
Robert
Couple of points.
1) I think the title of th thread is wrong. Not only can are AACS keys easy to aquire on xp with a couple of software players, it is not really possible to stop this on vista. An even biger problem for AACS is that that keys can be taken from stand-alone players as well. You can get a memory dump from a stand alone player. It requires some equipment and knowledge, but this is not something everyone needs to do, only the volume keys need to be seeded to the wild. Revocation of player keys based on publication of title keys is unworkable.
2) I think the analogy of the bank vault is problematic. This process is not illegal everywhere, it is not illegal in all cases, and in many many cases it is certainly not unethical or equal to theft.
Do you realize the net consumer investment in non hdcp dvi monitors is probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars? Perhaps a billion dollars? If a person purchasing hd material wishes to view this material on their set it does not mean they are going to sell or seed the material to others. If a person rents it for one time viewing it is also hard to justify an analogy to taking from a bank vault.
In a third case a person wishing to back up their purchase is also not in the same ethical category as a thief, pirate, bank robber and that hyperobole by the content industry is part of why they are not taken seriously.
3) your point on both net speeds and storage costs is well made. To expand it further HD DVD and Blu-Ray are well behind were SD DVD was in both those areas at the same time in product marketing. HD and Blu Ray films are about 25 gb. This is roughly five times the file size of SD. Early adopters buying SD DVD's when they were first introduced could well have been early adopters of fast consumer net connections and may have had 128k ISDN which was contemprary to early SD. Burner at the time were about $900 and dvdr media cost about 25 times what it costs today. HDD media cost about 25 times as much as well. Moderate consumer broadband is now 3 to 5 mps (25 to 40 times as fast as isdn), HDD storage is $0.25 a gb. and dvdr burners are $25-$30 and dvdr5 media costs about $0.25 ($0.06/gb).
The math is simple. The increase in size did not take us back ten or even five years relative to SD. It went back about two years. The protection method is eroding not just faster but incredibly faster than SD DVD.
Lastly I would say I very much support very tough enforcement against persons who pirate material onto the market. This is a very different thing than making assumptions a) about the natural inclination to disassemble something, made even more tempting by its categorization as illicit, b) or categorizing the many people with perfectly ethical reasons to strip the protections off of material for their own use after they have bought, or in some cases rented the material.
