[Infowarrior] - Next-gen DVD formats fall to the first of many hacks

[Richard Forno]

...anyone care to speculate how long before the MPAA will try to get the use
of the Print Screen button criminalized?

-rf


 Next-gen DVD formats fall to the first of many hacks

7/7/2006 1:21:01 PM, by Jon Hannibal Stokes
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060707-7214.html

The folks at c't magazine have discovered a simple tool for beating the
content protection on Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats: the print screen button.
By pressing the print screen button once per frame, you can capture an
entire movie at full resolution. Of course, you'd want to automate this
task, but c't has shown that it can be done. They're promising more details
in the forthcoming print version of their magazine.

The few machines on which they've confirmed the hack have been running
Intervideo's WinDVD, though it's likely that this hack isn't specific to
WinDVD. C't also reports that Toshiba now has updates planned to disable the
screen capture function while the software is running, and they may also
update the AACS key in order to force users to either patch their software
or be unable to decode the content.

I think it's ultimately pointless for Toshiba to even bother to plug this
particular hole. I mean, from a legal standpoint they're clearly obligated
to address the matter, because if a rightsholder lets stuff like this slide
it will come back to bite them in court. But from the perspective of
combatting so-called "piracy," Joe User is not going to rip a DVD this way,
because even if the process is automated it's still going to be labor- and
time-intensive to get a full movie using this method. The vast majority of
unauthorized viewers of movie content prefer to grab a full DVD rip off P2P
rather than do the relatively painless work of ripping DVDs themselves. The
new HD content will still be available from unauthorized sources like P2P
networks and bootleg dealers, one way or the other, because there's just too
much money in black market movie sales.

I read someone somewhere commenting on the US-Mexico border fence that was
being debated a while back, and this person said, "a 10 foot wall will just
create a market for 12 foot ladders." This is a pretty good way of phrasing
the point that many problems that we might try to solve with technology are
really economic problems. People don't use P2P because they're immoral, or
uneducated about intellectual property rights, or because they just enjoy
wading through a sea of bad rips, trojans, and disguised advertisements for
porn; they use P2P because content is either too expensive, or because it
comes burdened with so much onerous and restrictive DRM "protection" that
they can't enjoy it the way they want.