
So I’m looking through my RSS reader and see this Ars Technica headline: “Goodbye, DRM; hello ‘stealable’ Digital Personal Property.” It was like a fucking trainwreck. I could not just pass by the article. I had to read it.
Consumers hate DRM—all that “phoning home,” the outside control over one’s behavior, the fact that you can’t resell encrypted digital media, the worries about activation servers dying. But what if digital rights management could be turned into “consumer rights management” and people could actually own and fully control the digital content they purchase? That’s the dream of Paul Sweazey, who’s heading up a new study group on “digital personal property” at the IEEE.
[...]
Digital personal property (DPP) is an attempt to make consumers treat digital media like physical objects.…[DPP files] can be freely copied and distributed to anyone, but here’s the trick: anyone who can view your content can also “steal” it irrevocably.
And why would anyone want something like that? Well…
Digital content lends itself easily to the creation of identical copies, so crafting a system in which digital content can be “stolen” is trickier than it might sound. The idea is to make it a “rivalrous good,” one that, after being taken, deprives someone else of something.
Which is exactly what DRM attempts to do; DPP, at its core, amounts to nothing more than changing two letters. Of course, that’s not just because it tries the same thing. It’s also because it fails spectacularly in the exact same way. Much like every DRM system ever, “the scheme will be cracked, and once it is—even if only a few technically-savvy people can do the necessary work—content will flood P2P [file-sharing] networks,” says Ars.
The fact that people who have actual jobs and educations still consider these kinds of ideas is absolutely baffling. I mean, they’re presumably sapient enough to know how to wipe their own asses, so why does the fact that DRM doesn’t work continue to elude their common sense?
Given that digital content just isn’t like physical content, I ask Sweazey why we might want to force it back into that model…His answer is that such freely-copiable [sic] goods breaks the basic business model of human commerce by making goods nonrivalrous; it no longer has aspects of a private good, and this makes it difficult to sell.
You know, Mr. Sweazy, you’re right; freely-copyable goods do break the basic business model of human commerce. That’s certainly a problem. Now, you go run along and play, because us adults have to go back to accepting reality and coming up with a solution that works outside of Magical Unicorn Fantasyland.
Major Breakthrough in Cracking HDCP, the DRM System That Restricts the HDTV You Bought
HDCP, or High-bandwith Digital Content Protection, is a system that degrades the quality of or blocks audio and video from, among other things, Blu-Ray discs being sent to an unlicensed piece of equipment, with the intent of preventing unauthorized copying. In practice, it doesn’t actually prevent copying at all, and only serves to cripple older HDTVs that predate the technology, equipment built by hobbyists and smaller companies without the means to pay the technology’s licensing fees, Mac and Linux users with Blu-ray drives, or even a PS3 being used in a completely normal fashion. Fortunately, its defeat may be imminent.
An anonymous individual posted the master key for HDCP, the (now former) trade secret on which the system’s encryption algorithm is based. This master key is what’s used to generate the vendor keys unique to each model of TV, Blu-ray player, etc., and now that it’s out in the open, anyone with cryptographic tools can create their own working keys.
Essentially, the system is blown wide open. Permanently. A new master key can be created, but it would be incompatible with all of the HDCP devices currently in existence.
No word yet on exactly how the master key was discovered, but it was probably reverse-engineered; it’s been known for a while that one could calculate the master key using less than fifty different vendor keys.
The person who posted the key requested that it be mirrored, so I’ve decided to do so. Hit the jump if you’d like to see the HDCP master key.
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