AACS Vows to Fight Bloggers 601
Jonas Wisser writes "The BBC is carrying the story that AACS has promised to take action against those who have posted the AACS crack online. Michael Ayers, chairperson of AACS, noted that the cracked key has now been revoked, and went on to say, 'Some people clearly think it's a First Amendment issue. There is no intent from us to interfere with people's right to discuss copy protection. We respect free speech.' The AACS website tells consumers how they can 'continue to enjoy content protected by AACS' by 'refreshing the encryption keys associated with their HD DVD and Blu-ray software players.'"
Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, as I said yesterday [slashdot.org], ignore these threats. Go out and blog. Understand that freedom of speech is NOT a government-granted freedom, it is an inherent one that all people of all citizenship must understand. The U.S. Constitution's (Bill of Rights) 1st Amendment does not say "You are free to speak," it says that Congress shall make NO LAW restricting the freedom of speech -- NO law. Discussing encryption mechanisms is free speech, and Congress shall not abridge that. As for patents and trademark and the rest, as long as you do not mimic the mechanism in your own hardware or software, you're fine, Constitutionally. As long as you do not quote verbatim the actual code used to create this mechanism, you're not violating copyright. The DMCA is unconstitional, and regardless of what Congress, the Supreme Court, the President, or any company says, it is non-binding in terms of the moral realization that Congress, and honestly no State organization, can prevent you from freely airing your opinions. You are free to talk, but no one has to listen.
From yesterday's post I made about "legal recommendations for bloggers," go out and blog. Say what you want to say. There are more of us than there are of them -- not only can they not afford to go after everyone, they can not afford to go after even a small percentage. Let some bloggers get caught, and all it will do is show other people that non-violent actions should not be criminalized or penalized.
AACS, your days are numbered. Your salaries will end. Your powers will be diminished. It won't be because of competition from another company (that you are likely in bed with, in terms of promoting the abuse of State power), it will be because millions upon millions of people will ignore you, and all you do, in trying to revoke our inherent (and in my opinion, God-given) right to speak freely amongst ourselves.
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To the AACS: Get real. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't care how hard you fight the damn cat, it's out of the bag, and it's not getting back in.
One part of the article I find funny is this:
Isn't that the point? I'm neither trying to justify nor rebuke file sharers, but think about it, man, and be practical for a change. Among those who download and share movies, who really cares about the nitty-gritty details of how keys are cracked, who all gets them, which ones get revoked, what players are and aren't affected, and so on? Most of them only care about one thing: Can I download the HD-DVD of [insert movie titles here]?
And as long as a key out there is cracked enough for the answer to that question to be "yes," the copy protection industry has lost. They can fight all they want to, but the thing is that unless they literally shut everyone down everywhere, they're doomed. As soon as one single solitary person is able to crack a key and unlock the encrypted data, all of their massive—and expensive—efforts will be in vain.
I also thought this was funny:
To Mr. Ayers, I would say this: Get real. For one thing, how many times has it been proven that your technical efforts are futile? How much more time and money are you going to waste developing something that consumers at best don't want and at worst outright resent? For another, what exactly do you plan to legally do to people who live in places where publishing the cracked keys is not illegal? As much as people like you would love to have the U.S.'s misguided laws apply to the whole world, it will never happen, and even if it did, people would still break such laws in civil disobedience.
If only they could figure out how to fight a winning battle for the hearts and minds of paying customers instead of this inevitable losing battle against people who are much, much smarter than they are, maybe everyone could be happier. This industry could sure learn a few things about the direction the music industry is headed, finally dropping DRM after realizing how useless it is.
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, is that so? (Score:5, Insightful)
"There is no intent from us to interfere with people's right to discuss copy protection. We respect free speech."
A comparison comes to mind here. Here's a hint, Mr. Ayers. It comes from a bull and it ain't a steak.
The hubris of thinking they can ban the mention of a number, and then turn around and say they "respect free speech", is breathtaking doublethink. Part of free speech is the right to discuss things you don't like. Part of it is the right to discuss them in as specific of terms as anyone wants. And part of it is being able to mention any number one wants to, from zero either direction to infinity. There's not a bit of respect for free speech here.
I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Good reporting (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess its times like these when it is good that there still are some news organizations independent of the big media conglomerates.
Two faces (Score:5, Insightful)
this is the hallmark of the world we live in: (Score:5, Insightful)
we can all 'continue to enjoy being ignorant slaves' by 'reaffirming our desire to be shackled.'
the audacity to think of people as so supplicant to corporate will is incredible
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:1, Insightful)
But posting the encryption key to the content is not the same as talking about the encryption key to the content -- not that I care about AACS or the MPAA or whichever. It's just that there's a difference. Posting a long, seemingly "authorative" post on the subject is really a disservice when you are disseminating false information.
"Protected free speech"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Michael, you're dumb even by MAFIAA standards (Score:4, Insightful)
And that Ars Technica article is widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. That hack is, indeed, irrevokable, but it is also completely impractical for anyone but the most dedicated hacker, and it doesn't give you all the data needed to decrypt a disc, but only the Volume ID.
Good point (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good reporting (Score:5, Insightful)
We each pay around $250 a year so that the world can have an unbiased mass communications system which is not driven by audience ratings and can produce quality. And, in the case of radio, in all the world's languages.
It would be nice if some of the anti-licence-fee Americans on
Internet whack a mole is a game that (Score:5, Insightful)
The part where he says over 700,000 pages on the Internet reference the code is fscking hilarious. I want to see AACS group try to sue 700,000 people. Before they even get started there would be 1.4 million more references to it on Google. That is how the IWaM game works and exactly why they can't win. The sheer volume of people working against their worn out DRM business model will overwhelm both their resources and those of the court systems around the world.
In the US it appears that the courts are still willing to waste time on this. Other countries, not so much. Sure, if they find commercial pirates distributing DVDs for profit they will shut those operations down, but there just are not enough law enforcement resources to stop this hack, or any other.
Playing IWaM = stupid and the more you play, the more money you lose. period.
Certainly, some will be harmed, and there will be small wins for the AACS group and **AAs of the world, but in the end all their money will be gone. The DMCA was ostensibly implemented to protect them from exactly this. Legislating DRM doesn't work, DRM doesn't work, and if your business model depends on DRM, it won't work either. It's time that Wall Street and VC groups started to act on this one principle. If their business model is DRM it's a bad investment.
Sure, you might argue that MS is an exception but I think that the sales performance of Vista is going to prove me right on this. MS has been trying to play Whack A Mole with malicious software and spam. Yeah, that has been working out well. Their new flagship DRM laden secure operating system
Back on topic, the lawyers for the AACS group must be staggeringly stupefied. Maybe if they make an example of Digg and Mr Rose they can send a message, and if they try, every new key will be poste in blog comments on every blogging system around the globe. They literally need to surrender and rethink what they are doing. DRM DOES NOT work.
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. Just before the Death Star blew her home world to smithereens.
But let's hope that's not the case here, eh?
I'm not sure bloggers are the real audience (Score:5, Insightful)
The real target of this action is likely a different audience, namely Hollywood. The AACS doesn't have to make their DRM undefeatable. They do need to convince their customers - and remember, that's not us - of the value of their work. And when their DRM is broken and seen to be broken, they need to convince those who want to believe that they at least have not lost faith in the cause.
So we may talk about winning and losing, and people like use may be the targets of lawsuits. But I think we may be giving ourselves airs when we assume that for the other side it's about us. If, on the other hand, we figure out who our real audience is then we have a better chance.
Re:Michael, you're dumb even by MAFIAA standards (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Michael, you're dumb even by MAFIAA standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:this is the hallmark of the world we live in: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:3, Insightful)
Still lying (Score:5, Insightful)
That is the part that ticks me off the most. The DVDs already could be copied without the key. Their "technology" is "playback protection", not "copy protection". The only honest sentence in the quote was earlier, where he said, "Some titles could now be played on more than one software player." Yes, THAT is what your evil scheme is trying to prevent. (Not that I will ever buy HD DVDs until I can actually play them whenever/wherever I want.)
As long as "playback protection" is working, you can't actually "buy" an HD DVD. You can only rent the privilege of playing it under conditions specified by the publisher. Whatever happened to laws against false advertising?
Re:To the AACS: Get real. (Score:3, Insightful)
When a consumer goes to buy a HD player, they expect that it'll be the same as the VHS player they bought in the 80s, or the DVD player they bought in the 90s. Which is you buy the player, then you get a tape or a disc of some sort, you put it into the player and you press play and it shows on your screen. Now when you buy a HD player there is all this stuff about plugging it into an internet connection and running an update on the device. Because some disks won't work until it's updated - all of this is counter intuitive, there is nothing about connecting your device to the internet which makes sense to a basic consumer, they think "I have the player, I have the disc, what gives?" they don't know why on earth the internet needs to be involved. Despite this being new and advanced technology it requires more work than the old technology, and all it delivers is more resolution; all of this effort for just a clearer picture and sound?
This might seem obvious, but it is not consumer friendly. Sure I bet you anyone on /. would think these steps are easy, but there are still lots of people out there who need help plugging in the cables from their player to their TV/Panel/etc. Who can't use a computer, write an email or even subscribe to an ISP.
This approach is only going to further harm the adoption of HD content. Especially when you combine this with the fact that the average consumer isn't going to care for the difference HD provides over DVD SD when all the hassle comes into play. (Remember in the 90s studios advertised that DVD was "HD", plus lots of consumers are running it on SD televisions were it's downscaled.)
It'll be a long time before we all have gorgeous panel displays which make DVD SD look like rubbish.
The consumer experience must be held above all else, otherwise the consumer will simply not buy it and the only HD players out there will be the ones shipped in PS3 and 360.
Re:Good point (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not in 99.9% of the cases. It's about getting in on the fun of watching the class bully getting his butt handed to him while spins around crying for everyone to quit being mean.
Revenge doesn't make you a better person, but sometimes it sure is fun to watch.
The 'unrevocable hack' (Score:5, Insightful)
I spent a while trying to get my head around AACS last night, and the bottom line is that what comes out of the un-revocable hack that you mention isn't the same thing as what's being posted around the internet, and what the AACSLA has the whole revocation scheme for.
Oversimplification ahead, and I may have some of the details wrong or, but this is the gist of it: the content -- the movie itself -- is encrypted with title keys. These title keys are encrypted with a volume unique key (VUK). The VUK is composed of two parts, a media key and a Volume ID.
The Media Key is the thing that you get with the code that's being posted all over the Internet (the Processing Key). Processing Keys can be revoked, but only for new discs -- so the discs that are out in circulation as of the compromise of the Processing Key, are out. They're cracked. However, future discs will use a new Processing Key, and that one that's around on the internet won't work
The "un-revocable hack" you mentioned, doesn't have anything to do with the Media Key, it's all about the Volume ID. The purpose of the Volume ID is to prevent bit-for-bit copying. In a lot of ways it's very similar to parts of the CSS system used on DVDs right now; it's a key specific to each batch of pressed discs, written to the disc in a way that's difficult to read off manually (the drive isn't supposed to let the user see it at all), and impossible to write to a blank disc
So: while the Volume ID hack involving the XBox360 drive is a major step forwards (backwards if you're the AACS!), it's not a silver bullet, and it doesn't make future titles trivial to compromise. There's still going to be a cat-and-mouse game in the near future, where the AACS will try to revoke Processing Keys and try to discourage the publication of new ones as discs are released. (It's been pointed out by several people now, that the AACS' over-the-top reaction to publication of the processing key, may indicate that they've realized that their revocation procedures aren't nearly as fast or as flexible as the people who are going to be compromising them.)
Last I checked. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. A free society is one where all citizens are equally free from legal force that gives power to some and takes power away from others, without their express consent (ie, a contract). In a free society, you and I can contract to limit each other -- but the State can not unless we individually tell them that they can. Also, a free society is one where an individual can make any decision they want, as long as they do not directly harm the physical property or body of another individual. Speech can not do physical harm, so speech can not be criminal, no matter how repulsive it is. The effect of the speech could be a physical reaction, but if that physical reaction is performed by a person other than the speech giver, the speech giver has not caused harm.
People will visit their library more. They'll go walk at the park with friends more. So while I think it's good to fight for our rights, the result wouldn't be that bad. "Burn the land, boil the sea, but you can't take the sky from me..." We'll find plenty other things to occupy ourselves with. Who cares about AACS and movies and stuff when you can find something else just as, if not more entertaining, for half the price?
Entertainment has more to do with time preference decisions than just saving "money" doing something that might seem entertaining. Someone who is very busy and who has a high hourly-value to the market may want a quick relief of "getting away from reality" and may be more than happy to pay $150 per person to see an Opera. Someone who is not so busy, and may not command a high hourly-value to the market may be more entertained reading a book, which could take hours or days or weeks. It all boils down to how you (and the market) value yourself.
Personally, I see nothing wrong with paying $20+ to buy a movie -- if I can use it the way I want to. I prefer to live in a tiny home so that I do not have to pay for extra unused space. This means I have no room for the clutter of physical movies (DVDs, VHS, etc). Instead, I have a great Media Center PC (yes, Microsoft), and I have 1TB of movies and TV shows available to watch based on my mood. This is considered illegal, even though I have paid for all the movies and shows I watched. I also used my own time/labor to put those movies/TV shows on that PC. I've harmed no one physically, so the law is unjust and ridiculous. Provide me with a process to reimburse the authors/distributors/producers of a given content, and also allow me to put that content into a system that works with my life, and I will pay AND continue to be a customer. I don't believe in NOT reimbursing those actively involved in the creation of content. I have no desire to pay for the lawyers, DRM researchers, or those who lobby the State to use force against me to uphold their monopoly.
Question to the AACS (Score:3, Insightful)
What about hardware-only players?
Assuming that the old key was imbedded in the the player firmware, and that the existing crop of HD-DVD/BluRay players are as locked down as their DVD brethren, how do you plan to "update" standalone players to work with newly-released content? A recall?
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude it's a number. Granted a large number, but still just a number.
Are you telling me that projects like the one trying to find the largest prime can't publish that they've tested this number as a prime?
There are certain things you should NOT be allowed to own - a number is one of them.
Re:What about hardware players? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think you can copyright 14 bytes. But the issue is not copyright, it is the violation of DMCA by providing a tool necessary to break any sort of copyright protection measures.
you can't post plans to view scrambled cable TV anymore (in the US), you can't post utilities designed to decode CSS so you can watch your DVDs on your computer. etc.
What's dumb is these companies going after average joes rather than people who are pressing boatloads of DVDs and importing them to the US. Or people who are hosting huge pay torrent sites to download movies. Or couriers posting the latest films on Usenet to be distributed to sites all over the world.
so will I be in trouble? My DNS resolves any string you give it, so if someone goes to http://09f911029d74e35bd84156c56356.rm-f.net/ [rm-f.net] they will get a page. (although not [currently] related to those keys)
Re:Protected Free Speech (Score:3, Insightful)
Under what legal theory ? I could see a patent infringement claim but writing your own software to play the disc isn't copyright infringement.
Could it be a DMCA violation - possibly
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying this because I agree with AACS on this, or because I even remotely support DRM, I'm just opposed to straw men.
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:2, Insightful)
It also helps that we're going in the morning. If I felt justified in doing so, we'd go in the morning during the weekdays and get two tickets for a total of $9, but the time off work isn't worth those $2. Normally we wait till movies show up in the dollar theater and then go on $0.75 Tuesdays. That's two tickets for a whopping $1.50, but there are a lot of movies we want to see this summer and so we're starting early. We haven't been to the theater for nearly 8 months, so we don't spend a lot there anyway. We'll also get the DVDs of most movies we watch. That's because we feel if it's not worth buying, then it's probably not worth watching. So in total, by the time we buy Spider-Man 3 we'll have spent about $30. $11 from the tickets for tomorrow morning, maybe one more viewing in the dollar theater, and then we'll get it on the first day Wal-Mart sells it which is usually fairly cheap.
While all of that is more expensive than a $6 picture book of space (can you reply with a link, cause that sounds cool), it's worth it to us. But where do you get off trying to dictate how people ought to value entertainment? If people would rather watch a movie for $10,000 than take a short free walk in the park with friends, then that is their prerogative. I read a lot, but I honestly don't see anything inherently more entertaining in a book than a movie. Literature is thousands of years old. Movies are slightly over a century old, and talkies are less than that. Games are only a couple of decades into their life. Images have been around for a long time as well. Just because one art form has had a longer time to evolve, doesn't mean it is inherently better than other art forms. Just because one entertainment medium has been perfecting itself for thousands of years doesn't mean it is inherently better than another medium.
Also, your arguments about restrictive and expensive are very much a reality already. When things get too expensive, people find other things to do. Why do you think it is that not everyone eats lobster? Sure, not everyone likes it, but if it was as cheap as carrot sticks then it would be eaten a lot more than it currently is. Not every one can afford a cruise. Not everyone can afford a trip into space. Not everyone that wants to can afford the ten thousand dollar escort. So people find something else that entertains them. Will the movie companies be upset that you can't afford the movie? Not at all. They'll price it so that they can make as much money as they can. If it's more profitable to them to sell tickets at $200 per seat than to sell it at $2 per seat, then they'll do that. Are they evil for doing so? No, they don't owe you anything. You don't deserve to be entertained by them, that is why they are charging you for it. Which is why your "so restricted that we can't download it for free" comment is totally ridiculous. I'm all for shortening the copyright term, I'm against DRM, but why should you be able to dictate at what price someone sells their work of art for. If they want to overcharge, it's their problem. If they do it because it's more profitable, then good for them. You don't deserve it for free. It is not some inherent right that you have to get someone else's work with the terms that you dictate.
Finally, those $10 books at Waldenbooks and Barnes and Noble are $10 because they know that is the price they can charge for them. If t
Re:Oh, is that so? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Declaration of Independence, which says in part:The Government doesn't give me any rights. Since they can't give me any rights, they can't take them away, either. You'll notice that the Constitution doesn't say "Congress shall ensure that all citizens have the right to Free Speech", instead it specifically prohibits them from taking them away. The Founding fathers weren't stupid: Both the Declaration and the Constitution are Natural Law Documents -- and people today would be well pressed to stop trying to get rid of natural law theory.
In conclusion: Your argument is moot. The US Laws do not give us rights, we give the Government the right to exist to help preserve our rights.
Revoking keys? Finally? Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
Kids, the mafiaa revoking keys is a good thing in the fight against DRM. Find more keys and publish them, so they revoke them! The more the better!
What happens when a key gets revoked? Some player stops working. Actually, a whole batch of players stop working. And thus, Joe Shmoe Average might get a clue. It might not matter to him that DRM exists ("Duh, I buy my movies anyway"). It might not matter to him that DRM restricts him ("Duh, I don't copy them anyway"). It might not matter to him that it takes away his ability to actually play that content on other media ("Duh, I only use it in that DVD player anyway, not the computer").
But it does matter to him when that new blockbuster doesn't work in his DVD player anymore.
It does matter to him when his DVD is "broken" and he has to get a new one or has to get his fixed. It is a hassle. He might not know how to update his player. He might have to get a friend to do it. He will get angry 'cause why the heck doesn't it "work" anymore the way it used to?
Maybe, just maybe, it's a wakeup call for Joe Average. And maybe he'll stop buying crap that suddenly stops working.
Re:I wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
The only real difference between your analogy and mine however, is a screwdriver.
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:3, Insightful)
Is that illegal? As far as I'm concerned, it's my public key for some of my work. Just because HD DVD happens to use the same key.. really means nothing to me at all.
Is it then illegal for me to point out that HD DVD uses the same key as me?
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:5, Insightful)
+1 Funny, -1 Dishonest.
To wit: Can I publicly post your credit card number, expiration date, and CVN? They're just numbers... and how can ordinary numbers have implications for property and finances?
In fact, I have a list here of 10,000 valid bank-account and PIN numbers. My right to distribute them is a First Amendment Issue, damnit!
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:5, Insightful)
No we cannot. Many of us believe that for that very reason (attempt at "ownership" or integer numbers, in defiance of the very phillosphical ideas of "ownership" or "trade") the so called "copyrights" are nothing but a scam, although they might have originated as an badly thought out, naive scheme to promote arts and science.
All of the so-called "intellectual property" schemes invariably fail the test of basic logic when analysed in depth, primarily due to the fact that they attempt to treat information as an entity which is subject to "trade" or "private ownership", for which information simply lacks the required attributes.
For small values of "free" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, we can "discuss copy protection" as much as we want so long as the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Act still stand, hm?
It's funny how everybody agrees that speech should be free so long as that speech is completely impotent. It's the speech that empowers, empassions, that enables legitimate users to do with their purchased media what they will that suddenly gets declared "unprotected."
"We respect free speech."
This from the same industry that wants to ban cell phone usage from movie theaters not because they annoy the rest of the audience, but because they don't want to let people warn others just how bad a particular movie is?
You said the magic words... (Score:5, Insightful)
The present - perhaps "previous"? - business model relied upon scarcity. If you held the negative to a photo, you held the only thing capable of producing a high-quality reproduction of that image. It was possible to make new negative from positive prints, but doing so resulted in a marked loss of quality, and the negative itself was irreplaceable.
Plus there was a certain investment of time, skill, and resources involved with producing a new print from the negative.
If I broke into your place of work and stole/destroyed your negative, that photo was gone forever.
But nowadays, the digital file can be copied without loss of quality ad infinitum. If I make a copy of your raw data file, you have not been materially harmed - you can still make copies - and all that has happened is you have lost exclusivity to that image.
And that image can be reproduced almost anywhere with minimal skill and investment in resources.
Effectively, the scarcity of the ability to duplicate images has been eliminated. There is next to zero cost involved with the duplication of images once they are in the memory card. As such, the image files themselves have next to no actual value.
What HASN'T changed is the necessity for a skilled photographer to take that image in the first place.
This implies - hell, it yells at the top of its lungs - that the business model of selling exclusive prints is now utterly broken, and pro photographers (and other media producers) need to find other business models. If the automobile obsoletes your buggy whip manufacturing business model, you need to adapt.
My suggestion is that you regard photography as a service. You are being contracted for your ability to take artistically skilled photos. You price your services based on the amount of time you have invested and your level of artistic skill, and you sell the customer the digital data files you produce for him.
I know photogs working to this model now, and they seem to be doing well. The days of the reprint gravy train are over, but people seem to be willing to pay for the quality of SERVICE they get.
DG
Precedent: BATF (Score:3, Insightful)
The legal solution was to declare a key part, the "receiver", as the regulated item. That hunk of metal is harmless/useless on its own, yet - due to intentions to control an industry - was declared THE essential part and is thus is the precise subject of otherwise over-broadly worded "firearms" regulations.
Relevance? Considering the billions of $$$ perceived at stake and intense motivation of the *AA, coupled with the intense opposition's creativity, the DCMA will be modified to declare decryption keys something equivalent to a firearm's receiver: federally registered, and if you're caught possessing one (even if plainly harmless on its own) without proper licensing, very bad things will happen to you.
Yes, the key on its own is useless - as is they decryption software lacking the key. However, the intention is clear and the motivation to regulate/restrict combining and using them is powerful, so possession of the essence of decryption - the key - will eventually be regulated.
And yes, they WILL hunt down anyone distributing decryption keys without a license. While warm fuzzy arguments about "anyone with a lathe & drill press..." may be true, nonetheless the BATFE exists as a very large, powerful and motivated government agency.
Someone paid a quarter-billion dollars to make SpiderMan 3, not to mention hundreds of other 9-digit-buget movies. That someone will see to it that a government agency is enacted, empowered, and funded enough to be motivated to ensure every bit moving from camera/mic to screen/speakers moves entirely within a fully licensed (i.e.: aggregating massive royalties) environment.
You just want a few free movies, and to play movies on hardware of your choice.
They're not going to let you.
Don't underestimate their motivation.
It happened before. It will happen again.
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:3, Insightful)
What you describe is what starry-eyed libertarian idealists wish capitalism was all about.
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:3, Insightful)
For example would the square root (3640917314083012466.760454263) be illegal as well - what about the cube root, or a list of prime factors, or it's square, or it's integer multiples - just how many numbers are you prepared to outlaw?
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:4, Insightful)
From what I can tell, the AACS are not actually claiming copyright protection for the key, though, they are instead invoking part of the DMCA, claiming that the key's distribution violates the prohibition on releasing software to circumvent copyright protections. This is a separate issue, and one that is not easily resolved. To be honest, in spirit, they are probably right - people who distribute this key are doing so to stick it to the industry, and by the spirit of the law (whether you agree with it or not - I do not), should probably be considered to be doing something illegal. But I don't really think the key itself could reasonably qualify as software, and I think the DMCA is very specific about banning software that undoes copy protection, and never mentions a password that could be USED in software to undo copy protection, so everyone might be on fairly good legal ground, technically at least. Then again, I'm no lawyer, so who knows...I imagine judges get annoyed at people for this stuff since at root, people disagree with the laws in place and are pushing the boundaries of those laws just to piss on them, so I wouldn't want to be the guinea pig that tests out this stuff in court...
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:2, Insightful)
My personal take is that it doesn't even apply to discussions of algorithms, including possible keys. The key, in isolation, is just a bunch of numbers. There's nothing magic about the numbers, unless they are placed into a device that can 'circumvent' the protections.
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:3, Insightful)
Get AACS to solve P=NP (Score:1, Insightful)
md5sum(key) = cfddca0b93558c11cd6d2a7023a544bf.
While the key is mathematically defined by this(*), currently no one knows how to compute the inverse of an md5sum in a feasible amount of time. Will Slashdot be asked to remove this comment? I'd love to see the AACS laywer demonstrate how he can derive the key from this post.
In the same way, you can test various computational complexity conjectures by translating them into a statement concerning the key and waiting for the takedown letter.
* There might be a few other solutions, but you can exclude them by seeing that they don't work when you try to use them.
inapt analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
The AACS key is a password that's, in effect, distributed to everyone who owns a HDDVD and is furthermore useless to you unless you possess an HDDVD. It's an open secret. In that respect it's different from a credit card, and your analogy is inapt.
And it's not illegal to post a string of digits that may or may not be a credit card, without more, and the same should apply in the case of the HDDVD key.
Re:Since they're just using Primes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's nothing to do with free speech... (Score:4, Insightful)
So it's not a free speech issue, it's a "you can't win this race" issue. They're not so much *wrong* to try and fight, they're simply foolish and doomed.
Re:The 'unrevocable hack' (Score:3, Insightful)
Sort of. If you know the Volume ID, which you can now sniff from an XBox HD-DVD drive, then you can make a bit-by-bit copy of the rest of the disc. (Actually I don't know whether the drive even prevents you from doing this without a Volume ID.)
But as you started to surmise, although the Title Keys -- they're the real goal here, the MacGuffin in this little play -- are on the disc, they're encrypted at least two times; once with the combination of the [Media Key + Volume ID] which together comprise the Volume Unique Key, but also encrypted with the Player/Processing Key. And this player or processing key is what the AACSLA has the whole revocation scheme for.
Just to clarify, the processing key for the XBox360 has not been compromised. To date, I don't think the processing key for any hardware player has been compromised. (Each hardware player, each individual machine, has its own key...however, software players aren't so unique. Each version of the software shares one key.) The keys that have been compromised have been sniffed from the memory of software HD-DVD players. Although the new versions of HD-DVD software will probably try to encrypt and obfuscate their memory more, this will probably continue to happen until the AACSLA either gives up or abandons the concept of software players entirely (Microsoft would probably try to kill them, because it would destroy the software-based HTPC concept).
So far, the processing key that has been found is one that the AACSLA people will happily revoke. This doesn't do anything for all the movies that have currently been released, though. But in order to decrypt new movies, the Doom9 guys will need to get their paws on a new version of a software player, and do the sniffing thing all over again, in order to get a new processing key.
The threat to the AACSLA is that, over time, the Doom9 and other hackers will find ways of discovering the new processing keys very quickly, to the point where it becomes impractical for them to even issue discs with the new keys anymore. (Just remember, it takes them probably a month or so to issue a new key and get it into production, and even when they do, it doesn't "fix" the old discs, it just means that the hackers need to rinse and repeat with the new key. If the hackers can demonstrate that they can find every new key, then AACS is effectively impotent.)
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:1, Insightful)
CLUE: What if the mass piracy isn't what bothers them? What if it's all about stopping average joe from viewing his movies on Linux, BSD, GNU systems, etc.? Now Microsoft in the background charging a movie tax to empower their monopoly... this would explain much.
From the beginning, I've said that none of these corporate pirates really give a damn about their copyrighted content - it's what kind of device you view the content on that is what they want to control.
Re:Cue oft-used Leia quote... (Score:3, Insightful)
This, of course, is one of the ways the various greed-mongers are attempting to confuse the issue and you apparently fell for it. What is happening here is that two completely separate and wholly tangential to each other issues are being shotgun-wedded in order to create an illusion that information is somehow measurable in terms of labour or monetary value.
The truth however is that information and labour (in terms of marketplace) are completely independent from each other. Your own example of a random number generator is one way to show it, but there are many others. For example the labour of an artist occurs at the time of creation and/or performance, but it does not re-occur if the performance is done by a machine or another person. In other words the creation becomes independent of the labour used to create it (or more precisely to find it in the domain of all possible large numerical values). Furthermore, since information lacks some of the crucial attributes needed to make it compatible with the concept of "private property", such creation can be duplicated endlessly without diminishing the original in any way, but labour of which is done by people (or machines) other then the original creator and so the creation propagates even if the creator is still "in possesion" of the "original" item and performs no action with it.
The way to logically solve this problem is, of course, to treat information and the labour needed to produce it as separate. There are many ways of doing so but all of them have to acknowledge that control of information, once released, is impossible. One of such methods being true and tried -- but updated to modern realities -- "patronage" system, whereby authors get paid by foundations, which in turn are subsidised by either individual art enthusiasts and/or governmental and charitable concerns. Publicly funded academia was always, until very recent times, responsible for the corresponding support of authors in the realm of science.
Please note, and this is a very important element, that art is not commerce. It is not a business. It is not an "industry". Music "Industry" isn't. Film "Industry" isn't. Art is an effort by an artist to share his thoughts with as wide an audience as possible, and to be rewarded by recognition and fullfillment of his artistic desires. Money is completely incidental to art and only enters the equation in terms of giving artists freedom to create. Same goes for science, whereby scientists pursue knowledge for their personal gratification (and recognition amongst peers) and not for money. An "artist" who does his "art" for money is no longer an artist, he becomes a kitsch peddler. A scientist who wishes to charge everyone for his discoveries is very quickly reduced to being a crackpot, because none of his discoveries can be corroborated.
The whole idea of greed being the main motivator of artistic expression and scientific progress is a recent abberration, introduced by avarice-worshipping market-religion ideologues, and it is patently, and demonstrably false. In the realm of art one only has to look at the present choices in film or music to see what I mean. In science, the costs of research are escalating and whole segments of the scientific community are practically crippled by the greed-oriented concerns which are diametrically opposed to the whole concept of science where free sharing of research results is the very foundation of progress. If Albert Einstein had to pay the current rates for the scientific journals he read in the 1920s, he would have died still a patent clerk.
Re:Oh, is that so? (Score:3, Insightful)
Suppose someone made a different movie that was not popular at all; you were the only person who bought it. Everybody's talking about it, but it's not nice things they're saying! Having paid $20 just to see what all the fuss was about, you decrypted it and posted it on the Internet anyway; but the movie was so utterly dire that nobody else even downloaded a copy without paying for it, let alone bought it.
This movie also made $20 in total, as opposed to the $1 000 000 000 that other movies made. Is anybody guilty of stealing $999 999 980 this time?
The fact is, you don't have an automatic right to make money just because you do things that you think people might pay you for.
It's called the Economics of Plenty -- you can't apply the old Economics of Scarcity to goods that are by nature not scarce. If you want to be able to sell things that other people can make for themselves, you have to offer better value than anyone else. Downloading a movie ties up your PC for days on end, and the use of a PC has Value. If you want people to buy movies from you rather than downloading them for themselves, you have to sell them at a price lower than their assessment of the Value of the Labour and Materials involved in downloading.
That's why people don't "pirate" newspapers, magazines and the latest Harry Potter novel, despite the total absence of copy-prevention technology in most printed material (though I believe some sheet music was printed in UV-reflective ink, which messed up any attempt to photocopy it on some older machines) and the presence of a photocopier in nearly every newsagent, bookshop and library: making a copy requires a greater outlay than just buying the item.