HDCP Fiasco

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Janooo
LM,

you are right. There is no way that out of 7M downloads all of them would buy the movies. All the Hollywood loses are their estimates and who knows how they make them.

...but some of them certainly would have bought or rented the movie instead, or gone to see it in the theater. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle; they're losing business to piracy, but not as much as the raw numbers might indicate.

Certainly it's enough to greatly concern both the movie and music industries. If they weren't worried about it, they wouldn't be pushing any of this crap.

 

[Wellsoul2]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: Janooo
LM,

you are right. There is no way that out of 7M downloads all of them would buy the movies. All the Hollywood loses are their estimates and who knows how they make them.

...but some of them certainly would have bought or rented the movie instead, or gone to see it in the theater. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle; they're losing business to piracy, but not as much as the raw numbers might indicate.

Certainly it's enough to greatly concern both the movie and music industries. If they weren't worried about it, they wouldn't be pushing any of this crap.

I still think they are hosing people on the price, both hollywood and Music industry and
would lower piracy with lower prices.

I could agree to a scheme for computers similar to games or XP where you need to
validate it online to play it.
This hardware scheme is ridiculous. They will switch to some other way or piss off
alot of people - This will be plug and pray version 2.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Wellsoul2
I still think they are hosing people on the price, both hollywood and Music industry and
would lower piracy with lower prices.

In theory I agree, although a debate about the economics of these industries is really outside the scope of this thread (and forum).

I could agree to a scheme for computers similar to games or XP where you need to
validate it online to play it.
This hardware scheme is ridiculous. They will switch to some other way or piss off
alot of people - This will be plug and pray version 2.

...the problem is that you can't (yet) require having an Internet connection to every Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player for it to be functional. Hence, you have to have some sort of standalone copy protection mechanism.

For your average user who is going to own a standalone player and HDTV and plug them together via DVI or HDMI -- everything is going to work just fine. Most people will never even know HDCP is there. Where things get complicated is on the PC side, since making the hardware and software secure is MUCH more difficult.

 

[kki000]

While i agree piracy is bad and it eventually hurts the consumer, the truth is that most of what either industry has come up with in terms of copy protection has had zero effect on piracy.

HDCP has had zero impact as far as hidefintion piracy is concerned. Its main effect was to delay hd adoption on the consumer side and cause all kinds of confusion.
Dont forget its also another layer that can go wrong in your system. Ive heard stories of compatability issues with some front projectors, where the security handshake never takes place, even with all HDCP compliant devices in the mix.

HDCP is like putting a bank vault door on the front of your house, but leaving the back door wide open. Doesnt address the issue at all, but my what an impressive front door you have.

 

[Janooo]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: Wellsoul2
I still think they are hosing people on the price, both hollywood and Music industry and
would lower piracy with lower prices.

In theory I agree, although a debate about the economics of these industries is really outside the scope of this thread (and forum).

I could agree to a scheme for computers similar to games or XP where you need to
validate it online to play it.
This hardware scheme is ridiculous. They will switch to some other way or piss off
alot of people - This will be plug and pray version 2.

...the problem is that you can't (yet) require having an Internet connection to every Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player for it to be functional. Hence, you have to have some sort of standalone copy protection mechanism.

For your average user who is going to own a standalone player and HDTV and plug them together via DVI or HDMI -- everything is going to work just fine. Most people will never even know HDCP is there. Where things get complicated is on the PC side, since making the hardware and software secure is MUCH more difficult.

Just wait for an error that can lock thousands of players. I see it coming.

 

[Janooo]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: Janooo
LM,

you are right. There is no way that out of 7M downloads all of them would buy the movies. All the Hollywood loses are their estimates and who knows how they make them.

...but some of them certainly would have bought or rented the movie instead, or gone to see it in the theater. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle; they're losing business to piracy, but not as much as the raw numbers might indicate.

Certainly it's enough to greatly concern both the movie and music industries. If they weren't worried about it, they wouldn't be pushing any of this crap.

Agreed. They lose money. Nobody knows how much.

 

[TheRyuu]

WHAT IF the Blu-ray/HD-DVD was cracked like a regular DVD.

Would the GPU still need to support the key thing?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: wizboy11
WHAT IF the Blu-ray/HD-DVD was cracked like a regular DVD.

Well, it probably won't be, at least not quickly or easily. Please see the numerous long threads/discussions about HDCP.

Would the GPU still need to support the key thing?

If you 'cracked' it somehow? No.

 

[dwcal]

Originally posted by: kki000
While i agree piracy is bad and it eventually hurts the consumer, the truth is that most of what either industry has come up with in terms of copy protection has had zero effect on piracy.

Right now, HDCP is irrelevent to download piracy. Most movie downloads are lower resolution than DVDs, and HDCP devices will still output 480p over unprotected channels. Someday storage and bandwidth might catch up to enable 30GB downloads instead of 700MB, but it'll be a while. Given the low quality of most downloads, I'd say the downloaders will be happy with 480p for a long time.

HDCP is more about preventing hi-def copies of digital cable and the HD/Bluray discs. It'll inconvenience early adopter customers who paid lots of money to watch in 720p/1080i at a time when piracy of hi-def content is uneconomical because of storage. Are they really worried about people ripping 30GB per movie onto their hard drives?

 

[dwcal]

Originally posted by: Janooo

Originally posted by: Matthias99

I could agree to a scheme for computers similar to games or XP where you need to
validate it online to play it.
This hardware scheme is ridiculous. They will switch to some other way or piss off
alot of people - This will be plug and pray version 2.

...the problem is that you can't (yet) require having an Internet connection to every Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player for it to be functional. Hence, you have to have some sort of standalone copy protection mechanism.

Just wait for an error that can lock thousands of players. I see it coming.

It can happen, and you don't need it to go online to disable your player. They can put key revocation lists into new movie releases, a trojan horse that turns your player into a paperweight if you're lucky enough to have a player with a compromised key or is otherwise non-compliant.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: dwcal
It can happen, and you don't need it to go online to disable your player. They can put key revocation lists into new movie releases, a trojan horse that turns your player into a paperweight if you're lucky enough to have a player with a compromised key or is otherwise non-compliant.

Very true. If this happens, you'd better hope the company that sold it to you covers it under warranty.

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: dwcal
HDCP is more about preventing hi-def copies of digital cable and the HD/Bluray discs. It'll inconvenience early adopter customers who paid lots of money to watch in 720p/1080i at a time when piracy of hi-def content is uneconomical because of storage. Are they really worried about people ripping 30GB per movie onto their hard drives?

I rip and store uncompressed MPEG2 for all the DVDs I own (I'm not a movie thief quite yet), and could easily imagine doing something similar with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray - especially if I took the next step of stripping out languages I don't know (eg, English, Ivrit).

If you're willing to make the investment in drives (and it's not really so huge anymore), you can get basically limitless storage on most computers. I mean, right off, USB2 and Firewire-400 can do 40-50MB/s - you could probably toss a six drive software RAID 5 on both those channels and not lose too much in terms of (needed) performance. Six 500gb drives is a TB of storage - thus, we're talking about 5 TB of data with a full 12 drives. Even if you went a notch down to four each, you still get 3 TB. That's one hundred movies.

If you've got spare PCI slots, you could also invest in external SATA - add another 3 TB.

However, you are correct that the pricing mechanics are somewhat non-sensical for those huge, high-end drives at this very moment. At 65 cents a gig, storing that 30GB movie costs you $19.50. That said, I don't think the average movie rip is going to be 30GB.

-Erwos

 

[Janooo]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: dwcal
It can happen, and you don't need it to go online to disable your player. They can put key revocation lists into new movie releases, a trojan horse that turns your player into a paperweight if you're lucky enough to have a player with a compromised key or is otherwise non-compliant.

Very true. If this happens, you'd better hope the company that sold it to you covers it under warranty.

This is the reason why it's a risky business. The new protection schemas are more complex therefore there is higher chance something can go wrong.
Just look at Sony. 400K tv's that have a firmware bug and it's suppose to be only 'simple' stand by mode.

 

[kki000]

Originally posted by: dwcal
snip

HDCP is more about preventing hi-def copies of digital cable and the HD/Bluray discs. It'll inconvenience early adopter customers who paid lots of money to watch in 720p/1080i at a time when piracy of hi-def content is uneconomical because of storage. Are they really worried about people ripping 30GB per movie onto their hard drives?

The effect of HDCP on the number of pirated hd movies out there is zero. There are plenty of hd movies you can download, most that had its origins on digital sat. (I have never dl any of them!)
If HDCP would have been wielded by hollywood the way they would have liked, it would do more than "inconvenience" early adopters. In truth, had they done what they threatened to do, shut down or down rez all analog outputs, then it would have been a big fu(k you to all early adopters.

History shows they didnt do that, in effect negating all the benefits of hdcp from content protection point of view. What will happen with b-ray and hddvd?
I dont know, if they follow thru on the promises of tighter controls, they will elimante (not alienate) a large potential customer pool, that is hd owners with no hdcp. This leads to poor adoption, everyone loses.

If they do not, hdcp is a meaningless scheme again, only there to annoy. I suspect they would probably do the latter. What does this mean in the htpc space?
Looking in my crystal ball, i think it would have the same annoying qualities as the current implementation. That is, unless yer hdcp thru and thru, you wont be able to output via dvi.(hdmi)

All you 2405 owners dont lose heart. I suspect vga and component should be wide open, up to 1080i at least. The net effect on actual picture quality would be negligible. Again hdcp, here to annoy, not to protect. This is all guesing on my part, but its based on my use of CE hdcp enable devices for 3+ yrs.

If im wrong and they close all analog output, well their customer base then is reduced to a point where adoption will not happen. No adoption, no movies, so no one has anything to worry about.

 

[Janooo]

Did you know that HDCP was broken before it went to production?
This is from Wikipedia:

Cryptanalysis

Cryptanalysis researchers demonstrated fatal flaws in HDCP for the first time in 2001, prior to its adoption in any commercial product. Scott Crosby of Carnegie Mellon University authored a paper with Ian Goldberg, Robert Johnson, Dawn Song, and David Wagner called "A Cryptanalysis of the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection System" [1]. This paper was presented at ACM-CCS8 DRM Workshop on November 5, 2001.

The authors conclude:

"HDCP's linear key exchange is a fundamental weaknesses [sic]. We can:

* Eavesdrop on any data
* Clone any device with only their public key
* Avoid any blacklist on devices
* Create new device keyvectors.
* In aggregate, we can usurp the authority completely."

Around the same time that Scott Crosby and co-authors were writing this paper, noted cryptographer Niels Ferguson independently claimed to have broken the HDCP scheme, but he chose not to publish his research due to legal concerns arising from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [2].

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: Janooo
Did you know that HDCP was broken before it went to production?
This is from Wikipedia:

Cryptanalysis

Cryptanalysis researchers demonstrated fatal flaws in HDCP for the first time in 2001, prior to its adoption in any commercial product. Scott Crosby of Carnegie Mellon University authored a paper with Ian Goldberg, Robert Johnson, Dawn Song, and David Wagner called "A Cryptanalysis of the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection System" [1]. This paper was presented at ACM-CCS8 DRM Workshop on November 5, 2001.

The authors conclude:

"HDCP's linear key exchange is a fundamental weaknesses [sic]. We can:

* Eavesdrop on any data
* Clone any device with only their public key
* Avoid any blacklist on devices
* Create new device keyvectors.
* In aggregate, we can usurp the authority completely."

Around the same time that Scott Crosby and co-authors were writing this paper, noted cryptographer Niels Ferguson independently claimed to have broken the HDCP scheme, but he chose not to publish his research due to legal concerns arising from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [2].

Heheh...so much for "hardware" protection.

 

[Janooo]

I know this is 5 years old but it's interesting reading.
Neil Ferguson's website:

Jurisdiction

The DMCA is a US law. I am a citizen of the Netherlands, and I live and work in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Why do I care about the DMCA at all?

The USA is apt to apply its own laws way beyond its own borders. Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian programmer, was arrested last month in the US. He is charged with violating the DMCA while performing his work in Russia as an employee for a Russian firm. As far as we know, what he did was perfectly legal in Russia, and in most other countries in the world. He is now out on bail, but cannot leave northern California until further notice.

Where does this lead to? What if countries start applying their own laws to the things people do in other countries? Will you be arrested next time you go abroad? Do you really want to take that holiday in China if you have more than one child? Are you sure that Germany allows you to have those links to political pamphlets on your web site? This type of extraterritorial application of national law violates a basic human right, because you cannot possibly know which laws apply to you. Imagine living in a country where the laws are kept secret, and you never know whether you are violating a law.