No need to hack iTunes, just download the movie in a DRM-free format. I've heard that there are places on the Net that has things like that, something with pirates and a bay?

But sure, if the Blu-Ray replacement happens to have a working protection system they might finally pull it off. Too bad for them that the last part of the delivery chain will always be unprotected, unless they find a way to put HDCP in Eye 1.0 wetware.

> Too bad for them that the last part of the delivery chain will always be unprotected, unless they find a way to put HDCP in Eye 1.0 wetware

That won't help you record it if there is sufficient pressure on the small number of manafacturers of recording devices:

I would imagine it would be possible to create something like a EURion for video and audio.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

I think it would actually be a lot harder to apply something like EURion to video or audio, because of user expectations. Video and audio recorders are not expected to duplicate an existing artifact but to make a record, something you usually only get one chance to make. A EURion measure would be prone to abuse, breaking the user expectation that the given event had been correctly recorded.

The obvious example: What if a guy robbed a bank wearing a EURion t-shirt? None of the security cameras would record him, unless you had some exception for security cameras. And once you have an exception for security cameras, do you have an exception for, say, home security cameras? If so, anyone will be able to get a circumventing camera; if not, a lot of people will be upset.

I don't know how varied the possible DRM policies are, but it would seem possible to implement a 'generation counter' for DRM'd media which would restrict the number of copies.

e.g. the output of a video camera could be tagged with "allow 3 copies only". Each DRM-aware copy produced would decrement the # of allowed copies. The copied file would have an allowed-count of 0.

If a EURion-like image triggered this mode on the camera then that would probably be sufficient for manufacturers to avoid liability, but still serve to effectively close the "analog hole" (not really analog, but hey).

Yes, it all does seem unlikely. But so does tagging of printer output with yellow dots and EURion, and DRM in general.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography

It wouldn't work. This has all the problems of DRM in addition to all the problems of pattern recognition. Not a chance.

The problems of DRM are the ones facing us right now. Sure, individual implementations are buggy. If there's pressure, that'll improve over time.

The basic technical approach of the current DRM systems is sound, which is why they're a problem. High quality implementations would restrict people.

In terms of pattern recognition, you're not exactly doing facial recognitiion. The hard part would be putting a signal in there which was:

- distributed through the whole picture (so you can't just mask off the logo in the corner)

- sufficiently unobvious to humans threshold so that quality doesn't go down too far. Dunno about this one, apart from the fact that we have a lot of bandwidth here to hide a signal

- could survive basic disruption attempts by 'hackers' (colour filters etc)

It is a fairly tall order, but so is convincing the entire PC parts industry to put crypto in all their components against the interests of their customers.

Sure, but the pirated HD version had to remove the DRM in the first place (eg, some Blu Ray titles require HDCP, which you have to remove to rip it).

Yup. But figuring out how to do it will probably take longer than the download!

Aye, but someone's figured it out, hence making the download possible.

It's might seem like a chicken and egg discussion, but it isn't: the crack needs to come first. But once one person cracks it, the content is available for everyone else.

OS X is weaker in this regard than Vista; Vista won't play protected content if the kernel includes unsigned code. But OS X will get there.

Switch to linux and the OS stops caring entirely.

And so does everyone else, because Linux won't play the content we're talking about.

Yes it does. You could play HD-DVD media on Linux - I have personally done it. I'm relatively sure you may play Blu-Ray too. It's just like playing WMV or WMA - all you need is a codec - plus a tool to handle the DRM, which, as we're all aware, is inevitably created the day after the DRM is released.

There's still no permanent break for Blu Ray BD+; there are still titles that Slysoft can't play, and no evidence that the next Macrovision refresh won't stall Slysoft for months. You are drastically oversimplifying.

BD+ was broken last week, as I understand. The VM that implements both BD+ content and BD+ encryption schemes can be emulated.

What's left?

Bochs can emulate X86 quite well. Does Bochs itself bypass X86 copy protection code?

There's two obstacles:

(1) The VM emulation has to be perfect, and the Slysoft and open source emulation is reverse engineered. Reactos is Win32 reversed from one of the easiest platforms in the industry to reverse, and it's not perfect; BD+ was designed to be hard to reverse.

(2) Once the VM is perfect, so that the next 20 revs of Macrovision's protection code can't just go peek at some dark corner of the VM that Slysoft didn't know about, you still have to use that emulator to beat every successive program that Macrovision chooses to run on it.

A major challenge for SPDC, the underlying technology behind BD+, was that it had to be implemented autonomously by numerous consumer electronics companies, most of whom have no expertise in the areas of CS (compilers, virtual machine runtimes, content protection) that BD+ plays in. I expect it to get better over time, not worse.

I think the VM is emulated only well enough to run existing bytecode samples. If a studio can discover a bytecode sequence that executes differently on the licensed and unlicensed VMs, they can use that code in future movies.