At 08:36 PM 1/7/03 +0000, Peter Fairbrother wrote: >And apart from that, what was the point of CSS? You can do a "dd" on a DVD >and play the image from a hard drive. I don't have a DVD burner, but I'd >imagine you could burn a DVD from such an image, so direct copying is >probably easy enough. Maybe I'm wrong, I haven't tried it, but the pirates >don't seem to have any technical trouble.
The DVD Mafia's job is to make sure DVD-media play only on licensed DVD-players. (Licensed players are supposed to implement region-restriction, obligatory advertizement watching, etc.) If you pay their Mafia, you get a "secret" (bwah hah haaaa) decryption key and the right to use their logo. I'm not up on the chronology/conspiracy theories but its possible they anticipated how to abuse the DMCA in the way that they are, and so some trivial encrypting --even rot13-- is required. They must have known that recordable DVDs (multigig) were coming, but did not anticipate advanced codecs that put a DVD into a CD (or KaZaa :-) sized file. They also know they are obstructing the consumer, not the pro pirate. As a senior Sony engineer once said to me, re encryption & cable-box architectures, "yes, we know they have logic analyzers in Hong Kong" ------ SAFETY RULES FOR US STRATEGIC BOMBERS 5.1. Don't use nuclear weapons to troubleshoot faults. http://cryptome.org/afi91-111.htm
