HD-DVD Copy Protection Cracked

by on December 31, 2006 · 22 comments

Someone has figured out how to bypass the AACS copy protection scheme on the new HD-DVD format. HD-DVD players have been on the market since March, so this encryption scheme survived for approximately 8 months. The only thing that’s surprising about this is that it took so long.

I believe that in theory, the HD-DVD format allows the cartel that controls the format to blacklist compromised devices so that they won’t be able to play future releases. The story I linked to above doesn’t mention if this is likely to occur in this case.

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Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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