Blu-ray copy protection, BD+, hacked already
By Dave Parrack
Blu-ray, the high-definition format being mooted by some to be the future, and mooted by others to already be on the way out, has already had its copyright protection broken. BD+, the system in place to prevent any illegal copying of Blu-ray discs has been cracked by members of an Internet forum.
Blu-ray is the high-def format currently battling to overcome run-of-the-mill DVD and digital downloads to become the format of choice for the foreseeable future. With the news today emerging that the format has been cracked, with the BD+ copy protection broken, will this be good or bad news for the format?
Members of the Doom9 forum seem to have taken BD+ apart in a thread lasting 17 pages (at the time of writing). The discussion is hard to understand for anyone who isn’t themselves a technical marvel. I myself admit to not understanding huge droves of the language used. I’m clearly less of a geek than I thought I was.
As ZDnet breaks it down, in essence the forum posters have successfully recreated the BD+ virtual machine that resides in a normal Blu-ray player and then picked it apart one step at a time. The method arrived at for copying Blu-ray discs isn’t easy, but the fact it’s now possible is an important development.
The fact it has happened so early in the format’s life has got to be a worry as experts originally predicted the copy-protection mechanism wouldn’t be broken for ten years. It seems that whatever protection the manufacturers come up with, there will always be someone willing and able to break it.
So what does this actually mean? Blu-ray movies can now be pirated, and while it will take a while for the copies to filter down to the population in general, the fact that it’s possible in the first place is bad news for Hollywood.
But, as The Guardian technology blog points out, this could actually be of benefit to the hardware manufacturers, as pirated films and the ability to back up discs is likely to massively increase the demand for players over the next few months or years. And with prices dropping massively around Black Friday, I wouldn’t bet against this holiday season seeing much improved sales of Blu-ray players.
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November 5th, 2008
Hardly unexpected. Why the movie studios continue to think some form of copy protection is necessary amazes me. You would think that after years and years of all forms of copy protection ultimately failing that they would have got the message and just stopped squandering development time and resources into something that only penalizes those of us who do NOT pirate their stuff!