And yeah, approved devices? This why my most recent film purchases were the Tremors collection, Airplane and Rashomon on DVD. I know that shit just works. If I actually had any HD gear, piracy would look pretty tempting, since it’s both a better product and a better price.
Paying your way and supporting the creators is the right thing to do, but if they don’t want to sell the product to you because of where you live or what you own, why not enjoy it for free? You can never remove the free option, you can only be better than it, like the old DOS games on Steam that are bundled with a properly configured copy of DOSBox so you can just download and play.

“While we were hopeful the HDCP model would not have been cracked this soon, we are impressed with the resourcefulness of the hacker community. Bravo!”

…but then the lawyers wouldn’t make any money

Wouldn’t breaking HDCP now be an entirely legitimate method for playing NON-copyrighed or protected material?

And wouldn’t a player be totally legal for use in such purposes?

That’s why I read BoingBoing.

Thank you Mr Doctorow!

@ #20
In short, no. Thank the DMCA for that.

We’re all in it together!

You may be familiar with it by its more colloquial name, “law school”.

Franz Kafka once said that in his opinion, studying law was like chewing sawdust that had been chewed before by countless other mouths.

What I’m curious about it whether or not they would successfully be able to win a lawsuit. A plain reading of the law, which bans “circumventing a technical measure which effectively controls access to a copyrighted work” and defines circumvention as “avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or
otherwise impairing a technological measure” doesn’t clearly show that using a correct key without authorization would be violation of the law. The clearly are not removing or deactivating anything. Whether or not they are avoiding, bypassing, or impairing it depends on how “it” is defined. They’re certainly not avoiding, bypassing, or impairing the authentication and key exchange protocol. It would only be if we read “it” as being broad enough to include the entire system including the handing out of authorized keys as part of the “technical measure”. This seems a little dodgy to me.

But, of course, none of this means that the courts won’t find in their favor. At least one court has ruled previously that gaming console mod chips are DMCA violations despite the fact that the method they avoid clearly doesn’t control access to a copyrighted work. (The mod chips allow the games access to the console, not vice versa, and the gaming console is not a copyrighted work.)

But it has an important secondary purpose: to make sure that you can’t create a DVR without also implementing a receiver for the specialized and tricky decryption of a satellite / cable provider’s bitstream. In other words, it’s about ensuring that the only playback devices of any use in the digital age are those supplied by the service provider. HDCP was always meant to kill Tivo and its cousins.

Intel is telling us that HDCP may be broken, but it will still continue to fulfill it’s secondary objective: the developer of a device that implements the spec with a self-made key will be sued out of existence.

However, underuse of the passive voice occurs in the aforementionned quote.

Specifically, “we and others would avail ourselves, as appropriate, of those remedies.” should read “those remedies would be availed upon, as appropriate, by ourselves and others’.

The missing of this opportunity disappoints.

http://www.digital-cp.com/hdcp_technologies

Or in short: intel be availin’ an whinin’, we be circumventin’.

I ignore fake commercial laws that serve only to restrict my personal freedom in cases like this. Seriously, I just don’t care what they say. I’ll use MY hardware and software however I want to, and Intel and the RIAA can threaten me all the way to the moon if it makes them feel better. It’s not going to make any difference in the way I choose to use what I have legally purchased. The only likely effect it’ll have is that I’ll buy less of their crappy product and Hollywood will suffer, not me.

They don’t make the content, perhaps the chips that do the HDCP? Either way cracking it isn’t going to affect the usage of the HDCP model since it is so well ingrained in all our products at the moment.

The only really good reason I see for Intel saying all this is to save face with the other players in the business. Intel’s job is to sell it’s product and services, and if the companies that you deal with feel you are on their side then it will be that much easier.

HDCP is/was crap. The whole Blu-Ray encryption thing was pointless over 2 years ago. I really wonder how many people would go to the effort of buying a DVR/PVR like device if HDCP didn’t exist for the sole purpose of making DVD/Blu-Ray of movies they have recorded off an HD source?

Seems like a lot of work when you could spend 15-20$. It’s like Hollywood doesn’t know you can just rent and rip…