Ernest Hua (hua@chromatic.com) wrote:
Third, the entertainment industry giants will have to improve and agree on an encryption technology. The current 40-bit encryption standard used on DVD discs, which is supposed to stop copyright pirates, has already been cracked in China. Stronger encryption, however, forces PCs and players to run at a crawl. Partially as a result, Fox, Paramount, and Disney have not committed to producing materials on DVD, Burdon noted.
DVD encryption is described on the Web at: http://www.kipinet.com/tdb/tdb_oct96/feat_protection.html There's a very simple way to 'break' it - you just copy the entire disk. Key-size is irrelevant. As the article itself says: "While copy protection for DVD is often mistakenly referred to as "anti-piracy," it does not in fact provide much of a deterrent to those who would produce illegal discs on a mass scale." Or in other words, it will do nothing to stop the Chinese, it's simply intended to prevent you and me from copying disks and giving them to our friends. This is, of course, inevitable from the nature of the technology. As has been discussed many times in the past, this kind of scheme just can't work. Since that article is a few months old and talks about the big movie company's desire for a mandatory standard and laws against the sale of any machine which allows access to unencrypted data, I'd guess that this new article is FUD to persuade Congress to pass the laws. (Now explain to me why I'd want to buy yet another video format which can't even record?) CopyMonger