And so a new cottage industry is born. And more “raids”. and more hatred of big companies. Where does it end?

The easiest way would be to alter the firmware to think it has a different device identity if you run into any trouble.

unfortunately firmware is very hard to deal with.. requires extra leetness.

If the player trying to play the movie reads that it should prevent itself from playing that movie it will refuse to do so and tell the user to call “tech support” where they can be arrested for piracy (without dealing with such concepts as presumption of innocence).

Or you could just somehow make the player ignore the process of reading the list of banned players, or make it not ban itself anyway.

Shouldn’t be too hard.
Could get involved if you need to alter it at the hardware level though.
And none of that nonsense about not having the legal right to modify your own player.

Simply make a tool which will read a drive’s firmware when new and “fully authorized”. If and when the drive gets revoked, simply use the program to blank that firmware and replace it with your original saved version.

Some modifications for software based revocation or software based enforcement of revocation would be necessary, but this seems the easiest way to deal with their system.

They can then look for this flag when they find files on networks and build instructions into their next release to disable the dvd player whose info was in the flag.

The potential avenues of attack, ranked by ease (none of them are nearly as easy as css was to crack) include firmware/software hacking to prevent response to ignore codes or prevent the marking entirely(i’m unsure how easy it will be, but it is most certainly the surest way), a program to copy a disk bit for bit and remove any revokation instructions(not simple to implement, but possible), building a filter to seek out and destroy the flag during encoding (very hard).

This one actually has me concerned. The attack methods will have to be subtle but also very complex. There is no guarantee at all that a universal crack will be developed.

A. Hack the firmware (easy in any case, there are massive archives of hacked firmware)

B. Put the software through a resourcer program and modify it to ignore disable codes.

C. Put filters in encoding or ripping software to remove the watermark during compression.

D. Enjoy! =)

Ooooooh, so it’s REVERSED-watermarking such that the PLAYER adds the watermarking.
So fucking what? It doesn’t have more of a snowball’s chance in hell of working.

You know what?
All you need to do is bypass that part of the player to get around it!
And since it’s YOUR player it’s very EASY.

Either that or buy a player that’s not completely stupid and that doesn’t modify data on the fly!

(As a side note, statistical analysis from multiples players WOULD in fact produce the original version of the content, notwithstanding the gratuitous and unsupported allegations to the contrary.)

Would you like a broadcast flag with that? Why, no thank you, Mr. Jackass!
Personally, I would rather not buy a player that can block my viewing of arbitrary discs subject to the whims of multi-national corporations.

Besides, professionnal counterfeiters are going to copy the DISC not run said disc through a player and then record the output!

You can’t have an open format and force ALL hardware makers to comply with your little schemes to make you rich. Similarly, closed formats are reversed-engineered, analysed and improved. Even if R-E is illegal in the US, who cares? Most humans don’t live there anyway.

Competition dictates that the best player will be the one most used.
The player that supports the more useful and easy actions is arguably the best.
The lack of competition is monopoly or void.
Monopolies are illegal since they have adverse effects to society as a whole.