p2pnet.net News:- When Norway’s Jon Lech Johansen wrote DeCSS to decrypt Hollywood’s Content Scrambling System (CSS) meant to stop CDs from being played back on unauthorized hardware, the major studios launched an all-out attack to stop DeCSS in its tracks.

They failed ignominiously. But that was only the first act, says IEEE Spectrum, in effect. Act II will have a different ending, or so Hollywood hopes, because moviemakers see the next generation of DVD players and discs as a, "rare opportunity to get the horse back into the barn and lock the door tight," writes Tekla S. Perry in IEEE Spectrum, going on:

"So, this past July, two entertainment companies joined with six electronics manufacturers and chip makers to announce the creation of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), the copy protection scheme designed to keep future generations safe from pirated DVDs. The specification was due by year-end 2004, and products incorporating it are slated to appear by year-end 2005."

The studios are betting on AACS finally thwarting, "unauthorized copying of DVDs while allowing consumers to distribute movies legitimately over networks within their homes, play them on a variety of devices (standard televisions, portable movie players, and laptop computers), and store them on home media servers".

The members of the record label cartel are, of course, lurking in the undergrowth.

So far, all attempts by Big Music and major movie studios to come up with DRM technologies capabable of stopping people from copying discs have failed, although that hasn’t prevented firms ranging from Kazaa owner Sharwood Networks, with its DCIA, to SunnComm from claiming they have the answer.

Now, "We are confident that AACS technology will be part of the next generation of content on optical media," AACS’s Michale Ripley is quoted as saying.

He’s undoubtedly correct. AACS technology will indeed be part of things. But so what?

"Once products do ship, potential crackers – including teens in basements, academics, and large-scale pirates – will undoubtedly tackle this new encryption challenge," as Perry states, continuing:

"Some details of the specification were apparently still under discussion as this article went to press, including where on the disc the encryption codes will be physically stored. But one key parameter has been made public. The CSS encryption in the first generation of DVDs, which Johansen defeated, used a proprietary 40-bit key for encryption. AACS will use a so-called strong key, the 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard approved by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology and, ‘This removes one of the obviously dumb things from CSS – they were using a cipher that was easy to break," says Dan Wallach, assistant professor of computer science at Rice University, in Houston’."

Perry has GartnerG2’s Michael McGuire saying although he appreciates the industry’s need to address cracking, he also sees the cycle of crack/fix/crack as an endless loop.

"The motivation to crack high-value content like movies isn’t going to go away, he notes, so the overall economic benefit to the industry is not obvious."

"In the meanwhile, individual consumers will find ways to transfer their content anyway, Wallach says. "It is not a matter of if – it is a matter of when. As long as I have the technology in my living room to watch it for myself, I can modify the system to extract the video. They can make it hard, but they can’t make it impossible.

"They are living in a fantasy world," he declares, adds IEEE Spectrum.

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See:-
different ending – DVD Copy Protection: Take 2, IEEE Spectrum, December 31, 2004
the answer – Sharman woos Hollywood, p2pnet, June 19, 2004

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