AACS DRM Cracked?

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, December 28, 2006, 02:15 PM EDT

Engadget has a story, complete with a short video, on-line that claims the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) DRM technology incorporated into HD-DVD has been cracked. Before anyone in the HD-DVD camps starts boo-hooing, or anyone in the Blu-Ray camp starts cheering, I'd wager this actually helps boost the popularity of HD-DVDs over Blu-Ray.

"Can it be? Is Hollywood's new DRM posterchild AACS (Advanced Access Content System, see more here) actually quite breakable? According to a post on our favoritest of forums (Doom9) by DRM hacker du jour muslix64, his new BackupHDDVD tool decrypts and dismantles AACS on a Windows PC. Just feed the small utility a crypto key (it comes bundled with keys for a few popular HD DVD titles, with the promise of more on the way), and it'll dump the video right off the disc onto your hard drive, supposedly playable in any HD DVD compatible player."

Should this turn out to be true, would anyone really be surprised? And as consumers, why do we even let these big companies go to such extremes to limit how we're "allowed" to use the content we purchase anyway? It's incredibly easy to copy, transcode, and transport DVDs, and it has been that way for a couple of years now, and yet the movie industry had a banner year in '06. So, why do we as consumers have to deal with ever more intrusive and limiting DRM schemes? What are they actually protecting?

Did tape decks, CD recorders, or even Napster, or the MP3 kill the music industry? Did the VCR or DVD-R kill the movie industry? Will the industry crumble when we're able to easily copy HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs? Of course not.

OK. Rant over.

Tags: DRM, Crack, aac, AA, AACS, AC, K

AACS DRM Cracked?

Login with Social Media or Manually