An ad-hoc experiment in Slashdot-style collaborative journalism. Background reading: Michael Olson got us started by linking the RealJukebox privacy flap with the recent crack of DVD encryption ( see http://tbtf.com/blog/1999-10-31.html#7 ); Seth David Schoen contributed a "let 100 DVD players bloom" perspective via Dave Farber's IP mailing list ( see http://www.interesting-people.org/199911/0016.html ). Got any useful insights on the DVD crack and its implications?

As $/meg for hard disks drops, and as cable modems, DSL, and other high speed net links proliferate, I forsee the crack of CSS as the "thin end of the wedge" in starting an MP3 like revolution for video. It's currently just barely feasable to download a 5GB video over DSL (order of magnitude 10 hours). One more order of magnitude bump in net connections (and many dorm rooms have ethernet already...), and it becomes cheap to download a movie for your collection.

Ah well! Once more the geeks have won and the suits have lost.
As far as I am concerned, it is now time to start working to destroy the two great curses of modern civilization - patents and copyrights. Anybody who has thought deeply enough about these issues will realize that both patents and copyrights do not work in consumer favor - both are instruments designed to take away freedom of choice. And if someone still thinks that patents and copyrights protect the rights of authors and inventors, I have only one thing to say- WAKE UP!
How can patents be right? - did you know that Galileo was denied a patent for the telescope because the Patent Office thought it was an obvious idea. And now we have patents on specific colors! There have never been a truly innovative idea in the history of mankind ever since the invention of the Wheel, fire and the number Zero. And no one ever got patent rights for those!
Copyrights are even worse! Anyway who thinks copyrights protect authors is truly mistaken. A writer gets no more than 5 percent of what his book is actually sold for! Musicians get seven percent! The rest is cleaned off by the "industry" people. I'd rather pay 10$ direct to a books author than 40$ to the company.
Sorry for being off topic in "Offline", but I think there is at least a tangential relation here to the actual topic.

By the sounds of it, the current generation is comprehensively
cracked. The industry is bound to respond, and it may be amusing
to try and predict that response. I'll ask the salesman today, when
I go to buy my first DVD :)

One easy "fix" is to not license a "next generation" to software
suppliers. Having a software DVD player does make it a lot
easier to reverse engineer than hardware. A further improvement
would be to develop a combined decrypting-analogue chip that
took a stream in and provided the video/audio out. Once all the
action occurs within a single chip, this will make matters harder,
as all that is available is plaintext and cyphertext. Especially if
they start using real keylengths.

If the chip was also supplied directly by the consortium, then there
is no reason for the muliple licensees to participate in the key
management. Which makes for less mistakes.

You would still have the single key break problem, so atom-scraping
the chip would be worth someone's while. As there is a single
distribution it is hard to get around that issue.

Further down the line, you might see DVD machines hooked to the net,
in which case they could dynamically request the key on supply of
some meatspace put-em-in-jail hook. That still wouldn't solve the
problem, as it just raises the cost of the hack to how hard that protocol
makes things.

Another possibility is to sell them for much cheaper. If official DVDs
cost a buck, who'd bother with the pirate? At the current price of $20
or more, they are at the point where it is tempting for bored compsci
students to give it a go.

Video on DVD copying won't be a significant issue until
  A) DVD-R recorders come out (next summer apparently,) and
  B) DVD-R media price goes under $10, even more so under $5.

If the DVD content creators have enough leverage in their contracts with the DVD device&media manufacturers to keep media prices high, they can make the copying/piracy issue practically irrelevant by manipulating or taxing the cost of media (or secondarily, read/write devices). But DVD will then never supplant CD-R(W) as a data storage medium.

I'd be very interested in knowing exactly what the terms are for the apparently-secret legal contracts that tie together the DVD content owners and DVD device manufacturers.

Anyway, back to the subject- implications for DVD. Assuming there aren't any useful penalty clauses in that contract for restricting DVD technology adoption once the "CSS cat is out of the bag", the content producers could also threaten to jerk all their content now, forcing media/device manufacturers to sign new contracts that will keep the media price high (a "sign or we kill the baby" move.) While drastic, they don't have to delay DVD media price drops forever; just to slow the rate of price drops for 2-4 more years so that there's time to roll out a DVD successor.

Which brings us to my final point. No matter whether any of the above things come to pass, clearly the DVD-crack substantially increases pressure on the content producers to get the post-DVD SDMI watermarking technology in place, as soon as possible. (With any luck, they'll rush through SDMI and get details of it wrong too!)

  --Greg

P.S. DV isn't the last word in video, BTW. I won't be using it in 30 years (unlike CDs), I guarantee you. Why? Lousy resolution. DVD's TV-resolution is about 640x480. My PC does 1600x1200. Film screens are around 4000x4000. So I'm not making any of my permanent archival video stuff in "lousy" DVD. Higher resolutions will be enough for both content producers and device manufacturers to sell a post-DVD upgrade cycle of devices and media and content. In my book, DVD is an 8-track.

Nobody has commented on how this might intersect with the MPAA's push to try to get PC lockouts added into 5C/DTCP [1].

At first glance, I'd say that it moots the MPAA's demands, at least for the moment. I rather doubt that the guys writing unauthorized DVD rippers are going to incorporate 5C. In fact, I can't imagine that their NDA for the 5C technical specs would even be accepted.

[1] http://tbtf.com/blog/1999-10-24.html#9