SlashNOT

Matthew writes: The MPAA announced today that it had developed its own Digital Rights Management (DRM) protocol that defeats all forms of file copying. The announcement surprised serious DRM researchers, who didn’t realize that the MPAA had the technical and security acumen to develop an uncrackable rights management scheme.
“Basically, early attempts at DRM would move the “decryption” component closer to the user–for example, with DVD, decryption was done in the player by hardware, but hackers got around that by doing a key swap with a legitimate player and then ripping tracks. We tried moving decryption to the display drivers, but then the hacked the players and transcoded to the easily swappable DiVX format.”
“We realized that no matter what we did, someone could just make a display device that captured the screen and re-encoded it. It only takes one pirate on the Internet to crack a title and release it, so the odds of someone doing this are very high.”
“Then we looked at the market. Users who buy DVDs typically only watch them once. It’s really more about ownership than viewership, and they’re not supposed to be loaning them out anyway.”
“Our new protocol addresses all of these problems by eliminating the decryption phase. By leaving the media encrypted throughout the play process, we never lose control of our content, and the consumer is only inconvenienced and average of one time. They still get the exact same ownership experience, and that’s what buying DVDs is really about.”