John Turner

Engadget has a post about the recent vulnerability in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks. I didn’t get into all the details, but apparently all it took was someone watching the memory registers on their computer for changes…eventually one of the keys was shown in the clear, and that’s all she wrote. Big media companies will never get it…DRM will ALWAYS fail as long as it involves having to distribute keys to customers. As one commenter notes, you can’t have encryption if you need to distribute the keys for decryption. That’s a recipe for a crack. Instead of spending money on increasing value and making content better, big media companies are wasting millions, perhaps billions, fighting a battle they can never win. They’d be better off (as Steve Jobs also suggests) simply releasing their content in a way that encourages customer loyalty, instead of presuming all of their customers are thieving pirates.