Copy protection hole in Blu-ray and HD DVD movies

Found on Heise Security on Thursday, 06 July 2006
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The Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD are new data carriers for high-resolution motion pictures. For fear of piracy, Hollywood had the developers install a cornucopia of copy prevention mechanisms on them. For instance, the film data on the disks are protected by means of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS). Digital output only reaches the monitor via connections encrypted by means of High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP).

Computer magazine c't has discovered that the first software players running on Windows XP allow screenshots of the movies to be created in full resolution. To do so, you only need to press the Print key on your keyboard while the movie is running. Such a screenshot function could then be automated to produce copies of HD movies both from Blu-ray Discs and from HD DVDs picture by picture.

When asked to comment, Toshiba confirmed the security hole found by c't, which affects the computers already sold, and announced updates for the player software and graphics card driver. These new software versions should disable the screenshot function.

Step by step, legitimate options are removed for the sake of content protection; that's like removing the shift-key so users cannot bypass the autorun function when they insert an infected "audio-cd". In the worst case, when your Windows is crippled so much that you cannot copy anything, you run it virtualized on a Linux system and do the recording from there. The "protection" stays inside the gues OS, and the recording will be done through the host OS.