DRM: Hackers Batting 1000, Industry Zero

Found on Information Week on Wednesday, 01 August 2007
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Whether the millions of kids who load up their iPods from LimeWire are thieves, or whether there's something incongruous about Sheryl Crow, a millionaire many times over, railing against piracy. When you look at the technology, there's no getting around the fact that DRM is an abject failure.

The 10-year-old Content Scrambling System employed on early DVDs is such a technological relic at this point that Crunchgear recently reported that: "According to the Finnish courts, CSS is so weak that it doesn't even count as a protective measure anymore."

In a game of iPod cat and mouse, the DRM system used in iTunes' music has been repeatedly cracked and then "fixed" by Apple. Last fall, the cracking program called QTFairUse6 had been updated so it could continue to perform its DRM-stripping duties within hours after Apple released iTunes 7.

There's been no update from the Advanced Access Content System people on the cracking of their AACS DRM, which is used in the new high-definition HD DVD and Blu-ray DVDs, since May 7.

The widely circulated crack comes in the form of a program called FairUse4M. The first iteration of this crack worked with Windows Media Player 10 under Windows XP, but for a long time wouldn't work on Vista. Alas, FairUse4M has now been updated to crack WMP11 running on Vista.

I think that speaks for itself. DRM is made to annoy those who don't have the skills to fix it; but it takes just one person who can get around, and the cat is out of the bag.