Ugh. When will the disastrous, failed DRM experiment end?

Quoted: But what the world of unencrypted music giveth, DRM-locked media can taketh away.

Quoted: Furthermore, Google is not refunding the total cost of the videos. To take advantage of the credit Google is offering, you have to spend more money, and furthermore, you have to spend it with a merchant that supports Google Checkout.

Very broad coverage of yesterday's crazy Digg chaos. Got picked up by all the top tech news outlets, and blog mentions on other top-tier news sites.

Quoted: Of course, for the content providers, any delay is still better than no delay at all, so expect the battles between copy protection and hackers to continue.

This assumes that DRM is actually about content protection, rather than control. From a financial perspective, some delay is worse than no delay at all, because it's tremendously expensive (developing and supporting the technology, delaying product releases, litigation costs, etc.) to create what amounts to a meaningless delay which only affects content extraction (and even a perfect DRM system fails if the content is extracted before it's encrypted, e.g. within the studio).

These people are stupid, but they're not that stupid -- quoting DVD Jon:

Quoted: AACS, like CSS, will be a success. Not at preventing piracy. That’s not the primary objective of any DRM system. Anyone who has read the CSS license agreement knows that the primary objective is to control the market for players. Don’t you just love when your DVD player tells you "This operation is prohibited" when you try to skip the intro?

Excellent -- although it's still depressing that a company had to spend years in court to protect their right to innovate. What's especially interesting is a product in such a high end niche will probably be amongst the first to get to pure Internet distribution. They won the battle, but it matters less than it did when it started.

Quoted: Kaleidescape argued, first and foremost, that nothing in the DVD CCA licensing agreement prohibits the development of products that allow users to copy their DVDs.

Quoted: Everybody hates DRM and the RIAA. Hating DRM is like hating bigotry or hating racism or hating those horible predators that Chris Hanson grills on NBC's "To Catch a Predator." Again, I exagerate to make a point.

Well, not quite ... I took a look at this, and it's not really that groundbreaking. Here's my Digg comment:

AACS has not been "hacked". The author's source code simply implements the decryption algorithm (documented, no black magic here).

The only thing of interest is the fact that he extracted the title keys, which he almost certainly obtained by poking around in PowerDVD's memory space.

The proper title for this post is (probably) "AACS Title Keys Extractable from PowerDVD".

Now, if the title keys can be obtained and distributed en masse (100,000 titles would require only a few megabytes even with title metadata), then AACS is certainly ineffective, but it's incorrect to say that it is "cracked" or "hacked". Nothing here will lead to a libdeaacs.so that could operate in the absence of a key database.

Angry but often insightful post on piracy vs. DRM-infected "legitimacy".

Quoted: Then came the PC makers, the dumb sheep that they are. There seems to be a race to see who can pass the buck quickest ...