AACS reputedly took years and billions of dollars to develop while hackers appeared to have compromised it in the few months since the release of both formats into public. As Steve Jobs’s recent open letter pointed out, the development of DRM systems is “a cat-and-mouse game” with content providers trying to constantly stay one step ahead of hackers.
Circumventing copy protection is, of course, illegal under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and it has yet to be seen if the content providers will strike back at the hackers with the full weight of the law—which, of course, won’t actually be able to stop the cracking process, since the information already exists all over the Internet. There is a chance that the encryption scheme will be updated, but I imagine it’s a very slim one. Perhaps they should, instead, consider this another example of the futility of DRM.
[via Slashdot ]