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Comment by kia | Hacker News Reader

Isn't DRM on noninteractive content (not games) doomed to failure?

Yes.

If a human can view it, you can always, always, always copy it, reproduce it, and share it. No matter how much HDCP you throw at it, no matter what specialized hardware you devote to it...in the words of Mr. Universe..."you can't stop the signal."

(And all the King's horses, and all the King's men, couldn't put the industry's shitty paranoid ineffective wannabe DRM back together again.)

From Axel Boldt's idea diary,

1/24/2007 10:13 PM Defeat any copy protection on video/audio: play the content on a certified software player in a virtual machine, copy material from the virtual screen/loudspeaker.

http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/Diary.txt

Not that easy - any virtual machine, that allows copying material from virtual output devices will break the chain of trust and the certified player will refuse to play.

The problem with the "chain of trust" is that most of the links are held by Chinese companies who bid the lowest. All it takes is one employee with access to the key to leak it, and then everyone has it.

Note the ready availability of HDCP-strippers, for example.

You won't have much luck with that, I tried to view some online flash video in a virtual machine (we all know how fucked flash is on Linux), which lost the audio/movie sync after about 20 minutes.

It being in a virtual machine doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the problems; Audio/video sync in lots of flash content doesn't even work properly outside of virtual machines.

I watched the rest of the video on a normal windows machine, it didn't have any problems.

I'd put the odds over 80% that it's just because the VM wasn't fast enough. You then have two options. One is to get a faster machine, the other is to run the VM in slow motion while you save. Obviously the second isn't an option for realtime viewing.

My favorite quote on the matter:

> For Alex, the impossibility of making digital information copy-proof is a central truth of our age: something to be explained, and then re-explained, to judges, reporters, and businesspeople, in amicus curiae briefs and interviews on NPR. For me, it follows from the fact that the set of n-bit strings constitutes an orthogonal basis for Hilbert space.

-- http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=32

Unless the game cannot effectively be played offline, I think that'd also be doomed.

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