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Comment by AlexanderDhoore | Hacker News Reader

Can someone PLEASE explain to me the following: If my computer is playing the video and playing the audio. How on God's green earth can they stop me from capturing that? ... It's playing right in front of me... I can hear and see it. It's not hidden or secret. Look.

If you ask me, the only reason DRM has worked up to now, is because code/file formats/protocols were secret. People didn't have access to the source. But now they do, in the open source browsers.

But PLEASE enlighten me. I wants to know.

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The analog hole will always exist. But please understand: it's ANALOG hole.

Ten years from now (I know it will happen by then; probably sooner), if I grab my Apple smartphone and press "record video" and point it at a piece of DRM-protected content playing on my computer, it will not record. Will not record. There will just be a black spot in your recording. The recording audio will cut out as well, if an audio watermark is detected.

It's an ANALOG hole. Film cameras will always be able to record your screen. Cassette recorders will work fine. But your digital equipment? No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

What makes you think DRM has worked up to now? Which content is unavailable for pirating because of DRM?

As far as I can tell DRM has only ever punished, and still only punishes, legitimate users.

It only punishes users if it is badly implemented. I doubt many users of Steam or Netflix feel punished.

I can't watch my Netflix account on Linux without using some Wine distribution because of the Silverlight DRM. I'd say I feel pretty punished on that end.

Yeah well your use case doesn't fit the "many" qualifier that was mentioned in the comment you replied to.

I disagree. Even though Linux desktop usage isn't a huge percentage (~1%?), I would consider 1% of millions "many".

I would consider many to be a worthless weasel word, that tells us nothing other than more than one but less than even a significant minority.

Ever heard of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia ? Sure you can record in the analog hole, but the playback of copies will becut or limited.

Imagine a browser refuse playback video or audio clip based on Cinavia DRM plugin, and also a website requiring such plugin -- via the DRM API -- to provide any content.

From that link: "When media with the watermark is played back on a system with Cinavia detection, its firmware will detect the watermark and check that the device on which it is being played is authorized for that watermark."

So I just make a media player that ignores the watermark, based on the open source code I found in the browser... DRM hacked.

HDCP does a 'pretty good' job of achieving that. There's a protected path all the way to the display, that can't be accessed by other software.

If it's encrypted all the way to the hardware, then it get's a bit more believable. But that really can't be done on the web, can it? "You no have DRM chip? No tubez for you!"

"You no have DRM chip? No tubez for you!"

That is actually their plan.

1. Your cellphone can't watch YouTube without hardware decoding.

2. An issue closer to home can be seen http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Raspberry_Pi/FAQ#Video_and_audio... .

3. Companies target audiences and not platforms. For example, Netflix on Linux.

Come to think of it, in theory the Raspberry Pi could support a DRM scheme that's entirely "open source" in the same way that their graphics drivers are already. Basically, the GPU is actually a fairly powerful processor running a binary blob that receives messages from the ARM CPU - if it did all the decryption the CPU-side code could be entirely open.

It doesn't matter unless the website acknowledges your DRM scheme.

Pretty good job, until the key was leaked. [0][1]

[0] http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/14/hdcp-master-key-supposedl... [1] Key: http://pastebin.com/kCA3dFDv

The parts of the browsers that support the DRM would probably have to be delivered as binary blobs in order to be standards compliant.

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