Ravneet Singh

Rampant piracy has become an issue in content distribution industries. The cause of financial loss in these industries is blamed on piracy which the consumers appear to be causing. However, a deeper look at this problem reveals a different story. Power has simply shifted from the consumers to the producers. In this shift of power, producers can no longer take advantage of the consumers. The consumers demand to be treated better and piracy is simply a solution to the content distribution industries' inability to understand that they can no longer abuse their power. Those business models which take this shift of power into account, not only gain respect from the consumers, but also reduce piracy by providing better service then the illegal alternatives. There is a battle stirring in the digital world between the producers and the consumers. The producers, out of touch with the demands of the consumer, are unable to provide services which meet the demands of the consumers. Thus, consumers have turned there back on the producers' restrictive services and products, and have found other unrestrictive ways to obtain content. Being a producer is tricky in the digital world. Products in the digital world can be reproduced countless times with almost no strain on one's resources. All copy protection schemes to protect digital content have proven to be useless. Thus, the producers have lost the power to enforce restrictions over there content. Looking at how the businesses are cooping with this change in the product model, there is a clear distinction between those who have embraced this change and those who are fighting a loosing battle. There is a quote which goes something along these lines: There are two types of engineers. Given an unmaintained path, there are those engineers who will put up a fence and then, there are those who will pave the path. Many schemes have been implemented by various industries in the digital world which attempt to place a fence around digital products: DRM, copy protection in video games, cd-key verification etc. Very few schemes, if any, have ever succeeded at protecting content from duplication. Often times these restrictions drive consumers away from legitimate vendors and into the hands of piracy. There are even cases of content protection schemes so poorly implemented, that legitimate owners turn to piracy to access content which they should rightfully have access to. The music industry is one of the industries which is having a very hard time coping with this change. It has done so poorly in dealing with this change, that it has created resentment amongst consumers! Digital content cannot be restricted. Those businesses and industries which fail to recognize this and fail to adapt to this change will face extinction. While those who understand this shift in power from the producers to the consumers will learn to satisfy their consumers' demands, and in doing so, create new markets and sources of revenue. There have been many Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes implemented in hardware and software. Majority, if not all, have been hacked. One of the early examples of failed DRM is the “Content Scrambling System” (CSS) found on DVDs. Released in 1996, completely hacked by October 1999. This type of DRM was enforced using pure hardware. As with most DRM prevention schemes, a pure software solution was found to get around it. The relative simplicity of the encryption scheme used by CSS helped ensure that it was an easy standard for the manufacturers to follow. Thus, it resulted in players which would have little trouble playing their intended content. But, this simplicity was also the reason why CSS was easily and completely cracked. Modern DRM however is much more complicated. Blu-ray disks have been promoted as a replacement for DVDs. Blu-ray content has two content protection schemes, AACS and BD+. AACS is a more complex decryption scheme similar to CSS, but with improvements with the lessons learned from the mistakes of CSS. AACS has been cracked, with its encryption keys posted publicly on the Internet. This however, is a temporary attack since old keys can be revoked and new ones issued. Thus, there is a race between the hackers and the content providers in cracking and reissuing keys. The more interesting of the two encryption schemes is the BD+. BD+ allows individual content providers to implement there own decryption schemes which are executed in a virtual machine on players. With this complexity comes flaws in the implementation of the standard. There have been cases where legitimate players were unable to play Blu-ray disks because of poor implementation. As with all schemes, BD+ has also been cracked. Modern content protection schemes not only enforce DRM on the media but also on the transmission of data. Thus the connection between the players and the displays is also encrypted by a scheme called HDCP. It is designed to prevent a man-in-the-middle attacks. Thus, it is unintuitive to people who are used to analog signals. For analog signals a simple