Take a look here before you decide that copy protection is a dead issue.

I didn't say copy protection was a dead issue... The SDMI watermarking scheme is only a part of one possible copy protection system. The copy protection that Rob S. described is a completely different system and unrelated to SDMI.

The SDMI crack isn't the death knell for copy protection, but it's a great example of something that I've been saying all along: If you can run something with the copy protection in place, then there's also a way to run it with the copy protection removed. Whether that "something" is a dongle-protected piece of software, a copy protected computer game, a region-encoded DVD, a macrovision-protected video tape, or a watermarked/encrypted music file, there are always ALWAYS ways to circumvent copy protection.

This doesn't make copy protection a dead issue. There are many copy protection schemes which make it very difficult to pirate something. And that's all that the publishers are shooting for: making it difficult to make a casual copy. So copy protection definitely isn't going away any time soon.

The only reason I say that SDMI is going down is because of the wonderful way these folks handled the announcement of their crack: they refused the prize money and went public with it. If they'd signed the NDA and kept its details secret, then possibly the SDMI folks would have been able to lie to their potential customers, saying some marketing doublespeak like "SDMI is 99.99 percent secure". Now they can't keep it under wraps, and no one will back SDMI because it's already been cracked.

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Tony Fabris