Ranting to /dev/null

RIP DRM

It's a really bad day for the entertainment robber-barons. First, there's a Vanity Fair piece on The Pirate Bay, one of the leading torrent sites in the world. They ran into some legal trouble last summer, with a bunch of their servers being confiscated by the Swedish police in what turns out to have been a US-motivated sting operation. Needless to say the Swedes were not happy. Also needless to say, the site was back up, initially in the Netherlands but now mirrored around the world, within 3 days. It was up so fast the prosecutor was giving self-congratulatory interviews and had to be informed by a journalist that, hey, it didn't work.

Second, Ars Technica has a piece about a recent statistical analysis of filesharing data against physical media sales. Turns out there isn't a statistically significant correlation between the two, and the reduction in sales has far more to do with retailers ordering no more stock than they're convinced they're going to actually sell than with piracy. They study also suggests that the reduction in music sales can be linked to the increase in DVD sales. Which makes sense: there's a finite amount of money consumers have to spend on media, and if they're spending more on DVDs they're spending less on music.

Finally, AACS, the DRM methodology used to protect HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs has now been officially broken. Doom9, perhaps the world's premiere cracking forum, has the info. BoingBoing has commentary. Previously, they had reported that the same forum had discovered how to extract the media once you knew the relevant key. Now you can extract the key itself, meaning that any and every next-gen medium is officially pirateable. I expect to see a fully automated process by this summer.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of entertainment executives all cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something wonderful has happened. DRM is dead.