Digital Rights Management (DRM) part 1

The industry does not only actively fight pirates. It also tries to protect its products by
including DRM technologies in digital media, like CDs DVDs or even files of different formats.
These DRM technologies are meant to protect the media from being copied, however hackers
always crack them in no time leaving only legal copies with additional useless features making
them working worse than the illegal ones. These DRMs make legitimate users unable of making
back-up copies of their discs, so they have to buy new ones in case of problems with scratches on
the surface. Pirates do not have such problems.

All legitimate DVDs contain unskippable content such as advertisements and anti-piracy
warnings which threaten the viewers with legal punishment for copying it (Allessandroisback,
2010). Pirate copies of films are ready to run immediately and the original ones – make us wait
even a few minutes during which we have to watch advertisements (even though we have already
paid for the movie) and read text in which the FBI threaten us. Many people choose piracy, just
because they do not like being disrespected, as one can read in the comments under a YouTube clip
with these warnings. Why do they have to loose time for these video clips, since they have already
paid for the film in a shop? The answer is fairly simple – distributors believe in the power of
advertisements and just want to earn even more money.

One of the first examples of DRM was the Content Scrambling System (CSS) chosen by the
DVD forum in 1996 to protect DVDs by using an encryption algorithm. Manufacturers of players
have to pay for the license and also implement it in their products to make them able of decrypting
and playing content of the DVDs. In 1999, at the beginning of the DVD era, before even it became
a technology cheap enough to be popular worldwide, Jon Lech Johansen developed an application
called DeCSS, which cracked the CSS and let users watch DVD movies on Linux, which was then a
system on which there was no official DVD player software available, thus leaving people no
choice but to buy expensive Windows or BeOS operating system.

On March 31, 2006 Toshiba released their first consumer-based HD DVD player in Japan
and its DRM technology, the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) was already cracked in
December of the same year. Many commentators conclude that the concept of DRM makes no sense
and is useless because the money spent on the researches could be as well spent on developing new
products. Products without DRM would also be cheaper, making them available for a wider range
of customers.