Goodbye 2006, Hello Digital Rights Management- Page 3/5
January 3, 2007
By
Christopher Saunders
V for Vendor Victimization
Vendors of graphics cards, networked and portable devices, displays, software players, hardware players, and so on, all must play by the rules set by the content industry. If anyone fails to uphold their end of the agreement, or if hackers are able to circumvent a vendor's implementation, HDCP enables their keys to high-definition content to be revoked with relative ease, prohibiting them from receiving HD data, such as future DVD releases or downloadable content. 11
Those AACS and HDCP specs, controlled by media owners, also dictate the heavy lifting that hardware and software manufacturers will have to do in order to be able to decrypt and output "protected" content to monitors and high-definition TVs.
To support these content controls, vendors dealing in video output at some point will need to use technology robust enough to support another AACS requirement: downsampling all HD video, verifying AACS compliance, then upsampling the video once more for output.
That on-the-fly re-sampling (and the cryptographic and authentication processes that facilitate this) is far from cheap in terms of processing power.
Although the downsampling-then-upsampling requirement (called Image Constraint Token, or ICT) is a part of AACS, it's reported that movie studios have informally agreed not to implement ICT on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs for up to five years from now, in an effort to encourage the emerging formats. However, it's unlikely that hardware vendors will be able to avoid supporting ICT in their systems until then, since ICT is part of AACS. As a result, these vendors may be baking in technology today that won't be needed until 2012. Legally, AACS licensees will be required to support ICT by January 31, 2007.
For it's part, Microsoft as well as the content owners can revoke a certified graphics card/chipset's ability to play protected HD content if it determines that the vendor has been tainted by "content leakage".
Let's take a look at how your portable and networked devices will fare. To make a device that can play HDCP-protected high-definition video, consider that a typical manufacturer will have to pay for HDCP licensing and (in this case) Windows Media DRM licensing.
That's in addition to the development (or licensing) of cryptographic and authentication components in their products that support these. There may be additional considerations for online distribution services that the device supports. All this, even before manufacturers get to the costs of actually handing media transport, storage, playback, etc. Don't worry about the manufacturers, though: End-users will be the ones picking up the tab.
11In other words, if a vendor's technology is cracked, content owners can "lock them out" from being able to play future releases of HD-DVD, Blu-Ray DVDs, etc. Potentially, this could even mean that playback of DRM-controlled HD content on users' hard drives could be prohibited if the software player vendor's implementation is cracked -- even if users have already paid for and possess that content legally.
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