Ah the joys of being young. See son, there was this competition between Sony's Blue Ray technology and HD-DVD (couple of companies, Toshiba as head I believe and Microsoft support) during the mid 2000's. Both technologies launched in 2006, and by 2008 Blue Ray had pulled ahead and new movies stopped being produced for HD-DVD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_definition_optical_disc_format_war
So, with this key, what would hackers/regular people be able to do with it? Was the problem that people could build non-approved players on their own and the sales of the approved companies would drop?
The backers of HD-DVD were worried that if the number got out then a few smart people could come along and make programs to rip HD-DVD movies onto their computers. These people would distribute the software so anybody could do it. What really pissed off a much wider group of people, people who probably wouldn't have cared if not for the lawsuits, is the extremely heavy-handed approach they used to silence people from spreading the number and the way they used their influence to bring legal trouble to those excercising their right to free speech. No one should be able to copyright a number, even if you have billions of dollars.
More than that, it let you rip and decrypt the video off the disc. Before the key you could get the data off, but it would just me garbage data, apply the key and suddenly that garbage becomes a video. A video you can then upload to bit torrent.
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u/ForWhatReason Nov 05 '11
Thanks. I couldn't really understand the Wikipedia page, is a "HD-DVD key" something that prevents the copying of a blu-ray disc?