Anti-Piracy Software in DVDs Cracked

The system used to protect DVD-formatted movies from being copied--a feature that took years for the entertainment industry to agree on before it would green-light this popular technology--has been cracked.

A group of programmers has duplicated the software equivalent of a skeleton key and placed it on the Internet for anyone to download. Using this tiny program, called DeCSS, anyone owning a personal computer with a DVD-ROM drive can unlock a DVD movie and record a perfect digital copy of it onto his hard drive--within minutes.

DVD (or digital videodisc) is the biggest change in watching movies at home since videotape. It projects a crisper, clearer image on the screen than tape, improving the picture much as the compact disc improved sound over that of traditional records. Almost 4 million DVD players have been shipped in the United States to date.

The news comes as a bad surprise to movie studios, which were relying on the technology’s built-in encoding scheme to protect its DVD releases from piracy.

This is not the first time DVD’s security has been compromised; DVD’s “regional protection” software, which was supposed to keep DVD players that are sold on one continent from playing digital video discs sold on another, has already been cracked repeatedly. But this exploit could be much more damaging.