A group of
ethically bankrupt charlatans who hoodwinked the
music industry into thinking that there was such a thing as an uncrackable code, devised a wholly inadequate set of protection mechanisms and then issued a
challenge to find if anyone could break them. Wait, it gets better.
Researchers at Princeton University succeeded in breaking the protection, and have been legally threatened by the SDMI (citing that wholly unconstitutional law the DMCA) not to publish their findings. It's fairly sickening that a bunch of snake-oil peddling fuckwads can claim to have the legal imperative over an academic institution, and worse still that they have so little shame as to put their deeply deranged, greed-driven argument into the public arena.
Of course, even with a clueless puppet-man like Bush holding the reigns, the SDMI don't have a legal leg to stand on. If they do manage to buy a favourable result, they've still already lost: their algorithms have been cracked, and the rest of the world laughs in the face of the DMCA. Maybe the music industry can get on with imploding now.
The paper sums it up best:
"Ultimately, if it is possible for a consumer to hear or see protected content, then it will be technically
possible for the consumer to copy that content. "