

The HDCP magic inside Bunnie's NeTV - fanf2
http://rdist.root.org/2011/09/13/the-magic-inside-bunnies-new-netv/

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NateLawson
This is an amazing technical accomplishment. But it also has huge
ramifications for the TV industry and licensing.

Currently, all HDCP chips are licensed from a central agency (mostly Intel).
It has "robustness rules" about how and where the chips can be used, otherwise
you don't get a license. These rules are intended to prevent people from
building HDCP strippers (HDCP in, plaintext out) but also to make it harder to
inadvertently leak plaintext.

For a long time, I believe it was hard to get a license for a device that used
a general-purpose processor. But the Logitech Revue and similar devices
basically have two HDMI ports and a CPU in between. So those rules may be
changing.

The NeTV is different. It's a slow CPU and FPGA in an ultra-cheap design. It
only does encryption to insert its overlay into the stream, it doesn't do
decryption. But it uses the HDCP master key to do so, which would probably not
be ok with the HDCP corporations.

This has interesting questions for the DMCA and content protection in general.
Will this approach be allowed? If not, on what grounds would someone file
suit? Would it be purely anti-competitive, an attempt to prevent a small
company from playing in the big leagues?

I'm now watching intently to see what happens next. Incidentally, Bunnie is
speaking about this at Maker Faire and Open Hardware Summit tomorrow through
this weekend.

