Motivations

People’s motivations for cracking the new HD DVD format are varied, but most people can be assigned into two main groups: those that do it in exercise of free speech and those that do it simply to have fun. The first reason is the one most people associate with when they hear that someone has been ripping or copying discs. Whether or not this is in fact the predominant reason, it is, at least, the argument people use most frequently to justify their behavior. This group of crackers believes that digital rights management, the term given to any type of technology used by publishers or copyright owners to control and restrict access to certain digital work, goes against the constitution and the law. To them, restricting the access to digital content is not a digital rights management, but digital restriction management. In other words, they argue that trying to restrict use of copyrighted material goes against the statutes, common law and constitutional grant of exclusive commercial use given to them. Therefore, most crackers believe that by ripping movies, they are actually exercising a right to make use of material they have actually bought.

The other group of crackers, the ones that rip movies simply for fun, are far less motivated by ideological reasons. For them, ripping HD DVD movies is all about the thrill and the excitement. They do it as a challenge to prove to themselves and prove to others, that they indeed can crack security and data protection mechanisms. This group of people is motivated by the simple prospect of being able to rip the movie, and then telling the world they were able to do it. Most people that do it for fun become so addicted to ripping movies, that they sometimes do it even if they never see the movie again; they become movie collectors. In the case of the HD DVD, many people were fascinated with learning how the AACS protection systems were implemented. A separate forum on doom9 was created for the specific purpose of discussing the AACS encryption mechanisms, and with the help of the whole HD DVD cracking community, secrets from the AACS were soon discovered.

It is important to highlight, that most of these people do not rip movies for financial or commercial purposes, and, on the other hand, promote the fair competition among disc producers. In other words, they do not do it not make any specific company better or worse off.

Snapshot of a post by a cracker who celebrates the discovery of the processing key. His motivation: fairuse. In this post, the cracker also encourages his fellow community members to start working on the Blu-ray processing key, to make competition even.

To see the doom9 forum full post screenshot, click here.

On to Conclusion