it seems like they [the entertainment industry] have a hopeless battle ahead of them.
..................
Indeed.
Only days prior to Vista's official release, Alex Ionescu announced that he'd defeated the DRM surrounding the Protected Media Path (PMP) a key component of Vista's "premium content" enforcement infrastructure:
<snip>
...it turns out the code I’ve written does not work out of the box on a Vista RTM system. Although it can be effective when combined with a reboot, this doesn’t provide any advantage of any of the myriad other ways that this could be done (including booting with the disable integrity checks BCD option or the /TESTSIGN flag).
However, it does bypass DRM. As part of the Protected Media Path, (PMP), Windows Vista sets up a number of requirements for A/V software and drivers in order to ensure it complies with the demands of the media companies. One of these features, which has been heavily criticized as being the actual reason behind driver signing, is that “some premium content may be unavailable” if test signing mode is used. Originally, I assumed that this meant that the kernel would set some sort of variable, but this didn’t make sense: once your unsigned driver could load, it could disable this check. After reading the PMP documentation however, it seems to me that the “feature” explained is more likely the cause of this warning on premium content.
This feature is the ability of the PMP to notify A/V applications that there are unsigned drivers on the system, as well as provide a list of unsigned drivers. The idea is that the application can either outright refuse to play content, or that it can scan for known anti-DRM drivers which might be attempting to hook onto the unencrypted stream. This leads me to believe that it’s up to applications, not the OS, to enforce this DRM check.
[...]
Link -
<http://www.alex-ionescu.com/?p=24>
For the curious, a link to the Wikipedia article about the Protected Video Path, a related methodology -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_Video_Path>
.d.