The other night I sat down at home and saw that the new Star Wars was available for digital purchase. I hadn’t seen the movie in theaters so I decided to buy it and watch it. All good right? Wrong. As the movie was buffering an error popped up saying I could not watch it in High Definition (HD) because my system did not meet HDCP requirements. HDCP which stands for High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection is a protocol on computers, cable boxes, blu-ray players, video cables, monitors, and TVs. HDCP has been around for a while its purpose is to prevent pirates from intercepting the video data when it travels from a source such as a computer or Blu-ray player to a destination TV or monitor by using a digital handshake through the approved cables. If there was a device between the source and destination attempting to copy the content the handshake will fail and the video will not be sent.

Trying to protect digital content from pirating is fine, however in the case of HDCP it does more harm than good normally. Three years before HDCP was first FCC approved for use it was already proven to be breakable Scott Crosby and associates at Carnegie Mellon University. Six years after its release anyone could go online and get the master key and break HDCP v1. The point here is that anyone trying to record or pirate the content was able to with ease, but an honest person trying to rent a movie might not be able to watch their content without expensive upgrades especially since each device needs to be HDCP approved. In conclusion HDCP punishes the honest users for trying to view digital content, whereas pirates can simply break the protocols or view the content from a previously recorded source.

Sources:

https://www.techhive.com/article/2881620/4k-content-protection-will-frustrate-consumers-more-than-pirates-meet-hdcp-22.html

Image:

https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-High-Speed-HDMI-Cable-1-Pack/dp/B014I8SSD0