News

On our last News Desk post of 2006, we reported that an anonymous hacker called Muslix64 had announced that he had crackedhttp://www.stereophile.com/news/010107hacked/">cracked; the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) digital rights management (DRM) scheme. Muslix64 said he'd release more details (and decryption software) on January 2. That software, called BackupHDDVD, is now available onlinehttp://rapidshare.com/files/8318838/BackupHDDVD.zip.html%22">online; and the Internets have been all atwitter about it, with charges ranging from "bogus!" to "hallelujah!"

On December 13, 2006, the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the August 8, 2005 grant of summary judgment in favor of AudioQuest, finding that the district court had correctly terminated Monster Cable's January 5, 2004 assertion that AudioQuest's Dielectric-Bias System (DBS) willfully infringed upon Monster's Bias Circuit System (BCS) patent (US Patent No.5,307,416 for Audio Interconnect & Speaker Cable, "Bias Circuit System").

HD DVDs and Blu-Ray discs came to market with a digital rights management (DRM) content encryption system called Advanced">http://www.aacsla.com/home">Advanced Access Content System (AACS). Supposedly, AACS was intended to permit greater flexibility than conventional DVD's Content Scrambling System (CSS) DRM, since it was touted as allowing purchasers, say, to load DVDs onto their media servers or burn downloaded HD purchases to disc.