Reportedly, another crack for the AACS encryption utilized by Blu-ray and HD DVD has been created. A step above the one that made headlines the past few months from Muslix64, this new crack apparently lets someone get the processing key out of a player, which can then be used to rip any compatible media. An enterprising fellow was able to dump the contents of a players memory at a certain time and was able to retrieve the information required. On top of this ultimately allowing the media to be duplicated, the article brings up a very good (and sarcastic) point regarding the efforts in the first place:
There is no future in which bits will get harder to copy. Instead of spending billions on technologies that attack paying customers, the studios should be confronting that reality and figuring out how to make a living in a world where copying will get easier and easier. They're like blacksmiths meeting to figure out how to protect the horseshoe racket by sabotaging railroads.
What about cooperation? With the billions of dollars invested into developing this encryption method and the support across the industry for it, do they still not realize there are better ways? That doesn't mean the end of AACS, for sure - it's not exactly an easy task for anyone to do this, and firmware updates or future revisions of players could render existing keys (though not the method) obsolete. I imagine a particularly scary future in which your player must auto-update itself at regular intervals to get the latest set of keys to play legit movies.