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The inevitable just happened to BD+ (the last copy protection for Blu-ray): it got cracked.

First, HD-DVD and Blu-ray had AACS which was defeated in a community effort among open source developers. It didn't take very long and the public could read and learn about the progress on different forums.

Blu-ray has (had?) an extra non mandatory security mechanism called BD+ which at first wasn't used on any Blu-ray discs. But when AACS was defeated the big movie studios turned their heads to BD+ to secure the discs once again. BD+ probably played an important part in the settlement of the HD-War. But the switch to the more advanced protection seem to have been effortless, the 10 years BD+ was said to survive now seems like a joke or a great overestimation.

Today's mantra backed by many historical events, is:

There will never be a copy protection that will work for a long time.

History has proven this and we now see specialized companies with task forces with only one goal: break DRMs. This is of course a reflection of the dissatisfaction with DRMs and the demand from consumers to more freely use their legally purchased content (creating a backup copy of discs etc.).

I hope movie studios realize that the solution to piracy isn't in the DRMs but in other things like good services, availability, price and quality. And watermarking can be used to secure content, let us prove this! 

First out to try BitTorrent distribution was NRK in Norway a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, CBC (the Canadian public broadcasting service) read about it and decided to give it a try too.

CBC will release high quality, DRM-free copies of one of its major primetime shows, "Canada's Next Great Prime Minister" for free to everyone in the world. This is a bold move but a correct one and hopefully this will have an impact throughout the commercial broadcasting world too (I talked to Swedish public service TV, SVT, about this a week ago but there are currently no plans for trying this with Swedish programmes at the moment).

Today's words of wisdom come from Tessa Sproule, the CBC manager that got the idea and made it happen. She said in an interview about the reason for not having DRM:

"I think DRM is dead, even if a lot of broadcasters don't realize it."

And she added that

"if it's bad for the consumers, it's bad for the company."

Such statements don't really need to be commented on 'cause this ought to be obvious. Yet some doesn't seem to get it. Though winds have slowly begun to blow in drm-free directions and services such as ours are coming to life, it is a slow transition. And every day more people are enjoying drm-free from non authorized services. Above words should be printed and posted on office walls all over. Especially on some companies' walls. If you want people to change - you got to do it first.

Until now only Windows users have been able to enjoy DRM free DVD downloads from Headweb. Starting today, our fellow Mac OS X users can download a public beta version of the Headweb client software.

If you are a Mac user (Intel only) and would like to give legal DRM-free downloads a try, you can download Headweb-0.3.2.3304.dmg by clicking here.

Remember that this is a beta version. If you encounter problems with it, we would appreciate if you send a line or twelve describing it to bugs@headweb.com. If you have any thoughts or ideas about what can be improved, please use info@headweb.com.

This news article on IDG.se made us exceptionally proud. Headweb is appointed one of "Sweden's most promising IT-companies" by Almi.

This is nice to hear and we'll continue to build the best movie service to live up to this. Stay tuned!