HD DVD Content Protection Cracked - What took them so long?

There's an interesting story about the crack on the HD DVD DRM at Bobbie Johnson's Blog. DRM is hard, because as Bruce Schneier (and probably many others) have said digital content "wants" to be copied. In the latest twist to the content protection tale, a hacker has discovered that he can find the keys by looking in the memory of his DVD player. There's a surprise The significant thing about this hack is that Hollywood really did seem to believe that that they had good a "secure" DRM system. I can't find the reference, but I remember Andy Setos of News Corp saying that this was their last chance to get DRM right.

There is so much snake oil in the world of DRM, that I prefer to go back to cryptographic basics. If you want legitimate owners to view content, you have to send decryption keys. If you send keys, then the bad guys will get them unless you can hide them in software or some physical device. Pay TV smart cards try to do the latter and are fairly successful as you need industrial size equipment to hack them. This attack seems to be a standard bit of reverse engineering and the only surprise is that anyone is surprised!

I don’t really buy the “update” idea that the AACS people put forwards, as there must be a root key somewhere!