Yawn...
This was introduced a few years ago, and it is easily hacked with a sharpie pen.

" it is easily hacked with a sharpie pen"

We'll be OK down here, sharp pens are banned :)

Bob.

The DVD hardware does not lend itself to be protected any longer, not without breaking compatibility in some way. That was the case back when CSS was broken.

Blu-ray have sort of the same problem, as AACS and BD+ have been bypassed. AACS haven't been broken, and it is unlikely it ever will, it's a strong encryption, but the strongest lock can be beaten if you have the master key. And as with CSS, they can't replace AACS without causing compatibility issues. Then again we saw the distributors weren't afraid to do just that when they released Avatar.

I'm far more intrigued by the new audio watermark they've started using on some Blu-rays, and cinemas, and which is slated to be included on DVD's as well. It won't stop older hardware, but hardware breaks, and eventually very few will be able to watch pirated movies. The watermark survives even if a protected movie plays in the background as more than just normal background music and is picked up by the camcorder microphone. They got around the potential legal fallout of "accidental recordings" triggering the protection warning by allowing up to 20 consecutive minutes of "unauthorized" playback, before requiring an equal number of minutes of cool down.
Cinema boot-leg recordings trigger the protection after as little as a minute, no cool down, it just stops playback of the title entirely. Then again, I can't see how that will be a major problem for any regular law abiding user.

The watermark is called Cinavia, and is now a requirement for receiving an AACS decoder license, and requires that the playback unit have the software or hardware to do the analysis of the audio waveform it outputs, in other words; Apart from the software only players and the PS3, only new hardware player models,produced after may 2010 I think, contain the circuitry to detect Cinavia content.

From what I can tell, you can't break that watermark without breaking the sound to a point where it becomes useless, it's made by the same company who came up with the DVDA watermark, though it is said to be quite a bit more sophisticated.
My guess is that it is a frequency modulation spread throughout the frequency spectrum of the wave form, but at such a low frequency that it allows for only a few bps of data, thus the need for almost 1 minute of playback to trigger Cinavia.

Any system including Cinavia can be broken. Some take longer than others. Once you know how the digital watermark is added it becomes trivial to detect it and reverse the process used to add it and then you have back the pristine original minus the watermark.
Systems that are almost impossible to crack rely on well kept secrets only known to the recipient. The problem with all systems such as Cinavia is it isn't a well kept secret, millions of devices with the 'secret' in them will be sold to anyone, ooops :)

I am well aware that the system on offer for duplicated DVDs is pretty easily broken and offers little real protection. What it does (hopefully) mean though is it means it's not as easy as simply making a copy. This seems to be what plagues a number of us. For example one of my clients earns his income in part shooting kid's football matches. He's pretty much given the game away as he's had parents standing in line to place orders blatantly tell him they'll just buy one copy and make 10 copies for the rest of the mums and dads.

Obviously some will have teenagers smart enough to know how to circumvent any copy protection. The hope was that making it just that bit more work might be deterrent enough, there's no real gain to be had from cracking a video of a kiddie football match.

Bob.