You are absolutely wrong, kawecki.

If the data on the disc itself wasn't encrypted it would be trivial to just read the data straight off the disc (say under Linux which doesn't give a damn about copy protection) and play and copy the data to your heart's content.  The MPAA may be stupid, but they are not THAT stupid.

DVD's are encrypted.  What do you think CSS is supposed to be?  It was a weak and highly flawed algorithm (fortunately for anyone who desired to play a commercial DVD under Linux).  In particular it had the fatal weakness that compromising just a single key compromised the whole scheme.  Of course, DeCSS is illegal under the DMCA, but that hasn't stopped anyone from using it.

The data on Blu-Ray discs is similarly encrypted, only one can assume with a much stronger scheme.  They also learned their lesson with CSS and made it so that they would be able to revoke compromised keys (thus disabling the players that use them; of course there are issues with disabling people's Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players, especially if a certain compromised key is also used in a lot of legitimate players).

Quote - if you write a device driver that ignores the content provider information, Vista will not encode it and treat as the data as unprotected.

If you write a device driver that ignores the content provider information, then Vista will not allow that device driver to be loaded.  (Unless you can forge a signature for the driver, or crack Vista itself.)

Microsoft has also decided that 32 bit versions of Vista will NOT play HD content at all.  For no other reason than they can't lock down the 32 bit platform (i.e., lock out unsigned drivers) without breaking a lot of already existing applications.  So all software Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players will likely be 64 bit, so XP and 2000 are out.  (XP64 maybe, though the software might just refuse to run on anything less than Vista anyway).

Though in practice some hacker is going to rip AACS to shreds, and it won't matter what Vista tries to do anymore (other than trying to get decent performance out of your system :cursing: ).  Any player for Linux will probably be based on said crack, and therefore illegal under the DMCA, not that it is going to be stopping many people.

Anything that tries to get around the copy protection, under any operating system, will necessarily be based on cracking the protection.  Even Vista won't be able to protect against a rogue decoder based on a key that has been stolen or generated from a crack from decoding HD content and stripping away the protection on it.  (Unless Microsoft can find a way to specifically lock out unsigned video players along with unsigned drivers.)