The Chinese are upholding the right to break HDCP protection for 4K video

The Chinese company LegendSky, which produces a device for removing HDCP protection from video, officially notified the court that it did not consider the release of this device a violation of laws. The company is a defendant in a court case on the leak of several copies of high-quality films on the Internet. The lawsuit was filed by Warner Bros. and Digital Content Protection, a subsidiary of Intel.

HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, broadband digital content protection) is a media content protection technology developed by Intel and designed to prevent the illegal copying of high-quality video transmitted via DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI, and others. The encryption system first appeared in the year 2000, received a license in 2004, and was finally hacked in 2010.
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The system protects content from “illegal copying”, however it creates problems for device owners - a protected video signal can be played only on equipment that supports HDCP. If your TV or monitor does not support this technology, you will not be able to enjoy high-quality video.

Unless you buy, for example, a device that switches between the video source and the receiver, and removes this protection from the content. For example, one of the devices brand HDFury from the Chinese company LegendSky. They allow you to watch HDCP 2.2 encrypted video on any device that does not support this encryption.

Of course, once such devices remove encryption, they can serve as a tool for illegally copying content for the purpose of distributing it. On this basis, Warner Bros. and Digital Content Protection and sued the Chinese in January 2016, apparently in retaliation for several leaked films (in November 2015 , 4K films from Amazon and Netflix appeared on the network ).

Copyright dissatisfaction can be understood. But the Chinese company does not consider the fact that the leakage of films into the network is directly related to its activities. In addition, from her answer to the court, it follows that the manufacture of devices that remove HDCP protection does not contradict the laws.

The Chinese point to a note in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which allows for reverse engineering of a program in order to figure out how to configure data exchange between it and other programs.

LegendSky also claims that the plaintiffs sued with monopolistic intentions - they want to extend their influence even to areas that do not belong to them. In addition, the company is confident that the DCP jurisdiction does not apply to Chinese companies, and therefore asks to withdraw the lawsuit.