Technology

This would require an update be sent out to every blu ray player, which is not feasible unless they were all standardized to a single database or service for their license keys.

There are several ways to disable your player.

First, the movies themselves are encrypted with a unique key, that key is then encrypted with another set of keys and stored on the disc. Your player will read those encrypted keys off the disc and use it’s own keys to decrypt the key needed to decrypt the movie. If the blu-ray association determines that your player is compromised, they change the way the movie key is encrypted so your players key can no longer decrypt it. This means your player simply won’t play any movies newer than a certain date.

For blu-ray drives in your PC it’s a bit different. Your software player needs a so called ‘host key’ to be able to access the blu-ray drive. Once the key you are using is found to be compromised it’s put on a revocation list. When a new blu-ray movie is mastered they include the latests revocation list on that disc. If that list is newer than the one in the drive, the drive updates it’s internal list using the list from the disc. If your player software uses a key on that list, the drive will refuse to read any movie. You need a new, unblacklisted, host key to be able to play movies again.

There is no need to connect to the internet for any of these schemes, the updates are simply distributed through the blu-ray discs themselves.