A new anti-piracy system has been been developed by BD+ Technologies for Blu-Ray discs. It is called BD+, and it is coming to a movie rental new you.

The BD+ system works by creating a small virtual machine in the decoder's memory, and in this sense, it is similar to StarForce copy-protection software.  The virtual machine will be compiled using instructions from a new code interpreter that will be included in Blu-Ray optical drives, and from retrieving additional code from the Blu-Ray disc. The code interpreter is fairly small: only a 100 lines of code utilizing 60 different instructions. The code interpreter can do the one of the three things: it can transform data, being able to rearrange the video data on a Blu-Ray disc and insert watermarks; it can also self-examine itself, to see if it has been tampered with; and also, the code interpreter can run numerous advanced counter-measures on the Blu-Ray player during the use. These advanced counter-measures could eventually even be things such as time-limited playback for titles.

The Blu-Ray Disc Association is claiming that this protection scheme will be very difficult to break, because for each title the specific decoding keys have to be extracted, and each virtual machine has to be reverse-engineered. “BD+ will be the proverbial thorn in the side of Blu-ray movie rippers,” optical storage analyst Wesley Novack was quoted as saying. “With AACS and BD+ switching up encryption keys and methods routinely (BD+), it might become too much work to determine how to rip every Blu-ray Disc title out there.”

Some of the big movie studios have been waiting for better content-protection systems to be implemented before releasing big high-definition titles. This move by Blu-Ray to include BD+ might put them further ahead of HD DVD in the disc wars, as more studios chose to release only in Blu-Ray format, instead of HD DVD.