How is the notion of risk sitting with the entertainment field?
We have a guy in Japan who is meeting with CD companies. We've usually got somebody in Japan and somebody in LA. I am spending about half my time with studios right now. Nobody is saying anything publicly, but we have unofficial and strong support from much of the studios for what we are doing.
Some studios have one person whose job is piracy across the entire studio. Others have an actual group of people that are reasonably technical.
Who is more open to this concept -- the music or the movie studios?
I think that with the movie industry in particular, there is going to be this sudden and catastrophic point in time, where it becomes more convenient or more economically advantageous for your average person to pirate a movie instead of obtaining it legitimately. The music industry has sort of crossed a threshold already. They are really getting hammered by piracy.
With movies, the only big difference is that you have a lot more data, which takes time to download. Instead of having a couple megabytes, you have a couple gigabytes. But Moore's Law clearly shows that is going to change, and when that changes, piracy rates are going to go up dramatically. Hard disks double about every 12 months. You will be able to put every major Hollywood release ever onto an $80 hard disk in high definition, and if it is not 2013, it will be 2015. The technical impediments to piracy based on copying and storing the data are going to go away.
How did you get into cryptography, anyway?
Well, you grow up in Oregon, and you have no driver's licence, and you have a PC in your house -- that's part of it. I went to Stanford and studied biology, so I cannot really credit my formal education with anything, but while I was there, I worked part-time for Martin Hellman (co-inventor of Public Key Cryptography). When I graduated, Hellman retired the same year and sent consulting projects my way.
Also, the neat thing about cryptography is that almost any aspect of society you pick has some connection to it. When you look at the government and espionage and military issues, personal liberties to voting, it is very hard to find any issue that does not have some cryptography angle to it.
