Ars Technica reports that the first HD-DVD movie rip has shown up on the Bittorrent networks. It's Serenity, the same disc used in the AACS-cracking proof of concept that I discussed at length last week. There's a very small chance that Serenity's key was obtained through non-technical means, and that the breach is therefore confined to that disc. But I wouldn't bet on it.

So this makes it official: the genie is out of the bottle. What's more, it now looks like the use of PowerDVD in the the original cracker's demonstration video may have been a red herring. If that's the case, then the HD-DVD consortium is going to be scrambling to figure out what the vulnerability actually is so that they can revoke the appropriate key (assuming that key revocation can fix the vulnerability).

The HD-DVD folks may yet recover from this. But until they do, DRM on the HD-DVD format should be considered dead.