It looks like it. A few eager hackers on the Doom9 forum have, over the past couple of months, developed their own Blu-ray software player, by analysing in minute detail the workings of real Blu-ray players.

Rather than "crack" Blu-ray, the Doom9 group has tried to create a "virtual machine" (VM) that will play an encrypted movie in just the same way as any other Blu-ray player. Ideally, the Blu-ray disc (BD) shouldn't realise it's playing somewhere it shouldn't. (The code has sets of "traps" to detect this sort of thing.)

The advantage is that if the movie studios change their protection scheme, the VM should still work. On the Doom9 forum, Schluppo speculates that they would have to "force a firmware update (including new player keys, public key, memory footprints or signatures) and then use the content code to 'revoke' (or rather interdict) the leaked player specific data in future".

But the team could get round this by obtaining player-specific data for the new system.

This isn't the first time BD+ has been cracked. Antigua-based SlySoft did it, and added an HD option to its widely available Windows program, AnyDVD. (bit.ly/blu-ray2). This removes AACS encryption, BD+ copy protection and region coding from BD movies.

AnyDVD HD therefore lets you play HD movies without an HDCP-compliant graphics card or an HDCP monitor.

Of course, not everyone wants to pay €79 (£64) for a closed-source Windows program. Part of the motivation for Doom9's hackers was to have open source code that would enable Blu-ray movies to be played on Linux PCs.

But the bigger question is whether the crack is going to benefit Blu-ray or not. Linux users may finally be able to play BDs, but are they going to buy Blu-ray drives and commercial movies? Even if they do, will that make any difference to a market made up largely of PlayStation 3 games console owners? It doesn't seem likely.

Or will we see widespread casual piracy of the sort that already exists with DVDs? Well, Blu-ray's appeal is that you get 1080p high-definition video and TrueHD or similar surround sound. This is what fills 25GB and 50GB discs. How many peer-to-peer users are going to download one 25GB Blu-ray movie rather than 12 or more DVD rips? Surely no one who has looked at P2P thinks this is a quality-driven market.

It might spoil the idea of releasing some stunning new material exclusively on Blu-ray, to try to drive sales of players. Anything like that is going to get ripped, downsampled to fit on a DVD, circulated via P2P and pirated on a worldwide basis. But, let's be realistic, that was always going to happen anyway, wasn't it?