Movie studios do not like piracy of their content. To date, they have mostly used the "sue the bastards until they stop" strategy. As they gear up for a future of high-definition DVD releases, they appear to have come up with another weapon they call key revocation.

The short story is this. Anti-copying protection for high-resolution DVDs relies on secret, 128-digit passwords embedded in the hardware or software that plays the DVDs. Under its new key-revocation strategy, Hollywood and its allies in the high-technology industry start with the assumption that hackers will eventually decipher the passwords, which can then be used to make copies.

But once a password is compromised and posted on the Web, the industry answers by changing the way in which its new DVD titles are made. Anyone who pops one of the new discs into their personal computer without installing a software upgrade will find that it destroys the computer's ability to play any high-definition DVD at all. To restore the computer's ability to play them again, the owner is forced to download new software from the Web -- software with a new password that hackers haven't yet discovered.

Got that? The bottom line is that screens could go dark unless consumers continually check for password updates.

It reminds me of the famous line an army captain uttered to a television news crew during the Vietnam War. "We must bomb the village in order to save the village."