Media companies have long been keen on restricting how media content is accessed, and the most popular means today is DRM (Digital Restrictions Management, I call it).  Media traveling over high-bandwidth digital connections, such as HDMI, are DRM'd with HDCP.  As with the AACS HD-DVD key fiasco a few years ago, the HDCP master key was leaked and Intel, the creator of HDCP, confirmed that it's the real McCoy.

Intel also said that no one would be able to easily write a hack or crack to exploit the HDCP master key's leak.

As with so many DRM systems in the past, they were proven wrong within days.  The HDCP decryption code proof-of-concept is hosted at Stony Brook University.

http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~rob/hdcp.html

DRM: Making things harder to use while protecting data from no one since 1926.