With AACS going on the new HD-DVD and Blu-Ray and the terms of the new AACS agreement, it seems that the object of this is simply to completely and utterly obliterate the idea of fair use. Fair use is a very simple concept, I buy a CD from the local store, it's "fair use" for me to rip that CD to my iPod. Similaraly, I buy a DVD, I might want to rip that to my iPod too. But content creators hate this, the lawsuits persued by the MPAA show a pattern that they believe that their customers are thieves. The content producers seem hell bent on locking down consumers in every way possible. They don't understand that their content will only thrive in a marketplace where the content is allowed to to roam free.
Look at this from what happened with iTunes and the original hack on FairPlay. Originally the FairPlay decrypter did not remove encryption on music you did not own (mostly a technical limitation though) and most importantly, it didn't remove the markers that allowed you to identify a single file with a particular iTMS account. In a subsequent version of iTunes Apple used this information (unprotected AAC, has iTMS purchaser info) to determine what files were decrypted and refuse to play them or copy them to your iPod. This was possibly the dumbest thing that Apple (or more likey the music studios) coudl have done. The next generation of the decrypter, JHymn, stripped this and also allowed you to transcode to MP3. Now, the songs are completely sharable with no possible way of determining who actually purchased the file originally. Way to go.

The moral here is that content protection will fail. I, for one, know that I will *not* be buying any HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, HDMI, or anything AACSy or HDCPish until they either stop treating consumers like thieves or until Jon Johansen (DVD Jon) fixes this.
Go read
Mike Evangalist's post on this, his words are more eloquent than mine could ever be (BTW: am I the only one who thinks that his name sounds like he should be a televangalist?).