Does BluRay copy protection 'disable' hardware?

[videobruce]

I hate to ask these semi-newbie questions, but after doing some research, things are not clear to me.

I have held off getting a burner for this reason, especially after reading reviews over at Amazon where 20% plus of them are negative no matter what brand (same for NewEgg). Drives going back after a short period of time, not getting recognized etc. I realize some are defective and some are user error, but surely not all of them.

1. What exactly does Cinavia and these three different 'keys' do other than preventing coping BluRay discs?
2. How is the player affected and is it only when playing that disc?
3. How is a 'burner' affected and is that only affected when accessing that disc?

Specifically, is there long term after-effects to your equipment when the drives or players become disabled?

.

[Asmodian]

The keys are normal encryption keys, basically. They just stop you copying the disc.

Cinavia is a watermark in the audio, basically an audio signal that playback devices are constantly "listening" for. If they detect it on a disc they stop playback, this could be thought of as disabling the hardware but it reenables itself as soon as you insert another disc or restart.

[videobruce]

Some time back, I read in more than one place this overly complex system seem to have the ability to 'disable' the hardware if & when a copied disc was played. Continuing my serach on the subject, I cane across this site which (in the quote) seemed to give a similar impression.
I read it closer and it doesn't appear to do what I initially thought (under the AACS Encription);

www. miraizon.com/support/info_copyprotection.html

AACS includes a system by which the keys assigned to a particular player can be "revoked" for future Blu-ray disc releases if it is determined that those keys have been compromised. When a newer Blu-ray disc is inserted into an older drive, the drive is required to check the version of the "Media Key Block" (MKB) on the disc and, if it is newer than the one the drive has internally, to copy over to permanent non-volatile memory the newer MKB. Thus playing newer discs propagates the revoked key lists out to all drives

The most interesting part of that paper was the last page. ;)

[LogicDeLuxe]

I wonder, if they ever disabled a drive with such an update.

I've heard, there are titles generating a watermark from the drives serial number. And if illegal copies with such a watermark turn up, they can track down the drive used for playback.
Disabling that one drive would be probably a rather futile attempt in stopping pirates, though.

[foxyshadis]

AACS doesn't revoke hardware, it revokes software/firmware -- specifically the host keys in the firmware. The drive will pick up and store all new revocations it sees, and pass them on to software, but so far I've never heard of a simple disc drive being revoked. It's possible, but very unlikely, since a drive never performs decryption and therefore isn't a useful attack vector. I'm not sure if AACS rules require an updated firmware to be pushed when a revocation occurs, but so far that seems to be the case, so that hardware can never be permanently disabled.