Comment 34 for bug 1235918

The code itself is not so problematic, but you need to have a private key for a certificate signed by microsoft. This is similar if you would like to have the private key for the SSL certificate of microsoft.com, don't you think microsoft will take all possible legal actions to prevent you from publishing it?

Some countries have laws to allow disassembling of applications in order to achieve compatibility with existing systems, but in this case you need to have the private for something that allows you to circumvent copy protections. Your idea of enforcing Microsoft to publish this key won't work, it would break their protection. There may be a little chance that you could enforce them to sign a linux driver if the driver would provide the same protection (i.e HDCP), but at the moment this is not the case for any linux driver. You would need to convince both NVIDIA and Microsoft.

There is theoretically also another solution: Some nouveau developer told us that the firmware used on NVIDIA gpus is the same between windows and linux. I don't know whether parts of COPP are implemented in the firmware, but it might be possible that everything we need is already inside of the firmware but the proprietary NVIDIA driver does not use it. If this would be the case, it might be possible for a nouveau developer to find out how COPP and HDCP is controlled on Windows and to implement the same logic into the nouveau driver. However, I think they have more important tasks than finding out how to enable copy protection features.