I thought that Bluray players are supposed to down convert to 480i when an HDCP protected path is not available.   Am I wrong?

The reason for my question is that we have Netflix with the Bluray option.    It works great on our main HTPC, but the WAF is slightly askew because she cannot play them on her laptop (doesn't have an internal Bluray player).   So I rigged up an external USB Bluray to it, and installed PowerDVD 9.    On trying to play a disc, it just errors out with a message like "HDCP not supported."   This is correct, the system doesn't support HDCP, but shouldn't the player allow SD playback?

I am not sure this will work but perhaps if you remove the protection with a program such as anydvd hd you will no longer need to be HDCP compliant to be able to watch the movie.