Slashdot Mirror
ESR on the DVD Control Association
Johan Jonasson writes "Eric S. Raymond takes a look at how the DVD Control Association is trying to obscure the real issues in the whole DeCSS affair. " The next hearing is Jan. 14 - for those who haven't followed the case, check out the story. Thanks to Rik van Riel for pointing out the OpenDVD site. It's a community site designed to explain to people what's going on with the case and another perspective on the DVD industry in relation to consumer rights.
I'm not saying that Eric doesn't have a right to free speech. He's certainly allowed to say this, when and whereever he feels like it. But it seems like it would be more responsible to seperate his personal agenda from that of the people he's taken as speaking for.
--
But then he had to go and mix other politics into it. He included a standard signature with his usual gun rights stuff in it at the bottom, line upon line of it. Regardless if you agree with him on this or not, isn't it at best inappropriate to mix these controversial (even in the US, and in particular globally) view into speech from someone who claims to be a spokesman for the community? I think so.
--Joakim Ziegler
Many Slashdot kiddies
think earth revolves around them;
they're assholes too.
Not considering
my posts might be here only
as side effect...
The true target is
all the mainstream media;
and CEOs' heads.
Pointless chattering.
Vast `Operation Mindfuck'.
The sage susses out both.
>>esr>>
The more the mainstream media gets a copy of this article, the more they will understand the real issues.
What better story for the media than "big corporation spreads lies to smash little man" - the more that slant on the story comes across to the public, the less the DVDCA will want to throw their weight around.
So spread copies of that article to all media outlets far and wide!
The argument that CSS protects DVD's against encryption is completely false. Before this DeCSS whoopla I have noted that a lot of DVD started to appear in the market that are far from showing "the real thing". They come from a lot of sources but the main part of the pie comes from Chinese ones (they can be traced by some errors chinese usually do on translating from chinese to english).
:) ). If you wanna have another drink you have to buy another. Instead of being a similar to a book, on which, recorded information resembles, DVDs become soemthing like fast-food consumption...
I can classify for the moment the pirate DVD's in three categories:
-Bit to bit copies
-"Broken" DVD's
-Copies from mpg or VCR sources
Bit to bit copies are usually european or asian (american pirates are not seen around but I suspect this is just an "oceanic" problem)
Broken DVD are copies where encryption was broken somehow. I saw two such DVD's but people have told me that there are a lot more. In fact they are becoming a major segment. However these DVDs are quite problematic. Do don't always go and sometimes hang either the viewer or the machine. Quality is poor.
mpg or VCR copies. Some people have managed to make such a crazyness to copy from such sources to DVDs. It is understandable. Even pirate DVDs cost more than a videocassete. But such copies are usually horrible in their quality.
Now the market in many places is running over such pirated copies. Note! This is been hapenning before DeCSS came out. Sincerly I have not seen DeCSS or alikes to change tendencies or creating boosts in piracy. The most I have seen is that people have grown their tastes to borrow DVDs to each other and to write them in the HDDs. But I think this is a very questionable point to consider it as piracy or not. Anyone is allowed to make personal photocopies of a book. And anyone is allowed to borrow a book to his colleague or gilrfriend.
Commercial piracy has been growing on its own and I don't think that anyone will stop it. Much like CD history, when Sony claimed over all winds that it had given a blow to piracy. Today we not only have pirated cassettes but also pirated CDs...
This story rises some serious questions. Why DVD Control Association is so eager to give a blow over a rather primitive tool like DeCSS, while it keeps quite silent over the "real" threat? Considering many issues over commercial piracy I think that they are just pushing over people to forbid them the free use of DVDs. Note that many pirated products are made with the blessing of these same corporations behind DVD Control Association. I know that because I saw what happens in the VCR market and how smart these guys "collect" their part on the pie. At least, in the places where I have been, I know that even officially they collect some cents on every pirated copy. Something much like Microsoft Tax.
So the only interpretation of this story is that they are trying to avoid people to be free in their use of DVD. To turn DVD into Coca-Cola bottles (no offense Coke!
I don't know about evey DVD decoder board on the market, but I know my Sigma Hollywood+ is among the most popular, and the current version of their player software installs a program to allow you to change your region code.
Yes, we're all aware that there are tons of grey market applets available as shareware to be the same, but this is a CSS licensee distributing a supported application.
It's right there in the DVD Station menu on my windows box - first item, actually. "Change Region Code". Pretty much right out there.
So, I wouldn't say Windows is entirely in line with the region controll cabal. No.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
DVD Forum
They are a bunch of assholes
ESR said so.
They abuse the courts,
ignore the first amendent
and order silence.
No legal basis
Something about trade secrets
They have no patent
They blame the hackers
for their own weak encryption
Its their own damn fault.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Linux hackers? Weren't they windows hackers?
No. The original DeCSS program was a Windows program, but the purpose for writing it was to get an unencrypted VOB file on a hard disk for developing the player software while udf filesystem drivers were still in development. Shortly afterward, a Linux version of CSS was writted so that the intermediate step of unencrypting the file under Windows was unnecessary.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I say, screw 'em! I think region locking is unfair. If I had relatives in France and brought my DVD collection of American movies, I wouldn't be able to watch them? If I was an anime addict and the movie wasn't released in the USA, I would by it off the internet from a sight in Japan. With DVD region locking, I wouldn't be able to watch a movie I had paid for!
Amen! I live in Germany right now, but I'll be moving back to the U.S. after my studies. The only thing that has kept me from buying into the DVD market is the fact that I don't want to buy DVDs which I won't be able to play on an American-bought player, or having a player which requires me to order my movies from Europe after I move to the States. I will buy a DVD player only when I can be guaranteed to play any DVD I buy.
And I can respond to the idea that people would buy a DVD in India to use in America because it's cheaper. It's simple dynamics of trade: If it's worth it for me to buy a DVD in India and have it transported to the U.S., then it's obviously too expensive in the U.S.
In my opinion if a company can't even survive competition with itself, it deserves to go under.
Chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
BTW, there's more to this message than meets the eye. :)
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
>A few weeks ago, some Linux hackers in Norway cracked the encryption scheme used for DVD media, producing a DVD decoder called DeCSS
Linux hackers? Weren't they windows hackers?
I've emailed ESR about the fact that he claim's they're linux hackers.
He said:
>OK, why did they say in response to the DVDCCA complain that they had
>written the software in order to play DVDs on their Linux boxes? (Same
>thing one of the defendents told me in private email.) Am I supposed
>to believe they are lying?
My answer basicly being: Yes. I don't know why they did wrote it (It's obvious why they claimed they where doing it to view DVD's in linux), but somehow I find it hard to believe someone would write windows programs to view dvd's under linux.
Nothing beats a summary of everything everyone on Slashdot has been saying for 2 months. But hey, now that Eric has said it, it carries weight, right?
Maybe I'm bitching a little here, but it doesn't sit right with me that in a community that is so, well, community-oriented, a small number of people get zeroed in on and quoted/printed like they were the second coming. Who are we kidding?
A community without spokespersons is called a disorganized mob. Our community is somewhat more with-it than most, as displayed by the fact that it works so well with so little formal organization. No one elects any of our spokespeople, no one officially presents issues to them that we feel should be presented to the general public. It just happens. Amazing.
Well, I for one have forwarded his text to CNN.com - I couldn't believe my ears the other night when they read their copy on this story "the DVDCA went to court to prevent the spread of a program which was created by hackers to make illegal copies of DVD movies to exchange on the internet". What?!? Usually you say some thing like "the suit alleges that the software infringes on the copyright holders... blah blah blah" but this sounded like they read the DVDCA's complaint as fact. I sent off an email to CNN trying to point out that DeCSS was for playing, not copying DVD movies, a fact that seems to be lost on the media, but thankfully not on the Judge.
So, I for one welcome a coherent summary from ESR as it probably does carry a little more credibility outside of the "community" than a collection of AC posts on this fine site. (no, that came out wrong, I'm not slamming AC's or anyone else). I guess I don't see the harm in having a "spokesmodel" like Raymond put a communique (sp?) out to the wire with a coherent position statement, even if it just echoes what has been said here for a while. Goody - maybe some not-too-lazy reporter will pick it up and sniff about a little harder to figure out if what ESR says carries water or not, and possibly something a little closer to the objective "truth" of this situation will appear on CNN as opposed to the one-sided headline story that I heard the other day.
Yes, but every software DVD player that you get for "free" comes with hardware that you paid for.
/. posts I've read), open source DVD players on ANY platform would not need to sign license agreements for DVD technology, and therefore would not have to support any of the unwanted features of DVD.
Either the software or hardware DVD player for you PC had to pay license fees and sign the license agreement to some sort of DVD control board. This may be the DVDCA, I'm not sure.
More importantly (and this goes a little against what ESR was claiming -- as well as being regurgitated from other
For example, they wouldn't have to play the mandatory FBI warning at the beginning of the movie.
Most importantly, probably, they would not have to obey region-locking of the DVDs. This would be bad for content makers, since if they sold a movie for 10 rupees in india (dirt cheep) and $30 US in the USA, then people could by it over the internet for the cheaper price.
I say, screw 'em! I think region locking is unfair. If I had relatives in France and brought my DVD collection of American movies, I wouldn't be able to watch them? If I was an anime addict and the movie wasn't released in the USA, I would by it off the internet from a sight in Japan. With DVD region locking, I wouldn't be able to watch a movie I had paid for!
Maybe I'm bitching a little here, but it doesn't sit right with me that in a community that is so, well, community-oriented, a small number of people get zeroed in on and quoted/printed like they were the second coming. Who are we kidding?
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
CSS keeps the key information for a disk in a special block on the disk. This block will not be writable on consumer DVD-R blanks... you will NOT be able to duplicate a DVD using these blanks. Writable blanks will be hard to find, and IIRC they will require special commercial equipment; you won't be able to write them in your DVD-R drive.
Now, obviously, this will not be an issue for commercial pirates, who will find a way to get commercial blanks and commercial production equipment. However, it will be an issue for the person making small-scale copies to give (or sell) to friends. The motion picture industry is just as interested in that kind of copying as it is in commercial-scale copying. The commercial blanks will be hard to get, and the equipment to write them will not be in everybody's living room, at least for a while.
As I recall, the first time I saw a description of all this was around a year ago; I think it was in some IEEE magazine. Even then, there was a clear explanation that the whole thing was not aimed at commercial-scale copying. It was aimed at consumer copying.
Now, it's true that the weak crypto they used made it almost certain that the system would be cracked, making the whole bit-copying issue irrelevant. It's fine to point out that it was silly for them to think it wouldn't be cracked. But this idea that they didn't even think about the bit-copying issue is just stupid. The only real problem with the system is in the crypto.
In fact, they even gave some thought to how to make it harder to get drives that will give you the encrypted files for cracking... although, unfortunately for them, the early drives don't have those restrictions.
Making drives enforce the system really does help from their point of view. Sure, you can burn a new PROM for a drive, but how many people are actually going to do that? They're hoping that people will either have to spend money or manually hack hardware; that will reduce copying to a level they can live with... especially since they were (and to some degree are) probably expecting the Digital Millenium Copyright Act's ridiculously draconian penalties to prevent the spread of any hacks.
Pure software cracks are what they really worry about... and the reason they're so upset is that they didn't expect one to come out so soon.
CSS isn't perfect, and I tend to share the prevailing Slashdot view that it wasn't worth their trouble to do it in the first place. Certainly I think that the lawsuit is crap, and I like the fact that the law doesn't give them infinite rights.
Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that the designers, and their corporate masters, didn't think about the obvious ways the system could be cracked. Their goal was to reduce piracy; they've always realized they couldn't eliminate it. They are being stupid, but not as brain-dead as the bit-copying argument makes them out to be. Don't underestimate your opponents...
- Why focus on Linux over all free Unix (aka freenix) in general?
- Why just `free' Unix instead of all Unix?
- Why just Unix instead of all systems? What's wrong with (Open)VMS, for example, on an Alpha Workstation?
It would be nice to see us all supporting open systems again instead of just jumping on the Linux cheerleading bandwagon.But *isn't* DVD encryption a form of piracy protection if you think about it.
We all know that piracy protections cannot be implemented at the content level. Content is always subject to ripping and re-recording. Therefore, effective piracy counter-measures must be implemented at the player level.
If all commercially viable players require their content to be encrypted, and if that encryption cannot be duplicated by ripping, then effectively the schema has rendered ripped copies useless.
I won't disagree that it's evil, but I would have to argue that they are indeed trying to prevent piracy.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
(Mind my type, this Netscape font is pretty small.. :)
Anyway, as with the trial, they said in order for the gentlemen to have reverse engineered Xing, they would of had to click through an agreement saying that they cannot. Now...Does that agreement (And I assume most other license agreement) apply to the machine and anyone who uses it, or just to the person who installed and accepted it? If it only applies to the person who clicked 'Okay', couldn't person A of installed it, and person B reversed it? I don't know much about RE'ing myself, so I don't even know if you *need* to install the software, but I'm assuming so. Anyway, back onto my topic. If person B did reverse it, would he still be subject to the agreement, since he is not actually *using* the software, but just watching what it does? I would assume, if the case is that he would not be under the terms, then the case would hold even less water then before. Someone feel free to clear that up for me.. =]
- decryption (ie who is allowed to build players) - maybe they want to force everyone to join the DVD/MPEG patent pool?
- encryption (ie who can create DVDs) - maybe they want to protect the people who master to DVD or the film studios themselves?
Anyway enough paranoia - one thing to realise - the 'net makes a lot of tradition ways to distribute media obsolete - there are a lot of people out there who make big bucks distributing music, software, movies/video, booksAll these people are obsolete - most of them probably don't know it yet - they are going to fight like hell for their piece of the pie as it starts to get smaller.
'Copyright' was a usefull law when setting up a printing press and typesetting a book were a large capital investment - you could lose it if you got caught - but when anyone can toss something through a provate xerox machine in their house it's a prettyuseless law. The same thing that happened with paper and xeroxes is happening now with most of the traditional media and the net. It's going to change the world and whether the people making money off the old ways like it or not they are toast in the long run.
What we do need to find is a way for artists (musicians, actors, directors, writers, programmers) - people who make the stuff that goes ON the media - to make money off of their labors. Without the middle men we will all prosper and grow - consumers will cheaper products, artists will get a bigger cut (100%!).
The problem is how can we do this - how can we start a different way to pay for stuff - one that's fair for everyone? (and open source - that I think IS hard). There are alternate payment mechanisms out there already (www.kagi.com is one that's been very successfull for small programmers)
If I do something interesting say reach the south pole first then if people want information on how difficult getting there is they would usually ask me because before me they wouldn't know; additionally since no one would have gone before me then any possibility of getting any help would not be there. Now if you happen to go to the south pole and do so with only you and your trusty dog mike with nothing but the clothes on your back and a snickers bar then that is something. However because you don't have the ability to break into the my sphere because I got to the pole first then it gets more difficult to get noticed.
The whole point is that you can't blame people for wanting something from an entirely reputable source. To be honest anyone who uses just one or two or even all the posts on slashdot to base a major multi-million dollar decision on would be foolish not because people are stupid but because theoretically you could be getting screwed over by imposters who just happened to gt moderated to a 5 that day.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I'd be really interested in the relationship between Microsoft and the DVDCA. It's very convienent for Windows to be the only OS that you can get DVD software for (Before the advent of decss) and I'd be interested to know of the exact relationship between these two entities. Are any MS funds going to DVDCA? Have there been any meetings?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
ESR contends that the DVDCA wants to protect players since PC's will compete against DVD players. This argument holds very little water. For starters, Windows has a much larger marketshare than Linux, and Windows machines will compete more against DVD players, but Windows ALREADY had many, many software DVD players. Furthermore, these Windows players are essentially free of cost -- every video card in the world comes with a software DVD player.
That is just part of the conspiracy. Not all DVD players can decode all the keys. There are regional aspects to distribution. A Japanese DVD would not play in a US player. The Windows DVD players are in line with this. The linux players are not. If the encryption is broken then a DVD in Japan is just as good as a DVD here.
Also, is it really true that you can make a bit-for-bit copy? My understanding was that this required specialized hardware, and that commdity DVD reader hardware was not capable of reading special tracks.
Bit for bit READS can be made currently. The writes require a very expensive machine to do double sided double layering 17 GBytes per disk. For not so much money you could copy a DVD onto four disks though. Bit for bit. That is part of the point though - currently it costs a LOT more to make a copy of a disk at home than it costs to buy the disk. This will likely change in a few more years though.
This and more from http://www.opendvd.org
That being said, I know that slashdotters know all this. But has anyone seen any indication in the mainstream press that the DVD CCA is full of shit? I don't think so. Until we can spread that message to people who don't already know that, we're not doing any good. Write letters to the editor, folks. Write op-eds, if possible. Make sure people outside the tech community know that the DVD folks are wrong! In fact, I'm going to propose the smae thing I did back when NASA lost the last Mars mission - write your congressmen. Use registered mail, if possible. Write your newspapers, write to everyone you can think of. Forward these Slashdot stories to your less-technically-inclined friends. Spread the word, or we don't stand a chance.
- John Doe #53, an individual
ESR contends that the DVDCA wants to protect players since PC's will compete against DVD players. This argument holds very little water. For starters, Windows has a much larger marketshare than Linux, and Windows machines will compete more against DVD players, but Windows ALREADY had many, many software DVD players. Furthermore, these Windows players are essentially free of cost -- every video card in the world comes with a software DVD player. and I haven't noticed an increase in the price of video cards. So I fail to see how the DVD association is trying to protect investments in hardware players by going after the Linux player, since lots and lots of Windows players exist, at very little cost.
There is other mis-information as well. For example, he contents that DeCSS was developed by Linux hackers, which as we all know isn't true. I get the feeling he hasn't been following the story too well.
Also, is it really true that you can make a bit-for-bit copy? My understanding was that this required specialized hardware, and that commdity DVD reader hardware was not capable of reading special tracks.
DVD has been revealed as being just as much of a proprietary, closed-standard product as Windows. Either you play by the rules of a bunch of oligopolists, or you're out of luck. And yet we talk of digital distribution as the future. If we allow the distribution protocols of the future to be closed, then we lose.
We could complain, but mainstream news organizations, who drink from the same trough as the DVDCCA, will never hear us.
We could fight in court, but the opposition will always be better-funded. Now I don't believe money buys judgments, but it does buy time in front of a judge. We may win here and there, but can we afford to keep the fight up on every front? Not without a lot more organization, and money.
But the piracy issue will not just go away, and the media industry's desire for ever-more draconian controls will only grow as digital distribution grows.
The open-source community needs to do something about this. Unless a system which protects some freedoms is developed, then we will gradually lose all of our rights. I have many ideas about how this could be done, but the point is *we* need to do it, and offer it as an alternative.
Anyone interested, email cwkingsbury@hotmail.com
-cwk.
>CSS keeps the key information for a disk in a >special block on the disk. This block will not >be writable on consumer DVD-R blanks... you will >NOT be able to duplicate a DVD using these >blanks. Writable blanks will be hard to find, >and IIRC they will require special commercial >equipment; you won't be able to write them in >your DVD-R drive. No no no, no no no no. There isn't even a standard, right now, for DVD-R discs or recorders--several companies are all hawking incompatible equipment and have differing plans they're trying to push through. But that doesn't matter, because it's easy enough to trick DVD software into thinking that just about anything is a DVD disk--I got several commercial DVD players for Win9x to play bit-for-bit rips of DVDs off of an 8.4G hard disk. So, if I had a DVD-RW of any type I could record it to that media and play it--but again, the media is too expensive to bother. The truth is that ESR is right: they want all those $5000 licensing fees for anything remotely DVD-related. Aside from which, even without DeCSS, I can capture the video stream and re-compress in MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 and still have better-than-VHS quality video which I can record to the media of my choice. >Making drives enforce the system really does >help from their point of view. Sure, you can >burn a new PROM for a drive, but how many people >are actually going to do that? They're hoping >that people will either have to spend money or >manually hack hardware; that will reduce copying >to a level they can live with... especially >since they were (and to some degree are) >probably expecting the Digital Millenium >Copyright Act's ridiculously draconian penalties >to prevent the spread of any hacks. No, you don't have to fudge with the hardware or burn/buy special PROMs. The best DVD-ROM on the market (for the next 5 minutes, at least), the Panasonic/AOpen 10x drive, can be hacked by merely downloading a "firmware upgrade" to remove all region restrictions--go to http://www.dvdutils.com to get it.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
From our vantage point here in the 21st Century, we see that studios and production companies garner a sizeable portion of their income from video sales. And direct-to-video has saved projects that otherwise would have been total losses in theaters, if they weren't scrapped before that to cut distribution losses. So, far from ruining the film industry, the VCR has built a whole new market segment that generates a great deal of additional profit. I expect DVD-R will do the same thing. There is a good book on the Betamax case, "Fast Forward" that is well worth rereading in light of the DeCSS issue.
One issue I'd like to see tested in the courts, is the clause in US Title 18 that permits the owner of a copy of digital material to "make, or cause to be made, a copy, including an altered copy of the material for archival purposes". (Not an exact quote, and emphasis added). The 'altered copy' phrase has always struck me as applying to removing any copy protection. And, of course, I should be able to pay someone else to make that deprotected copy for me.
While all this is quite legal, I've never understood how the statute would create a 'right' to make copies, which ESR seems to think is being infringed. That is, there is nothing here that can be construed as forcing authors to provide their material in easy-to-copy format. It simply declares that if you can do it, it's not a crime.
(Anyone interested in opening a 'copy shop' to provide customers with legal, deprotected duplicates of their DVD's? I wonder what the DVD Association would say about that?)