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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 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
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...
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.