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DVD CCA Battle Continues Next Week
I recently had the opportunity to speak to Robin Gross, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation working on this case.
Slashdot : Come on, we're geeks, not lawyers. What does this hearing mean?
Robin Gross : It's important to note that in preliminary injunction hearings, this is pretty much where the game is played. This hearing is crucial in cases like this. Since we've got all these people in town for the RSA encryption conference, we're really calling upon the technical community to support this case and show up at court to educate the media there. Right now, the media focus is on piracy, and we need to turn that around. These folks are not trying to pirate movies, but rather watch the movies that they've already purchased, and continue research on DVD encryption. We're relying to a large extent on experts like cryptologists and programmers in the Linux community to educate their friends and family about encryption, and turn this around so people understand what the defendants are trying to accomplish.
This case is really important for a couple reasons. First, protecting the first amendment and free speech on the Internet. These defendants are engaging in activities that are completely legal in the US as well as in Norway where the plaintiffs are complaining the original sin occurred. A lot of these people are encryption scientists and computer programmers who are simply trying to learn how to play DVDs on their non-Windows boxes. Another reason is that it's really important that people are allowed to reverse engineer computer software. The law in this country, as well as Norway, allows people to reverse engineer software, letting them try to pick it apart, figure out how it works, and then use that knowledge to innovate and build new technology, products and services, and in this case, extending the DVD industry's market.
In a lot of ways, these people want to be DVD customers. They want to be able to buy DVDs and watch them on the computers they already have. So, their choice is either not buying DVDs, or watching them using this patch.
The EFF has their brief and other documents available at http://www.eff.org/pub/Intellectual_property/DVD/.
There are, of course, at least two sides to every story. This afternoon I spoke to Jeffrey Kessler, an attorney for Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, the law firm representing the DVD Copy Control Association.
Jeffrey Kessler : I hope that we prevail. That's all I'm going to say at this point.
Since they weren't talking, I decided to pull on the ear of Douglas Winslow, one of the defendants named in the case. Douglas still has the DeCSS code posted on his site, and he is one of the many defendants that cannot appear in court due to distance and time constraints.
Slashdot: So, the preliminary injunction hearing is next Tuesday. Any feelings?
Douglas Winslow : I feel we have a strong case. It'll be interesting to see what kind of precedent is set.
Slashdot: Are you going to party if the defendants are victorious?
Douglas Winslow : I plan to party either way. I'll either end up watching or burning part of my DVD collection to celebrate the outcome of the hearing.
To be continued by Robin "roblimo" Miller on the 18th...
Consumer DVD drives will not read all of the data physically on the disk without doing at least part of the CSS dance. The title key is present (encrypted with each of the 408 player keys and in a hashed form)in a special location on the disk. This area is not read by requesting the contents of sector X, but rather by issuing an IOCTL to the drive. The drive will then send some data that needs to be passed through a (once secret) hash function. If the software returns the correct hash, the disk is said to be "authenticated" and another IOCTL will return the 2k-bit special sector.
I think that someone who could reprogram the firmware in a consumer DVD drive, could redesign it to return this segment without going through the CSS dance. Then they could extract all of the information on a DVD.
But currently available writable DVDs won't help them make copies because the drives can't write the special sector. I've heard that it is because the sector is burnt out on blank media.
Another difficulty is that currently available DVD writers can only write on a single layer which limits the capacity to an amount less than most DVD movies.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
DVD CCA is courting the press for several obivous reasons.
/. and like sites) have I heard our story. If we are planning on winning the case, we need an effective publicity campaign also.
1. Judicial Opinion. I don't care if justices are supposed to be impartial and whatnot, but they do watch the news and I am willing to bet that a fair amount of them study the case before it starts. If DVD can influence the judge in any way they will.
2. NSI Opinion. Remember eToys vrs eToy? eToys worked darn hard to make sure that everyone thought eToy was in the wrong. Because they did it successfully, they got NSI to step in remove the website from its DNS.
3. Public Opinion. DVD CCA is not an idiot and realizes that people may be the deciding key in the case. If the laywers for DVD can convince the judge that the public is against DeCSS (maybe by Xpert witnesses and such) or show that the public does not yet have the DeCSS source code enough to prevent CSS from be a trademark anymore they win the case.
The DVD CCA is doing an excellent job at its game. We (open sourcers) are doing miserably. Does anyone know of any article in FAVOR of us at any major news site? Probably not. I on the other hand have seen articles decrying us in my local paper (Minneapolis Star Trib, Pioneer Press) and heard about it on local radio stations. Nowhere (outside of
Laws be dammed, history has shown that public opinion often decides cases. (If it didn't we would probably have far less supreme court cases and the thing about that cuban boy Elian - wouldn't exist)
Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?
What's to stop me from taking apart a DVD writer (which I understand currently can'`t do this, but do to density of writing or some such, but eventially they will exist) and hooking it up to a dvd reader, again directly to the electronics.
Absolutely nothing; and that is a critical point here.
Do you mess around with the Sony Playstation any? We'll, Sony engineered their hardware to prevent you from using copied Playstation CD in their systems. As I understand it, Playstation CDs are written with intentional checksum errors that are corrected when you attempt to copy them. The Playstation hardware looks for the errors; if they aren't there, it won't attempt to run the code on the CD.
We'll, didn't take long before some smart folks figured out how to get around it. The process involves soldering in a small microprocessor chip (a PIC) in the right place in the Playstation. The system checks tries to check for the checksum errors and the PIC says "it's cool - just go ahead." It's a $10 modification.
Sony doesn't send a cadre of lawyers to beat up people who do this. First off, they don't have a legal leg to stand on. The people who buy the consoles can do what they want with them and, if they want to solder chips inside - well, that's their right. Sony just makes hardware and sells hardware; you buy it and they are happy.
It's not the same with the DVD folks. The issue to the DVD guys isn't the encryption; the encryption technology is a means to an end. Rather, they want to control who can play DVDs in order to maximize profits. They make their money by licensing the decryption technology - other people make the hardware/software. That's why the Linux community wasn't important to them; it didn't seem like a big revenue source.
The reason they're mad (and sueing) is that they thought they could milk this decryption licensing cow a little while longer than it turned out they could. However, a bunch of smart people managed to shorted the cows life a bit. The DVD encryption folks don't have a leg left.
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
I'm the third defendant in the case. I *have* to appear becuase I live in California. I just wanted to say that I would really be grateful to the open source community if poeple made a good show of it.
I think we have a very strong case here. A reaffirmation of the first amendment and a good pounding out of internet law. I think the precidences set by winning a case like this will be beneficial to all of us.
On thing though... I jokingly mentioned to other defendants that I might attend this trial in a Metalica T-shirt with spiked up hair. That's what we call a bad idea. It's dress up day. We all need to look, hrmm, somewhat "professional". Remember, we're talking to a bunch of suits here.
Please, come if you can. Your presence will be felt by the judge, the plaintif, and us frightened (angry?) defendants. Hopefully we can really change some attitudes about open source here.
Dear DVD Copyright Control Association;
I wish to inquire of you how I may return my extensive collection of DVD movies I
have acquired over the past year. I no longer wish to possess them, despite their
vastly superior quality, number of options, and other market-changing,
market-creating attributes. I wish full refund of my movies, less a reasonable fee
collected because I have viewed them a few times each.
You see; I feel I can no longer, in good conscience as a law-abiding American
citizen view these wondrous disks legally on my computer system. Though I
bought or was given as a gift each DVD legally, as well as own legal copies of the
DVD hardware and decoding software from my computer manufacturer, I have
installed two components onto my computer since it was purchased that, I fear,
jeopardize the legality of viewing DVDs on it.
Most relevant, I possess a copy of deCSS, the program you are undoubtedly
familiar with that allows users to copy DVD movies from their handy DVD-ROM
disk into unwieldy, 6+ gigabtye files on their hard drives. I downloaded this
software in the hopes that it would enable me to view my copy of The Matrix more
fully, or enjoy DVD movies with fewer problems due to disk access errors. It has
proved far to cumbersome, however (I only have 3 gigabytes of free space, which
are rapidly becoming full with MP3s from MP3.com and from my own CD
collection (MP3s don't skip during dancing at parties, you see).
But furthermore, I have followed the slow progression of the production of a
reliable and hardware-independent Linux/*nix DVD Player. The other component
I have modified my computer with, you see, is a secondary hard drive from which
I can boot the Linux operating system instead of Windows. Ideally, I would like to
use Linux as my primary operating system.
Your recent letter to the LiVid (DVD for Linux) developers and the creative
programmers who released deCSS, however, has me concerned. It seems that
there is no possibility that any development in a Linux DVD player would be, by
your definition, using secret technologies via reverse engineering, despite the fact
that the CSS technique was not patented. I fear that because I wish to view DVDs
on Linux, and that any Linux implementation would be illegal, that I can no longer
in good conscience view DVDs on any Operating System running on my
computer-it is, after all, the same computer which could view them illegally in one
OS, so how could viewing the same DVD in the other OS be possibly legal? What
if I upgraded my Linux partition one day after a DVD solution had been reached,
possibly 'illegally', and accidentally entered into Linux, failed to recognize the
difference, and played a DVD of mine? I would fear that the police would be
knocking at my door instantaneously, and this time they wouldn't be asking me to
turn down my music (or which Jazz singer that was, anyway?). Having no recourse
to achieve my fair-use of the DVDs which I have purchased without entering into a
legal gray-area, I wish to return my discs and receive refunds for them.
Please indicate the shipping address to which they should be mailed, and when I
should expect reimbursement of their cost and the rather large cost of shipping my
substantial investment into what I had hoped would be a brave new world of
theatrical experiences.
Regretfully,
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer