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New DVD Lawsuits Filed by the MPAA (UPDATED)
In the words of MPAA CEO and President Jack Valenti in a press release from the MPAA:
"The MPAA is striking a blow today in defense of the future of American movies. We have filed suit in federal court to stop internet hackers from distributing the software designed to circumvent the encryption technology that prevents the unlawful copying of DVDs."
"This is a case of theft. The posting of the de-encryption formula is no different than making and then distributing unauthorized keys to a department store. The keys have no real purpose except to circumvent the locks that stand between the thief and the goods he or she targets."
Later in the press release, he goes on to state:
"The U.S. movie industry intends to defeat anyone who steals our intellectual property. We are determined to defend the technology that protects artists and intellectual property holder rights... If you can't protect that which you own, then you don't own anything."
Robin offered her comments on this new litigation:
"Clearly, this is how they're trying to portray this. Piracy is their story, and they're sticking to it. Of course, this is a sneaky underhanded attempt to undermine the litigation that they've already filed in California, most likely because they lost at the temporary restraining order hearing. They realize the weaknesses in their trade secrets claim, an so they've decided to file under federal copyright, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. This is also an inappropriate harassing lawsuit, because although the DMCA does provide for a general ban on circumventing technological protection, there are explicit exceptions to that general prohibition for the purposes of facilitating interoperability and computer security, among other exceptions. They've realized that their trade secret claim is not going to prevail, so this in Plan B. Quite frankly, this is what we were anticipating the first time around. We were not anticipating a trade secret claim, because it was so weak."
For those following the news about the DVD CCA lawsuit, this new litigation shows us that this matter will take a very, very long time to work itself out, currently with no end in sight. It appears that in this case, the MPAA intends to blur the line between hacking for interoperability and the intent to distribute until it's no longer recognizable.
This is all rather puzzling. From a Showbiz Today segment aired on CNN on January 11th, Jim Cardwell from Warner Home Video said:
"We expected the source code to be broken. We were surprised it wasn't broken earlier. We believe there is no economic incentive to hack this product. The cost of the blank is more expensive than the cost of the finished product, and the amount of time it takes to download is several hours. There's no real economic incentive for anyone to hack this product."
When the topic of DVD writers came up, went on to say:
"Certainly, all the copyright holders, all of the studios, all the rights holders, are not going to sit still to see that -- to allow this to become rampant. We are going to continue to protect our products."
The issues of interoperability and the right to distribute free software are key issues in the Open Source community, and they always will be. How far will the MPAA and the DVD CCA go? One thing is for sure; no matter how long or hard they're willing to fight, the Open Source community will be there to meet them every step of the way.
Update: 01/15 21:31 by michael : John Gilmore adds that the complaints are available online at http://www.mpaa.org/dvd/content.htm. The links are slightly wrong, though, so you'll need to encode the spaces in the URLs:
...and even after you've done that, you'll still need to View Source on the New York page, since they didn't close a TABLE tag. Anyone named in these suits as a DEFENDANT should contact the EFF (Robin Gross, above) as soon as possible.
And while I'm at it, adric submitted that Copyleft now has t-shirts with the CSS-descrambling code on them. Part of the shirt's price gets donated to the EFF! Buy one now, it's the most painless donation you'll ever make.
This has been a pretty bizarre week for me.
/. -- I'm suddenly one of the bad guys.
/. But here's a passionate plea from one of your employees; realize that if this bright new enterprise that AOL Time-Warner supposedly represents is to succeed, you're going to have provide much, MUCH more than a web-site and a browser plug-in. AOL fat-pipes on RoadRunner won't be accepted if they cram advertising down our throats like an AOL dial-up connect.
I reported to work Monday morning, and learned that I'd probably be working for Steve Case in the not too distant future (I work at a TWX subsidiary).
If I'm to believe the comments on
I've been working there less than a year, and I firmly believe that the primary reason I was hired (out of a field of 5), was that I had experience with Linux.
I'd been told that TWX was taking a serious look at Linux, and planned to widely deploy it within the next couple of years! I figured that part of the reason that I got the nod for the job was my Linux experience.
But now, with the AOL/TWX thing, I find that I'm only slightly less repulsive than a Microsoft minion.
I got a 'warm & fuzzy' email today cosigned by Steve Case and Gerald Levin, in that order, that was addressed to I can only guess who. I wish I had forwarded it to my home account.
I don't know if either of you guys (Steve and Gerald) read
You're going to have to change the way you think about business. You HAVE to have to reign in the MPAA and put an end to this DVD-CSS crap. Just admit that you screwed up, and let us play DVD's on something other than a Redmond based proprietary platform.
And Steve -- as my future boss -- if you're so savvy (and I DO believe that you are), why is it that you still don't offer Linux users access to AOL? Sure, it's a small market... but it's the market you want. The folks that use Linux are the same folks that friends and relatives call when their Windows boxes fall down!
And, then, to round out the week, BillG "steps down".
Yeah, right.
I've never been a fan of labor unions. I feel they had a legitimate reason for existing, at one time. I also feel that they've done more to hurt their membership (since I've been in the job market) than they've done to help them.
But I now realize that the labor union model is one that we, in cyberspace, might put to good use. Call it a "User's Union".
They need us more than we need them.
I've got a DVD library that consists of exactly 6 disks. I've got better than a hundred video-tapes. My VCR still works. I'll tell my friends and family to avoid DVD's for now. They'll listen; I'm their tech guru.
I've been responsible for "converting" 8 AOL users to local ISP's in the past year. My local ISP still works. I'll tell more friends and family to ditch AOL (AND Compuserve!!). They'll listen; I'm their tech guru.
I'm vocal about my boycott of amazon and etoys. I've cost amazon at least three sales. I hope to cost them more. I'll keep after my friends and family, and - eventually - they'll listen.
I'm their tech guru.
And I guess I'm about to risk my job, as I'm going to email my current boss, Gerald Levin, these same thoughts when I get to work Tuesday.
But I'll land on my feet, because I've got friends and family. And they trust me, because I'm their tech guru.
So, for tonight, I'm posting as an AC.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled 'Natalie Portman brand grits' post...
It looks to me like lawyers throwing lots of scary words about and serving papers with raised seals and talking to judged to spread fear and dissuade others from RE'ing DVD, yet... there have been no convictions of people, no rulings as to legality of reverse engineering, no rulings as wheather or not cartain programs are truly illegal. EVERYTHING is just in limbo.
I think that the DVD lawyers drop their action at the last second... deliberately. That way the "laws" they claim we are violating, are never brought to challenge. A challenged law has the potential to be struck down, without hope of returning. A dropped case means the "law" stays active on the books and can be used to harass and scare the next guy. And because no one can afford to be the test case they settle out of court or cave into to DVD lawyers demands in return for dropping the suit and the status quo of PH33R is maintained.
I work for a company that produces software DVD players for 9x/NT. We determined that it would not be viable at this time because:
a) size of market. DVD drives are being bundled and produced at a fast rate -- however, with the limited size of market for DVD-ROM drives, especially in the linux community, we aren't likely to recoup costs
b) the linux community is generally open source oriented. We predicted that piracy would be more prevalent -- as users are more technically oriented, and most of our deals are OEM's sold to large computer manufacturers selling to end users.
c) constantly changing systems that would be hard to support. From X to the linux kernel, there are many potential problems. There are also potential technical support nightmares helping new linux users through a non-standardized system.
There is potential in the future -- but I don't see it being soon. However, we are looking at porting other products over.
what if they left the lock off the door all together, and someone figures out how to use the doorknob.
Typ. the chips in the players either have a serial control bus that can be simply forced from master into slave mode (via another master chip) or if implemented via DSPs one just needs to change the program. The players are just lasers, sensors and motors. Don't give us this bs about can or can't be done. There are millions of engineers and techs in this society. It is trival to modify or replace the controller electronics and only a bit more effort to write the replacement control software. Heck one can just look up the original specs and data sheets to see how a DVD drive is suppose to work. With ASICs, DSPs and Microcontrollers there are so many ways to do anything that there is no room for a statement of "CAN'T".
That data may once have counted as a "trade secret" -- but it was freely distributed by the legitimate owners (they might not have realised they were doing this -- it was an accident, they meant to encrypt it first -- but they can't sue others for their own incompetence!) and for something to remain a trade secret in the eyes of the law (disclaimer: IANAL) you must actively prevent distribution.
And that data provided the necessary clues for the Norwegians to legitimately reverse engineer code. This is not the same as if, say, someone had leaked the source code to a DVD decoder.
For example, if the president of the Coca Cola Corporation accidentally mentioned the Secret Ingredients in their soft drink on TV -- perhaps not realising he was on air -- then anyone would be free to use that recipe. They're also free to independently discover it; this is the price a company pays for not patenting something, which does disclose the method to the public but assures the rights of the owner (at least... that was the theory... these days it seems to be mostly used for abuse... but that's another story.)
Umm, this actually did happen, 17 years ago (with Betamax, not VHS).
I'm right now almost to the point of burning the disks, and shipping the scorched remains back to them, or better yet the judges involved.
How can we get the press to do some more positive stories on our situation? US citizens always root for the underdog, so if we can start getting the word out that the big mean motion picute industry is beating up a bunch of developers trying to play movies then maybe we can get some positive spin going.
Maybe people here should write to the editor or a couple of reporters in the "Technology" section for their local papers. If the story get's picked up there, there is a good chance in IMHO that we can get something in one of the nationals, and get some public opinion on our side. But as long as the movie industry can portray us as evil hackers trying to destroy their industry public opinion (and likely the courts) is going to be against us.
I've been educating my non-computer friends and associates that this is not a Piracy & Evil Hacker situation, but rather the studio's attempt to totally control distribution and viewing of a new media format to prevent fair use and to silence the word that the emperor has no clothes! I.E. CSS is not a good copy protection format, primarily restricts movies to being played in particular "regions" (to protect their profits in the theatre), and prevents fair use.
- A1010
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconV alley/File/3635/
http://members.xoom.com/a1010_2000/
I believe it is the responsibility of those of us in the Free Software community to educate the members of the media who are reporting on this subject. We need to show them the truth about what DVD encryption means.
Here's what I understand from reading other comments:
1. DVDs are not necessarily protected from copying because of CSS. Hardware that can do bit-by-bit copying of a DVD doesn't need to decrypt anything.
2. The aforementioned hardware either exists in very low quantities or doesn't exist. Media would also be expensive (usually more costly than buying your own copy of the movie).
3. The primary motivation behind DeCSS (as I understand it) was to allow users of operating systems that are unsupported by DVD manufacturers to play movies. As a side-effect, this may make copying of DVDs somewhat easier (although such a DVD may not play in a regular player?)
4. The puzzling comment from Jim Cardwell could have untold legal effects (IMHO): "We expected the source code to be broken. We were surprised it wasn't broken earlier."
I'm sure that there are a lot of other interesting facts that may show up, and we should give those facts to the news media.
--
Sounds like a grand idea! However, I don't care as much about the money as having the DVD association release software/hardware that will work with Linux or any other OS. Perhaps release the specs and the algorithms for playing the video or something..
What would they be charged for, though? Barring a Market or something along those lines? Heh, or even Discrimination of some sort.
--
I hope they don't.... but if they do, I hope they ship my t-shirt before!
:)
I've just ordered (praying to the credit card gods that my mc goes through and that I'm near enough to the top of the list so that I get the shirt sometime before the next century) and encourge others to do so. Sure, supporting a) copyleft and b) the EFF is cool and all, but I think the coolness factor of the shirt with dvd decrypt codes on it is good enough on it's own!
alan, soon to be garbed in decrypt code....
FILM STUDIOS BRING CLAIM AGAINST DVD HACKERS IN FEDERAL COURT
Connecticut Claim
New York Claim
Note: The "New York Claim" document does not render properly in Netscape.
DVD does support multiple video streams ("angles"), but they are not used in many titles. I'm not sure if the player can automatically switch angles, but I'm guessing it can.
The Business Software Alliance consists of, among other member companies, Microsoft.
Yet more proof that the US has the highest percentage of lawyers in the world. They lost the TRO, so what do they do? File suit under a different association (MPAA) against a different set of defendants, for the same activity.
;-)
Should be interesting to watch...do you have your css-auth code? Get it today
"Insightful" is when you have a new POV to add to the discussion. Sharing true knowledge is merely "Informative". If you curse in a post, it's probably "Flamebait". If you yell at moderators, you're probably a "Troll".
Just to make the obvious point -- it will be some time before the average consumer can download a multi-gigabyte movie and blow it to their own media (a high speed connection is required).
John
John_Chalisque
All you need is a pressing plant in the east somewhere (I recall that an anti-piracy organisation in China was withdrawn after contracts were taken out against its management by the various large-scale copying operations over there)
John
John_Chalisque
very true -- most people would be happy to spend $5 for a TV quality version rather than $30 for the DVD quality version (which can then only be viewed at TV quality anyhow -- the lost detail won't be missed)
John
John_Chalisque
THE INTERNET. (January 15, 2000) - On January 14, 2000, in response to the reverse engineering of the weak DVD encryption system intended to prevent fair use of DVD movies, called "CSS," and subsequent Internet distribution of a cryptanalysis of said system, the major motion picture companies attempted to bully members of the Free Software community into silence by filing injunction complaints in the Southern District of New York and District of Connecticut against four defendants. The victims in New York are Shawn C. Reimerdes, Eric Corley A/K/A "Emmanuel Goldstein," Roman Kazan and Jeraimee Hughes in the District of Connecticut.
The plaintiffs are Universal City Studios, Inc.; Paramount Pictures Corporation; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.; Tristar Pictures, Inc.; Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.; Time Warner Entertainment Co., L.P.; Disney Enterprises, Inc.; and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.
Announcing the court action, Jack Valenti, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), made the following statement (as translated by Babelfish's corporate halftruths -> reality mode):
"The MPAA is sucker-punching the small guy today in defense of the future of the American Movie Industry's profits. We have filed suit in federal court to stop Free Software developers from distributing the software designed to circumvent the encryption technology that prevents copying and fair use of DVDs. We'd make a lot more profits if you had to buy separate copies of your favorite movies to accomodate the different places you want to play them and the different players you own. If you didn't have to buy a DVD for your living room, and another copy for your bedroom, and a third for your vacation home, as well as a VHS copy for the VCR in your RV, we'd only make 1/4th the profits we would otherwise."
"This is a case of theft. The posting of the de-encryption formula makes it possible for end users to make full and fair use of the videos they've purchased! Now they won't have to buy multiple copies. They can even play the movies on their PC's without buying expensive player software and costly proprietary operating systems! The Industry will sell less licenses for our proprietary player technology! We'll make less money! The DeCSS and Linux DVD player people have stolen these profits from us! Waah!" said Valenti.
Under federal law, it is illegal for anyone to traffic in any product that is designed to render useless encryption devices that protect copyrighted material, thus reducing the Movie Industry's profits by making it unneccessary to purchase multiple copies of movies in order to play them in different places and on different players owned by the same person. In 1998, Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to protect the creators of copyrighted material from not being able to sell multiple copies of the same movie to poor suckers who can't understand how to get around the copy protection.
The MPAA strongly supported the DMCA precisely because of concerns about profits. The defendants' brazen trafficking of the utility plainly violates the profit maximization provisions of the DMCA.
"The U.S. movie industry intends to defeat anyone who steals our profits. We are determined to defend the technology that protects our profits." vowed Valenti. "If you can't protect that which you own, then you don't own anything."
"The Free Software community intends to defeat anyone who interferes with our fair use of information and artwork we've rightfully purchased. We are determined to defend the technology and organizations that protect our rights to fair use," retorted Brian Ristuccia, advocate of the Linux DVD Player Project (LiViD) and operator of a DeCSS mirror site on the Internet. "If you can't use that which you own, then you don't own anything at all," he said.
Additional information on this case may be found on the OpenDVD web site at http://www.opendvd.org/.
Harassment, Perverting the course of justice, creating a public nuisance ( I don't know if that is a charge in the US ). Basically filing a lot of lawsuits you can't win against people who can't afford to defend against all of them is a crime all by itself.
Or if not a crime, at least an abuse of the legal system. Never mind that these cases have perjury at the very core.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I'm sorry, but I think anyone would be hard pressed to find anything coming out of holloywood that could be considered 'intellectual'.
Remeber when cassette tapes came out? (ok... ok... stop laughing... I can't be the only one old enough.)
Anyway, the music industry fought that like crazy as well. Claiming piracy and the destruction of the music industry. Suddenly, they shut up. Why? A percentage of every single cassette tape sold in the US (I'm not sure about other countries) now goes to the recording industry. Thats one hell of a lot of money.
I see the DVD people doing the same thing. Pressing these suits (the money they are spending is nothing compared to the big picture) until they can get a piece of every DVD recordable media sold now and in the future. Big money.
?
Deleted
The horse has bolted. These guys are *way* too late. They obviously don't think in "Internet Time"
t m
BTW, has anyone else noticed that they have only one email address on their web site. That of a "pegge@mpaa.org" who might be a one "Paul Egge - Vice President - Information Services"
Hmmm. I wonder what the email addresses of the other "MPAA Oficers" at this web page are:
http://www.mpaa.org/about/mpaofficers/content.h
Deleted
Just how legal is it to sell hardware which is known not to be fully functional?
Deleted
I guess this means that the code will have to be stored outside the US... In a free country. :)
Deleted
Is piracy really a threat? Do you or anyone you know go out and buy pirate videos? I have never seen a pirate video. Video shops buy most of the commercial videos and they are not going to deal with pirates as they are far more likely to get caught. If DVD finally takes off and I get a DVD player attached to my TV I would be renting DVDs instead of videos. Just the same as I am not rampantly copying videos, I would not be rampantly copying DVDs.
I have known friends copy a video so that another friend could watch it but this is not a level of crime that warrants the response. If it were not possible to have copied the video the friend would not have gone out and bought the video so the theft analogy is false.
This is all a red herring and purely about control of the market in the way that M$ got control of the software market.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
IANAL, but I believe the "if you can't afford one,
one will be provided for you" clause only applies
to criminal cases. For a civil suit, you'd be
representing yourself. And you know what they say
about someone yho represents themself in court...
As a side note, most jurisdictions will exclude
you from Public Defender consideration if you have
pretty much any source of income. You need to
be *really* poor to qualify.
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
Sorry, but no, their action isn't valid even from their own point of view, simply because they've got their facts wrong. The DeCSS crack cannot be used for producing "pirate" copies of DVDs, so their case is based on a totally incorrect premise.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I have not tried, but I would suppose I can make as good copies by capturing data from *GOOD* VHS as by decoding DVD and the resampling it to lower quality.
The quality difference would most propably be so minimal that it would a lot less trouble just capture the video feed from the VHS to the desired quality than first get the data from the DVD and then do the resample (which will take much time, while the capture can be done in realtime)
About the above, I do not have a DVD-ROM drive and I do not know how fast they can transfer data but given the limitations in interfaces they simply can not be many times faster than is required to show the bitstream which means you have to first rip the movie and then resample it, not worth the trouble.
Fine. Sue people a bunch of Linux people. Good strategy. Fire off a bunch of lawsuits towards a group of people who are used to working underground. And who are rabid about being oppressed by large stupid companies to the point of DEVELOPING A FREE ENTERPRISE-CLASS 64-BIT CLEAN POSIX COMPATIBLE OPERATING SYSTEM FROM THE GROUND UP. Good strategy. Hey, while you're at it, have you thought getting rid of that hornet's nest in your backyard by smashing it with your bare hands?
In all seriousness, whether or not the DVD guys win this case or not (and I have a feeling it's going to be one hell of a fight) it's never going to be over. Even if the DVD lawyers shut down every single hosting website, and stop the de-CSS authors from working it won't end. The code will be mirrored, and perpetually posted to Usenet, and irc, and home-DSL-hosted FTP sites. Future code development will take place in other countries. And that's future code development. The "secrets" they keep referring to are as good as gone.
I mean honestly, what does the DVD CCA have to gain other than slowing down development and keeping DVD players out of official Redhat distributions and such. We're only left with alienating Linux geeks - which as I've said before is *not* A Good Idea. Unless I'm missing something. If so, please enlighten.
Ross
He knows. code.shtml says "It is very likely that Slashdot will use this soon." Of course that was $BIGNUM months ago...
There is a program available, which I wrote, which adds NNTP support to Slash. The newsd home page has a link.
I've noticed something too.
The number of media psychophants posting what can only be catagorized as FUD, if not outright disinformation, in support of the court action and the 'piracy' interpretation.
I've noticed this phenomena occuring with other hot topics as well. It seems that various free market capitalists, an oxymoron if there ever was one, are sending out paid cyber-brownshirts to harass various OpenSource focal points to promote their special interests. (They have to be paid, only an idiot would freely suppress personal liberties.)
With these megamergers we are reading about things are only going to get worse. It's quite a scam they are setting up for themselves. Use dirt cheap slave labor in China to destroy local competition and manufacture schoddy products sold at prices well above their worth. With the major banks already magamerged the consumer must go through phone-menu hell to speak to a human being, IF one can be reached, in another city 1,000 miles away. The megabank, meanwhile, violates usery laws by charging $25 for a $10 overdraft that their own faulty bookkeeping created. The bank CEO's, meanwhile, go golfing with the state and federal legislator just to make sure that the proper legislative FUD remains in place so John Q Public can't get relief from the 50% usery rates the banks enjoy. Don't get me started on the HMOs and their use of the Medicare 'coordination' of benefits to rape the federal treasury while simultaneously jacking health premiums to $500/month levels and reducing benefits to a pitance. Unions? I was driving behind a union boss yesterday. His new Cadillac really stands out nicely against the 10 year old car I was pooling in. The rank and file are surfs like me, the 'bosses' are no different than the CEOs. They run the unions for their own benefit or to push their political agenda, which seems to be nothing more than creating a socialist utopia, aka the USSR. I don't need to re-live 1932, thank you.
These 'corporations' (corpus - body) have been given more rights than a real, living body enjoys in the USA under the present body of laws. Their 'creative accounting' misrepresents the truth of their corporate value. They frequently lie in court and like the mafia dons prior to the RICO act use their billions to pay souless lawyers to enforce their corruption. Gates use of his billions to undermine our system of justic is characteristic and his scofflaw attitude (video tape lies!) epitomizes the cancer eating at our economic system. The movie moguls are merely duplicating his process, an act of piracy which they don't mind committing.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Gene Upshaw (NFL Players Association) was numero uno at $1,799,972. Go Niners! No wait! They're not in the playoffs this year.
If Valenti loses this one he may have to take a pay cut to only a 6 digit figure.
Sounds analagous to wanna-be webmasters who want to know how to "disable" function foo in someone's browser.
Fuck Slashdot
Well, given the history of the film industry at least they were kind enough to leave UA out of it. It would be too ironic to see the Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks named studio try to muscle the little guy.
As has been pointed out far too often, a commercial pirate can do a bit-for-bit copy of a DVD at a low cost, and make a reasonable profit.
The interesting thing that people should remember is that MPAA/DVD is concerned about the same things as the RIAA-- changes in the distribution model for entertainment.
The pirate of the future that they are concerned about isn't someone copying the physical media and re-selling it, but someone that provides the content on a black market. The entry barriers in this type of industry would be very low... all you would need is high speed net access.
So, while we all recognize that the specific things they are saying are technically irrelevant, it does still pose a risk to their business model.
My Question is what has to be done to make the studios and the record labels happy, without gouging the consumers? Does this require a paradigm shift (lower cost, higher quantity products)?
A lot of ppl here seem to be saying that commercial DVD players can't read the hidden section. AFAIK this is really wrong.
/. :)
My understanding of how DVD encryption works:
1 Make movie in digital form(duh)
2 Get randomly generated session key and encrypt movie
3 Encrypt session key with all 400 or so of the software and hardware player keys
4 Put movie and all 400 encrypted keys on the DVD and sell (last part not actually part of encryption system)
If this is how it works then the keys need to be readable by the player otherwise they can't decode the movie either. It may be possible that writers can't write to that section.
People who actually know how this works feel free to correct me (I know how shy people are here on
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
The answer to all these court maneuverings by the DVD CCA and the MPAA is simple:
The hackers remove the code from their websites.
10 million folks with Linux can't view encrypted DVDs.
10 million potential customers won't be buying encrypted DVD films.
At $40 bucks a disk, with 10 million customers, each buying an average of one disk per month, that's $4.8 billion in potential revenue tossed down the toilet. I know I won't be buying any encrypted DVDs. What about you?
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
I think a lot of you have forgotten what you stand for... Open Source.
You see, when you create a means of DVD Encryption that is, in your minds, strictly for the playing of the files, and then release it as Open Source code, how many people think that someone else won't grab the code and rewrite it to decrypt for piracy?
What the creators should have done was find the key, and then put it in some sort of binary (Closed Source) and then run their stream through it. This would prevent anyone that wanted to rewrite the code for their own piracy purposes fairly well.
What a lot of people here overlook is the fact that Open Source means all is showing and all can take the code and use it where they want. Licenses are just a legality, but when it comes to piracy, you just don't care about them. Hence the reason that D.O.D. (Drink Or Die - a software piracy group) was able to write their program "DVD Speed Ripper v1.1" ( Some page I found with a link to it ).
BUT, if you look here you'll see that there are many programs to do this. I myself, quite a while ago, found a page describing how to do it with just Microsoft GraphEdit (a multimedia program in which you could rearrange filters and output types to decode anything to file).
This seems to be a link to a story about how DeCSS was created, almost an interview.
Well, I can keep finding resources but these are the best for you all to read.
I am -NOT- against Open Source, by ANY means. Please do not take it as such. All I am saying is that Open Source projects should have legalities taken into consideration, and this one started as an illegal idea and ended up in court with a backing that wants someone's illegal activity to be legal since they can use it. I believe that someone could have just paid them royalties and written a player for linux without a hitch, though, and this is what they'll stand by if they get intelligent about these things.
- 8Complex
If a company locked its secrets in a box with a cheap lock and distributed one of these boxes with each of its products, would you be liable for opening the box? (ok, that sentence sucks, but hopefully you get the idea)
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Actually, the root problem is that the menuing/control system on DVD-video is just plain braindead and broken. Even obvious things like a pointer/mouse interface were left out.
It's clear that DVD was designed only with playback on an A/V component in mind. They ignored 15 years of research and practice in computer-based multimedia systems and went for a cheesy postcard interface. (The hardware component focus also explains the weak encryption design -- it looks as if they were more worried about people with sodering irons than the computer programming community.)
In hindsight it's obvious that a good portion of their installed base would be DVD-equipped computer systems. The user base is just that much more technically saavy and open to early adoption. Unfortunately, that user base is saddled with a UI designed for people who can't stop their VCR clocks from blinking. What's worse is they ignored the long running predictions of television-computer 'convergence' just when it's finally starting to happen.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Anyway, manufacturers are more interested in our marketing, sales numbers, and a product fulfilling a need.
So, basically your arguments about piracy are moot. If the (Linux,OS2,Be,BSD,Solaris,MSDOS) markets were big enough to be profitable, people would sell players.
And while you are correct that the percentage of Linux users saavy enough to use DeCSS is higher than the percentage of Windows users, the saavy-enough Windows users far outnumber the saavy-enough Linux users. If piracy was a serious consideration, there would be no software players at all, or the computer DVD setups would be self-contained sealed hardware boxs.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Mod chips are feasible for the Playstation because there are a billion identical PSX units out there. While you could probably mod a DVD player, selling the kit would be hard because you probably would need a unique kit for every different make and model of player.
I could see DVD mod kits, but they would probably be expensive and marketed towards serious piracy operations.
It's probably a moot point anyway, because in the next couple years we'll have inexpensive computer backup media (removable disk, fast tape, etc) that can easily handle 10 GB of data. This will allow individuals to engage in small time piracy with other computer users, just not the supposedly with more lucrative a/v component DVD player market.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
In hindsight, I see that you're right. If a compatable DVD burner was released, you could potentially 'remaster' a unencrypted DVD which was playable on normal DVD decks. However, this depends on the ability/availablity of the remastering software, as well as hardware features that might prevent a full quality dub. As long as the film industry is designing the computer drives, I would expect problems like these to be designed in.
Despite the current troubles, I think the industry is most worried about technology that could make widespread DVD available to the deck-using masses. As long as it's only computer users playing VOB files of a NTFS/ext2-formatted optical media, they won't be too worried.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I read a "Stereo Review" article once that indicated that their selected "golden ears", in a blind test, couldn't tell the difference between a $1000 CD player, a $150 CD player, and a well mastered Dolby D cassette tape. (For obvious reasons, they don't print reviews like that anymore...)
The key here is "well mastered" and "Dolby D" -- too little, too late for the cassette as a hifi medium. I suspect it will be the same for MP3 and MiniDisc. Most people will probably wait for the next digital format, and judge the "high fidelity" quality then.
(Although, with the average set of crap speakers on the market, MP3, MiniDisc, good cassette, etc. is just fine.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Yup -- and if consumer tape is $2/Gig now, imagine what it will be in a couple years.
Right now the computer industry is sitting on it's hands and waiting collectively for DVD-R/W to stabilize and a compatible version of DVD-R to be released. But while the DVD people are dinking around, they won't wait forever.
I can imagine a situation in a year or two where Iomega, Creative and others in the industry get sick of waiting for writeable DVD and just release their own ~20 Gig disc format. Base it on existing CD-R technology, call it "SuperCDR", and push it out to the consumer at a reasonable cost. It would be designed for computer storage and backup, but of course nothing would stop you from putting VOB files on it. The only thing it couldn't do is play DVDs, but by then an IDE DVD player will probably be about $35
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It is the fact that their "trade secret" is no longer viable.
The stranglehold they have on DVD player makers will be lost if they don't defend this case until there's blood on the ground. You will see DVD players now that don't contain any technology licenses by the DVD-CCA from the MPAA.
They stand to loose quite a bundle...
Panaflex
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Now, the DVD CAA can protest their right to a monopoly on DVD players (they'll lose, but they can protest), but the MPAA, which is only concerned with unlawful distribution of the information on the DVD's, is completely unaffected by the cracking of CSS.
To sum up, this suit is a load of dingos' kidneys.
The dog ate my
As has been stated many times, the DeCSS software doesn't permit copying DVD's. So these sites claiming the you can use the decrypters to copy DVDs are just misleading their visitors.
Those sites would be much more accurate if they contained the instructions on how to modify your DVD drives for the copying. In which case, the lawsuit concerning DeCSS doesn't apply as it is now a hardware, not software, issue.
Digital Wokan, Tribal mage of the electronics age
...that there's no RFC where you can look up things like this.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Everyone,
... "your moral and ethical shortcomings" ... "hundreds of your patrons now hate you"
Will you PLEASE stop responding to this guy's troll!??!?!? It just encourages him.
This is one of the most non-broken web sites I've ever been to. I've never gotten a 5xx error code from Slashdot, ever, after visiting several times a day for more than a year. Chances are, neither have you or this troller, who has posted this same message dozens of times on practically every discussion. Note that he never says what he was doing or gives a reproducable scenario for these "problems".
And NOTE THE "ANTI-ROB" TROLL SIGNATURE CODE: "the same lack of technical skill that prevents you from overhauling"
I just hope you don't own any guns.
It is this point that needs to be hammered home, and hammered home hard. CSS is not about preventing piracy, it is about protecting profits on players. August
With all the money companies seem to have come into, there is a real and clear need for them to take some steps and act with it.
Just bought mine as well.
Well, you can write unencrypted DVDs, right? (Yikes, I hope so.) So, you could decrypt the DVD with DeCSS, then write an unencrypted DVD. My undestanding (quite likely wrong) is that the "blank" DVDs have a secret section pre-burned to indicate that their contents were written by a consumer.
Now, certainly there are machines in existence which can write to the secret section, since the DVD was created in the first place. The point is, they're not letting this get sold to just anybody.
It's a joke of a copy-protection system when you get right down to it.
Correct me if I'm wrong
OK, you're wrong. :)
but can't you still make a bit-for-bit copy of a DVD with encryption in place
No, that's the whole point.
The so-called security works because all commercially available hardware plays along.
It works something like this: there is the regular disk itself, with the encrypted data. Then there is a special part of the disk, with the keys. Your player will not allow you to read directly from the section with the keys.
Furthermore, commercially available DVD writers will not allow you to write to that sector.
So, if you do a bit-for-bit copy onto a blank disk, you'll end up with a new disk with the special "hidden" section different, and it won't be playable.
Unless, of course, you can crack the encryption.
Which was the intent all along: DVD-players for Linux.
Amen, brother. This is about consumers' rights.
I did incidently use Paint Shop Pro 6.0 to make the images. I'm still using Windows as my desktop until I can get multi-head out of Linux. I can't wait until XFree86 v4.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
First, if distributing a program that enables people to recover a an encryption key is tantamount to distributing keys to a department store, then does the analogy follow that Audio CDs, which have no encryption, are in effect sitting in unlocked unmanned stores all the time? If the studios still publish them, then they're admitting that this is an acceptable and profitable way to do business.
Second, hasn't it ben established that we're all allowed to make one archival copy of any digital media we purchase, be it software, CD, or DVD? Isn't the CSS encryption inhibiting us from exercising that right?
Thanks,
Kevin Fox
When will these people learn? They talk about keys to department stores, comparing a DVD key to the keys to a department store, saying that using the keys in DeCSS and other code is "no different than making and then distributing unauthorized keys to a department store. The keys have no real purpose except to circumvent the locks that stand between the thief and the goods he or she targets". They simply must think we are all stupid!
The DVD CSS algorithm only provides protection against those who may wish to use the algorithm to view the content, a bit-by-bit copy is possible without any keys.
Having said the above, using an algorithm such as DeCSS (and varients) can allow one to decode the VOB files and re-encode into an MPEG-1 file - which is much smaller and thus would fit on a couple of cheap CDs. This is the only situation in which I an sympathise with the MPAA. However, the quality loss is so great that a similar file would be obtained by encoding the video from a VHS cassette. Therefore they have no case!
Any judge that would rule in their favour is simply bowing to the corporate giants, without understanding what the "little guy" is on about.
Did everyone notice that the LiViD guys now have a booth at LinuxExpo? That should be a good forum for them to gather support and show the corporations why they do what they do and why we NEED DVD support in the OS(es) of the future. After all, once Linux has an opensource DVD player, every other OS will follow...
http://www.jonmasters.org/
Anybody happen to look at th mpaa site? Check this!!!
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) serves its members from its offices in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. On its board of directors are the Chairmen and Presidents of the seven major producers and distributors of motion picture and television programs in the United States. These members include:
Walt Disney Company
Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.
Paramount Pictures Corporation
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
Universal Studios, Inc.
Warner Bros.
http://www.mpaa.org/about/
One good thing about music... when it hits you, you feel no pain. So hit me with music. -Bob Marley
that and in this case we _own_ the "store" (dvd movie). Would someone object to a person getting a key made to a lock they already own? I think not. If I buy a dvd, I have every right to do with the data what I see fit, as long as I don't give it to other people
Something i've noticed over the last little while.
We always seem to be on the defence here. We react. I think it's about time that people got together. Made this a BIG issue and drive it home to these organizations. Not just complain and defend ourselves but put these organizations on the defence. In a big way. Make them feel the hurt. Consumers have been wronged here. Don't bother keeping things secret. Come up with an encryption standard that can be released to the public and yet still be secure.
It shouldn't be our place to justify what we do. Remember these corporations are here to serve us(This is a capitalist ecconomy right?). Not the other way around. Lets drive this home to them.
I don't know about the rest of the world but in Canada. A person can sue for slander, libel and (this would be the case) undue defacement of one's name (generally THEM.).
If someone goes to court and looses the defendant may then turn around and sue the original plantiff. Obviously they could sue for their legal costs+work lost but also for the loss in reputation. Obviously that's happened here as now the industry organizations are trying to pain these people as illegal pirates with no good pourpose in life...
There's a number of other things that could be brought up as well. INAL. But I do keep an ear to the ground about this stuff.
Quite correct.
Pity they are such abject morons.
You can buy TV's in the UK that can display NTSC
as well as PAL, you can order a player from the US
for a couple of hundred bucks, and you can get a
transformer for peanuts. The 60/50HZ frequency
difference is not an issue. You can now view
region 1 DVDs in the UK without any hackery-pokery
whatsoever.
Remind me again how the region code protected them ?????
Tim
how many sites are css on ?
if so many sites had all this stuff on it then
none of this could be a problem because even
though we know the truth, others don't because
of bullshit and misinformation.
I didn't say it wouldn't take a long time, it's just that there is no intelligence involved.
Cheers,
At some stage, the encrypted stream becomes plain text, and the information then can be trivially copied.
It doesn't matter how much effort is put into the encryption algorithms.
At some stage at least one key is read off the disk and used in plain text, so it can be identified and located.
At some stage the algorithm is used/executed so the steps can be seen. With the algorithm and one key, the remainder of the keys can be trivially found by brute force.
What people need to understand is that there cannot be anything really secret here, it's just "hard" to identify. (or in this case, relatively easy). Everything this encryption scheme has, is there for people to watch as it goes through it's paces. You just need to invest the time and effort to perform the observation.
Encryption of the media was NEVER going to work. It didn't protect anything. It gave the ILLUSION of protecting things. The MPAA just WANTED it to work, and now, because it never did, they are trying to litigate a solution.
The bad news for them is that technology doesn't understand law, and it doesn't matter how much they don't want their busted protection scheme to work, it never has, it never will. In some ways I feel sorry for them, because they've invested all this time and effort into a scheme that doesn't work.
I wonder how the "technical" advisor who identified this scheme is feeling now ? Who'd like to be a fly on the wall in their next "performance review" ? ;-)
Cheers,
If all those drives are being bundled, how many do you think might possibly be on machines that will also run Linux? Ever hear of the 'chicken or egg' problem? Did it occur to your planners that the first company to market such a product would most likely get a very favorable position there?
This point of yours makes no sense unless you are trying to make three different points... But to attempt to respond to all three:
- Yes, the Linux community is open source oriented, but there is acceptance for closed source software as well. A good example might be Loki Software.
- Technically oriented users DO NOT pirate software more than other groups. I have never seen a study that proves this, and indeed have found much anecdotal evidence to the contrary (i.e. the 'warez' community).
- Most of your sales may be to OEMs, but if you have a retail channel at all this makes no difference. In fact, because of the 'technical orientation' of most of the Linux userbase, they would be quite happy to go through mail-order or web-order channels and therefore free you from shelf-space and warehousing problems.
I should comment in passing that throwing out what might be interpreted as a slur upon the types of users who most other users turn to for advice on purchasing decisions is not good policy...This is your only point that has any real meat to it, and even it is flawed. X has had no changes that break compatibility in several years (when was rev5 released?) and there are ways for your software to run completely in userspace, or perhaps with open-source kernel modules that would not compromise your licensing agreements with the DVD forum.
I could wish that your company would show a bit more intelligence and foresight. However, those are things that seem to be lacking in today's business software world.
-- JHod, weirdness for hire
A good example of multiple camera angles (that I've come across) is Sarah McLachlan's "Mirrorball" on DVD. You can switch angles at any time during playback, of course I'm using PC software decoding, hardware DVD players may be more limited in this respect.
Three of the songs offer multiple camera angles (4 I think). The switch only takes about 2 seconds on my PC, the delay may be due to the format of the DVD data but I suspect that it depends on the decoder as well.
Using the multiple-angle feature to skip specific scenes may be technically unfeasible. The easiest way that I can think of is to simply include multiple versions of the entire movie on a double-sided or double-layer disk.
It seems like a lot of individuals and companies are beginning to make a whole lot of money with linux and open source software. maybe these people should think about thelping.
Wouldn't it be morally responsible and even of long term economic interest on the part of, say, Red Hat to help with the legal defense of those trying to delelop the Linux platform???
just a thought
Point and Grunt
Now its time for breakdown: (24x640x480x30x60x90)/8 = 149,299,200,000 bytes
((bits/pixle)x(h rez)x(v rez)x(fps)x(60)x(lengh of movie(90minutes)) = filesize of raw video
I don't know about you, but I don't have a 139 gigabyte hard drive laying around... Without hardware compression (and mjpeg really sucks, I've seen it in action), you're SOL for doing any kind of real work. with DeCSS all you need is 9gigs or so
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
. The only thing it couldn't do is play DVDs, but by then an IDE DVD player will probably be about $35
You would almost certanly be able to play VOB files off it, I mean you don't need a CD-ROM drive to play VCDs do you? There would be nothing to stop you from playing unencrypted DVDs
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
some DVD players can be tricked into playing from a directory on the hard disk instead of the DVD drive
Yes it is.
The copy on the HD will not have the encryption Key, so it will not be able to be played normaly. I suppose if you put the real DVD with the keys in, you could do it, but what then would be the point?
Some DVD movies are unencrypted, so you can go ahead and play those off annything
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Even if they did, how many DVD players recognize unencrypted movies?
All of them.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
WARNING: For home use only. Unauthorized public performance, broadcasting or copying is a violation of applicable laws.
the warning would imply that you are not within your rights to view it at the office, which would suck if your office is at home....
Well, they can say whatever they want. As can I. What they say, however has no bering on reality.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Yes, you are right. Line by line interpretation of text files is much faster then dynamicaly generated, optimized byte code... Sure...
Java may be slow (although its almost as fast as C++ now, with hotspot and dynamic code gen), but if you really think its slower then a pure text scripting language then theres somthing wrong with you.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Wow, you are so smart, so much smarter in fact then all the people ripping DVDs.
Please, with your great intellect, tell me where I can buy a VCD copy of The Matrix near where I live?
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I'm pretty sure that A) DVDs don't need to be encrypted to be played on a standard DVD player, B) DVD burners don't let you burn to the key tracks, and C) DeCSS the program dosn't let you encrypt, just decrypt
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I mean, can you read the english language? The guy was making an analogy, not saying what should be done, idiot.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I wonder where the DVD player manufactures weigh in on this. I would assume that they would be on the opensource side of the house, simply because it would mean more dollars for them in the long run.
Well, not if it kills the format. Also, a lot of the companys have there mits in the content creation side. Esp Sony. That's why there was never any problems with the MiniDisk, and why minidisk's have poorer sound quality then mp3s
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
At some stage the algorithm is used/executed so the steps can be seen. With the algorithm and one key, the remainder of the keys can be trivially found by brute force.
That parts wrong, you would need to repeat the process for each key. The reason the other CSS keys were found so quickly was beacse they were only 40-bit keys. 128bit keys would cause some serious problems...
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Those people would just get, and in fact have already gotten DVD factories. The same ones used by the MPAA people to make there DVDs. These dumbasses are just trying to stop exponential copying
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Uh, how will not being able to write to the encrypted part stop people from burning DVDs with unencrypted data?
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
While it won't be as radical as CD->MP3, compressing a DVD to a cube-matrix Wavelet will probably sqeeze it down to CD size with little quality loss
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Sqeze the DVD down to VCD, throw in people with cable modems and dorm-room eth, and you'll have a situation simillar to the one last year.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
CSS won't stop that. Just use an authorized window$ player, and grab the frame buffer out of the video card with a driver hooked into the vertical blanking interrupt. From there, it's just a matter of softwere re-encoding into MPEG and re-sampling the framerate (trivial) to exactly reproduce the unencoded contents of the disk.
Well, that will work great for the video, but you'll loose frames if the VSinc isn't right (60fps movie on a 75hz monitor=bad), and you'll also have to manualy sync the audio.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
but if there was a player made that allowed you to save a movie to an MPEG file as you played it (which is entirely possible) then every 3l|t3 haxor around could rip movies to MPEGs.
MPEG is an asyncrnous compression scheme, it takes much longer to compress a video then it does to decompress. You can't save mpeg in real time, just like you can't record directly to MP3.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Then why don't you just make your own website?
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
that's not the point I'm trying to make...
You could just as well buy an encoder card, what I'm trying to say is that DeCSS makes it much easyer to do it then without....
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Uh dude... Minidisks are not CD quality, not even close. Worse then 128k mp3s.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I don't think that these people are really worried about "real" piracy, but people making exsponential copys for there frends.
If it's posible, as it soon will be, for one person to simply e-mail movies to there frends, who would otherwise buy the copy, movie companies lose a large number of people.
I mean, yes its not an exact clone. I'm pretty sure that most people only care if the movie is the same.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
...I'd like you to prove that, because I don't think you can...
Why should he have to prove it to you? its his his desision, prove that there not.
Anyway all the 31337 sk1p7 k11d3ds are moving over to linux beacuse its 'kewl'
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
b) Piracy is going to run rampant in spite of the fact the cost of the blank media is greater than the cost of the recorded media, and the data on the media is certainly a small enough file that most of us have the bandwidth and hard drive space to snatch up dozens of titles in an evening over the internet.
He's talking about people pirating his $25 app, not DVDs. Why would he care if people pirate DVDs? The more DVD piracy there is, the more money he would make.
Anyway, You're on crack if you really think that Linux systems are not far more divergent then windows systems.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Have you ever tried to capture a movie like that? you need special eqipment. MJPEG quality sucks at low bitrates, and MPEG hardware is really exspensive. And don't tell me you can do it with a simple video in. I've got one. Do you know how large a raw-uncompressed 2 hour movie would be? well it would be a lot more then 9gigs, let me tell you. The only way you could really do it would be to split the file up in smal bits, compress each one and stick them together. That could take DAYS with current MPEG compression speed.
With DeCSS, you rip, and let your computer compress overnight. No special hardware needed.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I don't think many 'leet haxors are going to spend "Under $1000" to share movies with there frends.
They will go and spend $0 for DeCSS though. I'm not saying that the DVD consortium is right in there suit though. Just that there justified in there fear.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Uh, he said he was worried about people pirating his $25 software app, not the movies. As well as the problem of trying to sell a $25 app at all (as opposed to getting OEM deals like on windows)
I seriously doubt that the percentage of knowledgeable linux users interested in piracy is much different then the percentage of knowledgeable windows users. But ALL linux users are knowledgeable.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Sure, it isn't feasible to pirate DVDs now, other then making copies on friend's hard drives or something. And yes, even with a 100mbit Ethernet connection to the Internet, its still going to be a long download.
But on the other hand, would have it have been feasible to pirate mp3s when everyone had a 1200baud modem and 80meg hard drives? Probably not. I think what the MPAA and DVD CCA is worried about is the future. They want to set precedent now, and not have to worry later. I don't think they'll win though.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
...I still don't understand:
Your analysis seems sound, but is it even -feasible- to pirate DVD's? I was under the impression that DVD writing equipment was still not generally available, and that the cost of a blank is generally higher than a DVD movie.
As far as other avenues of piracy are concerned - aren't DVD's in the many-gigabyte range? Even with broadband internet access, wouldn't one consider this prohibitive? The only other avenue of 'piracy' would be to copy the DVD to a harddrive - running in the $100's to cover the size at issue.
Am I simply not getting something? Or is it an easy argument for our side to make that given the lack of feasibility of pirating DVD's efficiently, the main motivation for DeCSS is for other purposes (like the obvious: -viewing- DVD's on platforms not currently blessed by manufacturers.)
Comments, please.
I waited long for someone to say this at last =)
Now that we all have the possibilities to create with our equipment, now that everyone can take part in a creation process, we could make realize the people who made the movie industry, the music industry that their scheme is starting to sound old.
Right now, I can tell you that 90% of all the music I listen to is produced by independant artists on the net, many of which came from the demoscene and tracking scene. (links)
The very fact that those scenes, and their audience exist proove the point that a society only following the big standards of life, of art is not our only future.
People organize in small groups of interests, in tribes, and even if the mass media still keep and probably will keep its power, it is now possible to consider other sources of music. This is true for music now. Let's just hope it will be true for movies in the future.
I'm always amazed by the warez-people. Many of them are conventionnal people who are warezing because they are desperate enough, and unable to get access, or search for other sources of art.
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
Is why it was moderated down. I know about
patronizing - I'm an asshole too, ask anyone.
Even if we agree with you, it's still
offtopic.
The idea of Java "enhancements" from an
arrogant AC does not make me feel confident
forwhateverthatsworth. nntp would make
it unavailable at work (which practices
security though saying no to everything).
garyr
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
There is the DVDR that holds 37GB of data, The problem is that it cost about 4K right now. I don't know if it can wite to key tracks/layers tho. But I would think that it has to be able to read them for play back, so getting a rom that fixes that should not be a problem. I have heard that these same DVDR's should be under 2k some time this year. The media is about 35 bucks also making copying a DVD not worth the effort.
NoteToMalda: I think SlashDot needs a FAQ section, or perhaps something like a summary on ongoing developments/stories.
Regular consumer DVD players won't allow you to read the part of the disc containing the key used to encrypt the disk unless you do a authentcation handshake with it (part of CSS).
IF you are able to get your hands on a player without this security measure, or do a hardware/firmware mod to disable this protection, then you are able to get a bit-by-bit copy.
Then there is the issue of burning this copy on a double-layer DVD. I'm not 100% on this, but I believe that blank DVD disks available to consumers are pre-burnt at the location where the keys are. It is either that, or writers available on the consumer market won't allow you to write to that area without a proper CSS handshake.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
In Norway, it is legal to reverse engineer for the purpose of interoperability - no matter what the EULA claims.
I actually hope that they try to prosecute here in Norway, because it would be quite funny to see the lawyers thrown out of the courthouse. It would also generate a lot of bad PR, and hopefully, more public awareness about this and similar issues.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Does the 'CSS for anti-piracy' argument have merit? How does CSS actually stop someone from copying a DVD?
is included and I suspect a copy of the GPL in on one of those sheets. Compliance with GPL is probably why they did that. Remember you can publish section of GPLed code and in and medium even a T-shirt so long as you also have access to the full source as well as the GPL copyright. Again great job Copyleft I wonder if they are going to get sued too. :(
..how many of these defendant actually have that much money to give to these guys. Ok split the damages 71 ways or maybe 500 ways and it might almost be a sane amount but then how are you going to send bills to a few hundred John Does in different countries? How much money is MPAA or DVD CCA and whoever else willing to spend to unmask these people. Sure they have a lot of money but it is going to start eating into profits eventually. It could take quite a bit of $$$$ to bride all the officials in say Russia for example which doesn't exactly have the most cozy relationship with the US right now for a number of reasons including the major one, Chechnya.
The Connecticut claim is filed against a mirror of 2600's article from November 12, 1999. The key phrase there is DeCSS, a free DVD decoder, that not only facilitated the creation of previously unavailable open source DVD players for
Linux - also allowed people to copy DVDs.
Note that the prase explicitely states a non-piracy purpose of DeCSS, and, it only talks about making copies - which by itself is not illegal (according to the Beta case from 84, IIRC).
The fact that they are going against a single mirror is strange - either they have no clue about the web, internet, etc., or they have found an otherwise "weak link" where they hope to establish an easy precedent.
I wonder if the defendant Hughes can post some more information here.
actually - it would mean less - more people watching movies on their computer is less people watching movies on $200-300 DVD players. It would, however, mean more revnue for companies like Xing that sell dvd and mpeg player software.
It absolutely blows my mind when I hear about things like that. Why does Hollywood waste its resources going after this sort of harmless, small-potatoes offense (and making themselves look like evil bastards in the process) when big-time pirates are turning out thousands of copies every day?
Commercially available DVD hardware will neither directly read nor write the section of the disk which holds the decryption keys. So, prior to DeCSS, it was not possible for consumers to copy encrypted DVDs.
So pirates will use unmodified commercial hardware? Such hardware can't be modified to enable a "bit for bit" copy?
A far more relevent issue is the level of security at DVD fabrication plants... Remember that most pirate CD's are pressed rather than burned.
he claim is made (though I have not verified it) that hardware-hacking a dvd player to write all sectors is relatively trivial.
This is probably in reality altering the firmware...
My guess is that the original idea was to prevent digital redistribution over the internet; to avoid an mp3-type situation.
In that case they should have set up a system so that every DVD player used it's own display, the aspect ratio wasn't that of TV, the FPS had no common factors with 50 or 60 and the horizontal lines had no common factors with 525 or 625.
Otherwise all anyone has to do is hookup the output of a commercial player to a digitiser and they can do what they like, trailers, edited highlights, subtitles, etc
In order to legally reverse engineer something a clean room approach has to be taken, otherwise you're plaguerising and not reverse engineering
Are you sure that this is the law in Norway? This is something which keeps getting missed there are only two places in the USA where attempting to file such a suit would be remotly "in juristiction" one is the Norwegian embassy, the other is the UN general assembly.
I think the more interesting and accurate analogy would be the car dealer taking you to court to prevent you from making a copy of your car.
It's more like a cartel of car dealers taking people to court for attempting to drive the cars they have bought, because the cartel dosn't like the driving licences of those drivers.
In the process making all sorts of spurious claims to deflect attention away from their behaviour. (The most important people for them to convince are judges, since they have the power to jail people who they catch pulling such stunts in their courts. This may explain the pattern of filings the group concerned is specifically avoiding filing anywhere they know will result in their being found in contempt of court.)
You can buy TV's in the UK that can display NTSC as well as PAL
Or for that matter a TV card for a computer, which is also likely to be able to capture video...
Except, of course, for professional hardware designed for mass duplication, which is of course the only hardware that a real "pirate" would use anyway.
Why would a real pirate even bother with getting hardware, far less hassle to make the appropriate bribes to get hold of a production line to churn out some region 0 copies.
...other normal DVD players can't play the encrypted contents
Correct, but Linux DVD players will be able to play back these DVD-R disks by ignorning the keys. Linux DVD players will also ignore region codes.
Soon users of mainstream operating systems will be clamoring for aftermarket device drivers to play import (and bootleg) DVDs, and not much longer after that the wizards of Hong Kong will be selling component DVD players with DeCSS chips. (Currently, they sell region-ignoring component DVD players).
According to the latest issue of 'eMedia', the Pioneer DVR-S201 DVD-R costs $5,400 and blanks retail as low as $33. Many, but not all, regular DVD players can play disks burned with this unit. Hoei Sangyo is selling a $20,000 stand-alone duplicator which can burn three DVD-Rs at a time. Compare that $33 dollar price to the $40 list price of Shakespeare in Love (Collector's Series).
Another consideration is DiVX. I would guess those DiVX disks are selling for about a dollar a pound. Who wants to bet that DeCSS will be the only way to play them after DiVX shuts down its modem-based authentication service.
History Lesson: Sony, a plaintiff in this suit, convinced the US government that sales of blank audio cassettes hurt the business of Sony Music. Now they get a royalty on every blank sold. Did they educate their users that copying is wrong? No, they introduced a 74 minute cassette named "CD-it".
the URL is mangled..stupid assholes at MPAA dont even know how to write HTML. Anyway heres one claim :
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
DISTRICT OF CONNECTICUT
UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC.;
PARAMOUNT PICTURES CORPORATION;
METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER STUDIOS INC.;
TRISTAR PICTURES, INC.; COLUMBIA
PICTURES INDUSTRIES, INC.; TIME WARNER
ENTERTAINMENT CO., L.P.; DISNEY
ENTERPRISES, INC.; AND TWENTIETH
CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION,
Plaintiffs,
v.
JERAIMEE HUGHES,
Defendant.
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
Civil Action No.: _____________
)
COMPLAINT
(For Violation of Provisions Governing Circumvention
of Copyright Protection Systems, 17 U.S.C. 1201, et seq.)
Plaintiffs Universal City Studios, Inc.; Paramount Pictures Corporation; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.; TriStar Pictures, Inc.; Columbia Pictures Industries,
Inc.; Time Warner Entertainment Co., L.P.; Disney Enterprises, Inc.; and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation by their attorneys Cummings & Lockwood, as
and for their complaint, allege as follows:
Nature of the Claims
1. This is a Complaint for injunctive relief and for money damages and related relief against Jeraimee Hughes ("Hughes" or "Defendant"), an individual responsible for
proliferating a software device that unlawfully defeats the DVD copy protection and access control system -- the Contents Scramble System ("CSS") -- so that
individuals can make, distribute, and/or otherwise electronically transmit or perform unauthorized copies of Plaintiffs' copyrighted motion pictures and other
audiovisual works. The acts of the Defendant, which are described more fully below, violate the provisions of the United States Copyright Act governing
circumvention of copyright protection systems, 17 U.S.C. 1201, et seq.
The Parties
2. Plaintiff Universal City Studios, Inc., is a corporation duly incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware.
3. Plaintiff Paramount Pictures Corporation is a corporation duly incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware.
4. Plaintiff Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. is a corporation duly incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware.
5. Plaintiff TriStar Pictures, Inc. is a corporation duly incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware.
6. Plaintiff Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., is a corporation duly incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware.
7. Plaintiff Time Warner Entertainment Co., L.P. is a limited partnership organized under the laws of the State of Delaware.
8. Plaintiff Disney Enterprises, Inc. is a corporation duly incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware.
9. Plaintiff Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation is a corporation duly incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware.
10. Plaintiffs are the major motion picture studios in the United States. Each plaintiff is engaged in the business of producing, manufacturing, and/or distributing
copyrightable and copyrighted material, including, specifically, motion pictures. Plaintiffs distribute motion pictures theatrically, via television broadcast, and on
portable media such as videocassettes tapes and digital versatile discs ("DVDs") for distribution in the home video market. In the course of its business, each plaintiff
or its predecessor in interest obtained ownership of the United States copyrights, the exclusive reproduction, adaptation, and/or distribution rights under United
States copyrights, and/or the state statutory and common law rights, in various motion pictures embodied in such DVDs. Plaintiffs are the leading producers and
distributors of motion pictures in DVD format in the United States, including such recent blockbusters as "Titanic" and "The Matrix," and approximately 4,000 titles
have been released in the United States on DVD to date. Current industry estimates place DVD sales at over 1,000,000 units per week.
11. On information and belief, defendant Hughes either resides or has his principal place of business at 50 North Taylor Avenue, Norwalk, Connecticut 06854.
Defendant Hughes operates an Internet web site addressed as www.ct2600.org/2600-DVD.html.
Jurisdiction and Venue
12. The Court has jurisdiction of this action under 17 U.S.C. 101 et seq., 28 U.S.C. 1331 (federal question) and 1338(a) (copyright).
13. This Court has personal jurisdiction over the Defendant in that he either resides or has his principal place of business in the State of Connecticut.
14. Venue is proper in this District pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1391(b) and 28 U.S.C. 1400(a) as (a) this is a judicial district in which a substantial part of the events
giving rise to the claims occurred, and/or (b) this is a judicial district in which Defendant resides, and/or (c) this is a judicial district in which Defendant may be found,
and there is no judicial district in which the action may otherwise be brought.
Background Facts
The DVD Technology
15. With the advent of the VCR and videocassette tapes, home viewing of motion pictures became a convenient, inexpensive way to enjoy motion pictures. DVDs
are 5-inch-wide discs that hold full-length motion pictures, are the most current technological advancement for private home viewing of motion pictures. This
technology significantly improves the clarity and the overall quality of the motion picture when played on a television screen or computer monitor.
16. DVDs incorporating full-length motion pictures, together with additional and ancillary features such as interviews and alternative sound tracks, can be played
back for viewing in the home by dedicated, free standing "DVD players" and by personal computers configured with a DVD "drive" and additional hardware or
software modules sometimes referred to as "media players."
17. DVDs contain digital information. When motion pictures in form are digital copied or transmitted, the clarity and overall quality of the motion pictures do not
suffer (as they do when a copy is made from an analog source, such as a videocassette). Moreover, the fact that the motion pictures contained on DVDs are in digital
format allows any unauthorized copies of those motion pictures from DVDs to be widely transmitted over the Internet, stored in computer memory, and duplicated
for unlawful sale, transfer or exchange. Once these copies are in the hands of another user, the unlawful process can begin once again because the copies have the
clarity and quality of the original DVDs containing the motion picture.
The Contents Scramble System ("CSS")
18. Because motion pictures in unprotected digital format on DVDs would be subject to ready, unlimited copying and create a threat to the market viability of DVD
technology, the plaintiffs were reluctant to release valuable film libraries and new film releases without the implementation of a copy protection and access control
system. Plaintiffs therefore ultimately adopted a copy protection and access control system developed by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. and Toshiba
Corporation -- the Contents Scramble System ("CSS") -- in order to provide security to the copyrighted contents of DVDs and thereby provide protection for
copyrighted content against unauthorized copying. CSS includes elements of encryption and other security and authentication measures that require DVD playback
devices, including appropriately configured personal computers, to operate with certain keys in order to descramble and intelligibly play back copies of motion
pictures from DVDs. All members of the DVD industry, including software and hardware manufacturers of DVD players, DVD replicators and the content providers
-- the motion picture studios -- adopted CSS as direct licensees or by contracting through CSS licensees.
19. Each of the Plaintiffs relied on the security provided by CSS in manufacturing, producing and distributing to the public copyrighted motion pictures in DVD
format. Those motion pictures, many of which involved investments of tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars, were distributed on CSS-protected DVDs.
The Descrambling of CSS and the Creation and Proliferation of the "DeCSS" Utility
20. On information and belief, hackers in Europe were able to descramble the encryption on DVDs and create -- and post on the World Wide Web -- an
unauthorized utility commonly referred to as "DeCSS," which allows motion pictures in DVD format to be decrypted and illegally copied.
21. Subsequently, defendant Hughes posted DeCSS on his Internet web site, www.ct2600.org/2600-DVD.html. Hughes' site states that DeCSS is a "free DVD
decoder" that allows "people to copy DVDs."
Claim for Relief
(Violation of Provisions Governing Circumvention
of Copyright Protection Systems,
17 U.S.C. 1201, et seq,)
22. Plaintiffs incorporate by this reference the allegations contained in paragraphs 1 through 21, inclusive.
23. The Copyright Act, Title 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(2), provides that:
[n]o person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device,
component, or part thereof, that --
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work
protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls
access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a
technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
24. Defendant Hughes offers to the public, provides, or otherwise traffics in, DeCSS through his Internet website.
25. CSS is a technological measure that (a) effectively controls access to works protected by the Copyright Act, and (b) effectively protects rights of copyright
owners to control whether an end user can reproduce, manufacture, adapt, publicly perform and/or distribute unauthorized copies of their copyrighted works or
portions thereof.
26. DeCSS (a) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing CSS or the protection afforded by CSS, (b) has only limited commercially
significant purpose or use other than to circumvent CSS or the protection afforded by CSS, and/or (c) is marketed by Defendant and/or others acting in concert with
him with the knowledge of its use in circumventing CSS or the protection afforded by CSS.
27. By offering to the public, providing, or otherwise trafficking in DeCSS, Defendant has violated the provisions governing Circumvention of Copyright Protection
Systems set forth in the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 1201 et seq.
28. As a direct and proximate result of such violations, Plaintiffs have been damaged in an amount to be proven at trial.
29. Unless enjoined by this Court, Defendant's violations will continue. Plaintiffs' remedy at law is not adequate. Protection of Plaintiffs' rights must include an
injunction, as well as other remedies available.
Prayer for Relief
WHEREFORE, Plaintiffs pray for judgment against Defendant as follows:
1. For a grant of preliminary and permanent injunctive relief against Defendant, his agents, servants, employees, and all other persons in active concert or privity or in
participation with him, enjoining him from:
(a) posting on any Internet website, or in any other way manufacturing, importing, offering to the public, providing, or otherwise trafficking in DeCSS, and
(b) posting on any Internet website, or in any other way manufacturing, importing, offering to the public, providing, or otherwise trafficking
in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that:
(i) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing, or circumventing the protection afforded by, CSS, or
any other technological measure adopted by Plaintiffs that effectively controls access to Plaintiffs' copyrighted works or
effectively protects the Plaintiffs' rights to control whether an end user can reproduce, manufacture, adapt, publicly perform
and/or distribute unauthorized copies of their copyrighted works or portions thereof,
(ii) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent, or to circumvent the protection afforded
by, CSS, or any other technological measure adopted by Plaintiffs that effectively controls access to Plaintiffs' copyrighted
works or effectively protects the Plaintiffs' rights to control whether an end user can reproduce, manufacture, adapt, publicly
perform and/or distribute unauthorized copies of their copyrighted works or portions thereof, or
(iii) is marketed by Defendant and/or others acting in concert with him with the knowledge of its use in circumventing, or in
circumventing the protection afforded by, CSS, or any other technological measure adopted by Plaintiffs that effectively
controls access to the Plaintiffs' copyrighted works or effectively protects the Plaintiffs' rights to control whether an end user
can reproduce, manufacture, adapt, publicly perform and/or distribute unauthorized copies of their copyrighted works or
portions thereof;
2. For damages in such amount as may be found and requiring Defendant to account for and pay over to Plaintiffs all profits delivered from all acts of circumvention
of copyright protection systems; alternatively, for statutory damages in the amount of $2,500 for each act of circumvention, device, product, component, offer, or
such other amount as may be proper pursuant to 17 U.S.C. 1203(c);
3. For Plaintiffs' attorneys' fees and costs pursuant to 17 U.S.C. 1203(b);
4. For prejudgment interest;
5. For costs incurred in this action; and
6. For such other and further relief as the Court deems just and proper.
DATED: January 14, 2000
CUMMINGS & LOCKWOOD
By: ______________________
Robert P. Dolian
Federal Bar #ct04278
Four Stamford Plaza
P.O. Box 120
Stamford, Connecticut 06904-0120
(203) 327-1700 Telephone
(203) 708-3948 Facsimile
Attorneys for Plaintiffs
Of Counsel:
PROSKAUER ROSE LLP
Leon P. Gold
William M. Hart
1585 Broadway
New York, New York 10036
(212) 969-3000 Telephone
(212) 969-2900 Facsimile
Leon P. Gold (LG-1434)
William M. Hart (WH-1604)
PROSKAUER ROSE LLP
1585 Broadway
New York, New York 10036
(212) 969-3000 Telephone
(212) 969-2900 Facsimile
Jon A. Baumgarten (pro hac vice admission to be applied for)
PROSKAUER ROSE LLP
1233 20th Street, N.W., Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036-2396
(202) 416-6800 Telephone
(202) 416-6899 Facsimile
Attorneys for Plaintiffs
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK
UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC.; PARAMOUNT PICTURES CORPORATION; METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER STUDIOS INC.; TRISTAR PICTURES, INC.; COLUMBIA PICTURES INDUSTRIES, INC.; TIME WARNER ENTERTAINMENT CO., L.P.; DISNEY ENTERPRISES, INC.; AND TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION,
Plaintiffs,
v.
SHAWN C. REIMERDES; ERIC CORLEY A/K/A "EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN"; AND ROMAN KAZAN,
Defendants.
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
00 Civ. _____________
COMPLAINT FOR VIOLATION OF PROVISIONS GOVERNING CIRCUMVENTION OF COPYRIGHT PROTECTION SYSTEMS, 17 U.S.C. 1201, et seq.
)
Plaintiffs Universal City Studios, Inc.; Paramount Pictures Corporation; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.; TriStar Pictures, Inc.; Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.; Time Warner Entertainment Co., L.P.; Disney Enterprises, Inc.; and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation by their attorneys Proskauer Rose LLP, as and for their complaint, allege as follows:
Nature of the Claims
1. This is a Complaint for injunctive relief and for money damages and related relief against Shawn C. Reimerdes ("Reimerdes"), Eric Corley a/k/a "Emmanuel Goldstein" ("Corley") and Roman Kazan ("Kazan") (collectively, the "Defendants"), individuals responsible for proliferating a software device that unlawfully defeats the DVD copy protection and access control system -- the Contents Scramble System ("CSS") -- so that individuals can make, distribute, and/or otherwise electronically transmit or perform unauthorized copies of Plaintiffs' copyrighted motion pictures and other audiovisual works. The acts of the Defendants, which are described more fully below, violate the provisions of the United States Copyright Act governing circumvention of copyright protection systems, 17 U.S.C. 1201, et seq.
The Parties
2. Plaintiff Universal City Studios, Inc., is a corporation duly incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware.
3. Plaintiff Paramount Pictures Corporation is a corporation duly incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware.
4. Plaintiff Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. is a corporation duly incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware.
5. Plaintiff TriStar Pictures, Inc. is a corporation duly incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware.
6. Plaintiff Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., is a corporation duly incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware.
7. Plaintiff Time Warner Entertainment Co., L.P. is a limited partnership organized under the laws of the State of Delaware.
8. Plaintiff Disney Enterprises, Inc. is a corporation duly incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware.
9. Plaintiff Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation is a corporation duly incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware.
10. Plaintiffs are the major motion picture studios in the United States. Each plaintiff is engaged in the business of producing, manufacturing, and/or distributing copyrightable and copyrighted material, including, specifically, motion pictures. Plaintiffs distribute motion pictures theatrically, via television broadcast, and on portable media such as videocassettes tapes and digital versatile discs ("DVDs") for distribution in the home video market. In the course of its business, each plaintiff or its predecessor in interest obtained ownership of the United States copyrights, the exclusive reproduction, adaptation, and/or distribution rights under United States copyrights, and/or the state statutory and common law rights, in various motion pictures embodied in such DVDs. Plaintiffs are the leading producers and distributors of motion pictures in DVD format in the United States, including such recent blockbusters as "Titanic" and "The Matrix," and approximately 4,000 titles have been released in the United States on DVD to date. Current industry estimates place DVD sales at over 1,000,000 units per week.
11. On information and belief, defendant Reimerdes either resides or has his principal place of business at 295 Greenwich St., New York, NY 10007 and/or 162-14 Cryders Lane, Whitestone, NY 11357. Defendant Reimerdes operates an Internet web site addressed as www.dvd-copy.com.
12. On information and belief, defendant Corley, who, on information and belief, uses the nom de net "Emmanuel Goldstein," either resides or has his principal place of business at 7Strong's Lane, Setauket, New York. Corley a/k/a Emmanual Goldstein operates an Internet web site at www.2600.com/news/1999/1112-files/.
13. On information and belief, defendant Kazan either resides or has his principal place of business at 16 E. 55th Street, New York, New York 10022. Defendant Kazan operates an Internet web site at www.krackdown.com/decss/.
Jurisdiction and Venue
14. The Court has jurisdiction of this action under 17 U.S.C. 101 et seq., 28 U.S.C. 1331 (federal question) and 1338(a) (copyright).
15. This Court has personal jurisdiction over the Defendants in that each Defendant either resides or has his principal place of business in the State of New York.
16. Venue is proper in this District pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1391(b) and 28 U.S.C. 1400(a) as (a) this is a judicial district in which a substantial part of the events giving rise to the claims occurred, and/or (b) all of the defendants reside in the State of New York and this is a judicial district in which some of the defendants reside, and/or (c) this is a judicial district in which some defendants may be found, and there is no judicial district in which the action may otherwise be brought.
Background Facts
The DVD Technology
17. With the advent of the VCR and videocassette tapes, home viewing of motion pictures became a convenient, inexpensive way to enjoy motion pictures. DVDs are 5-inch-wide discs that hold full-length motion pictures, are the most current technological advancement for private home viewing of motion pictures. This technology significantly improves the clarity and the overall quality of the motion picture when played on a television screen or computer monitor.
18. DVDs incorporating full-length motion pictures, together with additional and ancillary features such as interviews and alternative sound tracks, can be played back for viewing in the home by dedicated, free standing "DVD players" and by personal computers configured with a DVD "drive" and additional hardware or software modules sometimes referred to as "media players."
19. DVDs contain digital information. When motion pictures in form are digital copied or transmitted, the clarity and overall quality of the motion pictures do not suffer (as they do when a copy is made from an analog source, such as a videocassette). Moreover, the fact that the motion pictures contained on DVDs are in digital format allows any unauthorized copies of those motion pictures from DVDs to be widely transmitted over the Internet, stored in computer memory, and duplicated for unlawful sale, transfer or exchange. Once these copies are in the hands of another user, the unlawful process can begin once again because the copies have the clarity and quality of the original DVDs containing the motion picture.
The Contents Scramble System ("CSS")
20. Because motion pictures in unprotected digital format on DVDs would be subject to ready, unlimited copying and create a threat to the market viability of DVD technology, the plaintiffs were reluctant to release valuable film libraries and new film releases without the implementation of a copy protection and access control system. Plaintiffs therefore ultimately adopted a copy protection and access control system developed by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. and Toshiba Corporation -- the Contents Scramble System ("CSS") -- in order to provide security to the copyrighted contents of DVDs and thereby provide protection for copyrighted content against unauthorized copying. CSS includes elements of encryption and other security and authentication measures that require DVD playback devices, including appropriately configured personal computers, to operate with certain keys in order to descramble and intelligibly play back copies of motion pictures from DVDs. All members of the DVD industry, including software and hardware manufacturers of DVD players, DVD replicators and the content providers -- the motion picture studios -- adopted CSS as direct licensees or by contracting through CSS licensees.
21. Each of the Plaintiffs relied on the security provided by CSS in manufacturing, producing and distributing to the public copyrighted motion pictures in DVD format. Those motion pictures, many of which involved investments of tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars, were distributed on CSS-protected DVDs.
The Descrambling of CSS and the Creation and Proliferation of the "DeCSS" Utility
22. On information and belief, hackers in Europe were able to descramble the encryption on DVDs and create -- and post on the World Wide Web -- an unauthorized utility commonly referred to as "DeCSS," which allows motion pictures in DVD format to be decrypted and illegally copied.
23. Subsequently, defendant Reimerdes posted DeCSS on his Internet web site, www.dvd-copy.com, along with the statement "Yes, you can trade DVD movie files over the Internet . . . You can break the encryption on any DVD and allow users to copy the contents of a DVD onto the a [sic] hard drive or alternative media! Notice: The DVD Copy Control Association are cocksuckers!" Reimerdes also told Internet users, under a section titled "How To Find/Trade FREE DVD Movies Online," that "people gather online in impromptu communities and trade these digital copies through one-to-one file transfers and group chatting."
24. Defendant Eric Corley a/k/a Emmanuel Goldstein also posted DeCSS on his Internet web site www.2600.com/news/1999/1112-files. Corley's site states that DeCSS is a "free DVD decoder" that allows "people to copy DVDs." Corley's site also exhorts others ("as many of you as possible all throughout the world") to "take and mirror [the DeCSS] files . . . ."
25. Defendant Roman Kazan also posted DeCSS on his Internet web site, www.krackdown.com/decss/.
Claim for Relief
(Violation of Provisions Governing Circumvention
of Copyright Protection Systems,
17 U.S.C. 1201, et seq,)
26. Plaintiffs incorporate by this reference the allegations contained in paragraphs 1 through 25, inclusive.
27. The Copyright Act, Title 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(2), provides that:
[n]o person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that --
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
28. Each defendant offers to the public, provides, or otherwise traffics in, DeCSS through his Internet website.
29. CSS is a technological measure that (a) effectively controls access to works protected by the Copyright Act, and (b) effectively protects rights of copyright owners to control whether an end user can reproduce, manufacture, adapt, publicly perform and/or distribute unauthorized copies of their copyrighted works or portions thereof.
30. DeCSS (a) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing CSS or the protection afforded by CSS, (b) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent CSS or the protection afforded by CSS, and/or (c) is marketed by Defendants and/or others acting in concert with them with the knowledge of its use in circumventing CSS or the protection afforded by CSS.
31. By offering to the public, providing, or otherwise trafficking in DeCSS, Defendants have violated the provisions governing Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems set forth in the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 1201 et seq.
32. As a direct and proximate result of such violations, Plaintiffs have been damaged in an amount to be proven at trial.
33. Unless enjoined by this Court, Defendants' violations will continue. Plaintiffs' remedy at law is not adequate. Protection of Plaintiffs' rights must include an injunction, as well as other remedies available.
Prayer for Relief
WHEREFORE, Plaintiffs pray for judgment against Defendants, and each of them, jointly and severally, as follows:
1. For a grant of preliminary and permanent injunctive relief against the Defendants, their agents, servants, employees, and all other persons in active concert or privity or in participation with them, enjoining them from:
(a) posting on any Internet website, or in any other way manufacturing, importing, offering to the public, providing, or otherwise trafficking in DeCSS, and
(b) posting on any Internet website, or in any other way manufacturing, importing, offering to the public, providing, or otherwise trafficking in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that:
(i) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing, or circumventing the protection afforded by, CSS, or any other technological measure adopted by Plaintiffs that effectively controls access to Plaintiffs' copyrighted works or effectively protects the Plaintiffs' rights to control whether an end user can reproduce, manufacture, adapt, publicly perform and/or distribute unauthorized copies of their copyrighted works or portions thereof,
(ii) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent, or to circumvent the protection afforded by, CSS, or any other technological measure adopted by Plaintiffs that effectively controls access to Plaintiffs' copyrighted works or effectively protects the Plaintiffs' rights to control whether an end user can reproduce, manufacture, adapt, publicly perform and/or distribute unauthorized copies of their copyrighted works or portions thereof, or
(iii) is marketed by Defendants and/or others acting in concert with them with the knowledge of its use in circumventing, or in circumventing the protection afforded by, CSS, or any other technological measure adopted by Plaintiffs that effectively controls access to the Plaintiffs' copyrighted works or effectively protects the Plaintiffs' rights to control whether an end user can reproduce, manufacture, adapt, publicly perform and/or distribute unauthorized copies of their copyrighted works or portions thereof;
2. For damages in such amount as may be found and requiring Defendants to account for and pay over to Plaintiffs all profits delivered from all acts of circumvention of copyright protection systems; alternatively, for statutory damages in the amount of $2,500 for each act of circumvention, device, product, component, offer, or such other amount as may be proper pursuant to 17 U.S.C. 1203(c); and
3. For Plaintiffs' attorneys' fees and costs pursuant to 17 U.S.C. 1203(b).
4. For prejudgment interest;
5. For costs incurred in this action;
6. For such other and further relief as the Court deems just and proper.
DATED: January 14, 2000
PROSKAUER ROSE LLP
By: ______________________
Leon P. Gold (LG-1434)
William M. Hart (WH-1604)
1585 Broadway
New York, New York 10036
(212) 969-3000 Telephone
(212) 969-2900 Facsimile
- and -
Jon A. Baumgarten (pro hac vice admission
to be applied for)
PROSKAUER ROSE LLP
1233 20th Street, N.W., Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036-2396
(202) 416-6800 Telephone
(202) 416-6899 Facsimile
Attorneys for Plaintiffs
The contention that DeCSS is "just like unauthorized copying of the keys to the local department store" is almost so ludicrous as to be self-obvious. DeCSS is more like inventing a pizza cutter so you can fit the pizza into your smaller microwave oven instead of having to heat it in your old, energy-hog-of-an electric oven. The pizza owners guild and the electric oven guild is trying to outlaw pizza cutters!
What really needs to happen is a couple of aggressive, smart lawyers need to get together and convince the Feds to file a RICO or SLAPP suit against these folks, to stop them from this nonsense.
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
Well, I think it is about time to mention that you can get all this stuff at my server here: http://ct441 09-a.lafayt1.in.home.com/~vividan/dvd_decrypting_s oftware/
I wasn't lost... I was only momentaraly confused of my spacial orientation relative to my prime destination.
Here's something...They could have patened it, then charged royalities to use it...Then they would have a legal leg to stand on against DeCSS...But they decided that they wanted their cake and eat it to...*BUZZ* Sorry, don't work that way folks.
--Ben
Sig error #666 -- The devil made me do it.
They argue that The keys have no real purpose except to circumvent the locks that stand between the thief and the goods he or she targets.
If only one person issues an Open Source movie (or other type of material) on DVD, then that argument is invalidated as it assumes that the only material available on DVD is copyrighted.
Maybe Jon can push Quentin to Open Geeks ?? :-)
It's a simple matter of complex programming.
Yea, and there are three or four other ways of doing that anyway, not the least of which involves a VHS tape, a VCR, and a video in connector.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Firmware replacements already exist to make popular DVD-ROM drives region free. I don't think reflashing a DVD-RAM drive to do nybble copying is going to be a hard obstacle to overcome. Once the firmware upgrades are workable they'll propagate all over net so clueful computer users can use them. The clueful users will show their friends how it works then everybody will be making bit for bit copies. The MPAA are idiots.
Damn slow connection. It forced to me to hit submit twice! I'm suing and filing for class action status. Now, who's got deep pockets?
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
I'm sorry if this sounds stupid, by why aren't there any DVD players for Linux? Does it cost the studios too much to port it over, or do they feel it's not worth the hassle to port it? Or something else?
The way the case is being portrayed by the MPAA, is that without DeCSS, piracy can't exist. That's a pretty big leap in logic. Right now, if I choose, I could copy as many DVDs as I want, not a problem, no DeCSS involved, all bit for bit copies. All able to be played back on ANY DVD player.
When you think about it from a commercial standpoint, who will pirates sell the copied DVDs to? Well, people that own DVD players, of course. Since the players will play back ANY bit for bit DVD, the example of the debit card is dubious, at best.
The MPAA presents a strawman argument. Reverse engineering for interoperability is indeed legal under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. That's what this is, nothing more, nothing less.
Yes, there has been a significant investment in technology regarding DVD. It's a fallacy to believe that breaking the encryption technology will lead to more pirating, because the encryption technology DOES NOT prevent pirated copies, in and of itself. You need the access control mechanism, which anyone that owns a DVD already has. The pirate market for mass produced DVD copies is home theater and people that already own a DVD player, not Linux geeks.
Think about it, as a mass market pirate why would one target people that don't own DVD players? You wouldn't, no more than software piracy appeals to people that don't own computers. CSS does not protect against copies made by or for those with DVD players, which is the bulk of the potential pirate audience.
It's not about freedom, but it's not about piracy, either. Some of it is possibly due to the embarassment factor due to the fairly weak and easily broken encryption scheme. If anyone should be sued by the MPAA and studios, it should be Mitsubishi for selling it to them in the first place. Caveat Emptor...
Dave
In case you haven't noticed, the encryption DOES NOT prevent pirate copies. I can make thousands of bit for bit DVD copies without any reference, using, or even thinking about encryption.
What is does do, is allow me to play DVDs (I legally own more than 50 DVD) on hardware like a Sun or Linux box. The encryption only prevents playback on certain hardware, it does not prevent piracy.
Dave
This question might be slightly offtopic: If I buy the VHS video of (say) The Matrix, then I have paid for a license to watch the film within my own home. I can't give my friend a copy, because he hasn't bought a license. So by this logic, if I know someone who has the DVD of The Matrix, I ought to be able to legally take a DVD copy and watch that, since I have the license. Right?
The same should apply to music: if I buy a battered old record of Queen's Greatest Hits at a second hand shop for next to nothing, I should then have the right to download the CD-quality MP3s of the songs for my own personal use.
Does anyone know if this argument will hold up in court?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I think the right to reverse-engineer is well-established throughout the European Union. That's presumably too big a market to ignore.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
and just when i was thinking about buying DVD's again ;)
messed up my tags.
The MPAA/DVD CAA made things worse by making a stink. I don't even have any hardware to do with DVDs, but I downloaded all the DeCSS, css-auth, etc. stuff just to help anyone who needs them. I haven't even used the things, but the DVD CAA encouraged me to download them.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
We have nothing. Not even a response to this post (before me). Set up a website and a non-profit organisation, and you'll get support.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
Give it to the EFF. www.eff.org
Actually, you can copy the contents of the DVD to the hard drive without decryption, it simply won't play because the decoder can't find any keys on the disc.
Now if you were to use assembly, and slowly go from the inside of the disk outward, copying EVERY byte as you found it, yes, you probably could. (Reverse this from the outside inwards a good distance, and you can copy GD-Roms !)
And you would probably come across the encryption keys. It's not possible for a CD-Rom DRIVE to refuse access to a certain track, if I recall. It's just whether the software will let you there.
With most discs I have found that while I cannot fast forward/rewind, I can skip to either the next title or chapter; problem solved.
My personal feeling is that the best approach would be going through restraint of trade, as they are forcing us to use whatever software they want for us to use their product. and maybee going to the WTO next time they have a meeting saying that this is restraining our ability to trade internationally.
Piracy is a little bit of an issue.
Think about format conversion. If you can decrypt a DVD video stream, you can recompress it for distribution, in the same way people rip mp3s off a CD. There will be a substantial loss in quality, but video streaming is getting better all the time.
I suspect that people are doing this already.
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
Yes, but the REAL purpose of the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" is to take away first sale rights, legitimate fair use rights, default UCC consumer protection and all the other things which might stand in the way of Disney taking every last cent in your pocket.
Because most of these rights derive from the constitution, and would be difficult to actually take away, they've chosen a back door method with bans whole classes of technology based on their potential for "defeating a technological copy protection mechanism".
So, Disney can't prevent you from selling your digitally pristine copy of "The Lion King", but they can create a mechanism that means it won't work for anyone but you, so that selling it is worthless. If you make a device to defeat their technology, and thus get back your constitutional rights, the DMCA puts you in line for a bad fall.
Similarly, NBC can't prevent you from time shifting a TV program, but they can use a feeble encryption technique and then outlaw devices other than TVs (such as VCRs) which decrypt the signal, so that you have to watch all their output live or risk getting shafted under the DMCA. This means you'll PAY to watch repeats, because you couldn't time shift the original programme
Finally, the DMCA lets media companies rest easy about software. In the past it looked as though these old fashioned companies might get eaten alive by software companies. Now, with the DMCA they can license out proprietary technology like CSS to control their "property", and any software that won't play ball can't work with their media -- just like Linux today. If you RE their stupid protection, as software companies would have in the past, you get DMCA litigation.
In summary, this "Digital Millennium" is presumably due to end in less than twelve months, and hopefully it will either by seriously weakened in application or it will get mauled and thrown out altogether. Right now the balance is too strongly in favour of giant international IPOs (and I don't mean stock offerings).
Go EFF, Go!
Nick.
Well, you were half right - it is stupid. I like to think of it as a feature that the script sometimes tricks people into thinking it's a first post.
Notice the fact that you wouldn't be looking so foolish if you simply hadn't said anything about First Post. What would you have accomplished with that even if you were first, besides to still make yourself look stupid?
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
I've emailed studios to let them know they're losing customers.
how exactly are they losing customers?
were you previously a dvd customer?
did you buy vhs tapes? those aren't usable on linux machines either
stop being a zelot, and think
Need a Catering Connection
i would think that most dvd pirating would take place with 'professional' equipment
the studios do write to the section that holds the keys, so it is possible
i would imagine that dvd players _have_ to read from the section that contains the keys or the existance or non-existance of data there is irrelevent
if i were selling pirate dvd's i'd want them to look as close as possible to the real thing, and i'd imagine writable dvd's look a lot different than normal ones
Need a Catering Connection
i dunno... theres a liscene attached to the data.....
my Dune dvd (universal studios) says:
WARNING: For home use only. Unauthorized public performance, broadcasting or copying is a violation of applicable laws.
the warning would imply that you are not within your rights to view it at the office, which would suck if your office is at home....
Need a Catering Connection
So, prior to DeCSS, it was not possible for consumers to copy encrypted DVDs.
do they honestly worry about piracy from consumers?
if i were a movie studio i would worry about large scale piracy, rather than small scale piracy....
with dvd, you can let your friend borrow your treasured movie without worrying that it will come back in worse condition, unless your friend scratches it or does something stupid like that
but with vhs, you know its going to come back in worse shape, and the question is only how much worse, and depending on how much you treasure your movie, you may just give him a copy to protect your investment
Need a Catering Connection
Do you honestly think that will make everyone happy? How many different variants of *nix are there out there that they would have to support? People want to play DVDs on whatever hardware they have, not just Linux/Intel. Open source is really the only way.
This DeCSS stuff doesn't apply to all of us..
I don't even have a DVD drive, yet practically
every article is about this lawsuit crap now.
Will there be a way to at least filter it out easily?
(1st?)
-bugg
I may be dillusional but this looks to me like the same old capitalism we've always had. It's not different. It's not obsurd. It's common sense really. Keep the power where it belongs. The movie industry just wants to remind us all who is in charge. I just see this as just an obvious example of why things need changing. Capitalism is about hinding information so to better exploit it for monetary gains. Information sharing is where it's at and our current systems of economics and government don't reflect that. If you want to point the blame for this situation point it at the system not the movie industry.
Why are all the postings for the law suit by Anonymous Coward? Probably some MPAA idiots think they are going to change our minds. Yeah...right....
I just mailed a clarification/correction to the feedback address given in the article (feedback@bloomberg.com), since they stated near the beginning of the article that DeCSS was a DVD copying program, which is not true. I encourage others to mail (polite!) messages to the feedback address in order to help combat the negative media spin the MPAA and friends are trying to put on us as end-users.
Wherever there's a will, there's a motorway.
This may be redundant, but I'll continue anyway. Writing the DVD decryption software cannot be considered stealing, as it hasn't even been used on a DVD! This is akin to accusing a manufacturer of crowbars of theft, because their product can be used to break into houses.
The MPAA is assuming that the software in question is playing a DVD that a user did NOT buy. Bullsh*t. Suppose I have a $20,000 entertainment system in my living room, complete with a legally-purchased DVD player. Also suppose I have 100 legally-purchased DVD's. Also suppose that in my study is a computer, dualbooted with NT and Linux. I have a windows DVD viewer installed on the windows partition. It is perfectly legal to bring a DVD from my living room to my bedroom, and view it with Windows. But, if I boot linux and watch the DVD with the software in question, now suddenly I am a criminal??? I have suddenly stolen the DVD from the companies filing the charges? What friggin' logic is this.
make world, not war
check out the links under http://www.mpaa.org/DVD
they can't even put up a stinkin web site.
Obviously their webmaster went to the same school the CSS authors did.
(all the hrefs on the page spaces in the URL.)
Heh.
"The MPAA is striking a blow today in defense of the future of American movies. We have filed suit in federal court to stop internet hackers from distributing the software designed to circumvent the encryption technology that prevents the unlawful copying of DVDs."
I assume then that they plan to provide: 1) A extra copy of every DVD that I purchase so as to allow me my right to make legitimate copies.
2) The right to mail or phone in and request a completely free copy in the event that I lose, misplace, or otherwise destroy any of the copies obtained via step 1. Thus, extending the protection that I legally have to make a copy for my self.
If they do not intend to provide the above services, are they not blocking my legal right to make a copy for my self? Isn't this illegal? Wouldn't that be the same thing as a car dealer selling me a car and then taking me to court to prevent me from making copies of my keys?
Just how legal is it to sell hardware which is known not to be fully functional?
I don't think they have anything to worry about. The hardware they are selling is doing what it was advertise to do. As long as it is able to do it reliably, I don't think it can qualify as defective. Unlike the recent defective floppy drive case, I don't see this as being the same.
According to this C|NET article, they were advertising the software on their website as DVD cracking software...
So, if I advertise car theft equipment, which are in fact my car keys, am I breaking the law?
How about building an open-source DVD player?
If such an application is made available to the public before the end of the trials, wouldn't that be sort-of a defacto defeat for the MPAA?
Obviously I know next to nothing when it comes to legal issues so I don't even know what sort of trouble we would get by doing this.
Still, the whole case would seem less relevant to me if I had an open-source DVD player installed on my box right now.
K.
>If you can't protect that which you own, then you >don't own anything." Couldn't the guys who found the key use this as their defense? I mean come on! Wasn't the key was left out in plain view! -------------------------------------------------- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. - Gandhi
This is indeed an intererting point. How does DVD encryption stop piracy?
My guess is that the original idea was to prevent digital redistribution over the internet; to avoid an mp3-type situation. If you need the decryption keys in the player to see the movie, you can't just save the data to your hard drive and run it through a player program. Of course, this doesn't prevent people burning encrypted data they've obtained electronically to DVD. Anyway, with DeCSS, it's theoretically possible for people to share decrypted movie data electronically and then view it without ever having to burn to DVD or go through a licensed DVD player.
Even so, I think the idea of people commonly sharing DVD-sized files over the internet is a pretty ridiculous one, and you're probably justified in referring to the MPAA's concerns as "groundless paranoia".
This is just my guess as to the purpose of DVD encryption. Does anyone out there know better?
I don't know the technical details, but I have watched porn DVDs where you can switch between "camera angles" during playback. So it is possible.
"The U.S. movie industry intends to defeat anyone who steals our intellectual property."
Sorry, it's already been stolen.
"If you can't protect that which you own, then you don't own anything."
For some, conjuring up these stupid ideas is the only income they get. They had better protect what they own if this falls through, or they won't own anything.
if this doesn't make sense, sorry, just trying to think of some witty comment.
bye,
-jimbo
What he (probably) means is that he only has Linux boxen in his house, and hence he cant play DVD:s. By not supporting Linux, they are hence loosing a customer. By following up on the DeCSS lawsuit they are making it all but impossible to EVER have a state-of-the-art DVD-player under Linux, since it would have to be an illegal underground product.
The alternative for all Linux longhairs is obviously to get a standalone player. This has drawbacks like no VGA out, no screenshots, etc. but also advantages like the possibility of having a DVD-changer (Sony has a DVD-player that can store up to 200 DVDs and CDs), easier remote navigation etc.
They ARE loosing customers this way, maybe a couple of PPM of their customer base. But they are obviously prepared to loose those customers to fight piracy. Not that the decryption program really makes it that much easier to pirate discs - they could previously be bit-copied. The only difference, as far as I can tell, is that now pirates can release region free versions, or edit the movie (remove copyrights notice, insert bonus material, etc). Like we coulnt disable region control anyway. Duh.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Uhmmm... Stay away from DVDs if you want to(I won't)), but don't look to closley at VCDs. First of all flipping isn't very fun, but futhermore this format suffers from its low bitrate. Scenes with little movement are OK, at least better than VCR, but lots of movement == BAD. I saw Deep blue sea on VCD, and the propeller in the airplane scene looked just... AWFULL. Like an old AVI. This is pretty much unavoidable, there is a reason DVDs use so much higher bitrate.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Damage to the open sources community reputation. I'm sure RMS could sue for$50mil in GNU "image" damages. And im sure Redhat, Caldera, Corel, and other Open source supporting commerical distro companies could as well....
Don't forget, if you want to talk to the people at the MPAA: =)
Rich Taylor or Phuong Yokitis
MPAA
202/293-1966
Emily Kutner
MPAA
818/995-6600
John Stodder
Edelman Public Relations
323/857-9100
do not fear the bottom-feeders that threaten legal action. look to the example that mp3 technology has made of lawyers. mp3 has prospered. the bottom-feeders have backed off in search of bigger fish to fry. as soon as some large corporation figures some way to make money off of dvd copying this will all pass by the wayside. http://i.am/dirtmerchant/fuckthelawyers
Enter the DirtMerchant
Recently some absurd issues have come up. Things like UCITA proposing to not allow software reselling (as I understood what I read. I would not be allowed to sell my software to someone else or even give it to someone else) and the whole DVD issue as well as stupid patents (which _can_ be written off to protecting IP (speaking of...)) are so... wrong (you know what I mean).
So, maybe someone can answer a question (since IANAHistorian(or anyone else qualified to answer my question (heh, nested ()'s))). I see trends like this happen repeatedly (I believe someone tried to ban reselling of books a while back). Why? I can almost see it as a societal thing (as a culture progresses it's initial values dissolve and are replaced by more "protective" laws etc.).
Thanks
jay
What damages have they suffered? How much cost damage would they put on it?
Whats putting a group of people going to acheive for these large companies?
Wiggeda Wiggeda Wack - Kriss Kross
Insert here.. I dont know whether anybody needs another analogy to explain this but here is my $0.02. The DVD situation is more like publishing all books in Klingon and then charging everyone for a Klingon-English dictionary (or universal translator). I do not think it is a crime in making available a dictionary for free. As far as making copies of those books, all one needs is a photocopier or to be really low-tech, pen and paper to transcribe each word, stroke by stroke. H
Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you still make a bit-for-bit copy of a DVD with encryption in place?? The decryption software isn't promoting piracy, in that if you decrypt it, you still need a player to watch it. And current players assume encryption is in place anyways. If you own an authorized player with a valid decryption key, and you make a bit-for-bit copy, you would still be able to watch the copy. The only thing the cracking of the decryption key allows is "pirated" player programs.
Which was the intent all along: DVD-players for Linux. I really hope someone makes a coherant argument in this vein in the courtroom. Rationality isn't always known to prevail, but it does break through every once in a while.
Sorry 'bout the double post. Hit stop in the middle of a submit. :(
My point exactly! I don't understand how any judge could look at the obvious truths here and still side with the MPAA. Unfortunately, worse injustices have been done.
Arguments that have no basis in fact make me angry at those who waste the Court's time and, therefore, my tax dollars.
Let's rip 'em a new one!
Also, I don't really care for artists like Puff Daddy pissing and moaning about how Napster is so offensive and that using it is "stealing." What's that you say? Four Rolls Royces aren't enough and you need a fifth one to complement the $3,000,000 summer cottage? Some more whores and crack and doobies? Right away, guv'nor! Shall I fetch your riding linens as well?
I remember when the Wherehouse used to have a giant machine with literally thousands of music titles stored on tape inside. You'd go through a catalogue, write down the numbers corresponding to the songs you wanted, hand it to a clerk, and s/he'd pop a blank tape into the giant machine and five or ten minutes later you'd have a custom tape with just what you wanted for something like $15-$20 (each song would cost $1.00 or $2.00 or whatever). If they brought that back today and offered Minidisc rather than just tape output, that would be the best. I'd rather spend $20 to get a minidisc with all the really, really, really good stuff on it, and REALLY have it at CD quality, than spend five or six hours scrounging all that stuff up on crappy-sounding 128-kilobit mp3s.
Plus, the music industry would probably be happy about the serial copy management system, which ostensibly prevents hooking up two MD players over optical cable and making perfect (serial) copies. (Not that no one has ever found a way of bypassing this, but still...)
>All of them.
I believe there could a difference between:
Does anybody know?
-steve
"I am not here. This conversation never took place." - Anonymous
Free Martian Whores!
As pointed out in the header, you can buy a shirt with the DeCSS code printed on it.
BTW: 4 dollars of each purchase goes to EFF.
Wasn't their a contest somewhere about who could distribute the source in the most creative way? This gets my vote?
David
Striking a blow into what?
This is about as bad as the Napster suit. No way we're going to see an MPAA or RIAA victory in copyright suits this millenium, or the one that begins next year...
-Michael
it is quite arrogant of the MPAA to think they are stopping piracy. It would be very straight forward to do a hardware hack to read a dvd bit for bit. What's to stop me from publishing such a hardware hack and technical info on the web?? (FYI I work with circuits)
I, for one, was thinking of getting a DVD player. Since it looks like the DVD makers don't want me to be able to play DVDs on anything but what *they* dictate, and the movie makers are on their side, I guess I will stick with pirateable VHS tapes and keep my money in *my* pocket, because it looks like the "intellectual property owners" don't want my money in their pockets.
</rant>
And that would be an argument I would make if I were an attorney on our side. It appeals to emotions a little bit but it also conjurs very powerful imagery.
Of course the judge too might see that and ask you to refrain from making such argument.
Ignore Alien Orders
>That's like making unauthorized keys to a department store.
No, it's not. DVDs contain information, stores contain stuff to steal. There is a difference. I have heard *way* to many analogys that *don't* work the way they are applied, this is stupid. Analogys to explain something technical is sometimes ok, but the abuse is with moral issues. You all probably know, but don't pay any attention to analogys to make a moral statement. Sorry about the rant.
i wonder if the movie studio execs wish that they had supported DIVX now :>
We have filed suit in federal court to stop internet hackers from distributing the software designed to circumvent the encryption technology that prevents the unlawful copying of DVDs."
The flaw in this argument -- and also in the complaint in the lawsuit -- is that the CSS (Content Scrambling System) does not prevent copying -- lawful or otherwise. It prevents you from playing the DVD -- the original or the copy -- on a player which the industry group that controls the system has not licensed.
In short, it's designed to extract royalties from the makers of the players. It also has another purpose: to enforce "region locking."
"Region locking" allows the vendor to sell copies of the same work for different prices in different markets. The disks are unplayable by players sold outside the region in which the disks are intended to be sold. Region locking prevents "parallel imports" -- a form of arbitrage in which an enterprising dealer imports product from a region or country where it's sold for less money.
Region locking is, technically, a violation of the Robinson-Patman Act, an antitrust law which prohibits the manipulation of markets by charging different prices for the same product. But this doesn't keep the vendors from trying.
In any event, the key point is that CSS does not , in any way, prevent copying. If you make a bit-for-bit copy of a DVD, it will be playable on any machine that could play the original.
--Brett Glass
When will they give up. The amount of nerds in the world is far greater than theirs, they/we carry lots of power and skill.
Warner brothers sees it, though:
"We believe there is no economic incentive to hack this product. The cost of the blank is more expensive than the cost of the finished product"
It's right.
Of course, in our the last article about this (we "winning" the last trial), the boldest point was that You Can Still Copy and Play it Even When Encrypted.
I can rip the DVD and email it to my friends! No decryption!
Of course, the media is $40! But the movie is $10!
Agh.. When will it end?!
1) Microsoft is NOT a monopoly - never has been by any reasonable definition
Ummm,.... you're on crack right? Or is this just flame bait? A joke maybe?? hmmm - maybe you're just not in touch with IT reality?
MS == MonoploySoft
What does it take to educate these journalists? I meet a few at COMDEX who were wondering why on earth the Government was after MicroSoft! (even after I told them about MS business practices, they still thought MS was innocent!)
Only in a criminal case. If you're sued, there's no requirement for an attorney to be provided: you're responsible for your own defense.
It matters not at all, but every time I see Valente's name, I am reminded of what he said thirtysomething years ago, when the C-in-C escalated the bombIng of North Vietnam:
Says a lot about the guy, if anyone gives a shit.
I hope a lot of you buy shirts (But not enough that I don't get mine for a year) =]
Well that's how it's going to be once MDAA gets to sue you.
Jack, chill. And maybe you should get a clue before going over the top.
---
---
Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
Say one of them other companies, that have the encryption keys and stuff, like xing techs, what if they develop a *NIX dvd player/software ?
Then, the bad guys^TM can say that the 'interoperatibibtiility' issue thingig majigi is no longer valid, because there is a dvd software of linux. Then again, maybe i am not making much sense cause i am abit drunk.
eehee
Flamebait my *ss - it's called "insightful" when you share true knowledge you know ...
it's in my head
I have not seen one broadcast outside the internet that comes close to supporting the CSSDVD- which most of us agree is a good thing. I believe that better publicity for us is necessary on this as on many other topics or public opinion will be so strongly against us that we do not have a chance of winning this battle (yes, I believe opinion does affect the law- and we NEED that lever to not be almost exclusively in the other direction.
One problem is that by its very nature, the open source community is not too keen on style over substance- butwe need some style.
--You say it best when you say nothing at all-
-Ronan Keating--
(First Post? and that would be better left unsaid...here goes any karma...)
--Only the intellectually lost ever argue-
I don't suffer from insanity- I enjoy it immensly!
Yes! Make it up in volume! Treat the DVDs as a loss leader to get your friends into your dorm room. Once inside, hit 'em up with some really over-priced appliances and personal electronics.
Just watch out from a lawsuit from Best Buy or Circuit City on their "patented" business method.
I think the more interesting and accurate analogy would be the car dealer taking you to court to prevent you from making a copy of your car.
Go ahead and try, btw...
You can make thousands of bit-for-bit copies. But since you cannot make them validly readable by commercially available consumer DVD hardware, without using the crack that the MPAA opposes, you've just wasted a lot of media.
It's rehashed over and over in comments to this article. Go read them.
I'm surprised that I had to read this far down the comments page to get to the first neo-Leninist "the end we seek is inevitable, we shall prevail" manifesto on this topic. Thank goodness my expectations were met, or I'd worry I wasn't reading Slashdot.
It might seem, from reading certain websites, like there is mass support on this issue, but it could be dangerous to try to call a quorum on the matter this early in "the fight."
An entertainer who has a loyal but small following doesn't book an arena that seats 100,000 people and invite the press in to see how "popular" he is. Unless he knows at least 85,000 people will show up.
Oh, come on! Trolling with that huge flashy lure isn't gonna get you a stringer of lunkers. You'll just scare away all the walleyes and end up with a hammerhandle northern pike.
Try again.
Will this ultimate DVD player run on my StrongARM Linux box? It's based on a nice ATX form factor motherboard from Chalice Technologies. Lots of room in the ATX case for a 5-1/4" form-factor DVD drive....
Obviously a binary would be available for the more common Alpha, PPC, Sparc, etc. And native ports for NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. On all the architectures those OSes run on. (oh wait, probably not needed on Vax..)
Anyhow, I hope you can figure out my point...
It was my first copyleft purchase. I couldn't resist, this issue makes me so angry.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
But now for the philosophical digression. What bothers me is this "freedom on the internet" genre of posts which makes it sound like us techies are being "oppressed" by big corporations. How is it that big corporations can control the 'net? Aren't we the ones with the technical skills to master the internet? And how is it that they can make the rules?
The truth is, they can't. Linux is proof of that. Who needs DVD? If we want to watch movies, we, the techies, should write an open source movie format. Or is this too difficult a challenge for a bunch of geeks? To be effective, it would have to be portable across all platforms, and provide a reasonable degree of copy protection.
That's right, copy protection. Movie makers make movies for the sake of making money. If we want them to use our standard (assuming we wrote one), then we would have to offer them assurances that their works could not be copied en masse and distributed without them making a profit.
As much as I would like to agree with most of the opinions regarding DeCSS and the MPAA, I can't. You see, they wrote the software - it is theirs. For us to claim that hindering the distribution of DeCSS is restricting our freedoms is ridiculous - it has the ability to destroy the very foundation for profit upon which the MPAA stands. Think about your own values regarding privacy and secrecy:
- Say someone discovered your debit card number; You wouldn't want them to post it on the internet.
- But say that someone did post it. Now, you could lose everything in that account.
Businesses are just like that debit card, folks. Investors have placed lots of money in the development of DVD technology - and stand to lose a lot in the face of DeCSS. The appeal of DVD to the movie makers is that it prevents unauthorized copying. Take away this, and DVD is a glorified CDROM. And here is the problem.We say investors, but we mean people. Real people like you and me invest in technology. We risk our hard earned money. And when something like DeCSS comes along, it threatens to nullify the investment that real people have made in technology, and make people more reluctant to accept new technology. Real people lose real money. It's not just an issue of freedom, but of ethics. To destroy someone else's business investment for the sake of "freedom" is unethical, to say the least. Our careers, our lives are dependent upon the acceptance of new technology, and ironically, DeCSS has probably hurt the geek community more than it has helped. Without trust in technology, we could look forward to careers in janitorial duties.
DeCSS is not the way to get DVD to Linux. We as a community need to display a little integrity and work with the DVD folks. An Open Source license may not be appropriate. But then, no one wants to be friends with someone who can't keep a secret. So we should either develop our own standard, or work with the MPAA. But we should stop whining about "freedom"(which isn't the issue at all), and do something to bring movies to Linux.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Absolutely. On the surface they are protecting their main interest: the rights of the starving artists^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H making money. But it's really a supply and demand issue. When internet access is user-friendly enough for your average couch potato, streaming video will probably solve this problem. You pay your fee and get access via some sort of pnm URL, like RealPlayer uses, and voila!
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
As for the software that doesn't do well under linux because of piracy, I'd like you to prove that, because I don't think you can. And even so, there are many many more such programs for windows than linux.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
I disagree. It doesn't matter how much things cost. People will pirate them anyway, because they simply don't care.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
You're really not helping our argument that linux user's aren't pirates.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
How about we sue both of them for anti-compeditive actions such as FORCING us to use a W1ndows OS to view DVD movies? Since the REAL issue is not piracy but our ability to use DVD products in OTHER ALTERNATIVE Operating systems other then Micro$oft W1ndows.
It's time we took a stand and said *NO*, we're not going to take this shit anymore. We need to make companies listen to us and demand they respond to their customers or risk backlash. This is a free world (so we think) and we have the RIGHT to use Linux (or another OS) to play DVD movies.
If the industry can't listen we have to make them listen. Perhaps by blocking DVD movies on the web?
We need to have a campaign to let the public know what these two organizations are doing. Fight fire with fire!
I don't post very much on slashdot but this issue has pissed me off hugely and If I had the money I'd so the hell out of both of them for their incompentence!
We need to turn the tables and prove that they are purposely alienating UNIX users from using DVDs on their systems.
(We need lots of money and a fund)
- earache
http://www.tgwbp.addr.com/cgi-bin/wwwboard.cgi
i would have bought a tee shirt but those are the uglyiest ones i have ever seen. the need to design new ones quick, before paramount, et. al. go after them too.
Ill be contacting the world trade organzination. regional coding is against the rules in the world trade organzation and like to sue companys for hundreds of millions. Teach them a lesson.
Finally, an intelligent statement....at leasst there's gonna be one thread on ehere that's not just "this sucks, DVD people suck"
Unfortunately, the arisen question is a rather difficult one....The only real way to change the way that things are would be the massively educate the public on the reasoning behind unencrypting DVD tech, and how illogical it is to actually rip DVDs to give to other people...Of course, this is easier said than done.
Can we do it? Can we stay out of movie theaters until these folks get hit enough in the bank account to make a difference? Can we hit hard enough through TV advertisers who support our favorite shows? Or is it just the DVD hardware manufacturers who we take action against? I spend over $2k per year taking me and my family of 4 to movies. I don't watch much TV, but my family does. I can do this, ignore the latest installment of Hollywood. I won't like it, but I like what they're doing much less. BTW, I've given DeCSS out to 100+ folks. Had a bunch of old floppies I paid for and didn't want to throw away. Tell Martha to get the kids in, looks like a nasty storm's a comin'
These people really tick me off. It really torques me that an organization like this thinks they can get away with this. I say... distribute this as far and as wide as you can. Don't let them try to close it down. We (the linux community) are not trying to pirate, we just want our own choice in what platform we watch DVDs on. Has it ever OCCURED to them that this software might not exist if they would LISTEN to their customers?
This is the ultimate in corporate arrogance. I wouldn't be surprised if theyre under contract with MS to make sure DVDs can't be listened to under Linux.
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
Please use caution when considering the cost effectiveness of copying a DVD movie.
Currently, the cost of creating a DVD is high, and it is somewhat cumbersome to move around several gigabytes of data at once. But we can't ignore tha fact that someday, a few years down the road, average Joe will be able to burn double-sided DVD's with video information stored on his 1 terabyte hard drive. It's not cost effective now or very possible to burn DVDs but soon it will be.
But rather, we can use the cost effectiveness argument to clarify the purpose behind DeCSS' creation, in the context of present time. You say something like "Why would one use this software to help us pirate DVDs when nowadays it's not possible to effectively do so at all." DeCSS exists today, even though it's totally impractical to pirate DVDs today, so how can DeCSS and piracy be connected?
Sure, you could point out that down the road, DeCSS will still make piracy easier, but an unencrypted DVD movie is only of use to computer users with MPEG2 players, as software DVD players and console DVD players will just laugh at your unencrypted data (or choke, depends). If you want to get raw video data, just use a frame buffer grabber. That couldn't be too hard to write, hasn't anyone ever needed to record what they see on the monitor to a video file?
My main point is that when using the cost-effectiveness argument against DeCSS being a piracy tool, then be sure to include time context.
Other than that stuff, another way to look at things is to see what use a huge file is, encrypted or unencrypted.
So let's say you have a 5 gig file of encrypted video that you grabbed from a DVD. You do this by mounting the DVD as a drive using the experimental filesystem for DVDs (I forget the name, there's info on how to do this on opendvd.org) and grabbing the file. If you burn this to a blank DVD using your thousand dollar equipment, you have a disc that won't play in a DVD console player because it has no key blocks on it. Using fancier hardware, you could get those key blocks and write them to the disc (it's just like any other data, you just need the right hardware to do it.) and have a DVD that works on console players. You can supposedly trick software players into playing a file. I don't know if this file has to be encrypted or not. A straight MPEG2 player won't do anything with encrypted data.
So now let's say you have a 5 gig file of unencrypted video data that you just DeCSSed. You can copy it to a DVD disc and it's useless in a console player. You can use the special hardware to even put the key blocks on the disc and you still have a worthless disc. (So the console runs decrypted data through a decryptor and gets what? Scambled eggs?) The unencrypted files can be viewed on a computer with a simple MPEG2 player.
So we've established that making a DVD disc that can be played in console players requires special hardware, and DeCSS doesn't help us. And playing a file on a computer, it doesn't matter if it's encrypted or not, as long as those players really can be tricked into playing an encrypted DVD from hard disk. So would someone please clear up the details on getting software players to play movies on hard disk?
Beer wants to be free
How about small piece of 4mm DAT.
This is about what you'd ecpect given the reception they got at the TRO hearing. I'd say they are trying to make it difficult for the white hats to be everywhere necessary and are prepared to spend what it takes to do that. In military terms disrupt and defeat in detail. It goes without saying that they are jurisdiction shopping as well looking for a more receptive judicial ear.
Give it yes, sell it no. Also I feel if I buy anything I own it period. If I want to jumble the data anyway I want. If I want to run it over with my car or play frizbee with it ro pump 27,000 volts across it I have that right. They sold me the key with the product, it is mine and I should be able to do with it whatever I want.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
If the litigation falls in support of open source, wouldn't the DVD manufactures make more by selling all the component based DVD writers?
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Not in your home, there are specific allocations for that. On a related note though my buddies wife had a home daycare thing set up, she watched about 4 kids during the day. She showed movies like Bambi in the afternoon and was served with a cease order from MGM. Seems showing to the kids constituted a public viewing, even in their home.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
What do we do do make an impact? Spam, letter writing, DOS on the law firm representing? No, this stuff really never seems to have an impact.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
I wonder where the DVD player manufactures weigh in on this. I would assume that they would be on the opensource side of the house, simply because it would mean more dollars for them in the long run.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
With all the intelligence this forums community has, targeted at an issue like this I think we could make an impact. Not just for the short term either, it could be precident setting on open source as a whole.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Although I'm not commenting on if the MPAA has a legitimate point here, or if the case is going after the real problem, I'd like to point a concern that is part of the reason why they are going to these lengths at this.
:) I feel that their motivations are not entirely to blame. History has proven piracy to be a major problem, if it is allowed to escalate.
MPAA is is concerned about the future of the movie industry. Large-scale privacy has affected the previously thriving Hong Kong movie industry drastically. They are not able to produce and finance movies in the same scale and number as they used to, because piracy puts the money into the pockets of organized crime bosses. In fact, movie directors, producers, writers and even actors and actresses held a demonstration last year against the rampant pirating in Hong Kong. This "grassroots"-picketing was an eye-opener to many HK-people. If it's too late remains to be seen.
MPAA is genuinely interested in preserving the industry. It might very well be that the case(s) demonstrate a knee-jerk reflex. But as a screenwriter (unproduced, but just wait
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
Look at this: (lifted from someone else's post...) From the Connecticut suit 23. The Copyright Act, Title 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(2), provides that: [n]o person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that -- (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; (B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or (C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. Read the preamble carefully. You can OWN the software, but you can't ACQUIRE it. You can't provide it for download domestically, nor can you download it yourself from abroad. That, my friends, is the crux of the matter. If that Washington suit is upheld, and CODE is held to be a valid form of expression covered by free speech / 1st Amendment, then this clause is flagrantly unconstitutional. Now, if we can just make this point in court, we're saved. :-) ISHBAL (I Should Have Been A Lawyer)
You can already buy DVD players (legal, above board units) that will play DVD from ANY region. There's a place in the UK that sells Denon units for around $1500 US (yes, $1500. I didn't say it was cheap). These units include decoders for all six regions. No hacking or cracking involved.
I assume that you can buy them in Asia for a fraction of the cost, since I picked up a multifunction Philips VCR in Singapore for $250 last year (compared to US price for same model : $1200+).
Also, if you're a masocist and you have one of the earlier DVD-ROM drives (or are just a discerning shopper) you can swap your region as often as you like by re-installing your OS every 5 changes. Perfectly legal, but a hassle. Or you could download a little piece of software that'll tweak your registry for you. Arguably not-so-legal, but wouldn't stand up in court.
So there.
*sarcasm* oh well, if i can't PIRATE DVDs in linux (which is my WHOLE intent...) then i guess i'll have to switch back to plain old blatant THEFT from the store. heck, when was the last time SUNCOAST got shut down for being a distro? -barton
Whoa, back that train up... let's look a bit closer at this. A) indicates a product or technology "Primarily" designed to circumvent copyright protections. Is that DeCSS' primary purpose or is it incidental to it's functionality? B) is right out, to my thinking (depending on one's definitions of Open Source and Commercial viability)since interoperability with alternate platforms would seem commercially valid. But, notice that this links with an "or" to C) their primary avenue of attack. If they nail these few guys for wording this as a product which enables copying (and hence, these guys knew people might use it to pirate) then precedent is set that everyone else (RedHat, Suse, name yer distro) also must know the potential for abuse and thus will NOT take on the liability. Also unfortuntely, the wording these guys used doesn't look good. The key, as has been said before in this discussion, is to get a viable Linux DVD player out before the end of this case. HIGH PRIORITY on this one, people. Tranq
Something that I discovered recently about my Pinnacle Systems DC10+ is that any DVD signals passed through it on the way to the VCR or hard drive end up having the Macrovision signal disabled. So in theory I can save the DVD audio and video stream onto my hard drive in the native MJPEG .avi format and then later convert it to MPEG with little loss of quality. Now since Pinnacle also offers a card that goes straight to MPEG, I would have to wonder if this "capability" is still possible. Or even if owners of other video-editing cards can do this. While I know that this process won't take you from DVD to DVD flawlessly, it does open the possibility of making acceptable-quality MPEG copies of these DVD's for "pirate" distribution.
[n]o person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that -
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person?s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
- Etam
Even so, I think the idea of people commonly sharing DVD-sized files over the internet is a pretty ridiculous one, and you're probably justified in referring to the MPAA's concerns as "groundless paranoia".
I would be careful calling DVD piracy "groundless paranoia." When CD's first came out, they too were viewed as almost limitless in size. One couldn't imagine storing the contents of a 650 mb CD on their harddrive, let alone actually transfering the things over a modem. Of course, storage and bandwidth got better and cheaper, but, more importantly, advances in compression (mp3) really set the scene for piracy. People with 56k modems happily wait half an hour to get a song, and with consumer broadband on the horizon, the situation is looking better and better for audio pirates.
With Phillips releasing CD copiers that work sans-computer, CD piracy is reaching new heights, even amoung the low-tech.
Labeling the MPAA's conserns about piracy as "groundless paranoia" is horribly short-sighted. While I do think that they have a valid point, I do not think that they have a case.
-x1r0k3wl
I was under the impression that it was every person's legal right to have an attorney provided for them by the state if they were a defendant in a case. I could be wrong. So running the defendants out of money wouldn't be a viable option in that case, as the state would have to provide them with adequate defense.
I don't have a sig.
Inasmuch as Linux DVD users amount to a class. That's the ticket -- sue the bastards!
Do you understand what bit-to-bit copy mean ? it simply mean : dd if=/dev/hdd of=mydvd_backup This will be an ***exact*** (bit-to-bit) copy of the content of the disc... In order to play it : just reap mydvd_backup content onto a DVD, this isn't possible at this time cause there isn't DVD writter ( maybe i'm wrong here ) availlable to customer.. Or just use a player and make it assume that mydvd_backup is a plain dvd...
This is becoming crazy !!! When does people will understand that the so called CSS is nothing for copy protection, but is a commercial thing !!! It was said more than 100 times : if someone want to copy a DVD just make a bits to bits copy !!! CSS was just created in order to restrict company that can offer a DVD player and make them pay royalty... This is really becoming a money problem, and the company which carry complaint have really many monney... Stop this : at the next DVD hearing for the CSS case, just show to the judge that CSS is nothing but bullshit, show them that a bits to bits DVD copy is possible, even without knowing anything to CSS...
DeCSS or the like is also useful, more even, in reverse; to put your own material on a DVD that's
readable on a normal DVD player. With DVD-writers coming soon, they're trying to make it so that nobody can make a video (home movies? South Park premiere?) without permission from the DVD Cabal.
Join the EFF. When the original suit was announced I went to the EFF's site and signed up at the highest amount I could manage. that's www.eff.org. I've had differences with them over crypto before, but when it comes down to who's going to defend against this kind of garbage, only the EFF has been there for us. Join. Join now.
--
We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
Download.com has a DVD Ripper available as freeware on their site, I suggest getting it before it is taken down. Also, if they have it on their site, along with other DVD ripper/hacking utilities, and with DVD burners widely available, how do the Plaintiffs ever expect to stop the hacking of DVD's?? The cat has already been let out of the bag folks. And just think, VHS is a piece of cake to copy, and have the movie companies all gone out of business, I think not!
They pushing around the little guys with thier souless army of lawyers, but they never stopped to think:
The average joe still can't burn DVD's economicailly... he doesn't like downloading humungous files just to avoid the $2 rental of "The Matrix"... and he doesn't have the disk space to store a DVD video library on his hdd!
The MPAA's strategy is rediculous. If you want to stop piracy you need to start with the big boys that have the means to burn the damn things. Alienating your core tech audience by suing the pants off anyone that tries to tinker with your product is a waste of time abd money.
It's lots of stress for the poor sod on the recieving end of the summons, and it's downright evil.
First the music industry then the film industry... let's all just hope the TV people don't turn on us too.
I can't believe this crap. I didn't even KNOW about this until just today when I came on Slashdot. Anyway, like CmdrTaco says, PLEASE everyone support this by joining the EFF or at least getting a T-Shirt at Copyleft. I am a friend of A. Sleep in CT, who is being prosecuted, and I cannot stress enough the everyone's help will be appreciated. Everyone should Learn the Facts from http://www.2600.com/ and http://www.ct2600.org/ and my site is temporarily at http://www.geocities.com/supruzr
here
The EFF *is* our defense in cases like these. Support their efforts!
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Whenever a long dominant beast is finally bested by a larger beast, it will fight and fuss until it is silenced. The corporate beast which is (MPAA/RIAA/ABC/NBC/CBS/MTV/takeyourpick) is steeped in deep, deep denial of the future, of bandwidth and access to the media they have dominated so well for the last 30 years. Of course they will file frivolous, arrogant, amazingly void lawsuits against small, weak people (in the financial sense). The best way to make this quick and (relatively) painless is to expeditite the death of the behemoth. There are 2 ways to do this, and they must be done in tandem to be effective: 1) Openly defy their illegal assertions as much and in the most high-profile way possible. 2) Get the word out to anyone who will listen. The Swindle
DeCSS was not written for the sake of interoperability. From looking at the README, it looks like it was cracked for the Hell of it, then passed to a contact in the Linux scene.
The cracking for the hell of it happened in Norway. No matter how hard the US courts try, they have no jurisdiction there. The distributors promote it as a tool to play DVDs in Linux (interoperability). As for the Windows dlls, iot's still interoperabiolity. It allows software that plays mpeg and other files from VCD or hard drive to interoperate with the DVD storage format.
That leaves only USE. Use will have to be handled on an individual basis. If someone uses DeCSS for unauthorized copying, MPAA is within their rights to sue that user for that particular use.
Well, that will work great for the video, but you'll loose frames if the VSinc isn't right (60fps movie on a 75hz monitor=bad), and you'll also have to manualy sync the audio.
Actually, movie = 24fps and NTSC is 30fps (60 FIELDS per second 1 odd field + 1 even field makes a frame) every fourth frame of a movie is shown twice in the video to make up the difference (you can verify this by frame advancing a video tape and watching for duplicates). Since the 75hz of the monitor is more than twice the rate of the movie the problem is removing half updated and duplicate frames rather than missing frames. That is quite possable to do after the fact, it need not be real time.
This is true, but how many people have the technological know-how ot do that?
All it takes is ONE person. In many countries, the software would be perfectly legal under fair use. With the net, it will soon enough be used elsewhere. As I understand it, there are already SEVERAL such programs in existance that pre-date DeCSS by a year or two. There are also people who are either using those programs or their own version of DeCSS for purposes of piracy. It's hard to tell how many are using them for fair use.
Do you have to arrange a license agreement with the MPAA? What happens to these kids who just happen to code 10 times more than the suits? Is there something special about a business suit that says these guys can offer a DVD player and the kid who does the equivalent work using 1/1000000 the venture capitol can't offer anything?
The cose of the media is one issue. The cost of the equipment to do a bit by bit is much bigger. Apparently those things are extremely expensive.
Here's a permanent link for theDigital Millennium Copyright Act.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I'm afraid that DeCSS's primary (only?) purpose is to provide access (defined as to decrypt or descramble in the law) copyrighted materials. It does not matter in the eyes of this law if the end user has purchased the material.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Publish the source in the LA Times... What a LOVELY idea.
-- Slashdot sucks.
You probably can't sue them back. I did some browsing around when the code was first released and when it was yanked. Proprietary code was leaked so DeCSS wasn't really a feat of reverse engineering. In an attempt to make things legit somebody went through the effort of rewriting the code. Unfortunately any such attempt by anybody who has had access to the code results in... tainted code.
In order to legally reverse engineer something a clean room approach has to be taken, otherwise you're plaguerising and not reverse engineering.
This is pretty well documented in courts by the early days of cloning the IBM PC BIOS. IBM really wanted to nail Phoenix technologies (I think it was Phoenix, its been quite a while and I was pretty young) but Phoenix was pretty smart. They had two groups of engineers, one group who would characterize what results they saw from a BIOS and would explain it for the second group of engineers. The second group of engineers had the task of coding.
If the code was truly reverse engineered the lawsuit would probably still happen but it would have a lot less teeth. They could point at any patented technology but not trade secrets.
But if commercially available writers don't allow you to write to the special sectors then it's impossible to create "pirate" copies of DVDs even if one *does* possess the decryption key, so the DVD piracy claims are 200% bogus either way.
Talk about a weak case. The judges are going to have to be deaf, (very) dumb and blind to let this action succeed.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
A question for the lawyer types ...
Are there grounds for a countersuit anywhere here?
I guess you can't sue someone for being technically clueless, irritating and regressive, but how about at least seeking punitive damages for them willfully wasting the time of the court and of hundreds of defendents while in full possession of the knowledge that the DeCSS crack *cannot* lead to the production of "pirate" copies of DVDs?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I don't think that what you say is the case, because small-scale cracked copying (as opposed to commercial-scale replication or cloning) of DVDs is an *exact* counterpart to personal copying of music on cassette tapes as practiced extremely widely over the last two decades. The studios took great exception to that as well, yet in practice it didn't decimate the music industry at all. In fact, it probably stimulated it. [Eg. it's very common for folks to later buy CDs of the artists that they had recorded on cassette in earlier days when they were much poorer, especially at school or university. Nostalgia is a very powerful force.]
But then, it's pointless to point out the flaws in anti-copying arguments and the counter-lessons of history to a bunch of deaf, short-termist money grabbers with closed minds.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
A cracked DVD written onto media without encryption is not a duplicate of that DVD, and being different to the original it isn't going to lead to the huge market losses that they are alleging will happen. It's not mainstream. It won't be sold in the high-street as a forgery of the original product.
If you don't distinguish between this kind of enterprising but limited-market stuff and mass-volume copying then it's no surprise that you can be led by the nose by those who base their attempts at consumer control on the fiction of rampant piracy.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
This is relevant because it means that without using reverse-engineered code (such as that in DeCSS), it is NOT possible to make a copy of an encrypted DVD using readily available consumer or commercial equipment. The people who assert that it is trivial to make bit-for-bit-identical copies of encrypted DVDs without decrypting them have obviously never tried to do so.
AFAIK there's nothing that would prevent a skilled engineer from extracting the modulated data directly from the read channel of a DVD player or DVD-ROM drive, and feeding that stream "directly" to the write electronics of a DVD-R drive. This would require the construction of a moderate amount of custom electronics, and possibly some alteration to the firmware of the DVD-R drive.
2600 have been hit by a preliminary injunction about the DeCSS, basically banning them from thinking about it.
Exactly. History repeats itself, folks. I remember waiting 8 hours with bated to download fscking Wolfenstein - the 3D graphics were supposed to be jaw-dropping (At the time, I guess they were.) Things will get cheaper, and better, and faster, and soon we'll all be shooting DVDs across the net. As is typical, this will first happen at colleges, the same place that MP3s first became big, simply because they have no money and the fattest pipes around. I wouldn't count on any compression advances for DVD (they're already compressed; compressing a compressed file is meaningless), but there comes a time in the foreseeable future when transferring an 11gb DVD image and burning it ain't that farfetched. I'd give it three years. And oh, whaddya know, I'm going to college next year :)
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I believe the EFF is helping the defendants and that a defense fund will be (is?) set up. Things should not be that hard from the legal side.
On the front of public opinion, however, there is a lot to be done. If everyone who reads this article would phone or mail their local newspaper and tell them what's up (or just point them to the right sources), then we'll be able to make an impact.
Just point your local journalists to this site and explain them (politely and patiently) that the movie industry is (illegally) trying to take away consumer's rights. Your rights, their rights!
And remember, nobody will be interested in the story until you can show them that it is relevant to them too. In this case it is, so please use that facet of the story to get publicity...
This is a very bad plan. It will only encourage more lawsuits and sillyness. If we can convince a judge that PIRACY IS NOT A PROBLEM, we can go on with our lives. If piracy is a problem, espcially due to DeCSS or other "hacker programs," we will lose. Not only will we lose in the DVD case, big buisness with then have a case to cite in other areas. Remember, American law is precedent based. If we lose here, we lose everywhere.
No, the best course of action is not to thumb our nose at authority and say "Dare Ya to Crack down on us HARD", but rather to show our good and peaceful intentions through legal means.
However you look at, piracy is wrong. You can rationalize all you want about how the man is screwing you over, but when it comes down to it, you are commiting a crime if you pirate movies. Even RMS, one of the staunchest anti-IP advocates does not advocate piracy. Circumvention through legal means, yes (winning these lawsuits). Piracy, no.
If on the other hand, we lose these lawsuits, there are still measures that can be taken. In a number of countries it is still legal to reverse engineer for the sake of compatibility. Wait till a Linux player comes from one of them.
No matter what happens, we will win in the long run, it is impossible to prevent the free flow of information forever, as any spook will tell you. But how we conduct ourselves in the short run is key to how the long run will look. I urge anyone considering piracy as a "solution" to this problem to count to ten and reconsider.
--Nick
Could someone in Asia pick up one of these counterfeit discs and send it to the EFF legal team? I'm sure it would be appreciated in court as evidence supporting our position.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
While the goal behind css-auth was to unlock the damn things so that they could be played under Linux, the fact remains that once unlocked, they can be copied. It's not economically feasible to make a true DVD-quality copy at this point, because of storage expense. However, downsampling them to mpeg-1 for VCD's is now possible.
On the other hand, this isn't that much different from people making crappy copies of VHS tapes by doing a tape to tape copy...
But I agree with you that if we pretend that NO form of piracy exists as a result of this code, we will get burned.
----
Is it possible for the best comments and suggestions to be picked out and forwarded to the lawyers? Are the defendands going to have a lawyer? Can they possibly do anything to fight the MPAA without a virtually unlimited supply of cash?
There must be a way Slashdot can help... besides spreading the truth around - this is already obvious...
(I can't provide any answers, so I threw up some questions instead...)
--
The problem is that they have the resources to pull publicity stunts like this all the time, and most people only hear one side of the story.
--
one of the poison ivy series (I really don't know which one.. I saw it at the video store) had the R rated version, as well as the unrated version.
:)
Not quite on the lines of what you're talking about, but kinda close!
No, the Poison Ivy I saw had both versions on the same disc.
By whatever method, some clever Chinese pirates have figured out how to create pirate DVD's that can be played on regular DVD players without the approval of the DVD consortium. This was the case even *before* DeCSS.
I only wish I knew exactly how they had done it (whether they had modified a DVD writer to do bit-for-bit copies, or some other method).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Copyright law in the US is almost totally defined by a few Supreme Court decisions; but occasionally the Congress does act. They have created the abortion called the DCMA (my humble characterization). It prohibits the circumvention of copyright protection devices if they have been put in place by the lawful copyright owner in order to control access to a copyrighted work. It also prohibts the manufacture or making available of technologies, products, and services that are intended to be used primarily as a means of defeating access controls and anti-copying devices. While the first prohibition (on actually doing the circumvention) doesn't go into effect until later this year; the prohibition on manufacture went into effect on October 28, 1998.
So, unlike almost every other interesting copyright lawsuit, this one actually has a law that can be pointed to; that actually specifies pretty closely what is the case here. The decss program is almost certainly a device to break encryption.
On the other hand, it would be hard for the MPAA to hold that the production of a Linux DVD player would be a device to break copyright. It would be interesting to see what the response would be to simple players. It's interesting enough that I might try and see myself.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
It seems that these guys have found some good "bad sheeps" to go after. It seems that they are afraid of making a direct face-to-face with the whole community. However their claims don't go over the Defendents "sins" (proclaiming piracy, links to pirated films and such). They are trying to use these "bad sheeps" to get a chance to come over us all. So, no matter who these Defendents are or did I think that we should defend them because they are just paws in a bigger game. However we should be careful to divide "the black sheeps" from the "real matter".
Some people talk about "export zones" on distribution of DVDs. Some years ago there was a similar feature with software. Even some Microsoft licenses strictly showed where you could or could go, sell or use software you bought in one country/region/continent. There were even some stories about customs agencies getting ready to control "import/export" of software. As far as I know these things went mostly into oblivion with Internet and WTO. Now DVD is a piece of data software. Ho matter the content. So how such export/import regions may still exist for films/music on such media?
I have noted this on a previous slashdot article and once again I can confirm this. In Eurasian region there is already a market of pirated DVDs and it its taking momentum. Most DVDs come from China. And *NOTE CAREFULLY* these DVDs started to appear a few monthes before this DeCSS hype. And by looking at them there are a few methods to break or pirate DVDs
http://dvdpiracy.com
With sites of such kind one THINKS A LOT about the real purpose the big corps are following...
It seems that the large corporations are doing everything in their power to piss me off.
What amazes me about this whole thing is how amazingly the 'geek' community is dealing with this issue, finally having the critical mass to stand up against corporate abuses. I predict many more suits like this in the area of patents and copyrights in the near future.
Hopefully this will remind us that the power of the corporations are eroding our individual rights, and that this appears to be on the rise in the near future. I'm sounding like Chomsky here...
Note to self: don't by anything DVD related. Encourage all of my friends to stay away from the technology. VCD2.0 is looking better all the time.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
This will be much more important when we start to get one to one encryption. It is within fair use to purchase a CD and lend it to a friend, but what if an EvilCD (TM) will only play on your EvilCD player. This law makes it illegal to tell somebody how to modify the EvilCD (or the friend's EvilCD player) to play the EvilCD on a friend's player, even though it is legal to modify the EvilCD or the player under fair use.
This has already happened with DVD technology. It was called DIVX. It was cooked up by Circuit City and some a group of lawyers. They reportedly had lost over $200M before pulling the plug last year.
After 'purchasing' a DIVX disk, you had one 24 hour period (many have been 48 hours, but jist of this is correct) of unlimited viewing. After that, if you wanted to watch it again, you had to pay an additional one time fee. The initial purchase price was ~$5 and the one time fee to unlock it forever was ~$15 - $20.
The 'EvilCD' feature was that the disk would only play in the machine it was registered to. The machine was connected via phone line to the DIVX center which checked to see if it could be played on that machine. So if I bought a DIVX disk, I could play it on my living room DIVX player, but not my bedroom player, unless I paid for it again.
Now while DIVX is dead, the same technology has been incorporated in the only high definition DVD player I am aware of, which was shown as a demo unit at last years CES show. So the EvilCD threat is still out there.
Steve M
Industrial hardware for copying entire dvds is 'commercially available' for large pirates, and the claim is made (though I have not verified it) that hardware-hacking a dvd player to write all sectors is relatively trivial.
So, while maybe not 'anyone' can copy DVDs, people who want to make money at piracy can get from here to there.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
The thingie of it is, they couldn't institute a better encryption scheme on DVDs.
Why? Why good ol' Uncle Sam's "strong encryptions are munitions, heh heh heh" laws, of course!
In order for DVD technology to remain exportable to foreign shores, the level of encryption embodied within it had to be very weak. Undoubtedly they would gladly have put something it would have taken the NSA to crack on it if they could, but they legally couldn't and still be able to sell it overseas. They were, thus, relying on security through obscurity, and, as it ever will, it came around to bite them on the arse.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
You are right there are no such thing as a writer that may write the "hidden" sectors of a DVD. Actually, there are quite few DVD writers at all. DVD RAM, yes, but not real DVD. And those that are able to burn DVDs can burn the hidden sector, altough not by normal IO. But to modify the writer is not harder than modifying your PS to play games from all areas or from home-burned CDs. In fact, decrypting will not help you copy the DVD at all, since you will have to encrypt it with some valid key, too, to make it playable by "normal" players. Just modifying the writer hardware to accept all sectors is much easier.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
No, the defense made the entirely trythful statement the one does not need DeCSS to pirate DVDs. The real point is that DeCSS does not really lower the bar to DVD pirates. Bandwidth and storage constraints remain.
The California case is already dead. It was based on a trade secrets argument and the court laughed when they asked it to stop the dissemination of the trade secrets. The MPAA understands this which is why the new cases were filed in Federal courts.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
In order to legally reverse engineer something a clean room approach has to be taken, otherwise you're plaguerising and not reverse engineering.
Actually, that's not the case. The big problem with the IBM BIOS was that IBM released commented assembler code listings to the BIOS. The clean room was necessary to have a defense against having copied IBMs source code. It provided a defense against copyright infringement.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
[...] but if I were the MPAA, I'd certainly try tactics like this to protect my business.
Yes, and if I were Bill Gates....
The only difference I can see here is that there is an oligopoly instead of a monopoly, tied together by common interests, trying not to loose their position they owned for a long time.
_And_ their actions seem not to fall under a law which forbids that.
Ok, so it seems legal what they do.
In my opinion this is a hole in the law, caused by the fact the in former times there were "natural" barriers stopping other, smaller companies stepping in markets like movie and music production and distribution.
What we have now is that these barriers have fallen, i.e. production techniques have become cheaper and infrastructure matters less.
The big players are panicing and seeking nervously ways to gain their oligopoly and my feeling is some cluefull (hmmm) politians should see this and recognize how some interest groups try to prevent the usefull impact of new technologies in their markets, because it would make their biggest sources of income and power redundant and superfluous.
In order to do this they use their financial power and their combined market influence.
In my eyes there is a big analogy to case like MS's, what's the difference in forcing schemes like CSS into the customers throat and to do the same with proprietary "hooks" in an OS or fileformats in an office suite, which both lock out potential competitors if you have 90% of the market.
Here's what to do if you are a Linux user or distributor:
Get together with a large group of other Linux users, distributors and so forth, and file a countersuit against the MPAA for restraint of trade. A good lawyer could argue that by refusing to make DVD decoder software available for the Linux operating system, the motion picture cartel are harming the Linux market. I'm not a lawyer, nor am I familiar with American laws, so for all I know this wouldn't work, but something tells me that this sort of action is more likely to succeed than the "trade secret" attempt that we have recently seen.
The MPAA is also working on the big assumption that stopping it in America will stop it everywhere. It won't. All it would do is drive DVD decoder technology to countries with less restriction on reverse-engineering. A decoder for Linux will be available, regardless of the outcome of the panic-mode lawsuits now being filed by the motion picture industry.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Furthermore, commercially available DVD writers will not allow you to write to that sector.
So you modify the recorder.
The cost of media and recorders makes home copying unattractive to the man in the street. A completely different picture emerges if you are going to sell 100,000 pirate copies. Such pirates will have the resources to buy or modify recorders to make bit-clone copies.
These cases are much more sensible than the previous one. The specific targets of these cases (as opposed to the DeCSS 'community' as a whole) seem to have specifically promoted DeCSS as a means/aid to copying DVDs.
If this is so then they are no friends of the legitimate users of DeCSS. What is at risk here is that all DeCSS users/distributors are tarred with the same brush, and what needs to be decided is how can we avoid this?
Do we turn up mob handed at court supporting people who perhaps do not deserve our support? It certainly seems difficult to defend them by saying that DeCSS has a legitimate use if they were openly promoting an illegitimate one.
Do we distance ourselves from them, stating loudly that while there may be illegitimate uses of DeCSS, for many people there are very legitimate and completely legal uses?
Whatever happens, it must be made very clear that the people targetted by this case are not 'typical' DeCSS users/distributers and that a loss for the defendants in these cases does not set a precedant for all DeCSS users/distributors.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
No commercially available DVD players will allow you to read or write the section that holds the keys. So, your copy will not have the keys, and other normal DVD players can't play the encrypted contents.
:)
If no commercially available DVD hardware will read or write the keys, then what good does DeCSS do? If I cannot write to that area, then I cannot make a copy of that DVD no matter what I do, right? Because DVD players will not play a DVD without the proper keys, correct? The DVD CCA made sure that I cannot have an "unencrypted" movie, right?
Also: I have heard of DVD copying machines. They don't attempt to play the movie. They simply read in the DVD data bit-for-bit, and write an exact copy of it to the new media. We're talking about a relatively straight-forward extension of CD-R technology. So I don't think you need the keys to copy a DVD after all. Just because such machines aren't available through "normal channels" doesn't mean they don't exist.
Disclaimer: No, I haven't attempted to locate a supplier of DVD copying machines just to verify they exist. I am simply reporting reasonable information which I have heard. Yes, that makes it hearsay, but this is Slashdot, not a court.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Actually, piracy isn't an issue at all, as has been said many times.
You don't *need the key* to do a bit-for-bit copy of the DVD media. The only thing you need the key for is to play it, not to copy it.
--JT
An on topic comment for a change.
Perhaps the these corporations really do feel that piracy IS the issue here. They see this DeCSS thing on a website and instantly can only think of one way to use it. Perhaps some education in the courts is in order. If it could be proved that A) the code was written to support playing on unsupported platforms and B) You can copy dvd's just fine without it then you've effectively poked
some pretty large holes in their arguments.
On the other hand large industry organizations have some pretty good spin-miesters and will start to get legal-technical on our asses. Something needs to be done. I know *I* have
a copy of the css-auth source on my system. I also know that it's not there for pirating movies. I'm quite happy to rent dvd's and watch them. It's there for me to read and learn how it was done. So 20 years down the road when i'm done my time in the trenches as a coder and have moved on to become a pointy haired boss I know what *NOT* to do.
This isn't a one-time cost. Each tape large enough costs $20. a DVD costs $15. sure, you can burn the movie for 20 friends, but you would save $100 if you bought the movie for 20 friends instead.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
OK, so your company produces software. You've chosen to make drivers for non-Linux systems so you're not in my market. Some hardware and content companies will get income from me if I start buying DVD products, even if I'm using a free driver. It's the content companies which are playing games with DVD instead of selling the content. If they really wanted to protect against theft they wouldn't be selling movies on VHS.
I've wanted to buy DVDs for a year, and I have nine screens in home and car which I'd like to view DVDs on. But most of those are on Linux machines, and I'm not going to get discs in a format which I can not use. I've emailed studios to let them know they're losing customers.
*RANT*
I just want DVD on my Linux machine. Is that too much to ask? What have I ever done to these people? I have given them lots of money by viewing their movies, and is this how they reward my sacrifices of real culture?
And all this legal blitz, why does that exist? The plantiffs consistently self-contradict, as in "it is of no economic incentive to [produce DeCSS]", and yet it is apparently of economic incentive to engage in legal action to undermine it's existence. Why does this apply to me, anyway? Most people involved in DeCSS are outside US legal jurisdiction, thereby making most of the plantiff's claims invalid.
And should I ever decide to copy DVD's, which is possible, however unlikely, it will probably be to my hard drive, and I can do it just as well in Windows as I can in Linux, but seeing as I can't even view the damned things in Linux yet, I'm deprived of the satisfaction of entirely obviating Windows, and thus might as well take advantage of it's presence on my hard drive, and use the abundantly available Windows software to copy DVD's.
Now, it is of particular interest to me, these so called law abiding people, where they get the necessary ignorance to sue advocates of open development, in stark raving legal and media lunacy: in the face of clear & obvious benefit to everyone. Everyone that is, except those behind these bizarre scapegoat legal actions.
In my humble but correct opinion, there is no sign of intelligence in these actions. It is the "established" staving off change.
*/RANT*
IIRC, you can't. The area that has decryption keys is either "burned out" or contains data there, such that it is impossible to record there.
So you have to hack the movie and hack the player to store the data...
Ever since I'd heard about DVD's, I've wanted one.. although I was going to wait until DVD recorders (stand-alone) became reasonably priced, so I could replace my aging VCR (several programs I like are shown during my working hours.)
:o).. I was going to take advantage of one of the many boxing-day sales.
When it was announced that "The Matrix" was going to be DVD-only (for purchase) I decided that I'd get a player first, since they are reasonably priced, and I could get a head-start on a decent video collection (I'd start by buying "The Matrix"
But when these stupid lawsuits emerged, it put a decidedly bad taste in my mouth; and until this is settled (in favour of the defendants) I've decided to hold off buying ANYTHING DVD... no players, no recorders, no movies, NOTHING.
So yes, here is ONE customer they have lost because of these lawsuits (I had decided to buy, but have changed my mind because of their bullying tactics.)
And I know several people who feel the same way I do.
I checked out the affidavit from "BRUCE E. BOYDEN, ESQ." one of the DVD lawyers, from 2600 and in it were these points:
5. Typing a URL into a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape causes the user's computer to request a copy of a web page from the server computer, which is downloaded to the user's hard drive. Netscape or Internet Explorer then displays the information that was downloaded. Another, faster way to move from one page to another is by use of "hypertext links", which are URLs embedded in a web page that, when clicked on with a mouse, act the same as typing in the URL into the browser manually.
6. Clicking on a link can not only download web pages; it can also download larger files containing programs such as DeCSS. Many of the pages we visited had such links to files containing DeCSS on the web sites' computers. When clicked on, these files were then downloaded to our computers. I saved each file to a separately named directory on my own computer, then printed out a copy of my computer screen showing the downloaded file in that directory.
WHAT?! You don't need the actual file just a SCREEN SHOT of a directory listing?! Holy cow, that file could be the Department of Corrections Sanitary Statements for all we know! I really hope the EFF doesn't let the DVD lawyers get away with this!
-- iCEBaLM
the defendants are :
www.ct2600.org - a alt2600 fan site.
www.dvd-copy.com - duh
www.2600.com - obvious
www.krackdown.com/decss - ditto
In short, they seem to be going after only the people who were within their jurisdiction - NY and CT.
Whether true or not, that statement is completely irrelevent.
There's absolutely no reason for this, or any other, software to *not* be avalible to the end user.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Yup, if I can view something, I can copy it.
Any case of software or media copy protecton is merely security through obscurity. And as we all know "Security through obscurity is not security at all".
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
On a side note, do SPA members (Microsoft, et al.) who claim multi-billion dollar losses from software piracy report the same to their stockholders and the IRS? I ask since it seems reasonable to start asking the same of the movie industry if we see massive damage claims tied to any reasonably non-vague dollar figure in this litigation.
Finally, is Chris DiBona going to spearhead the community effort here as well? If so, huzzahs.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
First, I urge everyone here to consider this shit as a personal reason to join and contribute to the EFF (and maybe the ACLU too). I know I'm going over to join the EFF (I'm already a member of the ACLU). These cyber/civil liberties activists will not back down, so joining them is one of the more effective things you can do.
Second, the MPAA seems determined to attack our ability to watch DVDs under Linux as piracy. I would suggest that the warez people out there take it as a personal mission to make movies as easy for people to pirate as possible.. just to fuck the MPAA. We need to make a pirating-made-easy tarball of the packages to rip the DVD and reencode it as a VCD (which are small enough to pirate if you have DSL). They can sue all they want, but we can adopt a scorched marketplace policy and make it so that every computer literate collage kid knows how to download a movie for free or give a free copy to a friend! Remember, writable DVDs are expencive, but VCDs cheep are not once you get them encoded and a small enough to pirate over IRC.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
It seems the DVD-CCA lawyers figured it would be easier to sue fewer folks, and those that fit their 'Piracy' angle.
Once the precedent is set there, it's way easier to get injunctions against everyone else. (i!=lawyer). Classic straw-man.
rbb
what we need is some geneva conventions here. they should go like this:
industry: you have the right to encrypt your stuff however you want. if you fail, you have the right to prosecute people for illegal distribution, but not for circumventing the encryption.
would be crackers: if you can crack it, you can have it, BUT it is still illegal to sell cracked copies, as it is with other unprotected media.
it should be this way for only one reason: it is the most defensible (read: enforcable) way of drawing the lines! and even with readily available cracks, if there is no real money in piracy, which there won't be, then pirated movies will account for like 1% of the market, as it does with auido CD's.
Interested in learning Chinese or Japanese? check out Chinese/Japanese-English Dictiona
I just wanted to let everyone know, that I just purchased one of the shirts and the donation was 4.00$ ...That's pretty sweet...Having the donation made me buy a shirt, but I didn't realize it would be so high. If I know my math, that's 20% of the entire price (Including S&H). I hope a lot of you buy shirts (But not enough that I don't get mine for a year) =] and help the EFF for helping us.
According to this C|NET article, they were advertising the software on their website as DVD cracking software...This Wired article names sites like krackdown.com and dvd-copy.com which sound like piracy sites to me. It seem they advertised the DeCSS software as DVD copying software. I expect this to be fodder for the DVD-CCA's lawyers next week.
I never did see the original web site, but honestly, C|Net never gives a specific place they took the quote from. I'd be curious to see how they attribute it to the authors of the program.
As to the sites listed, after the lawsuit was filed, the owners let the program go and be distributed on a lot of sites. True, mostly crack/hack sites picked it up, but those don't have any direct relation to the authors.
You're right - what bozos ... in this case the 'keys' are available to the public - you can walk down to your local computer or electronics store and BUY a set (in the form of a DVD player) - they stand between the OWNER of a DVD disk and their enjoyment of the content contained therin
The only one you might be able to use in the US would be harassment. Hovever, many states have laws protecting the 'little guy' from lawsuits of McMegaCorp after the fact. Usually they run along the lines of 'M.M.C. has sued me eight times in two years, bankrupted both myself and my company, and has yet to win' so they hand him a small sum and a pat on the head.
Side note: In the U.S. , the charge of 'public nuisance' is reserved for hostile homeless people, people with thirty dead Chevrolet's in their front yard, etc. And 'perversion of Justice'? Please! The US judiciary does a much more twisted version of it; the MPAA pales amateur in comparison. Oh, yes! Perjury! If you're a lawyer presenting an argument, 'creative reality' is the name of the game. Don't like the star defense witness? You, as a laywer, can call them communist, accuse them of being the Spawn of Hell, or intimate that they molest farm animals in their spare time. No proof needs to exist, and if you work it in correctly the judge may not even take issue with it.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Actually, I have a crappy bundled player (CyberDVD, avoid it like you would beer brewed in France) that allows FF/Next Scene/Main Menu through the 'copyright commandments'
So it's probably a 'suggestion' bit set somewhere on the disc that certain hardware/software manufacturers treat as imperative.
.sig: Now legally binding!
This is true, but how many people have the technological know-how ot do that? A lot of people at
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
That's because some DVD discs (like I think Payback is an example) put the copyright notice before the movie itself, while others put the copyright notice at the very beginning of the disc.
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-
IE -
Mulan = Copyright, menu, movie
Payback = Menu, copyright, movie.
For those discs, the copyright is just a chapter like any other chapter and you can skip it. But for disc with the copyright notice at the beginning, it often has its own title, so you can't just skip to the next chapter (there are none). And of course the DVD players know not to let you change title nor bring up the menu until after it finishes playing.
The problem is either a) bad DVD design by stupid companies (Disney = awful, Warner = great) or b) DVD player cannot or will not allow a viewer to control his or her own movie experience! Since this feature is nothing but a thorn in the user's side, I imagine it is a requirement of DVD licensing and not just all brands thinking the same way.
- JoeShmoe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
American Pie also has both "R" and "Unrated" versions and Showgirls I think is "R" and "NC-17".
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The problem with these two examples, IIRC, is that BOTH of them are using separate one-sided discs! Which, IMHO, is the ultimate side for movie studios.
I mean, come on...I shell out $18 for a movie and you want me to pay another $18 just because you are too greedy/cheap to stick it on the other side? That is unforgivable and I have no problem with downloading a pirate copy of the version that I don't have, and hopefully being able to someday put them on either side of a single DVD.
Sick sick sick...soon we will have to pay for every single variation and iteration separately unless we put a stop to this. How many people feel cheated about paying $7.50 to see Toy Story 2 and then having to pay anouther $7.50 just to see the outtakes they added a month after the release???
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I don't possibly see how.
Let's see, I've got this program that lets me decrypt the movie on the DVD to my hard disk. So now I've got the unencrypted data.. what can I do with it?
Can I burn it to a different DVD? Nope. Current DVD writable media don't have the capacity to store DVD movies. Even if they did, how many DVD players recognize unencrypted movies (since current and presumably future DVD writers cannot write the key block)? Few, I suspect.
Can I make a VHS copy? Well, if you want to create a significantly degraded version through your video card's TV out, go right ahead. It's gonna look a lot worse than it would if you simply linked 2 VCRs and made copies of the VHS release of the same movie (it'd be cheaper, too).
Can I view it? Absolutely. This is why DeCSS exists in the first place! It's been said before, but it bears repeating: CSS is not meant to protect against unauthorized copying, but against unauthorized viewing.
NathanLet's get someone at EFF to officially open an account at AllAdvantage, GoToWorld, and all of those pay-while-you-surf thingies (last I count there were at least 5 of them).
Then we'll start a slashdot hiercachy with EFF on top, and donate all our surf-income to EFF.
If it works it will be the best donation we can make...
it's in my head
Click here
What they're saying is so absurd. "We know it's going to be broken and we were surprised it wasn't sooner, but we're still going to sue the people" Why don't they just go and make better protection anyway? bah!
/.) and a lot smaller (remember, image quality doesn't make much of a difference in 21" monitors).
jeez! why don't they shoot themselves in the leg for losing potential customers. Honestly, who WOULD copy DVD's? they're like 30 bucks per blank and the writers are 400... they CAN claim that 'oh the pros that want to copy it can do it now.' Well i've got news for you buddy, it's not that hard to break through DVD's, just get the raw data and stick it on a stamp, whoop de doo. If they're going to make some kind of weird excuse that they need some data that can't be ripped, well we all know the pirate star wars DVD is out in asia, why can't they just swap the raw data file and instant dvd?
So basically the only reason that there would be a reason to sue is for the end user since it's already feasable to make pirate dvd's for the pros (and cheaply too). But the problem is the only way the end user is going to copy is using a DVD-RAM or keeping that huge file on your hard drive and you can only view it on your computer. If you just want it only to view on your computer, there are already DVD-RIPs of VCDs rampant on the internet (as many of people have said on
What are they trying to do then? ARGH! I don't know, can someone explain? They're shooting themselves in the leg!
That almost looks like a template they copied and used for the DVD suit ;-)
lame. They can't even be creative with their lawsuits! hahaha!
Apart from big corporations trying to screw over people once again - my major gripe with this is the MPAA are trying to deny my rights as a law abiding citizen.
Certainly in Australia it is legal to make a backup copy of VHS movies you purchase, just as it is legal to backup data and software. It should also be legal to make a backup copy of a DVD. If it is legal to backup then my copying of the data is authorised. The MPAA claim to be stopping internet pirates from making unauthorised copies when they are really trying to stop comsumers from making copies, regardless of their rights.
I will make backups of my DVDs and play them instead of my originals. Forking out $AU30-40 for a movie to have it scratched and ruined just isn't acceptable.
Here's hoping consumer rights advocates actually pickup on this.
Psyke.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - January 14, 1980
FILM STUDIOS BRING CLAIM AGAINST VIDEOCASSETTE HACKERS IN FEDERAL COURTLOS ANGELES, Calif (January 14, 1980) - On January 14, 1980, in response to the illegal hacking of the videocassette player system "VHS", and subsequent distribution of so-called VCR's, the major motion picture companies files injunction complaints in the Southern District of New York and District of Connecticut against anyone found distributing videocassette recording hardware or blank VHS media.
The plaintiffs are Universal City Studios, Inc.; Paramount Pictures Corporation; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.; Tristar Pictures, Inc.; Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.; Time Warner Entertainment Co., L.P.; Disney Enterprises, Inc.; and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.
Announcing the court action, Jack Valenti, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), made the following statement:
"The MPAA is striking a blow today in defense of the future of American movies. We have filed suit in federal court to stop videocassette hackers from distributing the hardware and media designed to circumvent the technology that prevents unlawful copying of broadcast shows and VHS movies."
"This is a case of theft. The distribution of blank VHS cassettes is no different from making and then distributing unauthorized keys to a department store. The keys have no real purpose except to circumvent the locks that stand between the thief and the goods he or she targets," said Valenti.
The MPAA refuses to realize this new "VCR" technology may have many uses, such as allowing the development of video cameras for the average home, or the ability to record broadcasts for legal personal home exhibition at a later time. Furthermore, it refuses to realize that an open hardware specification scheme may lead to new advances in home viewing, such as a personal digital video disc that would have sharper picture and better sound than the current VHS standard.
"The U.S. movie industry intends to defeat anyone who steals our intellectual property. We are determined to defend the technology that protects artists' and intellectual property holders' rights," vowed Valenti. "If you can't protect that which you own, then you don't own anything."
Additional information on this case may be found on MPAA leaflet's.
# # #Don't want to pay Lars? Sue him!
Judging from nearly every comment I've read, both this article and others, there aren't too many people who know the law, let alone know how to argue a case like this.
However, if you were really interested in helping the defendants, I'm sure you could put together a relief fund to help them pay for their lawyer fees (unless it is already being taken care of by the EFF/some other nonprof org, or they are exceedingly rich). Given the high volume of visitors to Slashdot, a link to such a fund on the front page gathering $10/pop would go a long way.
This is the real piracy concern currently, not a bit for bit copy of a DVD.
CSS won't stop that. Just use an authorized window$ player, and grab the frame buffer out of the video card with a driver hooked into the vertical blanking interrupt. From there, it's just a matter of softwere re-encoding into MPEG and re-sampling the framerate (trivial) to exactly reproduce the unencoded contents of the disk.
The only substantial difference is that DeCSS can be used for making DVD movies inter-operate with computers/OSes that do not have official player software (such as Linux).
For large scale bootleg operations, the development cost of that software is unimportant when compared to the profits from sales.
It should also be noted that the framebuffer grabber is not necessarily a piracy only tool. In many countries individual people still enjoy the right to make backups and to transfer content into a more convieniant medium for personal use (fair use).
As an amusing note on the new US law, we have a doctrine of fair use, and a doctrine that makes it illegal to circumvent copy protection even for a fair use of the content. Therefor, the law grants copyright holders the right to be unfair.
So, what are some good books, websites, and/or other media that you would recommend to start out educating myself about law, defending oneself against a suit, and other such topics?
Thanks in advance for any help you can give.
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
To clarify a bit. The big Linux distributors are the real targets but not in the way you may think.
1st you need to asses what the DVD-CCA and the MPAA etc... hope to achieve with these law-suites. The stated goal is to stop the spread of this software. However after something appears on a thousand FTP sites in a hundred jurisdictions actually making it disappear becomes a fantasy at best. So they have set the goal a little lower.
They accept that any savvy SlashDot reading netaholic will be able to find install and use this software on all "unsupported platforms". However that defeats the purpose of making money selling players. This lawsuit is looking farther ahead to the day when Linux box makers are shipping millions of PCs per month to home users. If each of those clueless users who can only make KDE run because it doesn't ever "break" was faced with the choice of a download and install from something other than a "name brand" site then another DVD player is sold.
You see this software is only a danger to Sony and the like if it's an option in the RedHat install and Mandrake updates lists the latest version. It doesn't matter if Sunsite, ftp.cdrom.com, Downloads.com and freashmeat.net all have to stay away to avoid the legal implications.
In that light the concept of getting a court somewhere to say that "the very existence of this software is a criminal offense" should make some kind of sense. Even if it's only banned in one small state the logistics of ensuring that your products with it don't officially go there costs too much.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
And to the best of my knowledge, even if you have the encrypted data, DVD-R drives will not allow it to be written to a blank in such a manner that a normal DVD Video player can handle it.
However, if you negotiate with the DVD-ROM drive, get the bits, decrypt them, and THEN write to a DVD-R, you will have an unencrypted copy. Of course, you've now spent more money than an original DVD movie costs.
But what the studios are afraid of is that the media prices will eventually drop to under $2, just as happened with CD-R.
Is there anyone out there that can set up a legal defense fund to defend open source interests? I have no problem giving a $20 donation to a fund that can fund the legal fees for the authors of DeCSS, and other causes that not only affect the defendants, but affect me personally.
There are many legal cases out there, DeCSS vs. MPAA, Napster vs. RIAA, and others that I can't think of off the top of my head. Their outcomes will all affect the path ot technology, and most importantly, open-source technology.
Can and does the FSF offer legal help to authors of GPL'ed software? Are there any other groups that offer legal help to authors of free software?
As the open-source movment moves into the main-stream, we need a group to represent our interest in court. We need a voice in the legal system so people like the MPAA and RIAA can't walk all over free software by getting laws passed and getting court decisions to favor them.
Movie productions have the MPAA, the Music Industry has the RIAA, who do we have? If there is a group out there that supports OUR interest(the interests of open-source), they need to have legal counsel there in each courtroom in both sates.
If there such a group, they need to post where we can send donations to. If not, we need to start one. We can scream all we want, but if we aren't in front of people such as congressmen and judges who have the POWER to change laws, we are wasting our breath.
Do you understand what bit-to-bit copy means? it simply means: dd if=/dev/hdd of=mydvd_backup This will be an ***exact*** (bit-to-bit) copy of the content of the disk.
You are wrong. You don't understand how a DVD drive reads a DVD disk and consequentially you don't understand that this method does not return all of the data on the disk. The keys to unencrypting the data will not be read with a dd and so your carefully preserved file is worthless.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
The consumer own his or her copy of the DVD. Copyright law already allows the owner of a copy to make copies for personal use, including copies necessary TO VIEW THE MEDIA.
Exactly. Well said; this is the entire point.
Anyone can copy encrypted DVD media to a blank DVD and play it anywhere.
It's worrying me that everyone has this impression, since it's just not true.
Commercially available DVD hardware will neither directly read nor write the section of the disk which holds the decryption keys. So, prior to DeCSS, it was not possible for consumers to copy encrypted DVDs.
I don't know if you are right or wrong.
The analogy doesn't hold up completely.. and can't be taken at face value. Whereas the key to a department store is a very tangible, physical thing, encryption keys are intangible.
Decryption is not a criminal act.
Now.. as for the keys, I can relate a similar story, though I don't know how it bears on this one.
In the late 80's (or was it early 90's? I dunno.. I think it was late 80's..) a similar thing happened in the satellite decoding business. This was very grey-area in Canada, I don't know about the US of A. At any rate, what it consisted of were two steps.
1) the modification of the standard satellite decoder board.. this involved basically new proms, and a new software load that allowed the manual (or later automatic, via modem) entry of decryption keys for the various audio streams (only audio used encryption, though video was scrambled in ways similar to TV, ie: by moving the sync pulse around...)
2) Black market for valid keys. Keys were obtained by an assortment of methods, one being the acquisition (usually illicit purchase from a legal owner for a fairly nice sum of money) of master chips, containing master codes, and then custom software to scan the satellite channels and discover the acutal decryption codes (I may not have this exactly right.. I never got that involved, but it was roughly like this).
In order to combat this, and I wish I could site the case, but I don't know it, the industry tried to claim copyright on their keys (these were rougly 32 byte keys... I think...), so they could prosecute anyone shipping them around for copyright infringement. Didn't work. Judge said no way, you can't just blanked copyright 32 byte hexadecimal strings. Period.
As a law student, this is a great question - and I'd love to give you suggestions. Unfortunately, as a -Canadian- law student, any specific suggestions wouldn't be much use.
There are no "what do I do if I get sued" books - obviously this would have to include every area of civil law imaginable: it depends on what legal rights of the other party you are purported to have traversed. (The answer is always, by the way, "consult a lawyer"). It's also never obvious to the layperson (or even the lawyer) precisely what legal area or discipline is raised by a given legal conflict. Take this one, for instance, it raises copyright issues, trade secret issues (both independent branches of intellectual property), remedies, etc. As one professor said the other day: "your client never comes to you and says 'I have a Rule Against Perpetuities problem!'".
So to educate yourself about the law isn't easy, because you'd never really know where to start. HOWEVER - In Canada there are a number of good book series on various topics. One is an 'essentials of Canadian law' series of books (Tax, Intellectual Property, Trusts, Evidence, Computer Law, Criminal, etc.) Some of these are quite good, and quite accessible to the intelligent but legally inexperienced reader. My guess is that there are such series available at US bookstores.
I.
But this makes it easy to copy DVDs on Linux, which is, of course, the only reason a person would want to use linux, right? I can't possible see why somebody would not want to reboot their computer halfway through watching a movie inorder to see the other half - a superb feature provided by everybody's favorite OS......Winblows!
-- no
So, my theory is (this is assuming that the MPAA isn't just stupendously dumb...which is a rather large assumption), the reason they're suing now isn't to get DeCSS taken off the net, because they know that it's quite a bit too late for that. Instead, it's to get a legal precedent, so that any company thinking of making a "universal" DVD player like the one I described above would know that they'd lose in court.
I doubt that they're stupendously dumb, but my bet is that your conspiracy theory is true. Of course, I think there are probably additional reasons as well.
Undermining fair use precedents is probably a big goal. You know, I know, and they know that there is always a way to make a pirated copy (whether it's an exact duplicate or not.) Maybe they've just been waiting for an excuse to go to court to make sure that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act would be able to be used to circument those pesky rights we've been given that allow for fair use copying. At any rate, I wouldn't be suprised if they haven't been planning for a case like this since before the DMCA was passed into law.
ESR has a nice essay on this case as well; avaiable here. Here's an excerpt:
Why is the DVDCA lying? That's easy -- because the lie sounds a lot better than admitting that DVD is a fraud designed to line the pockets of a few selected players in the consumer-electronics industry. The DVDCA's real issue isn't protection of the market for DVD films, it's control of the market for DVD *players*.
numb
This is very true, but there is a lot more to piracy than just making copies of DVDs. There is a growing market on the internet for downloading movies. These are usually in MPEG format. Currently, most of the movies come from people sneaking a camcorder into a theater and recording the movie as they see it, which returns a fairly poor quality video. Now imagine if you could rip the movie directly from the DVD into MPEG format. It would be almost flawless quality, which would make the "market" for pirated movies on the net huge. Sure a movie is a large download, but with cable modem and DSL becoming more and more prominent, a 500 Meg download isn't all that big of a deal. This is the real piracy concern currently, not a bit for bit copy of a DVD.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Does MPEG2 playback allow for branching in a video stream? What I mean is, with every player/movie combination I have seen, you can't change the angle during playback...only from the main menu.
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Example...Mulan DVD has both widescreen and standard versions on one disc. They make you pick every time you initiate playback. There is now way to set it to default to one or the other (since DVD players all seem to forget everything the second you eject a disc). Nor can you start playback in one mode (like widescreen) then decide to switch to standard half-way through. You have to stop playback and then start over with the new stream.
Is this a limitation with software or with the DVD design? The main reason I ask is that one of the features being advertised back in the early DVD days was the idea of having several different ratings on a single disc. You could have a movie with both "R" and "PG" ratings.
In looking at over 5000 DVD titles, I have NEVER seen a single disc that does this...I would love to be able to have my younger siblings watch certain movies with me, but I often have to wait for them to come out on TV with badly-editted patches and scene cuts.
So, my question is...are multi-rating discs simply not being sold, or is it technically impossible for a DVD stream to switch right in the middle (to cut out a nude scene, for example).
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Okay is it me or did the slashdot article not tell us who the defendants were?
Before we get all knee jerk-y and pissed, how do we know they are not genuine bootleggers being sued and instead of hackers like the DeCSS folk?
According to this C|NET article, they were advertising the software on their website as DVD cracking software...This Wired article names sites like krackdown.com and dvd-copy.com which sound like piracy sites to me. It seem they advertised the DeCSS software as DVD copying software. I expect this to be fodder for the DVD-CCA's lawyers next week.
Lawyers don't go around memorizing books of law. Memorization is for doctors. Lawyers learn a way of thinking. Any logical programmer type is already 90% of the way there. Go to any law school or college book store and pick up the "Nutshell" book on the particular subject you're focusing on. That is a good start. Much of law research today is done through large volumes of books, but rather through large databases storing every existing case. Go to one of these databases (warning, it can be pricy) and pull every case related to what you are looking for. The success of your research will be based mostly on the skill of your queries (hmm, I think any techie could run circles around a lawyer here). Read all the cases, look for a precedent that favors you, win the case, and home for dinner in time for your mom to tuck you in. All geeks do still live with their mother right? :)
Good luck, and remember don't ever back down, even if you aren't sure. One thing you always have to remember is that nothing is black and white in the courtroom. Everything is in shades of gray and if you can convince someone you are 51% right, then you'll probably win.
What we need is are free basic law classes offered for all techies. This is the only way we can truly protect ourselves in this day and age. Speaking as some who has gone to law school, but is not a lawyer, I can say it is VERY useful to understand the law. I no longer live in "fear" of a lawsuit. In fact, If I get sued, I get excited because I know I'm going to make them PAY. Pay through a counter lawsuit, pay through legal fees, pay through wasted time. Nothing is more dangerous to a large corporation then a sharp individual who stands up to them and says, "Bring it on! Bring it on more!" It will keep their legal fees mounting, it will make them sweat. The bigger their room full of lawyers, the more sympathy "David" gets and the harder "Goliath" falls in the end.
Stand up for your rights! Stand up for your rights!! Don't be afraid of Big Corporations! Tell them to go fuck themselves and then study the laws yourself because YOU really fucking do more than them or their fucking lawyers!
Here we go again. This is just as weak as the first go 'round. Remember all the yada yada yada that the movie industry put out on the VHS and BETA tapes when they first became popular. It's the same argument, just different media.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Most people who view these posts are on the consumer side of the MPAA and RIAA's lawsuits. Many don't realize both sides of the argument.
True, the MPAA is going after the wrong ideal here. They do want to create a monopoly here. They have every right to do so, because no other motion picture association exists to help promote and defend the motion picture industry in this fashion. Think of the MPAA as the EFF of motion pictures.
Just as the EFF protects online users' freedoms online, the MPAA protects the business and industry of movies. The EFF's clients are pretty much anyone online, which is primarily endusers and casual browsers. The MPAA, million/billion-dollar businesses.
So here's my valid point, on behalf of the MPAA. If the movie industry and businesses lose their hold on the ability to charge fees for their "encryption" technology, which they push, even in this lawsuit, as a means to keep people from copying the media. Those who do not know the technology of DVDs, will not realize that the encryption technology just keeps DVD-ROMs with computers and unlicensed DVD players from playing their discs.
But to do this, they must crack down hard on those who wish to create new methods to play these discs. The MPAA doesn't own the patent on DVDs nor digital media, and can't enforce anything on their behalfs. So they promote a simple "encryption" method in which movie makers can enjoy "piracy-free" home use. Sounds more like a rehashed Macrovision.
So here comes some people who "decrypt" the CSS technology, and make it available as an interoperability tool. Perfectly legal, and definitely good for the computer community. The MPAA, though, sees this, perhaps, as a threat that now anyone can make DVD console players able to play CSS-encrypted discs, without paying a fee for it, and have computers all over the world play DVDs without licensing the software or technology that so many others have invested money and time in developing and licensing.
So just like EFF protects the rights of people online, the MPAA is out to protect the investments and money of the businesses they are assisting. They can't do it through patent infringement or unlicensed technology, so they're out to provide a "case" that says this will promote piracy. Those who are unsure of how things work for the open sourcing of this technology, might believe this. What other reason is there to provide this but to easily crack discs?
Now, onto the other side, the side that most everyone reading this is on. Now that "DeCSS" exists, it's possible that that DVD-ROM you have can play these discs. Regardless of who made it and the platform your computer runs on, you can now enjoy these discs. What's the use of copying them? I've seen DVDs that are 2+ gigabytes. Even with a very fast SCSI burner, it may take several hours to burn a single copy. Or to take the information on the disk and put it on the web, that's still GIGABYTES of info. I hardly have the want to download ISOs of Linux to burn onto CD, let alone want to burn DVDs.
Plus the cost. A normal DVD costs $30, $40, sometimes a bit more. Blanks, that I've seen, cost about just as much. And I don't see the cost of these going down for a few years, due to the extremely high chance of misburns and the new technology.
So the threat of piracy should be near-nil. A software CD that costs $50 is easier and more wanted to copy, because CD blanks cost mere dollars, and take half an hour on slow burners to copy.
My point, then, is that DeCSS is actually doing the movie industry more good. Much like MP3s help the music industry by allowing small bands and indie labels to produce music without much cost, DeCSS will allow more people and software companies the ability to play DVDs.
Which means more sales for DVD movies. DVD movie sales equals profits for the movie companies. But to those who spent time and money researching DeCSS, and those who paid for the licensing of it, it's a loss of money if others get it for free.
But promote it as piracy, and the movie industry, which would profit from the explosion of DVD players, both software and console, fear loss of sales, where there would actually be an increase in sales.
If you were the MPAA, I think you'd attempt the same thing. Protect your money and licenses any way you can, or you lose business and money. I say we let the movie industry know exactly what DeCSS does. If everyone who buys a computer gets a DVD player and the ability to play DVDs, one would think most of them would wany to buy DVDs to try.
Anyways, sorry for the long wind, but often people don't see both sides of the problem. I don't agree with the MPAA, because I'm an enduser of DVD movies, but if I were the MPAA, I'd certainly try tactics like this to protect my business.
NO! In 1997, 2600 reported a driver intercept crack for DVD. Replacing the graphics driver with a spoofed driver, one could captured the decrypted stream. There is no way to get around this, unless you add DVD decryption in EVERY graphics card!
From the Connecticut suit (emphasis added)
This is a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act enacted in October of 1998.
The choice of this section of the law is important. There is a parallel provision (1201(b)(1)) covering actual harms to the rights of the copyright holder, but this was not chosen, since allowing a user to view a DVD they have purchased clearly does not harm the copyright holder.
I believe 1201(a)(2) is unconstitutional since it restricts free speech and limits the options of fair use without clear harm to the copyright holder. It also makes any distributor of any decryption software, reverse engineering system, or security bug information vulnerable to malicious lawsuits.
That being said, as the law stands I believe the DeCSS creators and anyone else that distributes their code is in violation of 1201(a)(2), since their code allows access to 'effectively controlled' copyrighted material. Note that here 'effectively controlled' only means that there is some attempt at encyrption or scrambling, not that the encyrption is strong in any way. In fact it appears that this section is specifically designed (with the input of the MPAA and RIAA no doubt) to criminalize the distribution of third party viewers for weakly encrypted digital media.
Whatever the MPAA says about piracy, I doubt that is their main concern since there are many other avenues for piracy. I suspect that they are mainly concerned about royalties on viewer sales and control of the ease of which a user can exercise his fair use rights, such as buying a DVD and viewing it in another country.
This will be much more important when we start to get one to one encryption. It is within fair use to purchase a CD and lend it to a friend, but what if an EvilCD (TM) will only play on your EvilCD player. This law makes it illegal to tell somebody how to modify the EvilCD (or the friend's EvilCD player) to play the EvilCD on a friend's player, even though it is legal to modify the EvilCD or the player under fair use. It's an end run around fair use and a clear violation of free speech. I hope the courts will see it for the farce it is...and soon.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Help the DVD defandants, help defend your consumer rights! Spread awareness of the OpenDVD.org campaign!
http://www.opendvd.org/
Have you read your ISP's Terms of Service contract? Check out this passage from RCN.com's Service Contract:
Note: Proof is not necessary; suspicion is all that's required to get your account pulled. If you've just bought a year's worth of DSL service, you could be out a few thousand dollars.
Then they're in it for the wrong reason.
If you're in this solely to make money, then you're a mercenary, not an artist.
We cannot offer them that assurance. The fundamental nature of digital media will thwart all attempts to do so. It was designed to copy bits infinitely and cheaply. Welcome to the real New Economy. Deal with it.
Uh, no. Those two guys in Norway wrote the software. The DVD CCA created the keys. But keys are not protectible under IP laws (nor should they be).
Absolutely correct (you get a cookie). We will have to develop new foundations for compensating people for their work. I encourage people to start thinking about them.
You are conflating concrete property (my bank account) with sales projections ("We might have sold this many DVDs if it hadn't been for those Commie-pinko pirates!"). Analogy fails.
Forgive me, but what utter nonsense. DeCSS is absolutely no threat to the sales of DVD players or discs. Even if you had a T3 into your home (at $5K/month), unsanctioned copying of DVD movies over the Internet is not going to happen; do the bandwidth math to see why. "Piracy" is simply not a problem.
Inaccurate. The appeal of DVDs to movie studios is that:
At the risk of completely torpedoing my credibility here, would your theorem apply to slavery as well? There were a lot of businesses in the American South 200 years ago that relied on slavery. Those businesses were killed (or, as it finally turned out, completely restructured) in the name of "freedom".
150 years ago, real people spent a lot of money digging holes in the ground looking for gold. None of them labored under the delusion that, just because they had invested a considerable sum into a hole, they were entitled to find gold at the bottom of it.
If you walk into the Digital Universe and honestly think you can prevent copying, then you've failed your fiduciary duty to yourself and your shareholders by not doing your homework.
Digital bits are -- and forever shall be -- easily copied at zero cost. Period. It is possible to do healthy business within this reality (NASDAQ:RHAT). Denying the reality only makes you look foolish and sets you up for one heck of an ulcer.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Actually, piracy isn't an issue at all, as has been said many times.
As has been said incorrectly many times.
You don't *need the key* to do a bit-for-bit copy of the DVD media.
No commercially available DVD players will allow you to read or write the section that holds the keys. So, your copy will not have the keys, and other normal DVD players can't play the encrypted contents.
The fact is, DeCSS does make DVD piracy easier. Repeating otherwise over and over again doesn't make it any less true.
Let's not cloud the issue with the piracy issue. Whether or not DVDs are easy or hard to copy has no bearing on this case, which is really about our rights as consumers.
A better analogy would be "someone making keys to a department store that locks their doors and only gives keys to whites (because they are the majority!)"
Since it is not illegal to sell "glass water tobacco" pipes, even though *nudge, nudge. wink wink* they are obstensibly used for currently, illegal recreational purposes, this case should be tossed.
It is not, in my mind, the responsibility of the public to give any quarter to industries who have failed to insure their own well-being.
That said, I think a lot of this comes down to public posturing, since the industry feels they have to say *something*. Judge tosses first request, message of "Just say no!" still not strong. Refile with new claims.
Though I'm happy to see the defendents crack a fairly crappy algorithm in the name of Linux interoperability, I'm shocked the industry hasn't taken action against Xing for having the crappiest implimentation, and allowing the work-around to take place.
Now, if only the industry can get past those pesky First Amendment issues. . .
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
The big thing to remember about this lawsuit is, you don't need DeCSS to copy a DVD to *any* format.
I'll say again, for the slow-witted. You don't need DeCSS to copy a DVD.
To *any* format.
Think about it. All DeCSS does is unencrypt the data on the DVD.
The same thing every DVD player in existence already does before it sends it to your video card drivers.
Before it sends it unencrypted to your video card drivers.
Or alternatively, before it sends it to one of several hacks which have been available for the past two years which sit at the video card driver level and save the damn stream for you. In plain old VCD, exportable to any format you want.
This suit has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with control over DVD player licensing. Yeah, you may say, maybe that was what the earlier lawsuit, brought by the DVD Consortium, was about. But why does the MPAA care if anyone can make a DVD player without paying silly licensing fees?
Glad you asked. Answer: export zones.
As y'all may or may not know, every DVD player around these days only includes the key to decrypt DVD's made for a certain "export zone"--a geographical region, like North America or Europe. The point being, this way the studios can release a movie on DVD in America before the film has come out in theaters in Europe, and not have to worry about Europeans mail-ordering the DVD from the states and therefore not paying the extra cash to see it in the theaters.
So, if DVD CSS works, then the only way you can make a player is by doing it according to their rules, which means only including the key to one export zone. Of course, now that DeCSS is out there, anyone can come along and play a DVD--a DVD they buy, that they pay good money that goes to the studios and all--encoded for any region, right on their computer.
Furthermore--and this is where my conspiracy theory of the night comes in--any company can look at the source code, copy it to firmware, and make a stand-alone DVD player which will play DVD's for every region. Probably won't make too much of a difference in the States, but over in Europe/Asia, where DVD's will regularly be released up to a year behind their release in the US, lots of people would want such a player.
So, my theory is (this is assuming that the MPAA isn't just stupendously dumb...which is a rather large assumption), the reason they're suing now isn't to get DeCSS taken off the net, because they know that it's quite a bit too late for that. Instead, it's to get a legal precedent, so that any company thinking of making a "universal" DVD player like the one I described above would know that they'd lose in court.
Or maybe not. Best I could come up with, tho...
Anyways, it's been said before, but if you haven't already, make a donation to the EFF. This is important.
If they come after your mirror - shut it down - make a big stink - remember there are an awfull lot more of us than them (DVD lawyers) - we're angry - and they get paid a lot by the hour.
The parallels between this case and the Scientology vs. the net cases (see www.xenu.net) are amazing .... who's going to be the first person to have the source read into the record in the Swdish parliament? or have it published in the LA Times classifieds?
It's very hard to force a large group of people to keep a secret - esp. if they don't want to
PS: the MPAA page is full of broken links to the legal documents - does anyone have a copy they can web?
I'd like to know if there is someway I can modify the content of a DVD disc to get rid of those annoying copyright notices.
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They used to be a minor irritation back in the VHS days because you had to fast-forward through them, but now it seems that part of the requirement for being a licensed DVD decoder is that you block people from fast-forwarding or skipping these #@$@!#$ notices. The worst offender is Disney, who makes you sit through about five minutes worth of crap in both French and Engligh EVERY TIME YOU USE THE DISC. My Toshiba player automatically shuts off after 20 minutes (as do many others) so I have to sit through this crap every time I turn on the player (since it autoplays discs).
Can DeCSS pull out just the A/V content and leave all the copyright/menu crap behind? If so, that's another reason to use DeCSS. There is not damn reason why I should have to endure that for the "privaledege" of watching a movie I paid $30 to own.
Thank god Warner Brothers movies just go right to the main menu when they turn them on. Bravo!
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Regarding the quotes above:
Ok, I've seen swiss cheese with less holes in it that this bullshit theory. I should be an attorney, yes indeed...
"This is a case of theft. The posting of the de-encryption formula is no different than making and then distributing unauthorized keys to a department store. The keys have no real purpose except to circumvent the locks that stand between the thief and the goods he or she targets."
This is NOT a case of theft. First and foremost, nothing has been "stolen". Nobody is being prosecuted for stealing a DVD. That would be theft, and this is NOT what the suit is about. Nobody is being prosecuted for copying a DVD, or illegally distributing a movie. This is would be a grey area; the law says it's theft, some people feel it's not. Either way, this is NOT what the suit is about.
Next, the above analogy is piss poor. I've seen middle school students do better. If this analogy were considered valid, then another valid analogy would be "By making tools to remove car stereos from the dash, Crutchfield is in effect making and distributing keys to department stores." Sure, one CAN use a Crutchfield tool to steal a car stereo. But it's primary intent is to make installation and removal of systems easier for the owners. Mark this: primary intent of a product is vital. If someone can *shudder* "prove" that decss's primary purpose is pirating, we're screwed twice over, and three times on Saturday. BUT, there is NO evidence of decss's primary purpose being pirate activity. None. Not a bit. Not a single site has a "377373 h4x0r guide to DVD ripping". Look at the author's pages. They say "Hey, use this to watch your movies in Linux!" This is not a pirating tool. One does not sue Crutchfield for making those awesome stereo tools. One should not sue the decss folks for making theirs.
"The U.S. movie industry intends to defeat anyone who steals our intellectual property. We are determined to defend the technology that protects artists and intellectual property holder rights... If you can't protect that which you own, then you don't own anything."
Oh, I like this. A lot. I completely agree with that last sentence. Furthermore, how about this: If you can't use that which you own, then you don't own anything. If I purchase a DVD legally, I have every right in the world to do with it what I will, so long as I don't redistribute the contents. If I want to put it in my toaster oven and cover it in peanut butter and mayo, dammit I should be allowed to. If I want to watch it under Linux, then dammit I should be allowed to. Make no mistake; if I own something, I have every legal right to do with it what I please, however I see fit. This has been established time and time again (see the backups-of-nintendo-cartriges cases, for one). So long as an individual doesn't use decss to pirate, they are free and clear.
Basically, this whole thing reeks of bullshit. The DVD folks are making every effort to shift focus from the real issue of right-to-view-what-you-own to this pirating crap. I really hope the EFF attorneys don't allow this to happen; precident has already been set - once you have bought something, you can do what you want with it. I can copy my CD's to tape. I can back up my copy of MS-Office. I can put my DVD in a toaster oven, use it as skeet, or anything else I want - including play it under Linux. So long as I own the disc, I have every right to view the contents, and decrypt them. I'm not supporting any pirating here (because it's not a cost effective move at all, as the DVD folks admit), but if I've got money to spend, and I'll keep hoarding it until the day I can do whatever I wish with MY movies.
In summary, don't bend over. They have no case, and they seem to know it. Fight.
--
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Just lurking, thanks!
I don't buy that at all. Invalidate their position by becoming their worst nightmare and the fullest possible justification for their most psychotic excesses? Somehow I miss the logic in this action sequence ;)
Do what I do, what I am doing. GET THE TECHNOLOGY and then work for free with other geeks and artists who are in line to be cut off from access to media. Make CDs and work for free with artists who will release mp3s. Make video and movies and start an indie movie subculture, get the 3DSMax guys and the owners of linux rendering farms into it. CREATE. Spend your own money and your own goddamn sweat and blood and CREATE and get the work out there into the underground! Do it for free, give it away because the alternative is equally to make no money but to not have access to the media the world runs on!
I'm still waiting on my next-gen ADAT but I've been putting the rest of my studio through its paces, the hopped-up mixing board, the vast monitors, the custom low-capacitance shielded-strand snake, and I remain convinced that I can (cartman) club the industry's quality levels in the head and make it cry like Nancy Kerrigan(/cartman) >;)
Furthermore, I will not only record open-source oriented geek musicians (i.e. mp3-liking unsigned rebel sorts), I will not only do it for free, but I will provide the tape on top of that. I'm debating whether my next buy should be electronic parts for building submixers and hopping up the adat, or a Color Quickcam for showing pictures of the studio to you slashdotter rugrats ;) The more the media industry follows this scorch-the-earth path, the more determined I am to say 'hell with it!' and simply dump everything I have into an all-out assault on the status quo, using the popularity of formats like mp3 and the irresistable appeal of the free as weapons.
I consider cries of 'pirate everything the studios do!' to be pathetic wussy childish attempts to 'fight'. Exactly how does your redistribution of THEIR MEDIA! help matters? Exactly how brave do you have to be to take something at no cost to you, and give it to someone else? Unless the MPAA literally beat down your door you're risking absolutely squat. You're not DOING anything, except being a 'bad consumer' instead of a 'good consumer'. Either way you are a luser. You are sacrificing nothing and creating nothing.
If you want your fight to matter, CREATE media and get it out there as free data, to underscore the idea that in the 21st century data is too cheap to meter! Create AMAZING media. Do the most amazing music, the most incredible movie, outdo the industry at its own game and then have the guts to stand up for your convictions and keep that data free, make it possible for people to buy T-shirts or some damn thing so you can get by, so it can subsidize what you're doing. Apply for grants, I don't know- the point is, if the traditional media (being progressively concentrated in ever-fewer hands) is a magic circle, we need content creators outside the circle. We need _genius_ outside the circle. And we need it now, and we need it fast. And we can get it- if people are ready to face the situation and start pulling together.
"The revolution will not be televised" - Gil Scott-Heron ;) tell the people you meet offline about the great band you found, and how you found them, and then tell them 'It's free, this is the digital underground. It lives.'
Isn't it ironic- now that digital globalisation has made any person techically capable of expressing their message to the world, surprise- the revolution will still not be televised- because MS owns this television station, AOL/Time Warner owns that, and so on, a merry game of media restriction with no loopholes! There will be no shortcut to the real digital age- so we will just have to actually do the work. Cry me a river- then roll up your sleeves. If you can't actually sing or play or create media of some kind, then go forth and scour mp3.com or some such place (it is one huge 'slush pile', but no worse than what the industry has access to), and hunt down some band, some artist who is committed to a future of mp3 and free data. Buy one of their t-shirts. If they don't have any, buy them _a_ t-shirt
I will confess: I have wanted to be the great breakout hit from mp3-land. This, without even having stuff up yet, while still building and assembling the gear (in some cases, literally building it out of parts). And not breakout as in 'crossover', not as in getting signed with a major label- breakout as in making it completely separate from the labels, the industry, making it big enough and hitting hard enough that you wind up on the cover of Rolling Stone or Time because the story _cannot_ be ignored any longer- and still remaining a completely free-data, internet phenomenon, with no ties to the standard distribution chains. The money or lack of same isn't even important- I think done right you could be quite upper-middle class with all the tech toys you wanted, but I'm talking about being a massive breakout hit as a paradigm shift, about changing people's expectations of where you get music/movies/etc. Only that can truly fight the studios. Only that will win the war.
I still want this- who wouldn't? But I'm becoming increasingly convinced of one thing- it's not about who does it, the important thing is that someone must do that, must break the paradigm, for the benefit of all us artistic types who want to be able to control our own destinies. If it's not me, and hey, it wouldn't have to be, then it will just have to be somebody else- and I mean to throw everything I have behind that person, whoever they might be, if I get the chance. I'll record 'em for free. I'll give them the benefit of 20 years of audio hacker experience and producer savvy. I'll coax their ultimate performances out of them... anything, everything, to get someone who can break the paradigm.
When your 'wares people' are finally spending most of their time copying off free data with the blessings of the artists to distribute among the consumers... because nothing the recording or movie industries produce is anything near as good... THEN we will have won.
I have been asking this since the case came up and I still havn't herd a response from anyone who shuld know.
These lawsuites are being filed in a maner which sugests they can't realy stand on merit and the idea is to spread the limited resorces of the defendants as thin as posible in order to get somebody "convicted" because they simply culdn't put up a defence.
That wold then become a precident to wave at RedHat and Caldera. The real targets of this lawsuite dispite all the bullS##t from everyone.
Now what if a lawsuite is filed on behalf of the many plaintifs with a stipulation of damages to be awarded as folows.
10,000,000 to be shared betwean the legal teams in all the suites on an eaven basis ( no negotiation or puling of rank ).
15,000,000 to be shared betwean the plaintifs on similar even terms.
100,000,000 to be kept in the EFF's kity and invested so we will have a war chest the next time something like this hapens.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
The purpose of DVD encryption is not to prevent piracy. Instead, it is to comfort the groundless paranoia of the MPAA.
There is a very big difference between encrypting an application on a demo CD and encrypting DVD media. In the first case a legitimate intellectual property is being protected. It is a demo CD and the application has not yet been purchased. However, in the second case, rights to the DVD media have already been purchased. The consumer own his or her copy of the DVD. Copyright law already allows the owner of a copy to make copies for personal use, including copies necessary TO VIEW THE MEDIA.
If the movie industry had implemented a security system that prevented unauthorized copying that would be one story. But they don't even attempt this. Anyone can copy encrypted DVD media to a blank DVD and play it anywhere. This encryption does nothing to stop bootleggers. What it does do is stop authorized viewers from accessing the media in a legitimate manner.
Imaging if you purchased an ordinary paper and ink book, but discovered that you could only read it by the light of a specific light bulb. You would be pretty upset at the publisher. It's no wonder that people are upset at the MPAA for doing exactly the same thing.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Check out this link to copyleft . ;)
I am think I am about to make my first purchase from them. I wonder will a cop bust me if I walk down the street with this T-shirt on
By the way part of the profits from this go to the EFF for their defense.