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Injunction Against 2600 for DeCSS
Vito writes "Figures. Mitnick's free, but now a federal court has issued a preliminary injunction against the 2600 website, and its webmasters have been threatened with immediate imprisonment, over the distribution of the DeCSS source code. Time to start that data haven." This is just the latest in the DeCSS fiasco, and it certainly won't be the last. The difference between this and the DVD CCA battle is that these are federal court cases, which is why terms like 'immediate imprisonment' are being tossed around.
Holy crap, that gedanken experiment is one hell of a good idea. In effect, everyone is a one-time pad for everyone else. And you could take it further. Maybe A xor B xor C xor D produces DeCSS. Any one of the four could have taken the three other random files, and made the fourth file which produces DeCSS. But there's no way to tell which of the four it was. And the instructions to combine files could be stored elsewhere, posted on forums, etc.
Yeah, like. Don't the dudes that make these devices falling to section (c) have like, licences?
and, just why is this post rated score:2 ?
Why should anybody, let alone an Executive, read Air-Sick's poorly thought out rantings?
That's exactly the point! The fact that they got an American judge to support banning, does not mean they can do it in other countries. My copy is up and running at ftp://jaqr.dhs.org/pub/css/ - which is on my own computer, easily traceable to me. So? When do you think they'll be ready to cross some ocean and try tricking a Dutch judge with their games? :)
These folks have the law on their side. Like it or not the DeCSS software publishes a trade secret, the CSS encryption algorithm. This is illegal. Plain and simple. Doesn't matter what you are going to use it for - piracy or viewing, if you plan to profit from it or not - it's just plain against the law to publish someone else's trade secret without their express permission.
WRONG. If the authors had stolen the trade secrets, then there would be a problem, BUT since it was developed independantly, this is not the issue. MPAA are using some new law about anything that can be use for illegally copying Copyright matter is itself illegal.
Hmmm... for once something that AC's could usefully spam slashdot with...
It's not illegal to publish trade secrets. It's illegal to publish them after obtaining them in certain ways. If you learn a trade secret by prying the cover off of some appliance you bought and looking inside, it's perfectly legal to tell everyone what you found. Trade secrets are covered by state law which varies from place to place. But generally if you learn a trade secret from someone whom you know got it illegally, you can't publish it. Otherwise it just isn't a secret. Isaac
not. it's your bad connection.
Last time I checked, we had 9+ months until DMCA took effect.
Hey, how about Hemos, etc. mirror the code right on slashdot? 2600 is getting in trouble just because they're mirror also happens to have traffic. Whack the moles is fine, but not if noone has a club. slashdot already has more than plenty traffic and would be a great place to put a mirror....just put a link to the slashdot hosted mirror somewhere on the links thingy.
A Trade Secret is only that if they do due dilligence and the person steals it directly from them or one of their affiliates. Trade secret protection does not extend to protecting the companies that have the secret in question from having the secret discovered independantly of their assistance either by experimentation or reverse engineering. If you wish that sort of protection, you need to patent the "secret" if it's patentable (My guess, it's not novel enough based on the white papers on the CSS system to be patentable.). Otherwise, if someone legitimately figures out the thing- poof, there goes your trade secret. In the case of DeCSS, it was legally reverse engineered in a country that allows it in spite of whatever agreements reagrding use of the software is in place. There was no acquisition of the secret from them or their affiliates- the person in question figured it out on his own. Read the above two paragraphs carefully over and over until you "get it". Simply put, it's no longer a "trade secret" - it was figured out independantly and in another country no less. On the basis of trade secrets, they have no case. This case, I think, is being tried under a different situation- DMCA violations. Based on the wording of the DMCA, it might be considered a violation of that law (although the software in question is not breaking copy protection, and DeCSS exists to ensure compatibility- both of which exonerate the people that are being sued.).
While you're at it, trafficing on Websites that don't care about copyright, put any GPL based binaries that you've modified and built on the site as well. Don't waste drive space on the site by providing the source code, though, because places that don't care about copyright by definition don't enforce the GPL either.
Where is "due process" when it comes to issuing injunctions?
Damn straight! I was fairly sure this was the case but never commented because I had no evidence. But since you've backed it up, this is pretty important. Hell, I'd say the MPAA/CCA don't have a case when put like this. If I could moderate, I'd give this 5 for insightful & informative.
Must suck to live in a shit ass place like the US huh ? The american people are pawns for the big Coorp.'s out there. WHen will you people realise that you are nothing but caddle for these folks? The US is not run by the people for the people anymore the way i see it. It is run by the big $$ FOR the big $$$... end of story. If this keeps up the US will end up like the soviet union once was. Only this time the Big C's will be running things. Not the goverment. The goverment will just be there for the ignorant to SAY that there is a gov.
Why doesn't someone host a "We want DVD on Linux" petition? I'll sign.
You may want to look around the web and confirm it, but as I recall her name was "Colleen" and not just "Collie."
-- Picker of Nits, Yeah
I'd like to see some site give rewards/awards to anyone who provides a photocopy of a store credit for a returned DVD player or DVD movie, chopped up Blockbuster or Hollywood Video card, etc.
Any recent Internet Billlionaires out there willing to pony up reward cash?
At the very least, someone w/ a high-traffic site (i.e. /., hint hint) should post an "honorable mention" list of people who've taken steps like this.
Even better: write a shell script to decode this file. Release the shellscript under a EULA explicitly banning reverse engineering or presentation of any results of running the program in any form to a lawyer. Sue the MPAA for EULA infringement.
Another mirror @ gwu.edu/~wahern/decss/decss.html.
Anyone in NY know where this judge lives? Time to picket his home, his work place. Someone in NY needs to organize this now. This needs issue needs to be everywhere. Non-Geeks need to be discussing this and the only way to do that is to get it in the national media in a big way (non-violently of course).
Huh. huh. Rob's goin' ta jail, man. Huh.
"Now really, Ms. Gross, I think it's a mistake for you to assume you're talking to a moron," said the judge, who pronounced Linux with a hard "i" and required a short briefing on the concept of linking.
I don't think we need to assume that at all!
http://www.geocities.com/rapier_decss
1. Print source out at 5 point type (it fits on a couple of pages)
:)
2. Put source on car, cat, house, billboards, supermarket bulletin boards, etc.
We need to start a large boycott of DVDs. Hit them where it counts.
In one of the earlier lawsuits, MPAA mentioned the estimated number of DVDs sold per week. I thought it was something like 100,000, but I'm not sure. If we could get 10-20% reduction it seems like it would hit them hard.
Maybe even just a week or two boycott, it would easier to convince 'non-linux' people to hold off for a week or two for a dvd, than indefinitely...
Passing out Leaflets in front of Best Buy, etc. Informing customers in at a very high level why they should boycott.
The teacher says, "Ms. Jones, do you have the answer?" Ms. Jones says, "The pupil of the eye."
The teacher says, "Thank you, Ms. Jones. And now, Ms. Smith, I have three things to say to you. One, you didn't read your lesson. Two, you have a dirty mind. And three, one day you are going to be very disappointed."
RIAA vs. Napster/mp3 generally
MPAA vs. DeCSS
etoys vs. etoy
Not to mention the more general stuff like Echelon, encryption restrictions... And more I've forgotten.
Not to mention the even more general stuff... by which I mean, non-technology related bullshit, legal system abuse, censorship, etc.
?section=YRO is nice, but isnt it time for a whole website dedicated to exposing this bullshit and fighting against it? I'm talking more direct badassed shit here, like j18... YRO tends to be a lot of preaching to the converted... we all know the score and make very insightful posts, but who gives a shit about /. posts? Who reads them? What about another more hard-edged site dedicated to fighting governmental bullshit? A name like disobedience.org or something... (tho I guess thats taken)...
The 2600 people don't explicitly advocate any of the above. They're the kind of smarmy creeps who claim all they did was stand there in front of the house holding the sign that says "the owner is away, here's a hammer to break the window and burglarize the joint."
It's as slimy as anything Bill Clinton did when he was futzing around in court about the definitions of commonly used words.
You got your kewl EFF t-shirt. Now you can get your festive 2600 pirate flag to go with it.
Just send in your dollars, boys and girls.
And another as soon as the account updates.
I was very nearly convinced by other posters on this thread that DeCSS isn't about piracy, and the industry is using the idea of stealing movies as a smoke screen. Good thing I saw this and now know better. Thank you for setting me straight!
Yea, this is true...there will be larger media cheap...but guess what? It don't require the decryption of the files to make a duplicate. As the decryption does is let you play it on non-commercial players...that is all.
http://www.pitchblack.org/members/trytostopme/ Whack away, lawyer dudes.
1) Blank DVDs cost more than most movies, so there's no payoff for making illegal copies.
2) CDs are copyrighted too. Making copies for private use is legal under fair use doctrine.
3) Since it's free, open-source is hampered more by a license fee than commercial software.
4) Civil disobedience has a long and honorable tradition. Read your Thoreau. Heck, the USA was founded on civil disobedience. When the law is controlled by the rich and powerful, sometimes the only principled response is to break the laws that are unjust.
-Um, you might want to try a nation that the US -government is on better terms with. You don't -want laywers pointing fingers at you for being -sympathetic with a Whacko nation. And what is the definition of 'Whacko' nation? Any country that doesnt bend over for the US? You got to love the way the US exports democracy.... you can vote for anyone you want but make sure its the candidates the US approves of!!
Flood roadrunner news groups with the DeCSS code. That will teach 'em.
> This is analagous to Macrovision which normal consumer VCRs respond to, but professional VCR
> equipment is immune to. There are people licensed to make such equipment
This is false. Macrovision affects professional VCRs in the same way that it affects consumer VCRs: it screws up the recording.
Only digital VTRs, which are immune to analog signal corruption, are not affected.
Until this year, in fact, it was not illegal to make a VCR that specifically stripped out macrovision encoding. This changed only a few months ago. (again thanks to the unconstitutional Digital Millenium Copyright Act's ban on "circumvention")
> The legal analogy is like keys... Suppose you are selling your house and have a lock box with a
> key inside.
This is not even close at all. The copyright on a movie is not a physical piece of property like a house.
A better analogy would be a that a DVD is like a house, and DVDCCA is a real estate agent who sold you the house on the condition that you are the only one allowed to lock or unlock the door. Then, when you want your friend to stay there for the weekend, they sue you for letting him borrow the key to your own house.
And also keep in mind that the design of the DVD format is such that every disk ever made contains the SAME KEYS... it's like a developer built a million houses and used the same house key for each one. Should the government make it illegal for you to know this piece of information (and thereby become aware that you should probably change your locks), just because it might hurt the developer's business?
No, if real life was a bunch of math problems, we'd still need judges. Or so Kurt Godel tells me. :-)
Now there's a dedicated slashdot reader! In recovery and still surfing! :-)
If 2600 didn't realize that they are a very compelling target for attorneys in almost any industry, and start working on a legal defense the same day they posted DeCSS, then I think it's a mistake to assume that the MPAA aren't suing a bunch of morons.
Once again for those not paying attention... YOU DON'T NEED DeCss TO MAKE A COPY OF A DVD. YOU NEED IT TO PLAY DVDs. that is all
Wonder how that got there?
These damn AC's, they never admit responsiblity for anything ;)
Most movies are made by american companies selling crap to american morons. I don't care if it's in the cinema, on CD or on DVD so I never intend to buy a movie on DVD. Corps will rule US while there are many morons with big buying power. Ever since the US turned into the land of "let greed be your master" I couldn't care less about what's happening there. And I don't even want to mention the hypocrites who run Slashdot, why should they be different.
Thanks for your attention, Have a Nice Day (tm)(r)(c)(pat.pending).
Free Slash !
You've still got the problem of people with Linux on StrongARM, MIPS, PPC, Alpha, Sparc, etc. And also the problem of NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD people.
You cannot release the player advocated above in source form. To do so just plain invalidates what the industry people are defending.
Nicely written. Moderate this up!
Like it or not the DeCSS software publishes a trade secret, the CSS encryption algorithm.
While this is the argument of the plantiff in the CCA case, it isn't necessarily fact. It's just an argument that a judge has yet to find valid.
I personally find it to be a very weak argument. Logically, for the authors of DeCSS to reveal a trade secret they would have had to have offical CSS documents/information that they received under NDA and then gone and blurted that info all over the net.
With DeCSS this was simply not the case. Rather, the authors started with a program and reverse engineered it. They had no internal documents or information. I'm sure IBM had several trade secrets invested in the original PC's but this didn't have any impact on Compaq's ability to clone because Compaq had no inside information from IBM.
If you believe that the EULA for the Xing player caused the case to work under trade secret law then you might have an argument (putting aside for the moment that the DeCSS authors are minors). However, I think any reasonable judge will see the immediate contradiction between fair-use ideas which are spelled out in copyright law vs. the tenuous argument that trade secret law overrides fair use through the EULA. If the latter is chosen then it renders the fair-use clause of the copyright law impotent and pointless.
Sorry, I think the DVD makers are sore that they invested a lot of money in a useless copy protection scheme. They are simply going to have to learn the same lesson software makers and CD publishers learned a long time ago: copy protection is a waste of time.
People can dupe software and CD's today both legally and illegally and yet neither the software industry nor the CD industry have collapsed under the weight of piracy. In fact, the last time I checked they were booming. So what's all the fuss about?
So the judge thinks he is no moron! Actually this is a problem. Because of the perceived ease of use of Windows OS, many morons are using computers. They now believe incorrectly that they can understand computer science concepts just by clicking on the mouse button.
On the other hand it's actually a good thing, that this "case" is going further. It will forever show that the arguments used by MPAA are not valid now or ever.
I will be boycoting the members of MPAA by not going their movies. I will restart seing more "cultural" movies like french cine and Russian.
If you wish to read the message below, order my proprietary program (SPSS-- Slashdot Posting Scrambling System). The message below, in its unencrypted form, is very valuable to me; therefore, I will prosecute anybody found to be in posession of an unlicensed program capable of decrypting the message-- whether for reading the message or making pirate copies.
Guvf zrffntr vf rapelcgrq. V ershfr gb qvfgevohgr vafgehpgvbaf gb qrpelcg guvf zrffntr-- vg'f genqr frperg. Nalobql sbhaq qvfgevohgvat fbsgjner jvgu gur pncnovyvgl bs qrpelcgvat guvf zrffntr, jurgure sbe gur checbfr bs ernqvat guvf zrffntr (jvgubhg cnlvat gur abzvany srr sbe gur qrpelcgvba cebtenz) be sbe perngvat vyyrtny cvengr pbcvrf bs guvf zrffntr (juvpu vf pbclevtugrq ol zlfrys) jvyy or fhowrpg gb yrtny npgvba.
The real danger is (obviously) not that DeCSS will disappear. The real danger is that when another DeCSS is created, we may never know about it.
a trade secret, the CSS encryption algorithm. This is illegal. Plain and simple.
You're wrong. Plain and simple.
1. Trade secrets are protectable in the U.S. at the state level only; you can't seek trade secret protection at the federal level.
2. To prove misappropriation of trade secrets in the U.S., the plaintiff has to show that the secrets were either stolen or were disclosed under contract (a NDA, Non-Disclosure Agreement) which has now been violated. Either way, the defendent would have had to have access to the trade secrets in question; misappropriation can mean this was done either by stealing them or that they were voluntarily disclosed under NDA and were released in violation of contract.
3. Trade secret misappropriation is not necessarily a criminal offense. In some states, the plaintiff can seek criminal charges; in most states, the defendent can only be sued. (Which is most likely why the DVD CCA case was argued in California State Court)
4. Once a trade secret has been released, it no longer has protection under U.S. trade secret law. The plaintiff can sue all they want, and even win and seek damages. But it is no longer a trade secret.
Truth is..
1. The individual who "misappropriated" the CSS algorithm did not have access to the algorithm; it was obtained via reverse engineering. It would seem that no NDA was signed, no contract was breached. This is why the DVD CCA in California made it a theft case rather than a misappropriation one.
2. The "theft" took place in Norway, whose laws explicitly allow reverse engineering. Since trade secrets in the U.S. are only protectable at the state level, you can't seek international jurisdiction for trade secret protection. This is most likely why the battle got shifted so quickly to the federal level and the DMCA. Copyright infringement is prosecutable as a federal crime.
I know that the facts tend to take the wind out of a well-reasoned emotional tirade.
Honestly, the only way trade secret misappropriation can be shown is by using the argument that the EULA on the Xing player was both agreed to and violated in a jurisdiction where this constitutes an offense. This is far from certain, with lots of holes.
The DVD CCA case is extremely weak; the EFF knows it and the CCA knows it. Trade secret protection isn't enough here. This is why the MPAA (essentially the same folks as the CCA) are filing charges under the DMCA in federal court.
For more info on trade secret protection in the United States:
http://www.lawguru.com/faq/17.html
http://www.lgu.com/ts46.htm
It would take legislative action on a national scale to make this type of censorship possible. Does anyone remember the key escrow debate? How could the goverment force you to use key escrow encryption, other than funnel the internet thorugh gateways at the national borders. Imagine the size of the gateways... Tell me there woudn't be a way to get around it, though. AC
Nothing Fancy... just the DECRYPTION routines, as that is what has the stiffs in a bind .h in line as text).
because I CONSIDER THIS FREE SPEACH!
I have put the source code INLINE (read css-descramble.c and
My Mirror.
>> This is analagous to Macrovision which normal consumer VCRs respond to, but professional VCR
>> equipment is immune to. There are people licensed to make such equipment
> This is false. Macrovision affects professional VCRs in the same way that it affects consumer
> VCRs: it screws up the recording.
>
> Only digital VTRs, which are immune to analog signal corruption, are not affected.
Sorry you are wrong about this... nearly all professional VCRs have the appropriate time base
correction circuitry which gates out the automatic gain circuit in the vertical flyback interval.
Since the macrovision signal is only on VBI horizontal line, such VTRs are immune to
macrovision
> Until this year, in fact, it was not illegal to make a VCR that specifically stripped out
> macrovision encoding. This changed only a few months ago. (again thanks to the unconstitutional
> Digital Millenium Copyright Act's ban on "circumvention")
Most people would say that manufacturing a VCR without licensing the appropriate patents wouldn't
be legal, but you are right in that a generic recording device that recorded video w/o using
any of the heilical scan patents in required to make a VCR would be legal until recently...
>> The legal analogy is like keys... Suppose you are selling your house and have a lock box with a
>> key inside.
> This is not even close at all. The copyright on a movie is not a physical piece of property like
> a house.
>
> A better analogy would be a that a DVD is like a house, and DVDCCA is a real estate agent who sold
> you the house on the condition that you are the only one allowed to lock or unlock the door. Then,
> when you want your friend to stay there for the weekend, they sue you for letting him borrow the
> key to your own house.
DVD=house is NOT how it's treated under the law. You are merely given license to play the DVD, not
all the rights of reselling, copying, redistributing. In this case, it is more like the
key to the house. The rights to the "house" are still owned by the record company. Thus my "key"
analogy...
Property rights of a DVD are owned by the copyright holder (not the purchaser of the dvd).
Buying a DVD is completely unlike a house.
> And also keep in mind that the design of the DVD format is such that every disk ever made contains
> the SAME KEYS... it's like a developer built a million houses and used the same house key for
> each one. Should the government make it illegal for you to know this piece of information (and
> thereby become aware that you should probably change your locks), just because it might hurt the
> developer's business?
I believe you wrong with this analogy. All versions of "the matrix" have 4000 keys on the
disk. All versions of "gone with the wind" have 4000 different keys on the disk. Each DVD player
vendor gets the info to to decode 1 of the 4000 keys. In fact DeCSS only uses 1 of the keys
(Xing's) key. At any time, the DVDCCA can decide to not put Xing's key on new disks.
However the more damaging information is that the people who reverse engineered CSS found a way
given 1 key to find all the rest of the keys for the other 3999 vendors (because of algorithm
weaknesses).
So the analogy is more like a developer made 10,000 houses and every 100 had the same key
(probably the actual case in most of the world). It's not illegal to have this info, but
distributing a lock picking set (which uses this info) is illegal in most US states (and in many
foreign countries as well). You may think that outlawing lockpick sets is wrong, but currently,
that's the law (so there's precedent).
By the way, analogous to the way car keys are made . There are only a small finite number of car
keys for cars of the same make/model... Not every car has a different key. In fact given the VIN
(vehicle identification number), a car dealer can cut you a new key (the pin codes are stored in a
central computer). Distributing this list is illegal in most states (and in many foreign countries as well).
This is not unlike giving out other people's credit card numbers, or the checksum algorithm
used for social security numbers, or the passwords on a unix system. It may be hard to stop, but
that doesn't mean it's legal to do (or moral).
Read the Constitution. Federal judges can be impeached for abuse of power.
some other AC, above, correctly noted that you eat shit. you really do eat shit. fuck you you shit eating punkass. fuck you, fuck you in the ass, fuck you with something painful and sharp. you bite shit you crapsucking little buttmonkey. and for good measure, so you truly understand the intent here, fuck you. in the rectum.
Not only permission, but licensing fees.
...but to be really effective we need to go all out and not do anything that will put ANY money in the MPAA coffers. This means not only boycotting theaters, but also rentals, PPV, network broadcasts - the whole shooting match. If we can start driving the ratings down, then they won't be able to charge broadcasters as much for the rights to show the movies. I know, it all seems extreme. But do really want to compomise your freedoms just for a couple hours of entertainment now & then? If so, you might as well put your TV on the floor facing up so you can watch while you're bent over getting screwed.
Hard-core pro equipment? You mean like the stuff that serious organized pirates (you know, the guys that actually *do* take away sales of 'legit' DVDs) can afford?
one more member...
Any site that is easily enough found to be useful to anyone is likely to be found, anyways. The idea is that sites actually carrying the code will be short-lived, stored on free web space, etc. But unless there's a ban on linking (seems unlikely, from the story), the links page can stay up indefinitely - and be kept updated with whatever the currently available sites are.
Another thought: Maybe don't wait for the 'mole' sites to get shut down. Take them down manually, put them back up again at a later date. Maybe have any given site only up one day/week. They're unlikely to be as vigorous trying to track you down personally if it looks like you've taken the site down voluntarily.
please see above, about the shit eating you do. fuck you, fuck you in the butthole, fuck you. i've never even met you and I know I'd spit at you if I ever did. fuck you, you shiteater.
Big, stinky shit
Mirror here
I said No Text.
/usr/share/sndconfig/sample.au
play
A lot of the people who are up in arms about this issue DIDN'T care about free speech, but this is exactly the sort of thing that gets otherwise complacent, peace-loving folks off their butts and makes them start doing something about their situation. Three weeks ago I couldn't have given a rat's ass about DeCSS. Now I'd love to see it spread hither and yon.
They used to say the next revolution would be televised. Then they started saying that the next revolution would be streamed. It's starting to look like this may be the start of the next revolution, and if it is, the next revolution will be Slashdotted.
On the contrary. The very existence of the DMCA in the US code violates the word of the law: namely, the first amendment of our Constitution.
It's not a serious waste of processing. While watching a DVD movie you arent likely to be doing much else. Any computer today (400mhz+) can sufficiently handle the stream without any skipping or artifacts. Of course HWMC is still useful. There is, however, no need for a strictly hardware solution if you are watching on your computer.
The Zoran software division was aquired by MGI Software Corp. at the beginning of last year. They rebranded it as MGI SoftDVD Max and are still adding features. Zoran still owns their hardware assets of course.
While it may be true that you can't do much with illicit DVD's right now, the industry was kind of planning on using the format for a while.
How long can they use this? HDTV is coming out in a couple years, and I think that will be a little too much data for a DVD. Won't some new data storage device have to come out to handle HDTV quality video?
HDTV is only 4x the pixels, so you just need 4x the data. A 5gig disc just needs 20gig
I bet you DVD-HD will have CSS2
In other words, consumer hardware won't copy DVDs. Well, duh. This has nothing to do with CSS. It has to do with the mechanics of constructing a DVD and the fact that you can't burn one layer of a two-layer disc.
Assuming that someone has the physical capability to make DVDs, they don't need the CSS decoder. And if they don't have the capability to make DVDs, then it doesn't much matter, does it?
This whole discussion is really stupid.
What, you think someones going to drive a truck full of furtilzer and clorine / break fluid and 2 tonnes of C4 and lite a match to it in front of MPAA?
Computer people are not like that but perhaps some associates could.
Very unlikely, unless some psycho does it for fun and uses it as an excuse like one of those arab iraqis or something.
Some decss files at decss.homestead.com. You should get 'em if you don't have 'em already.
The Xing player *does* have a license agreement, you're right.
.exe. WinZip can create plain vanilla self-extracting executables, and professional tools allow developers to require that the user click "yes" before the program extracts itself. But even WinZip can simply extract the files from the .exe file without ever displaying something.
.zip format or the self-extracting .exe. Not tough to get the files you want.
But that doesn't mean that the person had to agree to it (or even see it) to reverse-engineer the program.
Most your programs for Windows, in case you missed this fact, come in one of a few formats:
*Self-extracting
*InstallShield. There are programs that can simply extract the files straight out of the archives to a given directory; again, never displaying the license agreement.
*Proprietary formats. Most of the time, this basically means a derivative of the
Also: The person who did this was 15 years old, and in Norway. Because of his age, the Xing contract probably doesn't even hold water, even if he did click "Yes".
By the way: I'm not pissed about losing a pirate tool. I'm pissed by the fact that something *PERFECTLY* *LEGAL* is being taken away from the community because the creators are bullshitting and bluffing the public into thinking that the program is designed to destroy the entire idea of intellectual property.
As for paying the licensing fee: Why? The program was *LEGALLY* developed, using *LEGAL* information, you little fuck. None of the people with licenses are willing to do it, and nobody has enough money to simply purchase the license. As it stands, we have *legally* done this-- why should be forced to pay for the DVD Forum's ignorance?
put em up on shop.yahoo.com
and get amazon to sell em too
Here's another LINK
/*
/* Feed the secret into the input values such that
/* This term is used throughout the following to
/* Now the actual blocks doing the encryption. Each
* This encryption engine implements one of 32 variations
* one the same theme depending upon the choice in the
* varient parameter (0 - 31).
*
* The algorithm itself manipulates a 40 bit input into
* a 40 bit output.
* The parameter 'input' is 80 bits. It consists of
* the 40 bit input value that is to be encrypted followed
* by a 40 bit seed value for the pseudo random number
* generators.
*/
static void engine(int varient, byte const *input, struct block *output)
{
byte cse, term, index;
struct block temp1;
struct block temp2;
byte bits[30];
int i;
* we alter the seed to the LFSR's used above, then
* generate the bits to play with.
*/
for (i = 5; --i >= 0; )
temp1.b[i] = input[5 + i] ^ Secret[i] ^ Table2[i];
generate_bits(&bits[29], sizeof bits, &temp1);
* select one of 32 different variations on the
* algorithm.
*/
cse = Varients[varient] ^ Table2[varient];
* of these works on 40 bits at a time and are quite
* similar.
*/
for (i = 5, term = 0; --i >= 0; term = input[i]) {
index = bits[25 + i] ^ input[i];
index = Table1[index] ^ ~Table2[index] ^ cse;
temp1.b[i] = Table2[index] ^ Table3[index] ^ term;
}
temp1.b[4] ^= temp1.b[0];
for (i = 5, term = 0; --i >= 0; term = temp1.b[i]) {
index = bits[20 + i] ^ temp1.b[i];
index = Table1[index] ^ ~Table2[index] ^ cse;
temp2.b[i] = Table2[index] ^ Table3[index] ^ term;
}
temp2.b[4] ^= temp2.b[0];
for (i = 5, term = 0; --i >= 0; term = temp2.b[i]) {
index = bits[15 + i] ^ temp2.b[i];
index = Table1[index] ^ ~Table2[index] ^ cse;
index = Table2[index] ^ Table3[index] ^ term;
temp1.b[i] = Table0[index] ^ Table2[index];
}
temp1.b[4] ^= temp1.b[0];
for (i = 5, term = 0; --i >= 0; term = temp1.b[i]) {
index = bits[10 + i] ^ temp1.b[i];
index = Table1[index] ^ ~Table2[index] ^ cse;
index = Table2[index] ^ Table3[index] ^ term;
temp2.b[i] = Table0[index] ^ Table2[index];
}
temp2.b[4] ^= temp2.b[0];
for (i = 5, term = 0; --i >= 0; term = temp2.b[i]) {
index = bits[5 + i] ^ temp2.b[i];
index = Table1[index] ^ ~Table2[index] ^ cse;
temp1.b[i] = Table2[index] ^ Table3[index] ^ term;
}
temp1.b[4] ^= temp1.b[0];
for (i = 5, term = 0; --i >= 0; term = temp1.b[i]) {
index = bits[i] ^ temp1.b[i];
index = Table1[index] ^ ~Table2[index] ^ cse;
output->b[i] = Table2[index] ^ Table3[index] ^ term;
}
}
static byte Varients[] = {
0xB7, 0x74, 0x85, 0xD0, 0xCC, 0xDB, 0xCA, 0x73,
0x03, 0xFE, 0x31, 0x03, 0x52, 0xE0, 0xB7, 0x42,
0x63, 0x16, 0xF2, 0x2A, 0x79, 0x52, 0xFF, 0x1B,
0x7A, 0x11, 0xCA, 0x1A, 0x9B, 0x40, 0xAD, 0x01};
static byte Secret[] = {0x55, 0xD6, 0xC4, 0xC5, 0x28};
static byte Table0[] = {
0xB7, 0xF4, 0x82, 0x57, 0xDA, 0x4D, 0xDB, 0xE2,
0x2F, 0x52, 0x1A, 0xA8, 0x68, 0x5A, 0x8A, 0xFF,
0xFB, 0x0E, 0x6D, 0x35, 0xF7, 0x5C, 0x76, 0x12,
0xCE, 0x25, 0x79, 0x29, 0x39, 0x62, 0x08, 0x24,
0xA5, 0x85, 0x7B, 0x56, 0x01, 0x23, 0x68, 0xCF,
0x0A, 0xE2, 0x5A, 0xED, 0x3D, 0x59, 0xB0, 0xA9,
0xB0, 0x2C, 0xF2, 0xB8, 0xEF, 0x32, 0xA9, 0x40,
0x80, 0x71, 0xAF, 0x1E, 0xDE, 0x8F, 0x58, 0x88,
0xB8, 0x3A, 0xD0, 0xFC, 0xC4, 0x1E, 0xB5, 0xA0,
0xBB, 0x3B, 0x0F, 0x01, 0x7E, 0x1F, 0x9F, 0xD9,
0xAA, 0xB8, 0x3D, 0x9D, 0x74, 0x1E, 0x25, 0xDB,
0x37, 0x56, 0x8F, 0x16, 0xBA, 0x49, 0x2B, 0xAC,
0xD0, 0xBD, 0x95, 0x20, 0xBE, 0x7A, 0x28, 0xD0,
0x51, 0x64, 0x63, 0x1C, 0x7F, 0x66, 0x10, 0xBB,
0xC4, 0x56, 0x1A, 0x04, 0x6E, 0x0A, 0xEC, 0x9C,
0xD6, 0xE8, 0x9A, 0x7A, 0xCF, 0x8C, 0xDB, 0xB1,
0xEF, 0x71, 0xDE, 0x31, 0xFF, 0x54, 0x3E, 0x5E,
0x07, 0x69, 0x96, 0xB0, 0xCF, 0xDD, 0x9E, 0x47,
0xC7, 0x96, 0x8F, 0xE4, 0x2B, 0x59, 0xC6, 0xEE,
0xB9, 0x86, 0x9A, 0x64, 0x84, 0x72, 0xE2, 0x5B,
0xA2, 0x96, 0x58, 0x99, 0x50, 0x03, 0xF5, 0x38,
0x4D, 0x02, 0x7D, 0xE7, 0x7D, 0x75, 0xA7, 0xB8,
0x67, 0x87, 0x84, 0x3F, 0x1D, 0x11, 0xE5, 0xFC,
0x1E, 0xD3, 0x83, 0x16, 0xA5, 0x29, 0xF6, 0xC7,
0x15, 0x61, 0x29, 0x1A, 0x43, 0x4F, 0x9B, 0xAF,
0xC5, 0x87, 0x34, 0x6C, 0x0F, 0x3B, 0xA8, 0x1D,
0x45, 0x58, 0x25, 0xDC, 0xA8, 0xA3, 0x3B, 0xD1,
0x79, 0x1B, 0x48, 0xF2, 0xE9, 0x93, 0x1F, 0xFC,
0xDB, 0x2A, 0x90, 0xA9, 0x8A, 0x3D, 0x39, 0x18,
0xA3, 0x8E, 0x58, 0x6C, 0xE0, 0x12, 0xBB, 0x25,
0xCD, 0x71, 0x22, 0xA2, 0x64, 0xC6, 0xE7, 0xFB,
0xAD, 0x94, 0x77, 0x04, 0x9A, 0x39, 0xCF, 0x7C};
static byte Table1[] = {
0x8C, 0x47, 0xB0, 0xE1, 0xEB, 0xFC, 0xEB, 0x56,
0x10, 0xE5, 0x2C, 0x1A, 0x5D, 0xEF, 0xBE, 0x4F,
0x08, 0x75, 0x97, 0x4B, 0x0E, 0x25, 0x8E, 0x6E,
0x39, 0x5A, 0x87, 0x53, 0xC4, 0x1F, 0xF4, 0x5C,
0x4E, 0xE6, 0x99, 0x30, 0xE0, 0x42, 0x88, 0xAB,
0xE5, 0x85, 0xBC, 0x8F, 0xD8, 0x3C, 0x54, 0xC9,
0x53, 0x47, 0x18, 0xD6, 0x06, 0x5B, 0x41, 0x2C,
0x67, 0x1E, 0x41, 0x74, 0x33, 0xE2, 0xB4, 0xE0,
0x23, 0x29, 0x42, 0xEA, 0x55, 0x0F, 0x25, 0xB4,
0x24, 0x2C, 0x99, 0x13, 0xEB, 0x0A, 0x0B, 0xC9,
0xF9, 0x63, 0x67, 0x43, 0x2D, 0xC7, 0x7D, 0x07,
0x60, 0x89, 0xD1, 0xCC, 0xE7, 0x94, 0x77, 0x74,
0x9B, 0x7E, 0xD7, 0xE6, 0xFF, 0xBB, 0x68, 0x14,
0x1E, 0xA3, 0x25, 0xDE, 0x3A, 0xA3, 0x54, 0x7B,
0x87, 0x9D, 0x50, 0xCA, 0x27, 0xC3, 0xA4, 0x50,
0x91, 0x27, 0xD4, 0xB0, 0x82, 0x41, 0x97, 0x79,
0x94, 0x82, 0xAC, 0xC7, 0x8E, 0xA5, 0x4E, 0xAA,
0x78, 0x9E, 0xE0, 0x42, 0xBA, 0x28, 0xEA, 0xB7,
0x74, 0xAD, 0x35, 0xDA, 0x92, 0x60, 0x7E, 0xD2,
0x0E, 0xB9, 0x24, 0x5E, 0x39, 0x4F, 0x5E, 0x63,
0x09, 0xB5, 0xFA, 0xBF, 0xF1, 0x22, 0x55, 0x1C,
0xE2, 0x25, 0xDB, 0xC5, 0xD8, 0x50, 0x03, 0x98,
0xC4, 0xAC, 0x2E, 0x11, 0xB4, 0x38, 0x4D, 0xD0,
0xB9, 0xFC, 0x2D, 0x3C, 0x08, 0x04, 0x5A, 0xEF,
0xCE, 0x32, 0xFB, 0x4C, 0x92, 0x1E, 0x4B, 0xFB,
0x1A, 0xD0, 0xE2, 0x3E, 0xDA, 0x6E, 0x7C, 0x4D,
0x56, 0xC3, 0x3F, 0x42, 0xB1, 0x3A, 0x23, 0x4D,
0x6E, 0x84, 0x56, 0x68, 0xF4, 0x0E, 0x03, 0x64,
0xD0, 0xA9, 0x92, 0x2F, 0x8B, 0xBC, 0x39, 0x9C,
0xAC, 0x09, 0x5E, 0xEE, 0xE5, 0x97, 0xBF, 0xA5,
0xCE, 0xFA, 0x28, 0x2C, 0x6D, 0x4F, 0xEF, 0x77,
0xAA, 0x1B, 0x79, 0x8E, 0x97, 0xB4, 0xC3, 0xF4};
static byte Table2[] = {
0xB7, 0x75, 0x81, 0xD5, 0xDC, 0xCA, 0xDE, 0x66,
0x23, 0xDF, 0x15, 0x26, 0x62, 0xD1, 0x83, 0x77,
0xE3, 0x97, 0x76, 0xAF, 0xE9, 0xC3, 0x6B, 0x8E,
0xDA, 0xB0, 0x6E, 0xBF, 0x2B, 0xF1, 0x19, 0xB4,
0x95, 0x34, 0x48, 0xE4, 0x37, 0x94, 0x5D, 0x7B,
0x36, 0x5F, 0x65, 0x53, 0x07, 0xE2, 0x89, 0x11,
0x98, 0x85, 0xD9, 0x12, 0xC1, 0x9D, 0x84, 0xEC,
0xA4, 0xD4, 0x88, 0xB8, 0xFC, 0x2C, 0x79, 0x28,
0xD8, 0xDB, 0xB3, 0x1E, 0xA2, 0xF9, 0xD0, 0x44,
0xD7, 0xD6, 0x60, 0xEF, 0x14, 0xF4, 0xF6, 0x31,
0xD2, 0x41, 0x46, 0x67, 0x0A, 0xE1, 0x58, 0x27,
0x43, 0xA3, 0xF8, 0xE0, 0xC8, 0xBA, 0x5A, 0x5C,
0x80, 0x6C, 0xC6, 0xF2, 0xE8, 0xAD, 0x7D, 0x04,
0x0D, 0xB9, 0x3C, 0xC2, 0x25, 0xBD, 0x49, 0x63,
0x8C, 0x9F, 0x51, 0xCE, 0x20, 0xC5, 0xA1, 0x50,
0x92, 0x2D, 0xDD, 0xBC, 0x8D, 0x4F, 0x9A, 0x71,
0x2F, 0x30, 0x1D, 0x73, 0x39, 0x13, 0xFB, 0x1A,
0xCB, 0x24, 0x59, 0xFE, 0x05, 0x96, 0x57, 0x0F,
0x1F, 0xCF, 0x54, 0xBE, 0xF5, 0x06, 0x1B, 0xB2,
0x6D, 0xD3, 0x4D, 0x32, 0x56, 0x21, 0x33, 0x0B,
0x52, 0xE7, 0xAB, 0xEB, 0xA6, 0x74, 0x00, 0x4C,
0xB1, 0x7F, 0x82, 0x99, 0x87, 0x0E, 0x5E, 0xC0,
0x8F, 0xEE, 0x6F, 0x55, 0xF3, 0x7E, 0x08, 0x90,
0xFA, 0xB6, 0x64, 0x70, 0x47, 0x4A, 0x17, 0xA7,
0xB5, 0x40, 0x8A, 0x38, 0xE5, 0x68, 0x3E, 0x8B,
0x69, 0xAA, 0x9B, 0x42, 0xA5, 0x10, 0x01, 0x35,
0xFD, 0x61, 0x9E, 0xE6, 0x16, 0x9C, 0x86, 0xED,
0xCD, 0x2E, 0xFF, 0xC4, 0x5B, 0xA0, 0xAE, 0xCC,
0x4B, 0x3B, 0x03, 0xBB, 0x1C, 0x2A, 0xAC, 0x0C,
0x3F, 0x93, 0xC7, 0x72, 0x7A, 0x09, 0x22, 0x3D,
0x45, 0x78, 0xA9, 0xA8, 0xEA, 0xC9, 0x6A, 0xF7,
0x29, 0x91, 0xF0, 0x02, 0x18, 0x3A, 0x4E, 0x7C};
static byte Table3[] = {
0x73, 0x51, 0x95, 0xE1, 0x12, 0xE4, 0xC0, 0x58,
0xEE, 0xF2, 0x08, 0x1B, 0xA9, 0xFA, 0x98, 0x4C,
0xA7, 0x33, 0xE2, 0x1B, 0xA7, 0x6D, 0xF5, 0x30,
0x97, 0x1D, 0xF3, 0x02, 0x60, 0x5A, 0x82, 0x0F,
0x91, 0xD0, 0x9C, 0x10, 0x39, 0x7A, 0x83, 0x85,
0x3B, 0xB2, 0xB8, 0xAE, 0x0C, 0x09, 0x52, 0xEA,
0x1C, 0xE1, 0x8D, 0x66, 0x4F, 0xF3, 0xDA, 0x92,
0x29, 0xB9, 0xD5, 0xC5, 0x77, 0x47, 0x22, 0x53,
0x14, 0xF7, 0xAF, 0x22, 0x64, 0xDF, 0xC6, 0x72,
0x12, 0xF3, 0x75, 0xDA, 0xD7, 0xD7, 0xE5, 0x02,
0x9E, 0xED, 0xDA, 0xDB, 0x4C, 0x47, 0xCE, 0x91,
0x06, 0x06, 0x6D, 0x55, 0x8B, 0x19, 0xC9, 0xEF,
0x8C, 0x80, 0x1A, 0x0E, 0xEE, 0x4B, 0xAB, 0xF2,
0x08, 0x5C, 0xE9, 0x37, 0x26, 0x5E, 0x9A, 0x90,
0x00, 0xF3, 0x0D, 0xB2, 0xA6, 0xA3, 0xF7, 0x26,
0x17, 0x48, 0x88, 0xC9, 0x0E, 0x2C, 0xC9, 0x02,
0xE7, 0x18, 0x05, 0x4B, 0xF3, 0x39, 0xE1, 0x20,
0x02, 0x0D, 0x40, 0xC7, 0xCA, 0xB9, 0x48, 0x30,
0x57, 0x67, 0xCC, 0x06, 0xBF, 0xAC, 0x81, 0x08,
0x24, 0x7A, 0xD4, 0x8B, 0x19, 0x8E, 0xAC, 0xB4,
0x5A, 0x0F, 0x73, 0x13, 0xAC, 0x9E, 0xDA, 0xB6,
0xB8, 0x96, 0x5B, 0x60, 0x88, 0xE1, 0x81, 0x3F,
0x07, 0x86, 0x37, 0x2D, 0x79, 0x14, 0x52, 0xEA,
0x73, 0xDF, 0x3D, 0x09, 0xC8, 0x25, 0x48, 0xD8,
0x75, 0x60, 0x9A, 0x08, 0x27, 0x4A, 0x2C, 0xB9,
0xA8, 0x8B, 0x8A, 0x73, 0x62, 0x37, 0x16, 0x02,
0xBD, 0xC1, 0x0E, 0x56, 0x54, 0x3E, 0x14, 0x5F,
0x8C, 0x8F, 0x6E, 0x75, 0x1C, 0x07, 0x39, 0x7B,
0x4B, 0xDB, 0xD3, 0x4B, 0x1E, 0xC8, 0x7E, 0xFE,
0x3E, 0x72, 0x16, 0x83, 0x7D, 0xEE, 0xF5, 0xCA,
0xC5, 0x18, 0xF9, 0xD8, 0x68, 0xAB, 0x38, 0x85,
0xA8, 0xF0, 0xA1, 0x73, 0x9F, 0x5D, 0x19, 0x0B,
0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,
0x33, 0x72, 0x39, 0x25, 0x67, 0x26, 0x6D, 0x71,
0x36, 0x77, 0x3C, 0x20, 0x62, 0x23, 0x68, 0x74,
0xC3, 0x82, 0xC9, 0x15, 0x57, 0x16, 0x5D, 0x81};
Any one wanna hack mpaa.org or get that domain deleted????
Where are those guys that hacked doj.org?
It's one thing to be pissed off at the studios. It's another thing to boycott them! DVD's are great, and these companies make most of them. So screw this boycott!!!
This just occured to me - it might be good in the case out in California, too. Have a pc running Linux, BeOS, and whatever isn't supported with DVD players brought in. Ask the DVD people to have a technical expert of thier on choosing come in to set up the machine to play DVDs. Demo shows that without the software and DeCSS, the legally purchased DVDs cannot be played, even with a legally purchased DVD drive. It's theatrics, but that stuff usually helps persuade judges who do not necessarily have the technical background to understand the issues. fwiw
One might find it here.
I know a lot of people on here are concerned, but aren't going to go through the trouble or go make a donation .. but seriously, this is important stuff. I'm a typical lazy unmotivated American, and even I got off my ass and at least tossed a few dollars their way. So open a new window, go send some $ to them, buy a shirt, or buy some more diskettes to copy the code on and pass out at the trials. Get out there and do something. Please.
The world is turning into Snow Crash/Blade Runner.
Think about it..We are just cattle to them. It is disturbing to them when we demonstrate that we are in fact, intelligent human beings. So they make laws to force us to be silent, obediant and passive.
Our freedom is much more important than a movie cartel's unconstitutional desires. If my freedom means no more movies, then fuck the movies.
its time 2600 had a 1300.com mirror on SSL to bypass lame firewalls
or 26times100.com
Are you listening 2600???
dont use DECSS as the text, use other words, like
DEE_SEA_ESS_ESS.zip, anything, or De-DVDFUCKER.zip
anything so their lame search engine searches fail.
And what about DODSRIP??? thats the real DECSS, it was first.
WHY is there so littel talk about DODSRIP
And one more
The small GIF is absolutely perfect, as is - make the image a link to a page explaining (calmly and lucidly) what the situation is all about - does the EFF have a good page on the case that lays out all the issues? The phrase is short and catchy - it'll grab a lot of eyes and get a lot of clickthroughs.
And one more (I need to learn HTML ;)).
Not nearly as amusing as watching the MPAA, its lawyers, flacks, and astroturfers (like you) squirm.
For the interested, DeCSS is still available from a reputable site: ZDnet Germany. Click 'download' on this page.
(Note that this is a link to a site with a link to a third site that actually has DeCSS, thus this posting is not 'illegal')
The copy-protection system is flawed. Any system would be. The lock on the door to your house is flawed. Any lock would be. Any sufficiently determined adversary can copy a DVD, with or without this program. Any sufficiently determined (and well-armed) adversary can bash the door to your house in, no matter how thick the steel you use. However, you have the right to expect people to stay out of your house. Similarly, DVD content-owners have the right to expect payment for the use of their work.
What can possibly defend rights? No amount of encryption or steel can do it. Only a government can do it. (Ideally, a government that does nothing else.)
I hate to say it, but if a bunch of people were studying the plans for the locks on doors, and passing around pamphlets on "how to break any lock," what would you conclude, if you had a bunch of valuables and happened to rely on the lock to your house? That they wanted to break into houses, right? Perhaps yours. You wouldn't assume that they were thinking of how they could save your life in the event of a fire. It is easy to understand why the DVD people feel threatened.
It seems that nobody respects their rights.
If you felt threatened in the property situation, you could change your locks, but it wouldn't do any good, because you're still using that flawed security model, the only model you can have. You can't have the police arrest people for studying locksmithery; they are within their rights until they actually abrogate yours. The only real option you have is to ask the police to increase patrols. If there is no police force, you have to make one, starting with a neighborhood watch program. But you still must respect the rights of lock-studiers even if you run the police. Who knows? They really might be concerned about your safety, after all. And they might be friends of the farmers who sell you your food.
In a free country, the police can only act on probable cause, not on whim. If nobody turns criminals in, then the police actually have to witness the crimes (or the evidence of them) themselves. In a free country, almost all crimes would be committed on private property; justice would depend on witnesses who are willing to swear out warrants on criminals.
So let's start a neighborhood watch program.
I support the distribution of the DVD player software. I like watching DVDs, and I may make a DVD movie sometime and lose the original unencrypted master, and have to decrypt a copy of my own DVD. (Indie film production is on the rise, you know; the equipment is getting cheaper and cheaper... and I am curious about diving in.) But if I see anyone copying DVDs for other people, I'll ask him to stop. If he doesn't, I'll call the cops on him. That's what I would expect someone to do for me -- not because they have a blind devotion to any arbitrary law that may come down, but because they know what rights are, what justice is, and they know they want it. That's what justice requires. Nothing less will do.
Sign the above paragraph yourself and send it to your legislators.
-- an Ayn-onymous Coward
("the ideological warrior who drops thought drops his only weapon..." -- me)
maybe in whatever fanatasy land you live in. in the real america corporations and the government deny people free speech ALL THE TIME.
Just did.
And, oooh, did it ever feel good.
Is this the same Drestin that singlehandedly took it upon himslef/herself to attempt to redeem microsoft's Win2K test website? It sure reeks of his troublemaking.
you forget how big the internet is. if we get enough people to mirror it there is no way they could ever prosecute us. there would be too many people. and if they tried we would grow stronger. we would organize into a strong coalition and grow further support on the internet and start a 2nd wave of 10's of thousands more. larger people=cheaper cost of lawsuit to the individuals involved. the more people involved the cheaper it becomes for our side to operate, but also it becomes more expensive for their side to operate.
no matter what we win. but first we have to get everyone to mirror the source code with us.
anyone and everyone, MIRROR THE DECSS SOURCE!!!
Join the forces of freedom.
Do a rot13 pipe it to bzip2 -9 pipe that to uuencode and post it on a webpage. :-)
"...adicted to Shogo for some time after it's release (even stole one of the big 3 foot display boxes from CompUSA) ".
How can you pass judgement on the potential illegal use of DeCSS, when you are openly suggesting that you have stolen property yourself?
Now I finally found some use for these things.
Whether the moderators like it or not, this man speaks the truth!
"Yes, they'll put the code on a site, but when push comes to shove, and the FBI shows up at their house and explains to their mom that their computer is being used for illegal activites, there goes that website."
Not everyone lives in the USA, and in my country (France) not only do we have the right to make backup copy of our CD's DVD's Tapes... but their is something that is forbidden that is called "vente liee", which is when you sell something only if you buy something else too, and these "licensed players" look pretty much like a kind of "vente liee" given that Decss/css-auth notwithstanding I can only play DVD's on my computer with Windows, so this either mean I am forced to buy Windows or I am forced to buy a video DVD player for my TV despite having a valid one on my PC, in both case I am forced to buy another thing because of CSS while their is no reason to need it.
yeah but i'm not a script kiddie.
> So with DeCSS, which can be used to create an unlicenced player not subject to the restrictions
> placed by the CCA, they also lose the ability to prevent the playing of illicit copies.
Okay, so why are there so many certifible "pirate" DVDs from Asia being made? Are they all not playable on DVD players?
Hint: the big pirates never needed DeCSS or anything like it
I have downloaded and safe-guarded the
stuff against the day if it were to become
illegal. I dont have an online static presence
but I have managed to pass the code on to one
person already that has access to my domain.
This nonsense halted my decision to purchase a
DVD and the Matrix DVD. I will also vote
with my dollars and boycott the purchase of
DVD stuff until this is fixed one way or the
other.
Plan B says if this goes bad I will find
other ways such as e-mail, ftp, uucp, ssh
to provide access to the files anyway.
Yes, I do have an account here but I am not
going to advertise who I am because of the
above. Dont feel like making it that easy
for the suits.
Regards,
An anonymouse cowherd
There's nothing wrong with discovering a trade secret and then publishing it. If you are given a trade secret, and an NDA, then, that is wrong.
Reverse engineering is legal in many places and if a company didn't bother to keep their trade secret a secret, then they deserve to be screwed.
...because only a government can outlaw the competition. (Note that Microsoft has failed to do this.)
Another.......
http://members.xoom.com/DMDx86/decss/
Here's yet another mirror folks.
Some of his statements seem like grounds for appeal at the very least.
I have been meaning to join the EFF for some time now. This is the time, and I have done so.
-benjy
Depends on how you pull this one off- you could be merely omitting information, which is NOT lying. However, having SAID this, I will say that it DOES constitute an attack. I won't openly advocate it to anyone- it could get you in loads of hot water if they decide to go after you.
http://homepage.eircom.net/~decss/DeCSS.txt
I am John Doe 30 on the list!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sue me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (I am in The Netherlands)
a little off topic, however amusing enough i had to post it :P funny "unproven story" my law proffesor shared with our class. a certain group of individuals "reversed engineered" the formula for coca cola. this of course would destroy coca cola's entire organization, as it is a trade secret and not protected. in turn coca cola gave the CIA xxx million dollars, funding numerous intelligence operations to "take care" of the people who discovered the formula.
=|
If this gets any weirder I'm gonna go get me a tattoo of the source code on my Johnson and they can all inspect it in court... "yer honor, exhibit A" "OMYGAWD"
I joined last week ($100). Got myself that t-shirt from Copyleft, too.
Try finding it out in eternity space. Which servers have it- which ones don't? Can you tell where a given bit of the information is? Without the right indexing keys could you even know if it's out there? I think the combination of the two would make it excessively hard for someone like DVD CCA or MPAA (I find it hard to believe that they're doing this for the artists' benefit, by the way!) to stuff this or any other genie back into it's bottle.
Someone moderate this up.
This seems to be the heart of the issue.
DeCSS/LiVid shouldn't be illegal, their purpose isn't to copy the movies but to view them decode them for view on non supported archetectures.
The viewer should be crackable, the content should still be protected by copyright law though.
TraceRoute 205.136.158.2 (205.136.158.2)
network unreachable from 12.127.249.38: time=95 ms
1 1 1 172.25.1.254
2 2 1 209.203.124.193
3 14 12 208.153.224.97
4 16 2 207.170.198.169
5 17 1 207.170.198.30
6 17 0 144.228.170.21
7 18 1 144.232.1.41
8 64 46 144.232.9.250
9 86 22 144.232.11.5
10 112 26 144.232.11.106
11 66 -46 144.232.193.70
12 61 -5 12.123.16.178
13 78 17 12.122.2.90
14 80 2 12.122.3.238
15 78 -2 12.122.1.9
16 92 14 12.122.2.9
17 92 0 12.126.7.165
18 94 2 12.127.249.38 timed out
19 97 3 12.127.249.38 timed out
20 93 -4 12.127.249.38 timed out
21 94 1 12.127.249.38 timed out
22 95 1 12.127.249.38 timed out
23 96 1 12.127.249.38 timed out
24 94 -2 12.127.249.38 timed out
25 * * timed out
not reached
Surely we just need to have a single domain name that points to a site. If a site is closed down then the domain is just changed to point elsewhere.
What else could go on this page? I'm sure there have been stories of other pages with "illegal" information that have been closed down after a stern letter to the ISP
PHB: Hah, we just got the courts to screw one of those sites with the DeCSS.
SysAdmin: Oh really, which one?
PHB: I don't know. Something like 2600.org.
SysAdmin: Oh, sh*t.
I don't think that anything bad is going to happen. But if somebody's (MPAA) web site gets cracked, all they are probably going to do is throw Mitnick back in the slammer. Get a clue MPAA.
You can request a different judge. However, there are good judges and bad judges, and everyone knows who they are-- even the attorneys, the court clerks, etc. etc.
So it's a bad idea, because they like to discourage requests for a different judge. For example, in a criminal case, if the defendant requests a different judge, they will assign one who is worse and/or more anti-defense. This isn't just a rumor-- ask any seasoned lawyer. It's a fairly standard practice. So generally, don't ask for a different judge.
What's the big deal? And why doesn't somebody research and post some contacts for these companies so we can flood the suckers with complaints?
I used linux and only linux for two years as a programmer and i pronounced it with "AAI". there's no official pronunciation damn it.
Anybody who can't pronounce Linux properly in this day and age should be shot dead. Yes. What the hell was that judge thinking? He's an ignorant fool. I bet he hasn't compiled his kernel in weeks!
Ugly Sniffling Man: Little girl, can I compile your kernel?
Little Girl: No! My mommy warned me about people like you! *shriek*
Watching the OSS community squirm is amusing. People are trying to defend illegal bootlegging of DVDs. Please don't pretend to be stupid enough to claim it's anything to do with legal copies of your own DVDs. Crap and you know it and we know it. DeCSS was designed from the word go to bootleg CDs. Linux needs a DVD player (among other things) then it should pay for the license just like everyone else. It's not special, it's not above the law. DVDs are copyrighted, you have NO right to make any copies of it EVEN for your own private use (this is not like VHS or CDs).
Josh's post is right on the money. Whether you like it or not; agree or not. Today, right now, the law states you cannot make copies of DVDs. Period. To create a tool that does so and/or to distribute it is illegal. Right now today that is true. Fight to change the law, OK. But to defend those that broke the law as it exists right now? That's STUPID. Why didn't all you people bitching now say something before? Linux could have a DVD player (like Windows has) - they just had to do what anyone else has to do. Don't like it, bitch to the right people but breaking the law is not the right way to protest.
Can't 2600 et. al. simply post links to overseas sites with the DeCSS code and send a big FU to the MPAA?
Might generate an even more odious challenge to 1st Admendment rights...
Although many people are harping on the judges ignorance, I'll just have to say that the average /.-er is equally ignorant...
comment about this copying non-sense by the average
Encrypted DVDs CANNOT be effectively copied by DVD recordable devices without unscrambling them.
Why?
Because one of the encryption keys for the disk is stored in what is called the "lead-in" area of
the disk. For those people "ignorant" of disk storage technology, the lead-in area is a part
of the disk before a track that is used by the disk drive to figure out what track it is on and
to synchronize the incoming bit-stream to the actual data on the disk (self synchronizing data).
Under normal circumstances, it is not possible to read the lead-in area of a disk (that's why you
need to "unlock" the DVD drive first).
Even if you do this, most DVD recording devices do not allow you to specify custom data for the
lead-in area of the disk.
However, if you "crack" the DVD with DeCSS, then you can write an "unencrypted" disk. When a DVD
player detects a "unencrypted" disk, it doesn't look in the lead-in area for a key so it doesn't
matter what your DVD recorder wrote there...
Therefore the argument "you can copy disks w/o a program like DeCSS" is weak because it takes
professional equipment to really copy a DVD bit for bit instead of just copying the data in the
normally user-accesible sectors.
This is analagous to Macrovision which normal consumer VCRs respond to, but professional VCR
equipment is immune to. There are people licensed to make such equipment, but obviously the people
who are not licensed to make such equipment are breaking the law.
IANAL, but...
The legal analogy is like keys... Suppose you are selling your house and have a lock box with
a key inside. Some people are allowed to get access to the house (say real-estate agents).
By law, you are not allowed to discriminate (equal housing laws), but you still license some people
to give out access to your house.
Suppose somehow I figure out what the key to your house is. If I make a key to your house (or maybe
even the key pin codes) and distribute it on the internet, I'm technically breaking the law and
could legally have a court injunction preventing me from giving out keys to your house (or printing
the key pin codes so people can make their own keys). I'm assuming you haven't given me the right to do this...
SO.. I have the right to look in at your house as a potential purchaser, but only on your terms.
A possible legal avenue to pursue is that I have a right to look in your house and you are not
letting me look at it. But one that won't fly is that the real-estate agent can open the house so
I should be able to do this too... NOT!
This means the probably the best way to approach this DVD thing is to say that there's illegal
product tying (I buy the DVD, I want to watch it on a Linux system), or that it interferes with the
right to make back-up copies. Saying you can copy it alreadly is weak argument that is doomed to
failure...
According to the preliminary injunction:
(c) "DeCSS" means any computer program, file or device that may be used to decrypt or unscramble the contents of DVDs that are protected, or otherwise to circumvent the protection afforded, by CSS and that permits the copying of the contents or any portion thereof.
I think any old DVD player qualifies as a "device that may be used to decrypt the content of DVDs protected by CSS and that permits the copying of the contents or any portion thereof"... I know I can use mine to dub to a VHS tape.
Luckily this injunction only applies to a few people -- otherwise there would be a large portion of the U.S. where manufacturing and selling a DVD player would be illegal (or at least punishable by immediate imprisionment) under part (a)...
I wonder how many more times members they will have as a result of this despicable action by the MPAA. Perhaps, in the end, it will be the EFF who should be thanking them. ;)
I just did. Please do the same.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
I'm not sure that this is the same thing. My mpeg movie does not contain anything hidden in it, it just is. You could replace the mpeg with say the King James Bible which is freely available on the net. I think in this case, the only component that could be deemed illegal would be the instructions to transform the input file to DeCss. Now if you could create the instructions such that given a different input file, it would create a different fully legal output such as an image or an original piece of music, it would be very hard to ban the instructions or prove an illegal activity unless there were explicit links between the sources.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
You are probably correct that this considers all CSS decryption tools to be DeCSS. On the other hand, the injunction only prohibits the defendants from doing things with DeCSS. So they can't sell their DVD players, but Circuit City still can.
It seems to me that by prohibiting the functionality of deCSS, the DVD CCA is tying together two different products (DVDs and DVD players) much like when IBM said "you can't connect third party devices to your IBM computer" or when printer/copier manufacturers said that you had to use their toner/paper or lose any warranty.
After all, the DVD CCA et alia are a consortium conspiring to keep people out of their DVD manufacturers club by creating an artificial barrier to entry (access to the decryption algorithm). The barrier is artificial because it really only affects playback devices, not copying. Therefore they are effectively engaging in fixing the price of DVD players by limiting competition, which is a crime.
Could the defense be effective on this sort of idea? See here for more ideas on these lines.
-- OpenSourcerers
Soon enough
these people will realize that their trying to stuff a genie back into
a bottle.
They may not be able to stuff the genie back into the bottle, but they can litigate it into poverty.
--
The Future: Some assembly required; batteries not included.
Good idea. Here's mine! Now I'd better go join the EFF. I noticed that their site is /.ed, though.
--Alex
Causation can cause correlation
http://decssmirror.homestead.com/
Yes all of these mirror postings are redundant. That is why they are important.
Crulx
I joined the EFF too, $100 to start.
-- You can be a geeklord too
Here's another. This one also contains some other files to help form the basis of a Linux DVD Player.
email pegge@mpaa.org and ask to have your mirror of DeCSS be added to the list of "Related Sites", see if we can get the MPAA to sue itself.
*note: This is the ONLY email contact i could find on the entire MPAA website, guess they don't like feedback, imagine that*
Other than that misspelling, your description was accurate and informative.
Oops. Hehehe. My bad. Usually I just say fuck spelling, I know I can't spell. But that was a pretty bad mistake there. Sorry folks!
(hides head in shame)
--Nick
Democracy of any kind seldom comes easy. Hold fast though. Soon enough these people will realize that their trying to stuff a genie back into a bottle. I don't think the studio's give a rat's ass about this. I mean it is already easy and economically viable to copy music CDs with $1000 of equipment. Do the music labels try to encrypt their content, or stop selling CDs? Of course not. I still don't understand what the point of encrypting the contents was. I mean if any player is to be able to play the movie it has to decrypt the contents. Think of all those transistors/ clock cycles that are being wasted in decrypting DVDs.
Rant done, back to you on slashdot.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Yes, but I was planning on colocating a server outside the US (some place like LIBYA(sp?)) that doesn't care about copyright and just base operations out of there. The mirroring system would basically be "set it up wherever, and give us an expiration time". I can't police whether it's legal or not, nor would I try. The expiration is how often my crawler goes to the site to verify if it's there (and intact). Reason being mirrors would have a tendancy to disappear quickly. When you go to my site, you request the download, and then it redirects you to *one* *random* mirror. you cannot request more than 1 mirror, and it rotates on it's own schedule (ie, 5+n minutes where n is random) to spit out a new mirror.
That was one of my suggestions back when the restraining order was first announced... I sent the message to Jon Johansen, and he thought it was a pretty good idea, I just haven't had time to send it to 10 of my closest friends... :)
Time flies like an arrow;
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
They were who distributed the secret in the first place, only they didn't get to keep it secret.
As many others have. Got that nifty Copyleft T-Shirt, too.
:)
Get that shirt people. What can they do. Ask you to take it off?
(Would they really want you to?
Here are a bunch of maybe relevant (or somewhat relevant) snippets from the DMCA.
:)
They are extremely butchered, and I apologize for that. I'm trying to catch enough of anybody's attention to get them to actually go READ IT.
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/1201.html goes to "Sec. 1201. Circumvention of copyright protection systems ". This was posted earlier by
someone else (I forget who, but my thanks and all credit should go to them. Go ahead and mark me "redundant", but only if you actually followed their
link, and read it.
(Sorry about the plaintext... I'm on my way somewhere, and pressed for time)
I question the constitutionality of the DMCA and hope to see it challenged, but after reading it I wonder if this holds water even WITH the DMCA. Read
some of these unorganized bits, then go read the whole section to make sure you're getting it all in proper context. I may very well be wrong, and hope
someone who can follow this better than I can gets a chance to take a good look and maybe comment on what they think of it...
(And don't give me crap about cutting and pasting. I don't give a hoot about points, never have, and haven't even ever checked. I don't care... I just hope
someone can see and interpret this stuff for us.)
************************************DMCA Snippets***************************
(C) During the 2-year period described in subparagraph (A), and during each succeeding 3-year period, the Librarian of Congress, upon the
recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, who shall consult with the Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information of the Department of
Commerce and report and comment on his or her views in making such recommendation, shall make the determination in a rulemaking proceeding on the
record for purposes of subparagraph (B) of whether persons who are users of a copyrighted work are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year
period, adversely affected by the prohibition under subparagraph (A) in their ability to make noninfringing uses under this title of a particular class of
copyrighted works. In conducting such rulemaking, the Librarian shall examine -
(i) the availability for use of copyrighted works;
(ii) the availability for use of works for nonprofit archival,
preservation, and educational purposes;
(iii) the impact that the prohibition on the circumvention of
technological measures applied to copyrighted works has on
criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or
research;
(iv) the effect of circumvention of technological measures on
the market for or value of copyrighted works; and
(v) such other factors as the Librarian considers appropriate.
(D) The Librarian shall publish any class of copyrighted works for which the Librarian has determined, pursuant to the rulemaking conducted under
subparagraph (C), that noninfringing uses by persons who are users of a copyrighted work are, or are likely to be, adversely affected, and the
prohibition contained in subparagraph (A) shall not apply to such users with respect to such class of works for the ensuing 3-year period.
(c) Other Rights, Etc., Not Affected. - (1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including
fair use, under this title.
(4) Nothing in this section shall enlarge or diminish any rights of free speech or the press for activities using consumer electronics, telecommunications,
or computing products.
(f) Reverse Engineering. -
(1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may
circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and
analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other
programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification
and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
(2) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b), a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological
measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for
the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve
such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.
(4) For purposes of this subsection, the term ''interoperability'' means the ability of computer programs to exchange information, and of such programs
mutually to use the information which has been exchanged.
(g) Encryption Research. -
(2) Permissible acts of encryption research. - Notwithstanding
the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), it is not a violation of
that subsection for a person to circumvent a technological
measure as applied to a copy, phonorecord, performance, or
display of a published work in the course of an act of good faith
encryption research if -
(A) the person lawfully obtained the encrypted copy,
phonorecord, performance, or display of the published work;
(B) such act is neccessary to conduct such encryption
research;
**************That's it... now go read it in full******************
general links
Some random dude's take on Libya's Resources on the Internet (scroll down to get real info)
Isn't South Africa another country that doesn't care about copyrights, or is it patents?
Does this mean that /. has to take down the links you just put up due to this judge's ruling?
Is this shirt (at Copyleft.net, scroll down, its frames) talking about the same thing we are? (I haven't been following this closely.) If it is, it'd be a good protest shirt or something.
OpenDVD.org
download http://cubicmetercrystal.com/decss/mirror.tar.gz and $ tar -zxf mirror.tar.gz
Your mirror is decss/index.html
They can only take the freedom if you let them.
http://cubicmetercrystal.com/decss/
We should all email this to Jack Valenti, c/o webmaster@mpaa.org...
--
" It's a ligne Maginot-in-the-sky "
The whole point is that you do not need to decrypt DVD's to copy them. I really doubt that the duplication plants do this to copy the things.
DECSS will only give you the movie and not the whole contents of the DVD on your hard drive so it is in fact not a copy of the DVD. It allows a consumer to play the contents of the DVD nothing more.
I detest the control element built into the DVD player technology and refuse to adopt the technology until I can buy a player which legally does not encorporate this "feature". In fact this sticks so much of a monopoly so much more than the microsoft case that I think the DVD industry should be investigated. Current DVD technology is not for the consumer but for the producer to make as much money as they possibly can.
Just one thing as I understand it DVD's conatin about 400 keys, so what happens when the 401st player comes on the market?
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
I joined up too, 100 USD
If anyone feels strongly about this then join up, put your money where your mouth is. This case will set the in stone the future of eectronic freedom of speech.
I would suggest not buying any DVD's in the meantime as well.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
This is exactly the same as the Scientology case. The person who posted the trade secrets to Usenet was liable, but not anyone who downloaded the information or any use later, since it was no longer a trade secret.
The moral of this story: spread the source code as far and wide as possible. The MPAA lawyers have been careful to state that the code has not been widespread.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Blargh. Signal 11 is so friggin' annoying. I can't believe I'm replying to one of his posts.
But this seems to be a good place to post the link to my small piece of the LiViD Resistance.
Heh. It never occurred to me, but--you know--that is what it looks like, now that I think about it.
No, it isn't a stereogram, but you can have the source code to create the image, if you want. (The noise is different each time.)
Montag,
You can count me in for anything. I was on that list. Its a good thing I printed up my own DeCSS t-shirt, and now I'll have something to wear it to.
New worlds are not born in the vacuum of abstract
ideas, but in the fight for daily bread --Rudolf Rocke
A government or private party can ruin your life or make you feel their pain if you traffic in the "wrong" information.
The Church of Scientology has been vicious in protecting their allegedly copyrighted secret scriptures and harassing their perceived enemies.
The U.S. Government spends plenty of money on investigating, prosecuting, and sometimes entrapping, people who possess or traffic in child pornography. They make no distinction between harming a child through sexual abuse, which should be a crime, and photographs, computer graphics, drawings or paintings, which someone judges to have sexual content, even if no child was involved in their creation.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
emacs: meta-x rot13-other-window
--
I ate something that disagreed with me. Maybe I should have cooked him first.
I'd recommend skipping 2.2.14 - the interactive performance is a bit screwed up. Try the latest 2.2.15pre instead.
--
I ate something that disagreed with me. Maybe I should have cooked him first.
Rob has a disclaimer on the page stating that the comments belong to the poster and not /.
/. constantly, or grep through all the comments looking for snippets of the code then they REALLY are nuts!!!
If the restraining order suggests that Rob must monitor
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Not everyone compiles a kernel weekly. I compiled 2.2.14 the other day... I did not reboot, I mean, hell that would kill my uptime! I will live with 2.2.13 for now.
Switching to 2.2.14 on the next power failure...
:)
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
If you buy a video cassette, is the manufacturer required to furnish you with a TV and VCR?
If you buy a TV, should they arrange for you to have electricity?
The list goes on.
You had to buy a DVD Player and didn't complain. Why didn't you just buy the disc and demand that they give you a DVD player in order to watch it?
I'm sure there's a whole lot of people who would like to see 2600 go down in flames. I'm not a member of the group nor do I necessarily condone all of their actions. But even if they had done something illegal (which is still in dispute) they shouldn't be denied a reasonable opportunity to organize their defense. Especially since their lawyers are already involved in two other cases over the same issue at opposite ends of the country.
On the bright side, though, if the judge continues to make such decisions without allowing the defendants their due process and the case is lost, there's a good chance that they could have a successful appeal. That's a pessimistic way to look at things, but with the U.S. legal system sometimes that's the best viewpoint.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Like I just did, John Doe also just installed a copy of the C source on his machine.
Unless they change the algo and bring out new players, and retreive the old ones, there's no way they're gonna stop this.
VHS was easy to copy but still the movie industry is bulging with money...
A wonderful exercise in logic... :)
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
For now, just post mirrors under this thread.
http://www.stupendous.org/
http://www.xs4all.nl/~joskam/
Plus I joined the EFF, 2600 and bought the copyleft shirt.
Anybody manage to get through?
Is this going overboard? Somehow it doesn't feel like it at all -- not under these conditions....
Steganography could be used in this legal case to hide the decss code in the testimony of one of the witnesses or a statement by the defense. Since it is legal to publish the court transcripts they'll be everywhere after a while and then the EFF can release the key to decode them. The statement needed would be long and stilted; but, can probably be passed throught the court case. Once done, decss is legally everywhere, in a way :)
What is the file size of the DeCSS code without any comments? How many words would be necessary to hide it in a statement using steganography?
so they're going to SUE 2600 for having the source code? okay, now maybe it's just me, but why don't they then sue this site that i just found, and downloaded the source from?
i did a quick google search for 'decss source code' and found, on the second search page, the above site. and now *I* have the source.
perhaps i'll get another geocities account and drop it up there, so everyone else in the world can download it.
der dee der.
One good thing came out of all this DVD gestapo crap - it woke up the grumpy old man inside of me and I finally went out and joined the EFF.
Good call. I just signed up too.
You know, at some point in my life I probably would have done something similar had this stuff happened earlier.
Here's what will happen when we boycott this stuff: the uninformed consumer (mostly people who don't read slashdot) will still buy movies on DVD because it is convenient and economical for them.
I wish I could do something to help convert the uninformed, but as it is, I'm just as bad -- just spent some good money on a dolby digital decoder and a DVD player for my home theatre. And, let me tell you, even though they're playing hardball in the courts, I am still loving DVD at home.......
Karnal
I am sorry, but i think your sadly wrong. This is like saying that there is a hardware region protection in a DVD player, to make sure the disk can only be played in its region. I hate to break it to you but anyone who spends 15 minutes of browsing on the net can crack his PC DVD player to work with any region, and disable the screen warp feature buildinto DVD players to prevent them being copied unto VHS tapes. For hardware players, such as sony, philips, and samsung make, its a little harder, you have to go to a place like www.dvdkits.com, and open your DVD player, and mess with some chips and/or cables, and your free of any copie AND region protection as well... Ive got local DVD stores here to who will fix just about any DVD player for about 100 USD including components and labor.
Now if this 'security' was so easy to hack, its common now amongst most 'knowledgable' DVD users, why do you feel this reading of keys off a DVD drive will be any harder? Its just a matter of tapping into the DVD decoder chip, and reading the key from memory. Thats the same method they use to make DVD players warp and region free, so its a known and proven implimentation.
That also is my main problem with this whole DVD CCA crackdown, they will prevent me from playing DVD's on my nice linux box, while i could be copying and riping DVD's all day long if i wanted to. There are already plenty of DVD rippers out there in the warez & dvd scene (DVDRip by Drink Or Die, and some other tool by EvilIso), so they lost that battle, so please please mister DVD CCA, let me play the material i bought and paid for!
-- Chris Chabot
"I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"
Despite the prevailing opinion on Slashdot, it's my impression that you can't actually do a bit-by-bit copy of a DVD. The DVD reader hardware simply won't allow you to read the decryption keys off the disc. (It will only use them internally.) So if you tried to simply copy a DVD, you'd end up with a whole lot of encrypted data and no keys to decrypt it.
You are correct. The DVD has in it a "magic sector" (for purposes of this little post) that contains the encryption stuff. The drive[1] authenticates itself by doing some Cool Shit[2] and the drive saying "Ok, this is a valid disc. Go ahead and play it, using this key: xxxxx".
DVD-RAMs and DVD-Writers, according to spec, will not be able to write this sector. People have speculated that it's a firmware thing, others say the blank discs will come with that particular sector nulled, burned, or otherwise unwritable.
Once you understand this, there's no way you can belive that CSS is inteded to prevent copying, or even as a useful viewing protection method. There's also no way that a DVD could be bit-for-bit copied by the average consumer[3].
[1] Only DVD-ROM drives bother to do this.. Most set-top boxes don't even go this far
[2] DeCSS does this for you.
[3] Ignoring, of course, the truely resourceful, but they'll have the commercial-sized copiers anyway, regardless of CSS or not.
I want a rock.
Actually, *you* don't get it.
It is perfectly legal (and not at *all* uncommon) to "reverse-engineer" trade secret information. As long as you *independently* discovered the information it is perfectly legal.
A good non-computer related example would be the book series "Top Secret Recipes" and their associated web site http://www.topsecretrecipes.com/ . The author of this books "reverse engineers" the recipe to popular commercial food items (Oreos, Wendy's Spicy Chicken Sandwiches, etc). The recipies for most of these products are protected by trade secrets, which prevent employees at the Oreo factory (for example) from telling all their friends how to make Oreos. But trade secret agreements do *not* prevent and independent third party from "discovering" this information for themselves.
And those 3 things would be:r ee_dvd.html
1) mirror the files
http://home.student.utwente.nl/s.r.sijbrandij/f
2) join the EFF ($20,- for students)
http://www.eff.org
3) call the MPAA at 1-800-NO-COPYS (1-800-662-6797) and explain in a polite and orderly way what you think
it won't matter a drap whether or not Linux CSS decryption exists. You can still copy it bit-by-bit.
You cannot make a bit-for-bit copy with normaly available technology, DVD players are incapable of reading the key aria under normal circumstances. You'd need hard-core pro equipment in order to do it, if its posible to it at all.
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Does is mean "a state of being, currently, right now" or does it mean "a state of being, now, and at any time in the past".
Does is mean "is" or "was". Well, it means "is". And that's what Clinton said. Don't get me wrong, I think the guy's a creep, but the fact is he was correct in his use of the word 'is'. If we use the real definition of is, clinton was not liyng. I personaly think both clinton and starr commited immorral acts of near equal wrongness, however Clinton was correct about the definition of "is".
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that what the DVDCCA is doint is morraly right, All that I am saying is that without DeCSS, or some serious hardware bit-for-bit copys can't be done.
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
What about the pending legislation that alters the UCC regulations to make EULAs and shrinkwrap licenses enforceable?
But, its only pending, and will probably (hopefully ???) not get passed. But intill then, it is meaning less.
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The downside: End User License Agreements for DVDs.
License Agreements are just that, agreements. They are not legialy binding in anyway.
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Nothing can prevent copying of information, ever. If you can see and hear it, you can record it. The only thing you can do is make it more difficult. Unfortunetly the CSS dosn't make things very hard...
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
You don't need to skip the simpsons, unless you've got a ratings box, in witch case, just go somewhere else to watch the show, so that it's not reported. Also, don't buy the products advertized. TV isn't like the web, they don't know if your watching, unless you tell them
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Well, yes it is posible to make a bit for bit copy of a dvd, in theory. But theory dosn't really matter. What DVDCCA is worried about is people at there home computers, copying away like we do with CDs. some people can make bit-for-bit copies, but you cant, unless you've got some custom hardware that I don't know about.
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
http://www.eff.org/ip/Video/DVDCCA_case/dvd-bogk.h tml
Read and find out for yourself
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Sheeesh! I manually decoded that one by substitution before I figured out it was just ROT13'd!! :) Doh!
;)
(That's what happens when you read Applied Cryptography and don't use common sense!)
Anyways... I did it all by hand, mommy would be proud!
It appears you also ROT-13'd your message by hand since... either that or you can't spell.
For all you ROT13 impaired it said...
"ROT13 all filenames and all alphabethc chars in the decss source code, then st ore on your web-site."
Damn... I jacked with his SLOfuse!! The doorbell is ringing IT'S A SUMMONS!!
:)
Another thought I got though... if someone goes out and patents ROT13, could they get an injunction against people without first going through all the "fair use" stuff at the Patent Office? It seems they could, if the patent was previously filed and the judge didn't use common sense on it.
(That was a rhetorical question my friend)
Hasta,
-Don.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Gee, you are 0 for 3!
(no you are not first. No you cannot think of anything intelligent to say. No, Star Wars blows goats)
Another exciting mirror is available here:
The amazing mirror #124635653532
Crime and morality are not binary issues. There is no dividing line that seperates good from bad and this is why the field of ethics is so huge. If real life where decidable like a math problem then we wouldn't need judges.
-- Virtual Windows Project
From the mpaa.org website:
Since its early days, the MPA, often referred to
now as "a little State Department," has expanded
to cover a wide range of foreign activities falling in the diplomatic, economic, and political arenas.
------------------------------------
I think basically, this shows just how arrogant they are... "A little state department"? EXCUUUUSE ME!?!?! But what elected representatives set up this "state department"?
Looks to me like the media consider themselves a separate state, being that they are represented by a separate state department.. To whom I'm sure they pay "taxes" in the form of membership dues.
Be careful, ten years from now, they'll have their own military. They already seem to have a legislative, executive and judiciary branch.
- No Sig Today
Since the judge has made a public statement that shows a clear bias in the case prior to the hearing, is there any legal proceeding for getting him off of the case?
LetterRip
"Since the judge acknowledges that he doesn't forsee a victory for the plaintiff"
He actually stated ""I don't think there's the slightest question that plaintiffs have a very good chance of success." That is, he expects the plaintiff to win...
LetterRip
Now, I'm not terribly certain about this, but didn't the last (failed) try at an injunction take place in California (9th Circuit)? You always hear about how ultra-liberal the 9th is. Kinda makes it obvious then that the megacorps would hop across the country to New York -- a wee bit more conservative and "sympathetic to the cause," neh?
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
Well, Macrovision can be worked around. And it doesn't even affect recording via methods other than VHS.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Here I found this on opendvd.org
Dear Friends,
We publish LinxPlus, the biggest Polish magazine devoted to Linux (10,000 copies, http://www.linux.com.pl).
After a long argument we have decided to place the DeCSS code on our CD, as well as some other useful information. If you have
any comments/advice etc. regarding this, please contact me.
As far as I know this is going to be the first time someone has published this code on a CD on such scale.
Why not just encrypt it with CSS?
These folks have the law on their side.
If so why don't they go to a court in Norway to press their claims?
It's important to remember something about America and our Judicial system:
In America you can sue for almost anything.
Maybe someone should take legal action against the Motion Picture Association of America then..
Antl-stalking laws may be an appropriate thing to try.
No, the wife got those.
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
Clear, Dark Skies
Maybe A xor B xor C xor D produces DeCSS.
There are coding techniques where you could break up the target code into A, B, C, and D, but you only need three of the four to recover the target.
This could be done to any level of complexity - i.e., set it up so that whenever 3 random SlashDotters meet, they could combine their secret decoder rings to produce the DeCSS source...
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
Clear, Dark Skies
Perhaps the good folks of Slashdot should organize a boycott of MPAA affiliated companies. I, for one, am willing to avoid films and television shows by these parties (though giving up The Simpsons will be very difficult).
Perhaps we could organize a non-violent attempt to deny movie-goers access (i.e. a sit-in) to "blockbuster" films by these companies.
Something needs to be done to draw *positive* attention to the DeCSS cause.
Cheers,
Slak
You hit the nail on the head. The uninformed consumer is the problem. That's why I'd like to see folks out at Best Buy handing out flyers about the MPAA's steamrolling of the little guy.
:)
In my world, Slashdotters would participate in a sit-in at Disney World that would prevent visitors from accessing it. Non-violent, of course. Something like getting 20 or so people to lay in the street leading up to DW, preventing cars from entering the parking lot. Or handcuffing themselves to the doors of local theatres. Classic denial of service attacks.
Viva La Revolution!
Truly this revolution will not be televised, as the major players control the media.
Cheers,
Slak
Is your sig an intentionally cognative dissonance?
2600 will be putting the word out on a National/International level.
There will be demonstrations against MPAA and related organizations soon.
The president of the MPAA lives and works here in the DC area.
We have not yet decided on how those of us in and around the DC area will participate, but if you are near DC you have an open invitation for whatever events we put together.
Perhaps we will be able to stream it live (whatever it happens to be), as we attempted (failed) to do on the June 4th Free Kevin demonstration in front of the Supreme Court.
Thanks in advance
Guy Montag
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
The official offices of MPA AND MPAA are located in California.
The lobbying offices are here in DC and Jack Valenti might as well live here (when he talks in the area he acts like he lives here too).
Reserching specific locations of their operations.
Other info at: http://www.mpaa.org
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
I'm at work and will be for awhile. We have
software to cens^H^H^H^Hsheild us from the bad things
on the internet. This includes 2600! Has to do
with knowledg for criminal skills or something
like that. I would trigger the responce to get the
actual text but the trigger is recorded and
reported. Anyways what does the article say?
Real life is decidable like a math problem. It is
just that some math problems have no solution.
Have you tried to solve the three body problem lately?
that should have been while()
Damn slashdot.
that should have been while(<>)
Apparently if you use preview, it converts your codes, then if you hit submit, it munges it again so hit BACK then submit.
Double-Damn slashdot.
Me too. $100. I was going to go with the $65 but I wanted to offset the fact that I decided to ask for their book. :)
It's not really the first go. The anti-scientology have been doing this sort of thing for years now. We've had a few successes, and a few failures. Xenu has all the gossip on that.
Some dude and Mattle have been butting heads for a while, and if memory serves me, the people who make barbie were most annoyed at the barbie morph page.
But onwards we all go. This isn't the first time, and is no way gonna be the last.
Alas gallinaceas de urbe bovis volo
The code was developed in Europe. You can reverse engineer for interoperability, such as to watch DVDs under Linux/FreeBSD/AmigaOS/BeOS/DOS1.0 instead of the default Windows and Mac.
An argument for industry pushed monopolisation of computer OSs - Microsoft ask the movie industry not to write players for other OSs, they comply for a nice fee (or similar) and thus M$ monopoly grows...
Still, the judge says the Plaintiff (the movie people) will not have a good chance of winning anyway. Just get the source code onto your machine now... I might look into porting livid to freebsd this side of y3000!
~~
I joined too.
Anyway, I was thinking that people who are worried about Feds and lawsuits could put the DeCSS code in comment-form on their Web pages. I mean, they'd be less likely to be caught and they could point people they knew and trusted to the page and just have them "view source."
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
That's a cute way of rephrasing "Intellectual Property" theft, or IP theft for short.
Which is more valuable, a $5 DVD or a near perfect digital copy of a $50,000,000 movie? From a standpoint of the lawyers, the IP of the $50,000,000 movie is much more valuable than a pirated $5 DVD. And you can be sure they'll point that out in your defense trial.
I think the motion picture industry understood the potential for pirating DVD movies, that you didn't need a deCSS program to create a perfect copy of the DVD.
But if you had the *pure* digital source, you could create copies on any format, even if it's one more convenient than DVD's, and bypass the regional codings entirely.
So in that sense, it is copy protection and not "playback" protection.
This argument is weak.
First, a movie like Titanic grossed a Billion (with a capital B) dollars. So valuing the average run-of-the-mill movie at $50,000,000 seems pretty fair to me.
And, did you see the Kevin Mitnick interview on CBS this weekend? Mitnick tried to use the same argument that you did above, but eventually conceded that he did, in fact, "steal" the Solaris source code among other things.
You can call it anything you want. "Stealing", or "Making an illegal copy", or "Not depriving them of their trade secrets." But when the judge hands down the sentence, he will most assuredly convict you of "stealing".
I'd try to show beyond a reasonable doubt that the behavior of your program was so unlikely to have happened by chance that you must have designed it that way.
Once I'd shown that, I'd then claim that the input video + the program was in fact just on way of storing the illegal information. I'd make the analogy to encryption; just because you'd obfuscated the info didn't mean that you didn't have it.
As a defense you'd have to show that the effect did indeed happen by accident, which would be hard as the probabilites of that are VERY small.
---
In line with your gedanken experiment, conscider this:
There are three of us; each with a sequence of bytes of the same length. A xor B produces illegal DeCCS, B xor C produces a JPG of legal pr0n. A xor C is garbage.
Now which of us is guilty of storing DeCCS?
AFAICT (Can Tell) it'd be almost impossible to find anyone guilty. At first sight, A and B are seem rather co-guilty, and C is in the clear. Cool. But then the defence introduces D, which also C xor D producess DeCCS. Now by the previous argument, C and D are also guilty.
What? C goes from being innocent to guilty through the introduction of other information? But he was holding an innocuous pr0n, for gods sake.
This sort of wrangling gets really interesting, as you're often able to give at least one or two laywers coronaries if you play it well. And that is a Good Thing (tm)
Why not just post it to Usenet, then it will be picked up by Deja, Supernews and all ISPs that carry NGs, now the MPAA arent going to sue them, why? Because the only way for Deja etc to not pick this off the NGs is to stop allowing access to them, and therefore they would be out of business, and I think all the millions that use these resources would get very upset. That way we we get everyone involved. Just my 2 pence worth.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
I don't have the time or technical aptitude to implement something like this, but here's a proposal to subvert this absurd legal action: An internet-wide RAID-like filesystem.
Implement a daemon similar to NFS or CODA where the information that constitutes a file is distributed redundantly across all the co-operating hosts. The idea hear would be that no single host contains enough information to retrieve any specific file with integrity and the "fragments" of the file (eg. parity information, etc) is redundantly spread across many hosts. That way you can't ask one computer for a particular file and if a few computers are shutdown, there is no loss of information. If you ask the network as a whole, you can retrieve the file with integrity. Sorta like RAID but instead of being spread across a few hard drives, its spread across a dynamic array of computers on the net.
There would be no single point in the network that contains the "offending" file and the seizure of a handful of computers will have no effect on the integrity of the information.
I'd assume that there would be no authentication for this scheme, no file permissions either. THe only two file operations would be CREATE and READ.
Rather than deleting files from this network FS, they would simply "expire" if no one is reading them.
Store the deCSS stuff in this network and it would be effectively undestructable.
I'm going to explicitly defy the MPAA's desire by posting it to my site later. I'll also e-mail them that I have it up in defiance of their irrational complaints.
MPAA -- Go F Yourself
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
I totally agree (of course) ... but even if the primary objective were to make copies, SO WHAT? Am I the only one old enough to remember this same exact scenario when cassette recorders hit the mainstream? All those dire predictions that it would encourage rampant abuse and spell the end of the music industry? The widespread desemination of that technology actually increased music sales for god's sake. Sheesh! If I were the cynical type, I'd wonder if this hysteria is lawyer-driven; legalistic parasites convincing Dilbertesque managerial types in the movie industry of some phantom menace. Spreading hype and unfounded fear seems like the standard way lawyers keep themselves employed.
I just joined the EFF too. $100 well spent.
Dude, try *steganography*. Stenography means shorthand, like a court reporter uses.
In any case, I think this is not steganography -- or at least in might not be, if the intention is other than to hide the existence of the communication (for example, to comply with a legal loophole). I think the problem here is different, and pervasive to attempts to regulate the dissemination of information: the notion of joint information.
Suppose that some string X is illegal -- DeCSS, child pornography, nuclear secrets, whatever. I xor it with a random string Y and get Z. Now, there is zero information content in Y and Z, but their joint information content is that of X.
I believe that this sort of issue is an unsurmoutable hurdle to laws making some facts illegal to talk about.
For more on joint information, see the work of, e.g., Gregory Chaitin
I Can't Believe It's A Law Firm, LLP does not necessarily endorse the contents of this message.
Slashdot is not bound by the ruling. Only the subjects of the injunction are.
As long as new sites keep popping up, they'll never be able to hale all of them into court to be subjected to such orders. Or, at least, it will be prohibitively expensive.
I Can't Believe It's A Law Firm, LLP does not necessarily endorse the contents of this message.
Macrovision basicly messes with the AGC features of standard comsumer VCRs. At the top of the picture, just out of viewing area, Macrovision places these blocks that contain white at levels much hotter than the rest of the video. The AGC sees the hot video and adjusts the entire image to try and bring the hot white blocks to normal levels. Industrial recorders can defeat AGC or you can use a video switcher to mask off that part of the image.
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
Ah, but you didn't copy it down to do it (did you?). See, a lawyer would have to copy it down to present it in court. Then when he "translated" (reversed engineered) it for the judge, he would have violated my intellectual property rights. (The only reason he would do such a thing was if he thought I was advocating something in a secret message.) By the way, anybody got a utility, I'm kinda lazy.
Criminalize spam and telemarketing!
The above sentence is copyright 2000, SLOfuse. If you copy it by electronic or other physical means you agree not to reverse-engineer it. It means nothing as it is stated and any representation of the above sentence in court other than exactly as stated will indicate a violation of my intellectual property rights and will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Criminalize spam and telemarketing!
The point is, it is NOT that plain and simple. If it were, people would not be fighting over it in court. If you were a lawyer for the MPAA, you would think it was illegal - plain and simple. But I'm sure your not, so...Hmm....
Criminalize spam and telemarketing!
While the physical machine may be outside the country, you aren't. There may be some protection for the information on the machine, but there's little stopping "them" from holding you responsible for the contents of the machine and arresting you.
Yes, I've thought about this too with respect to export controlls on encryption, but as a US citizen (on US soil) I would still be responsible for "munitions" on the machine.
Laws can be soo damned annoying. (anyone want to colo on the moon?)
Why do I get the feeling this is going to end up getting physically violent?
The DVD movies already _are_ being reverse-engineered. Progress is being made on determining all the funky "magic" of the IFO and VOB file formats. However, no one has lifted a finger to prevent these actions or the spread of the information (yet.) Maybe this is plan C and maybe they know they have no legal recourse to prevent it outside of CSS scrambling the files.
Understanding of the file format is useless if you cannot read the file.
That's not the majority, though... to be more specific, most of the people who are upset are x86 Linux users who would be placated by a binary full-featured DVD player. The FreeBSD folk might even be able to deal with that. The only other platform where DVD players are common that Linux runs is PPC, so a PPC binary would placate a lot of the rest of the community.
I'm sure if they did that, a number of their defendents would melt away and be happy, making it easier for the MPAA to win. Unless the judge notices that the simple fact that a lot of defendents were now happy proved that people were using DeCSS to watch their own DVDs, not to copy them. ;-)
[TMB]
So? They got a preliminary injunction. The judge himself said that they had very little chance of winning the case.
Well if you are a network admin just call your friend over at corp legal (I know you got one... remember the guy's computer that you fixed?) and say "you may get a live one soon try not to hurt them too bad". Then download the code onto the company network system, propogate it to 5 countries servers, then mirror it out to 407 contractor sites (separate companies) who then issue copies of it through all their systems along with actual business data. Then call all your buddies and say "Come and get it boyz". Then you clear it off the main company site in the USA and sit back and let the bored lawyers play if anyone is game.
Lets see them issue an injuction against the planet.
As one put it, this is the mole game. You take a hammer and try to hit the head that pops up. I'm betting that the computer geeks of the world can pop up and disappear faster. We've done it before, we'll do it again.
Heaven knows if nothing else the really underground (what we called "elite" sites in the 80s, kinda kiddy grounds now in lot of cases) will always have this stuff now.
http://copyleft.net/cgi-bin/copyleft/t 039.pl
and the back:
http://copyleft.net/cgi-bin/cop yleft/t039.pl?1&back
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
corrected copyleft url:
http://copyleft.net/cgi-bin/copyleft/t 039.pl
and the back:
http://copyleft.net/cgi-bin/cop yleft/t039.pl?1&back
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
You and those lying lawyers from the MPAA can repeat, over and over and over again until your heads fall off, that DeCSS was designed for the sole, specific purpose of bootlegging DVDs, but that won't change the fact that it was designed to make a viewer for legally-purchased commercially-manufacturd DVDs that would work on Linux. If I were the judge and a lawyer tried with a straight face to sell me the load of FUDmatic hogwash you're vending out here, I'd throw the bastard in jail for contempt of court.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
http://www.zerohou r.net/zhbbs/post/100/01/17/technews144428.html
VOS/Interreality project: www.interreality.org
I believe you are quite correct in saying that this statement would refer to all DVD players of any kind. Of course, you have to expect that since DeCSS is designed as a DVD player component, and basically this is just legal mumbo-jumbo to enable them to get you to remove whatever they want from your site, including, if they so desired, players cracked to be multi-region, or even entirely legitimate player software. Ironically enough, though, this would not include region-changer programs which are a much greater threat to copy protection :)
Mmmmmmmmmm sabre-rattling!
---------------- Take the red pill
It seems to me that this preliminary injunction came _so_ quickly, and that the judge's reading of the law is_so_ unreasonable, that one has to wonder if the judge is either incredibly inept or there is some kind of monetary exchange under the table.
My experience from reading about other trials and such (on slashdot and other news sources) involving free speech and the internet is that judges use use preliminary injunctions somewhat conservatively. Judge Kaplan is tossing them around like there is no tomorrow.
Isn't there some kind of accountability built into the judicial system? If there is anybody that should be getting any kind of injuctions, it is this moronic judge who is obviously highly impressed by the MPAA, the companies they represent, and the money they toss around.
While it may be true that you can't do much with illicit DVD's right now, the industry was kind of planning on using the format for a while. It won't be long until recordable media will be availble that can handle files of this size, and internet bandwidth will grow over time.
If people really want a Linux DVD player they could work with a licensed vendor to create Linux DVD software. It wouldn't be open source, and you'd have to pay for it, but it would be availble. Instead, we have a crack which is likley illegal in the US at least.
Preliminary Injunctions are only granted if there is evidence that the case will likely succeed.
_ hacking_1.html
The industry is arguing that people distributing DeCSS are violating copyright law.
A provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act forbids distribution of products designed to crack copyright protection schemes, the studios argued.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000121/tc/dvd
They may not be able to say that it was illegal to create it, but distributing it may be another issue.
I've put up a mirror at http://thehangedman.digitaldriveway.c om/DeCSS
Also you can try to download them from my BBS (The file section is buggy).
Why not really have some fun.
Step 1: Create free web based email account. i.e. hotmail
Step 2: Create free Personal Ads and Classified Ads on sites like Classified2000.com and information sites that include classifieds.
Step 3: Post the source code as your ad.
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
You forgot the 94-95 'clipper' proposal and the (*cough* idiotic *cough* pointless) CDA in 1996.
It's ridiculous - common sense should prevail in courts over any fine technicalities and varying interpretations of prior rulings.
Somebody reverse engineered a trade secret. Oops - Guess it's not a trade secret anymore. Therefore, it's legal as the cat it out of the bag like any other trade secret.
Passing laws or hiring lobbyists to pass laws to protect your trade secrets is a low and dirty act. Laws are meant to protect people as a group - not coorporations - indvidual corpoerations specifically.
The laws just going to get more and more ridiculous... One day somebody will put on a smart hat and say, Geesh - Why don't we just look at things for how they are
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
From a wired article:
2 0000114-pi-eddy-dec/20000114-pi-eddy-dec -03.gif
The developers of DeCSS, a Norwegian group called MoRE (Masters of Reverse Engineering) got a key by reverse-engineering the XingDVD player, from Xing Technologies, a subsidiary of RealNetworks.
You might notice that the XingDVD player has a license agreement. That license agreement VERY specifically makes it illegal to reverse engineer their program. http://www.eff.org/pub/Intellectual_property/DVD/
The law was broken starting there. Next, it was used to remove encryption from DVDs so they could be played without using the licensed decryption system CSS. Whether you like it or not, that is how DVDs are supposed to be played.
To the person who commented that current DVD players might be covered by this injuction cause he stated that the output is unencrypted - anyone who's tried to videotape the output from a DVD knows that it's guarded by a macrovision type of system. You can view it but can't record it (without, again, a descrambling device designed to get around the copy protection).
DeCSS was designed to make it possible to bootleg DVDs easily. MoRE and Jon didn't deny it (until they were sued). Explain the sites like dvd-copy that very proudly yell out their bootlegging intentions? Come on people - you are just bitching because someone took away a pirating tool you wanted. This is like complaining when the satelite company EMPs yer bootleg DSS card. Or the cable company busts you for that "test" box.
Anyone claiming this is about freedom of speech has not clue 1 about what that means. The Supreme court made it clear, freedom of speech does not permit copyright violation, ever.
All I'm hearing is the cry of babies who can't bootleg movies for free. Is there ANYONE who would really stand up and honestly say: But, I'm so worried my DVD will become corrupted so I need to make a backup to my hard drive and for safety I think I'll post it in nicely rar'ed chunks to alt.binaries.movies so others will have it in case I lose it.
No linux player? Boo-hoo - pay the money to license the decoder like everyone else! You are not exempt.
You wrote: 3. plays them back over a unencrypted output ( the video/audio connections ), thus allowing me to copy them to any device that
accepts video input e.g. my RCA VCR, my computer via my Pinnacle DC30 capture card, et. al.
Ever tried it? The output is protected by macrovision. Go ahead, record the output from your DVD on your VHS. Now, play it back (looked great while recording didn't it?) -- suprise. Garbage.
The judge actually said: "I don't think there's the slightest question that plaintiffs have a very good chance of success" - that means the judge thinks there is no doubt that the plantiffs will win. PI's are not easy to get and especially against multiple plaintiffs like this.
In order to get a primilinary injunction you not only have to prove to the judge that you are being wronged and the law is broken but that you have a very high degree of probability that you will win the case! You have to give facts under oath and sworn statements to support it. The judge listens to both sides and very frequently the judge will decided that any damage done could easily be remedied by a money fine later so won't grant the PI - getting one means the judge is strongly convinced the case has merit AND will succeed.
Sent $20 to EFF instead of buying another DVD.
This *had* to happen, it was only a matter of time. There's no way to securely encrypt data if you're going to be providing the key along with it. You have to decrypt the data to view it!
I'm really surprised it took so long. If they replace the encryption with something different, it will be cracked even faster, because this whole mess has made many people very bitter.
It is our responsibility as an open-source and free information supporting society to speak out with one voice that this is wrong. In order to do that we must hurt the movie industry in the only place that matters to them. Their wallet. I ask that every open-source supporter boycot movies for a few weeks or months until paramount, turner, disney, sony, etc. stop the law suits and harrassment.
Just stop going out to the theatre, stop renting videos and stop buying movies on DVD or VHS formats from anything besides independant films. Just find something else to do for a few weeks or up to a couple months and I assure you if we all do this the movie industry will change their tune REAL fast. That's my $.02 cents.
No, the injuction is crafted such that it does prohibit linking to sites with the information.
A question may be, is that an HTML link (and even grant simply listing the URL to be copied & pasted rather than an "easy" link) or is that ANY link in the chain(s) that *could* lead there.
If it is any link that *could* lead to the information it takes on a whole new, greater significance (yes, more than just DVD). Why?
Here's the links I'd consider: search engines.
By now some spiders have surely indexed sites that carry the information which CCA is trying to suppress.
Intent (use the search engine to find the information we can't show you) may be a factor. But is having a specific link to an engine any different than saying "If you seek it, try a search engine"? If 'secondary links' are also forbidden, wouldn't this be a thing for the engines to be concerned about? Of course the CCA won't go after them, at least not publicly, as that would make them out to be fools to everyone, not just the few (really, how widespread is balanced coverage? Not very.) already.
What might be done? Quiet behind the scenes stuff, if they wanted to try and risk that should it get out. More likely, nothing, aside from going after anyone actually using the above technique as following the letter rather than the "spirit" of things.
As for going "all the way" that may be a very good thing. A Supreme Court ruling (which would of course not involve that particaluar judge..) could set things straight once and for all. But if things went the other way.. *shudder*.. and it would be slow getting there.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
Yes, joining the EFF is extremely important. This is something I've put off for way too long.
Also since 2600 has stated they will be in this fight for the long haul as well, it is obvious they too will need money for legal expenses. Getting yourself a subscription to their magazine would also be prudent. Not only will you be helping the future of electronic free-speech and open source, you'll also get interesting tech/hacker/cracker articles as a bonus. I've always wanted a life-time subscription to 2600 but have put it off. No longer.
I am both extremely shocked and disgusted by this. I'm shocked that a judge who is so obviously woefully ignorant of technology preside over such an important case. According to the Wired article, he mispronounced Linux. With Linux being the most visible "poster boy" of the open source
model, this calls into question his familiarity (or lack there of) with the topic as a whole. Judge Kaplan also needed to be briefed on what linking is! This is such a basic, surface concept of web technology. Linking *IS* the web. This is so shocking, I'm at a loss for words for this one. Yet, this is the same judge who, when the defense requested there be more time for all to have a greater understanding of the technology, chided the defense saying, "I think its a mistake for you to assume you're talking to a moron." Is judge Kaplan a moron? No, most definitely not for him to have gotten to where he is in the legal system. Is judge Kaplan falsely self-confident and dangerously ignorant of the topic at hand? That, there can be no doubt of.
That won't work. DeCSS is defined by the prosecution/judge as any software or hardware which defeats CSS. Catch-22.
However, now it seems any DVD player is illegal. Go figure.
A even better analogy, to give an example that is perfectly legal, it buying a slim-jim to open your car door because you locked your keys inside. Everything about this situation is legal until you use it on a car someone else owns...
----------------
Overheard: "Aww, why'd you go and install Windows on a perfectly good machine?"
DeCSS
Just to put it all in one place; I know it's a tad redundant, but its nice to have it all in once place:
My Mirror of DeCSS
The Wired Article
01.21.00 2600 Served with Federal Injunction
(Shameless plug): ProcessTree - Put your idletime to use.
Wow. I came across this BEAUTIFUL picture
:)
here. Its a beautiful pictoral of the
slashdot news, with captions regarding the whole
DeCSS situation with the MPAA.
I have heard, *cough*, that by using
stenography software such as The Steganos II Security Suite,
and using a key, lets just say, mmmm, the word
" slashdot ", that the entire DeCSS source code
apparently is decoded and revealed, no longer
hidden within the picture.
Mind you, I only HEARD this. Haven't TRIED it.
*grin*. I plan on distributing this pic far and
wide, for its 'aesthetic' properties.
(Shameless plug): ProcessTree - Put your idletime to use.
I didn't say copying was easy. I didn't say it was economically feasible. But it IS possible to make a bit for bit copy of the entire disc without breaking the encryption. That is the point, which you seem to be missing.
SEAL
See what the AC just said. When we do get to the point that copying DVDs is economically more feasible than buying them (i.e. blank DVD-R media for under 5 dollars, DVD burners for a few hundred dollars), it won't matter a drap whether or not Linux CSS decryption exists. You can still copy it bit-by-bit. All CSS does is provide player authentication, essentially. It's a way to keep a tight rein on the player (hardware and software) market. It doesn't prevent people from copying the contents of the media (this has been hashed out before, if you want people to be able to view it freely, you need to let them have access to the content). The copy protection schemes used in software aren't particularly effective, and almost exclusively rely on license keys and the like (they used to use things like defective tracks in floppies and the like). Neither of these methods are particularly appropriate for consumer electronic type products, such as DVDs (well, the funky track thing doesn't really work with optical media I don't think). Anyway, point is, you can't do what they claim CSS does, without being too burdensome to the consumer.
Where can you purchase a legal DVD Key? How much do they cost? Someplace like RedHat, VA Linux or even possibly LinuxCare once they IPO may be able to afford it. Perhaps a separate 'Linux DVD Coalition' could be formed.
American components. Japanese components. Russian components! All made in Taiwan!!
I went out searching the net to see what the liscense for CSS cost. Seems like the the cost for a software developer could be right around $0. (Note you still may have to pay money for development, and liscensing for hardware still costs money)
From http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html
3) Content Scrambling System (CSS)
Because of the potential for perfect digital copies, paranoid movie studios forced a deeper copy protection requirement
into the DVD-Video standard. Content Scrambling System (CSS) is a form of data encryption to discourage reading
media files directly from the disc. Most players have a decryption circuit that decodes the data before displaying it. No
unscrambled digital output is allowed until work in progress for secure digital connections is finished. On the computer
side, DVD-ROM drives and video display/decoder hardware or software exchange encryption keys so that the video
is decrypted just before being displayed by the encoder. This means that many DVD-ROM drives and video display
boards have extra hardware (and cost) for movie copy protection. Beginning in 2001, all DVD-ROM drives are
required to support regional management in conjunction with CSS. Some drives may allow the user to reset the region
a limited number of times; other drives will self-program after a certain number of movies have been played. Makers
of equipment used to display DVD-Video (drives, chips, display boards, etc.) must license CSS. There is no charge for
a CSS license, but it's currently a lengthy process, so it's recommended that interested parties apply as soon as
possible. Near the end of May 1997, CSS licenses were finally granted for software decoding. More on CSS below.
[6.1] Who invented DVD and who owns it? Whom to contact for specifications and
licensing?
DVD is the work of many companies and many people. There were originally two next-generation standards for
DVD. The MMCD format was backed by Sony, Philips, and others. The competing SD format was backed by Toshiba,
Matsushita, Time Warner, and others. A group of computer companies led by IBM insisted that the factions agree on a
single standard. The combined DVD format was announced in September of 1995, avoiding a confusing and costly
repeat of the VHS vs. BetaMax videotape battle or the quadraphonic sound battle of the 1970s.
No single company "owns" DVD. The official specification was developed by a consortium of ten companies: Hitachi,
JVC, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Philips, Pioneer, Sony, Thomson, Time Warner, and Toshiba. Representatives from many
other companies also contributed in various working groups. In May 1997, the Consortium was replaced by the DVD
Forum, which is open to all companies (more info at ). See section 6.2 or visit Robert's
DVD Info page for links to Web sites of companies working with DVD.
The official DVD specification books are available from Toshiba after signing a nondisclosure agreement and paying a
$5,000 fee. Contact Toshiba DVD Products 1-1 Shibaru 1-Chome, Minato-ku, Tokyo 105-01, Japan,
81-3-3457-2643, fax 81-3-5444-9430. ECMA has developed international standards for DVD-ROM (part 1, the
smallest part of the DVD spec), available for free download as ECMA-267 and ECMA-268 from www.ecma.ch.
ECMA has also standardized DVD-R in ECMA-279, DVD-RAM in ECMA-272 and ECMA-273, and DVD+RW
as ECMA-274 (see 4.3). Unfortunately, ECMA has the annoying habit of spelling "disc" wrong. Also confusing, if
you're not from Europe, is ECMA's use of a comma instead of a period for the decimal point.
Implementation of DVD products and use of the DVD logo for non-promotional purposes requires additional $10,000
format and logo licenses. Contact Toshiba DVD Business Promotion and Support: 81-3-5444-9580, fax
81-3-5444-9430.
The specification for the UDF file system used by DVD is available from www.osta.org.
Any company making DVD products must license the patented technology from a Philips/Pioneer/Sony pool, a
Hitachi/Matsushita/Mitsubishi/Time Warner/Toshiba/Victor pool, and from Thomson. Total royalties are about 6%
(minimum $6) for a DVD-Video player, 6% (minimum $6) for a DVD-ROM drive, 5% (minimum $2) for a DVD
decoder, and 10 cents for a DVD disc.
The licensor of CSS encryption technology is DVD CCA (Copy Control Association), a non-profit trade association
with offices at 225 B Cochrane Circle, Morgan Hill, CA. Send license requests to css-license@lmicp.com, technical
info requests to css-info@lmicp.com. Before December 15, 1999, CSS licensing was administered on an interim basis
by Matsushita.
Macrovision licenses its analog anti-recording technology free of charge to hardware makers, but charges a
per-copy royalty to content publishers (2 to 4 cents per disc).
An MPEG-2 patent license may also be required, from MPEG LA (MPEG Licensing Adminstrator). Cost is about $4
for a DVD player or decoder card and 4 cents for each DVD disc, although there seems to be disagreement on
whether content producers owe royalties for discs.
Dolby licenses Dolby Digital decoders for $0.26 per channel.
American components. Japanese components. Russian components! All made in Taiwan!!
But the cost of litigating the jin into poverty will be enormous...and the only ones winning are the laywers.
So let's say I mirror DeCSS, and get a "cease and desist". I, naturally, cease and desist and put up a copy of the letter.
That just cost 'em several thousand in legal fees. How much of their stockholders' money are they willing to throw at this?
Meow
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
I thought that background was a Sterogram.
;)
Came out a bit flat, though
Here's yet another mirror.
How about this?
Want free movies, or at least cheaper movies? Keep this code and forward it to as many friends as you can. This is the key to sticking it to the Powers That Be - and if you don't tell anyone you don't personally trust that you've got it, you're safe, 'cause the enforcers will be too busy tracking down people who boast to the world about having the goods. When the time comes, if the time comes, someone you know will know how to use it.
Our ideals of freedom and debates about encryption are one thing, but there might just be enough resentment among the general public to make this appeal work.
I won't want to argue the merits of either side of the deCSS case. They've been well discussed already. However, in addition to trying to win the legal battles, I would suggest to make a napster-like system to distribute deCSS and any future app that gets in hot water. The advantage would be that the governments would have to target EVERY individual computer in the network in order to suppress the availability; instead of hitting the big web sites that host it. Strength in numbers.
Huh? If Xing had encrypted their key, it would had taken just a few more minutes. Eventually, the key would had to be decoded inside the computer's memory to be able to use it, and then you could extract it ...
it's in my head
Here is another thought that came today while ordering my copyleft DeCSS t-shirts (one for everyone in my family. I teased my wife by telling her that I was surprising her with something that she could (maybe someday) get arrested for wearing in public ;)...
/. crowd for perusal...whaddya think?
Anyways, What if we wrapped the DeCSS code in an encrypted executable and slapped a EULA on the program itself. Don't flame me yet, this has the potential to be cool. Anyways, we (very carefully) word the EULA so that if they agree, they are saying that the output of the program (DeCSS source) will only be used for *playing* DVDs on Linux and any other use of the program output is forbidden and illegal (such as forcing someone to close a website like they are now)...
Now, like almost every other poster here IANAL so maybe the EULA would need to be worded by someone with legal experience but I think the idea might be workable. This way the source can go as far and wide as we want without causing anyone who is supporting this movement any problems (other than the MPAA, those rat-bastards). This is not a finished idea but something I am throwing up to the
The CSS shirt is great. Mine came via UPS today, and I'm going to wear it around all next week. Frankly, I don't like DeCSS.... but I do like LiViD. I think it will be fairly difficult to prove interoperability on DeCSS, but quite simple on LiVid. In either case, I have copies of both, and of course, of the source files.
NIVRAM
That's not exactly true. Part of the DVD specifications includes watermarking technology that prevents licenced DVD players from playing illicit copies.
So with DeCSS, which can be used to create an unlicenced player not subject to the restrictions placed by the CCA, they also lose the ability to prevent the playing of illicit copies.
Disclaimer: this is what I remember from a Communications of the ACM article I read over Christmas. Unfortunately I can't refer to it since I left it at home. Should be available on ACM's site, though.
http://www.swcp.com/~ampere
I'm sure a few years ago people thought the same about music due to bandwidth. I don't know if there's a Moore's Law equivalent for bandwidth but someday (sooner than you think, I hope) we will be transfering full quality mpgs of films. I would register mpg.com in order set up a business similar to mp3.com when the time is done but someone already has it :-(
Here's mine. Sorry about not having the domain transferred yet. But this will do I suppose.
ENJOY!
GIHM -The light at the end of the tunnel is only the oncoming train.
Volunteer to be a defendant! Imagine the MPAA suing 1.5 million people...
Everyone copy DeCSS to your website, and then mail the lawyer from Yesterday's article (I don't have the addy handy) asking to be named as a defendant in the case.
If nothing else it would serve as mockery to these legal proceedings... :)
--Alex
This is a signature virus...
I want to use DeCSS or some other suitable software to play my legally purchased DVD disks on my Linux system. Windows users can do this, why shouldn't I be allowed to do so also? The reasons as to why there is no such software for Linux would fill another whole discussion.
Now I am only interested in using my computers in a lawful fashion, but I am very concerned with the perception of Linux users and hackers, of which I am one, being created in this case as only wanting to use this software to copy copyrighted material, rather than how we intend to use this code so as to be able to view our legally purchased or rented DVDs. The discussion at this point could run on into what is this concept we call "fair use". I feel we are going to lose this battle, and the war, because we are being portrayed in the press as pirates stealing copy righted material. An analogy I might draw is someone saying I intended in purchasing a gun to go down the street and hold up the local 7-Eleven, rather than my actual intention to use the gun for hunting, target shooting or (God forbid!) protecting myself and my family.
We are being judged on how we MIGHT use this DeCSS code, not on how we really intent to use it. We are guilty of a crime we had no intention of committing just because we possess the means. This is all too often how our rights are mis-handled so that someone can have an exceptional and exclusive benefit. No matter that it might make it inconvenient for the rest of us.
Well neither am I. But as the MPAA has given *permission* for CSS decryption to DVD makers, softDVD authors, etc, this is hardly a hole.
IANAL either, though, but your theory seems far-fetched.
So where is this going to end up? The Supreme Court. They will not give up along the way, so ultimately that's where it's going to go. What does anything else that happens along the way matter? Nothing. Whatever the Supreme Court does will wipe out everything that came before.
So maybe we should start considering the constitutional aspects of the case and take the long road, and not get too upset about whatever some idiot judges do along the way.
Another - http://www.nedor.com/~ted/thoughts/d vd/mirror/
I have just joined the EFF and I am urging as many people to join as I can.
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
I'm pissed enough I also joined the ACLU.
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
I am on the phone with them as we speak. I told them that I intend on boycotting the DVD standard. I was intending on purchasing a DVD player, but until this is resolved favorably, I will not. I'll just go purchase a diamond rio. :)
In fact, I'd urge everyone to do the same instead. Purchase a diamond rio! Support MP3! :)
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
Agreed. I did as well.
I have written that may crack CSS. The code is A16F1CA16641FD. That's it. However, you need my own "secret" algorithm to use the code. If you reverse-engineered my algorithm, I will sue your butt out.
The case in New York isn't about trade secret. MPAA is using the new Digital Millennium Copyright Act against DeCSS.
Never knock on Death's door:
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Yes, the shirt is about the same thing. I bought one, everyone should buy one. There neat and they come with a printed copy of the original source code.
Power to the smart people!!!
Munky_v2
Jay
There legal teams.. if they saw this would have a coronary. The dumb bastards. Just start a massive lawsuit and throw a few thousand people in jail.. uh hu.
IANAL, but I would think that all you're doing is providing the gzip'd source code in this "file containing a sequence of commands," encrypted using your mpeg file. I don't know how illegal that would be, though.
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
And here's mine for good measure.
Step 1: Create free web based email account. i.e. hotmail.
Step 2: "Make" website at one of the many free (20M) website factories, i.e. geocities, fortunecity etc., using the email addy from step (1).
someone should make a script to do all of this and post it here
I also got my DVD CCA T-shirt from copyleft. Get yours before they're banned!
Here's my mirror:
http://www.ece.utexas.edu/~hintz/decss/
Trust me. It's not like you can actually USE what's printed. You've still got to have brains to actually implement anything that is remotely contemplated in their pages. I mainly buy it for the humor factor.
You should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
Jack Valenti
c/o Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
15503 Ventura Blvd.
Encino, California 91436
-Man cannot survive except through his mind. --Ayn Rand
God Bless America! Land of the free! Of course, to protect that freedom, you'll need to hire a lawyer. That isn't free. Sorry, but if you want to complain, you'll have to file a suit. How? Well, that requires hiring a lawyer...
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
Here's my mirror.
-MattT *** Not speaking for my employer, or any other sentient beings ***
guys, get the shirt with the source for DeCSS from copyleft! i think it's a great way to show your support! and they can't make you take your shirt off, can they?
you seriously need to get a life. being the first person to reply to every comment gets old after a while.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I saw (someplace .. ) A t-shirt that had the De-CSS source code on it and that place was going to donate some of the money to the EFF ... does anyone know what I am talking about or where I could get it?
Presto: the protection is compromised, and the DVD coalition is vulnerable to their (erstwhile) partner's legal fury. The content owners could sue the DVD makers right into their pockets for failure to come through on the protection of their content if the DVD coalition doesn't nip this in the bud..
But why should they want to sue? It would just be taking money out of one pocket and putting it into another. The studios are owned by the same media conglomerates that make the players. That's the real reason that such a ridiculous system got implemented in the first place. The studio arm of the conglomerates bullied the hardware arm into putting in the "copy protection" scheme, even though it wasn't really in the hardware side's best interests.
There are plenty of people who would be willing to fork over big bucks to buy DVD-R and DVD-RW players if they were available. There are plenty of valid reasons why people want and should be allowed to have them- like recording home movies onto a longer lasting and more up to date medium than video tape, or backing up modern large hard drives. The hardware manufacturers could be making a lot of money on that market, but the studio arm won't let them.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I must have supplemented 'a very good' for 'any'. (;
Either way, my point still stands - the laws are in place to protect our rights. Maybe this judge will suffer a crisis of conscience, or an awakening. We can always hope.
Read the Wired article...
kwsNI
http://www.linuxlots.com/~gialug/decss.html
kwsNI
Now I have a question for all you legal folks out there, if the Federal injuction in New York goes through, but it gets dismissed in California, will it make it legal for a server in California to have deCSS on it, while illegal for a server in New York to have it or post information on it? Isn't that illegally preventing interstate commerce?
There have been several attempts to get a vendor (at least Creative Labs and Sigma Design) to make a player for Linux, as well as get (parts of) DVD documentation licensed. So far without success...
(Well, SD said it would do a Linux player for their next DVD card, and Creative has Dxr2 DVD player on their opensource page, but AFAIK Creative didn't help with it. And I don't know how functional it is at the moment.)
The idea of a group of companies banding together to push a standard and subsequently hiding that standard from public view, for the purpose of controlling the business of another industry (DVD player makers) sounds a hell of a lot like an illegal trust. Granted, it's not a monopoly, but anti-trust law covers this type of thing as well. If CSS were the product, and they wanted to control access to developers of the product, that would be different (though I believe they'd still have to cough up the specs to anyone willing to pay whatever fee they charged anyone else), but in this case, CSS is NOT the product. The movie is the product. They are trying to control the propagation of the product, but the development of products external to their business, which is clearly illegal. Maybe MS will settle and the DOJ will have the time to look at this. Yeah, that'd be the day.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I mean, making guns isn't illegal, even though guns kill thousands of people a year, and are used in even more crimes than that. Cars are built that can go 140+ mph, yet there few places in the US where going that speed wouldn't be illegal. Does that mean that car and gun makers could be sued for making a product that CAN help a person break the law?
Just making a bit of code (which DOES, from what I've read here, have legal uses) wouldn't be a crime, right? They would actually have to use the program to break the law before they could be prosecuted. I would assume. Of course, I'm not a lawyer. In then end, however, none of this really matters. We're talking about a multi-billion dollar industry. They're GOING to win, eventually. What really needs to be done is to change the laws. But WE all know that. Maybe we should tell someone?
-T.J.
"Now really, Ms. Gross, I think it's a mistake for you to assume you're talking to a moron" - Oh, Lord!
Can't wait to wear it.
10 years ago if someone had told me I would become such a geek, I never would have believed them 8^)
Oh well. -DF
Can't wait to wear it.
10 years ago if someone had told me I would become such a geek, I never would have believed them 8^)
Oh well.
-DF
Don't make too much of this. In order to receive a temporary restraining order, all that they have to show is a prima facie case and a likelihood to win on the merits. The California case failed to receive a TRO because their trade secret case was obviously full of holes from day 1. It does not mean that the judge has prejudged the case or that the defense will not be allowed to present their defense.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
2600 does not advocate any of the above. The only thing 2600 advocates is freedom of information and freedom of speech. I realize this is a somewhat idealistic stance, but they have never explicitly encouraged illegal activity based on the information they release. It is printed for the benefit of those of us who disagree with the law and choose, at our own free will, to go against it.
[I am not affiliated with 2600]
// zyqqh
BTW anyone know of a "European EFF"
I think 2600 should keep it up! It's just like the current MP3 rippers. You should be able to do what ever the heck you want with the DVD products you buy! If my 2 cents are worth anything -Myself
I find it amusing that they actually thought their protection would actually stand up against any sort of effort to break it. They could look at the history of CD protection as an example, every time a new format to insure the CD couldn't be copied it was quickly broken.
Count me in. I just joined, too.
--Neil
Bzzt. What about the pending legislation that alters the UCC regulations to make EULAs and shrinkwrap licenses enforceable? (Including things like; violating the terms of the license allows the software publisher to disable the software on your machine?)
--Neil
2. Work with public policy department to push advocates and lobbyists in D.C. to support the Millennium Copyright Act. Have Bill sign it into law.
3. Meanwhile, set up de facto organization who is the only authority with power to grant licensed keys for access control to my movies.
4. Only license keys on my terms, and only when I like the people I'm licensing to. Only provide license keys to those who will pay me lots of $dough.
5. Squash anyone who attempts to reverse engineer my access control technology to prevent unauthorized 'players' from coming into existence, because if they do, I don't get my licensing money, and I lose control over ALL of the keys.
6. Repeat Steps 1-5 every decade or two when new home video technology gets invented.
Aren't these the actions of a monopolist? Or an organization playing like they are a monopolist?
Are any of the CSS or other DVD technologies involved in DVD playback patented? Arrrg.
--Neil
Exactly.
There is a law case... somewhere... a book publisher sued a bookstore. The publisher and store had gotten at odds, and the contract between the store and publisher stated that the books were provided on a license to the store, which could be revoked if the agreement ended.
But the bookstore had already paid for the books in question.
The court ruled that the store didn't purchase licenses of the books, but had, in fact, purchased real copies of the book in question, and was free to do whatever they damn well pleased to do with their property.
Unless this Judge in NY plans to revisit stare decisis, I imagine this case has to come into view.
I want to be able to build, use, modify, adapt, and construct a DVD movie playback rendering system for the DVD movies I own. Not for ones I don't own (which don't exist), but for ones I own.
Same reason I have a mod-chip in my PlayStation to play Japanese import games.
--Neil
I agree entirely. It is far worse to pretend at believing in an ideal than to not believe in the first place.
/. represent the leaders of technology - we don't realize exactly how much power we have.
However, action in a mass sense usually starts with talk, even talk that is not backed up with action at first. An ideological movement takes a lot of "energy" to get moving, and even though the individual contribution of a "me too-er" may be small, their comments will be read by others who may be willing to invest more of their time and energy.
Our viewpoints are changing, slowly. This world is dependant on technology, and the readers of
Can I hear a "hell yeah!"
/. readers who are willing to take a stand for our freedom. NO data should be illegal - it's just 1's and 0's.
This is ridiculous. How long are we going to let our rights get trampled on like this? Thank the goddess we have
They can't put us all in jail - WE are the people, WE have the power - those rat bastards in DC have forgotten that.
Lets remind them.
After reading the 2600 article, I cannot believe what the judge is thinking. DeCSS wasn't even created in the U.S. Let me make this point: How does a mechanic know how to fix a car? He disassembles the car to figure out how it works. I don't see a difference between this and figuring out the algorithm for CSS. If a product is with the public, then it stands to reason that people are going to modify or figure out how a program works. It's part of human nature to be curious. -Ryan Phillips
What I mean by this is, suppose I just happened to have a link to a file called decss.zip (etc.) that just happened to be the same size as the controversial file(s), but instead contained something non-injunctified... say, a nice textfile discussing in layman's terms the difference between decoding-to-view and copying-which-doesn't-need-to-decode.
Let 'em find a metric buttload of those on a search engine, and then they'd either have to download and unarchive every one (whack-a-mole is SO much harder when you have to make positive ID before whacking), or else get slapped with a SLAPP when they tried to issue an injunction against me and every other chaff site.
Or would that make it too difficult for a legitimate search to turn up a real mole?
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
CSS is like a manufacturer of door locks that uses the same key for every lock that they sell.
To prevent people from figuring this out, they include a piece of paper in the box that says "by opening this box, you agree never to try your key on anyone else's lock".
Someone figures out that every key to a CSS door lock is the same, and tells the public, because with that information, hey, the locks are basically worthless as far as security goes.
CSS then attempts to make the government imprison anyone who knows this piece of information, because it would damage their business of selling (defective) locks, and of course they can't go back and change EVERY lock they ever sold to use unique keys.
Here's the real heart of the matter. Here's one criteria for what they were banned from distributing: "has only limited commercially significant purposes ". (See the injunction at http://www.2600.com/news/2000/0121-pi.txt for complete text.)
So now in considering freedom of speech, we're first looking at how much money is involved.
Well, information is like booze. People will do anything to get it. Illegal or not. And the internet gives anyone with a computer and a net connection the ability to be an information importer/exporter/distributor. This gives each and everyone of us the potential to become a one-man international Mafia. Stop this? All govt's combined do not stand a chance. Like booze, knowledge, information cannot be suppressed once released into the public realm. The RIAA has taken on a truly impossible mission and will meet with the same success as the Feds did at stopping liquor sales.
The logical thing for the RIAA to do is to officially license distributors of CSS manipulating programs. Tax the licensee a fee and let the programs be sold for profit. Most people will go for the legal product if it's available. The Linux crowd will no longer have an excuse to use "illegal code" to play DVDs. And only then will the RIAA have a stable platform from which to strike out at those making and distributing illegally copied DVDs (I refuse to use the word "pirate") of their product, because legal alternatives were available. In fact, the RIAA would probably make more money from licensees than what they claim to be "losing" as a result of the DVDs that they think are being illegally copied with DeCSS and its ilk.
This means the movie company feels that it has "lost" $50,000,000, which has been "stolen" from them, since obviously no one will ever see this movie in the theatre or buy their own copy again now that someone has managed to play it under Linux...
I quote from "the Bible" on stupid government hacker punishment, Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown, 4:2 and a few pages down... (feel free to read more, it's all relevant--in this case, I didn't even quote *enough*.)
The E911 Document was also proving a weak reed. It had originally been valued at $79,449. Unlike Shadowhawk's arcane Artificial Intelligence booty, the E911 Document was not software - it
was written in English. Computer-knowledgeable people found this value - for a twelve-page bureaucratic document - frankly incredible. In his "Crime and Puzzlement" manifesto for EFF,
Barlow commented: "We will probably never know how this figure was reached or by whom, though I like to imagine an appraisal team consisting of Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller, and Thomas
Pynchon."
As it happened, Barlow was unduly pessimistic. The EFF did, in fact, eventually discover exactly how this figure was reached, and by whom - but only in 1991, long after the Neidorf trial was
over.
Kim Megahee, a Southern Bell security manager, had arrived at the document's value by simply adding up the "costs associated with the production" of the E911 Document. Those "costs" were as
follows:
1.A technical writer had been hired to research and write the E911 Document. 200 hours of work, at $35 an hour, cost : $7,000. A Project Manager had overseen the technical writer. 200
hours, at $31 an hour, made: $6,200.
2.A week of typing had cost $721 dollars. A week of formatting had cost $721. A week of graphics formatting had cost $742.
3.Two days of editing cost $367.
4.A box of order labels cost five dollars.
5.Preparing a purchase order for the Document, including typing and the obtaining of an authorizing signature from within the BellSouth bureaucracy, cost $129.
6.Printing cost $313. Mailing the Document to fifty people took fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858.
7.Placing the Document in an index took two clerks an hour each, totalling $43.
Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged to have cost a whopping $17,099. According to Mr. Megahee, the typing of a twelve-page document had taken a full week. Writing it had taken
five weeks, including an overseer who apparently did nothing else but watch the author for five weeks. Editing twelve pages had taken two days. Printing and mailing an electronic document (which
was already available on the Southern Bell Data Network to any telco employee who needed it), had cost over a thousand dollars.
But this was just the beginning. There were also the hardware expenses. Eight hundred fifty dollars for a VT220 computer monitor. Thirty-one thousand dollars for a sophisticated VAXstation II
computer. Six thousand dollars for a computer printer. Twenty-two thousand dollars for a copy of "Interleaf" software. Two thousand five hundred dollars for VMS software. All this to create the
twelve-page Document.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
--
Erskin
geek.
It's hardly secret anymore, if you ask me. (Oh, you didn't. Oh well, never mind.)
Then, there's this little matter of encryption. It's basically an XOR function, or very very little more. To the best of my knowledge, the XOR operator has been public domain for some considerable time.
Last, but not least, DeCSS does =NOT= break trade secrets, as it is NOT using the same code as the CSS encoders used by the commercial sector. (This IS important, as it has been a factor in a number of Intel instruction set lawsuits, in the past. Case law beats 4 of a kind.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You actually BOUGHT fscking STOCK in LinuxOne? What a complete jacka... erm, wait, that's LINX. I stand corrected ;)
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Here's my mirror in case there are someone here who don't have it yet :)
Amiga - Back for the future!
The whole point of Stego is that you cant say if something is or isn't there. In MP3Stego, it changes around the LSB of each frame. yes, there is a slight change in the music, but its almost subliminal. You cant tell which is the original music and which is the Stego file.
About the legal issues, I don't think any such case has come up where someone hides something in a freely available document. If a message is just lists of numbers of bytes in a particular file, then only the message should be illegal. But there is a very fine line to be drawn. Its a tough legal question, and I do not envy the judge stuck with it.
What you are really talking about is stenography. The process of hiding data in other data. Usually you also encrypt the hiden data such that it is impossible to prove (with the decryption key) that there is even hidden data in the first place.
Stenography is a relativly new area for both cryptography and the legal system. As I understand the current law (IANAL), both parts of your system (the carrier and the key) are illegal. Any document used to carry "illegal information" is illegal. At some point, this law will have to be revised (when someone hides info in the text of a supreme court case for example, then sues governemnt for distributing it [this will never happen tho]).
In the meantime, I believe there is a precedent for your home movie to become contraband. I'd love to see that in the media "NSA arrests father for illegal home movie." What is really needed is a way to make the VHS tape still contain the data, because the computer file is subject to restrictions that the video isn't. Like I say, it would be amusing.
--Nick
PS: if you are interested, there are a bunch of really good papers out there on stego that are readable to the non-cryptographer. From the software end there is some really nifty stuff, my favorites being MP3Stego (hides a few hundred k in an MP3 file) and StegFS (compatible with ext2fs, but hides date in 16 "security levels" which are stored in the unused blocks of the ext2fs. And does it in such a way as you cannot prove the existance of the data.) Very fun.
1) This shows that the AOL-TimeWarner merger is indeed news for nerds, and all the naysayers last week had valid concerns. Big Media are not on our side, and they're invading our space from the inside (the merger) as well as attacking from the outside (the DVD actions).
2) Conversely, maybe Time Warner has a more direct interest in not pissing us off, or at least as much AOL ever did. Does anyone have good contact info for them?
-----Chaz
Count me in.
----
----
Reminds me of a game called "whack the mole". I made a post about this earlier, but I'm too lazy to go dig it up. For now, just post mirrors under this thread. I want to get my name on this lawsuit too... I figure with several thousand defendants we can't lose. :) "Yeah, the RIAA just sued the ENTIRE internet, film at 11!"
would get a clue - they keep acting like they're afraid of their own shadows and jumping in fright at the littlest thing (kinda like the whole Y2K business all over again). These existance of VCR didn't drive theaters out of business; the existance of the web isn't driving print media out of business; and the ability to play back/copy media - which has existed since media was invented - doesn't automatically lead to rampant piracy and loss of "billions and billions" in revenue, digital or not. Leave people alone, just give us the facts, and we'll do the right thing. Beleive it or not, people are NOT so innately criminal in nature that they need a noose around their necks to keep them honest.
I'm getting a little fed up with the authorities cracking down on the POTENTIAL to commit a crime, like the Ramsey electronics raid, instead of the criminals themselves. Used to be you could copy, say, 8-track tapes. Whoopdedoo. Some people tried to setup for-profit pirate operations, and a lot of them got busted over it to. Nowadays we're guilty of crimes just because we CAN commit them, jeezus.
The Scarlet Pimpernel
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Ok folks, the list of the mirrors posted in this thread that I promised is running here. Please email me at fireball@magic.hurrah.com if you would like to be added to the list.
Here's my mirror. Alright folks, here's an idea, everyone post their mirrors here (if you don't have one, go to one of the links and get it), and I'll create a link page based off of this thread. I encourage others to do the same. To be honest, I think whacking the mole is a bit of a weak analogy, I think "putting the shit back in the horse" is a bit more analogous.
lemuria.org
OpenDVD.org
--
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I see this product allows the copying of DVD's. I noticed at the bottom of that page, the following warning:
*Use of these products for unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material from DVIX, DVD, VHS or other media is prohibited under federal copyright laws unless the copy qualifies as a far use under the Copyright Laws.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
(Apologies to the reader in advance for some more offensive imagery employed. If your world is G rated, do not continue reading.)
You are truly an idiot.
Others are risking financial ruin and even imprisonment in order to fight for our rights to free expression and fair use which morons like you take for granted, and you can't even get off your lazy ass and find some other way to entertain yourself for the duration of this fight? Words are inadequate for me to express my contempt for both you and the stance you advocate. Go back to eating your pretzels on your beer stained recliner and shut your mouth, for that is precisely the only right to expression you will have left if the attitude you espouse defines our response to this outrage, and it is indeed the only right to expression you have earned.
I suppose the thougt of reading a book instead of watching a movie never occurred to you. Most movies are based on novels, or have book versions of the scripts published at a later date. In the vast majority of such cases the book is vastly superior to the movie. Of course, reading may require a greater level of effort than your capable of, and might require you to occasionally put down your Colt 45 beer or your crack grinder in order to turn the pages.
In the meantime, the rest of us will pay your blithering idiocy the attention it deserves (read: none). In my case, I will no longer purchase any movies of any kind (which will cost the MPAA members a very sizable sum based on prior purchases of Laser Disks and DVDs). I may consider renting a DVD movie instead, as that vastly reduces the profits the movie industry makes. However, seeing a film in the theater or purchasing the media are no longer options for those of us unwilling to spread our ass cheecks for the MPAA.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Watching the OSS community squirm is amusing.
Actually, just about everyone I know (online and real life) who is into OSS is posting mirrors and laughing all the way. I really haven't seen any squirming.
Please don't pretend to be stupid enough to claim it's anything to do with legal copies of your own DVDs. Crap and you know it and we know it.
Perhaps you haven't been paying attention at all. Or perhaps you are just really dense. It is EASIER to make a copy of a DVD without decrypting it. Understand that? I didn't think so. The only reason you would want to decrypt it is to VIEW it. A perfectly reasonable use of your own DVD disk, now isn't it?
DVDs are copyrighted, you have NO right to make any copies of it EVEN for your own private use (this is not like VHS or CDs).
Oh really? Explain the what is different. The content in DVDs ARE copywrited, but I'm still allowed to view it if I own it. However, the encryption method WAS NOT copywrited, therefor, I may publish it at will. Others in this thread have touched upon this more than I.
Josh's post is right on the money.
Actually it contains many factual errors, again disputed elsewhere in the thread.
To create a tool that does so and/or to distribute it is illegal.
It's illegal for me to copy VHS tapes or record movies off HBO, but I can sell my VCR (which, believe it or not, can do this)
The funny thing is, DVD-CSS DOES NOT HELP you in copying DVDs. It's easier (and possible) to just do a bit by bit copy onto another disk. No decryption is needed.
Please read what others have written and follow the links to revelant information before making statements that serve only to make you look silly.
Finkployd
Bill Gates: "Innovation"
These folks have the law on their side. Like it or not the DeCSS software publishes a trade secret, the CSS encryption algorithm. This is illegal. Plain and simple. Doesn't matter what you are going to use it for - piracy or viewing, if you plan to profit from it or not - it's just plain against the law to publish someone else's trade secret without their express permission.
No sucessful Open Source product will ever be based on DeCSS because the DVD industry will continue to defend their valid legal right to their trade secrets and impose severe penalties on anyone who dares to defy them.
You say 'the genie is out of the bottle' - wait until the coders of the Linux DVD project get threatened with imprisonment and million dollar fines - we will see how far this project progresses.
You want a Linux DVD player? Get some venture capital together, buy a license for the algorithm, and go to town. Sell it to all the large linux re-packagers (redhat et al.) and laugh all the way to the bank.
-josh
Because they have reason to believe that you could cause real and permanent harm against the plaintiff. Just as eMachines and whoever else injunctions placed against them by Apple, which prevented them from shipping their copycat machines until the issue came to trial. Of course, eMachines realized that they were either in the wrong or simply didn't have the funds to fight the fight and backed off completely.
The injunction itself is a bad sign. That means that the judge has heard the plaintiffs and believes them enough to try to stop distribution of the product until the issue's resolved. He or she is listening to the industry and believing what they say. And if it goes through, then most of you moles will get whacked.
Time to enlist overseas developers to further this cause.
Here's a gif graphic that has the code in the comment blocks:
the ribbon page
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Injunctions without a trial can't last forever. Assuming the DVD consortium doesn't give up, this will eventually go to trial. And when you follow that case in court, you will learn something that you apparently haven't found out about yet.
DeCSS is not based on stolen or leaked specifications or source code. Instead, DeCSS was constructed from analysis of a DVD player binary. There's no trade secret involved; it's simply a matter of reverse engineering. When those facts are compared to the law, the defendants win.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Obviously, sleazy plaintiffs can abuse this technique, but if it weren't available, then it would be easier for sleazy defendants to commit other kinds of abuse.
(I'm not defending the MPAA, just defending this particular aspect of legal procedure.)
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
(b) "CSS" means the Contents Scramble System used to encrypt, scramble or otherwise protect the contents of certain DVDs from being copied.
All that needs to be proven is that DVD's can be copied without DeCSS and the entire basis of the injunction can be thrown out. The Judge clearly believes that DeCSS is meant to make it easy to copy DVD's which is definitively not the case.
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
(b) "CSS" means the Contents Scramble System used to encrypt, scramble or otherwise protect the contents of certain DVDs from being copied.
All that needs to be proven is that DVD's can be copied without DeCSS and the entire basis of the injunction can be thrown out. The Judge clearly believes that DeCSS is meant to make it easy to copy DVD's which is definitively not the case.---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
- MPAA.ORG
Department of Investor Relations and SalesMCA.Com
Paramount
MGM
Sony
Disney
Fox
Dear Sirs:
Just so you know, I will not be buying any DVD products from your company until such time as the MPAA, etc. drop all actions against websites carrying the DeCSS code. In addition, I will not be investing (or further investing) any amount of money in your companies for the same reasons.
Thank you.
Note to Slashdot Readers:
All of the above URLs are active as either email addresses or contact form pages. I would suggest that now would be a good time to exercise the /. effect and your brains (don't just copy my message) on behalf of the websites targeted by the MPAA.
P.S. If any of the URL's don't work, please fix them. I felt like it was more important to get this posted than to triplecheck all the links.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
On the off chance that any MPAA execs are surfing the slash and see this post, I just want you to know that I bought a nice new computer a few months back, but I opted out of the DVD drive because it didn't have Linux support.
And I don't have a set top. So you aren't selling me any DVDs.
Moreover, I quit buying video tapes a year or so ago when I saw that they would be an investment in obsolete technology.
I.e., you aren't selling me anything.
Oh, yeah: my next stop is the EFF page. Gotta join that revolution before you shut down the Web too.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I want to encourage everyone to follow Maxmenos' suggestions above. I don't have words for how appalled I am. However, I just joined the EFF 5 minutes ago.
Come on everyone - Use the slashdot effect for good. Join EFF! It's a secure site, and it starts at $20!
Come on, go do it now! All that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
As the EFF press release says:
"Today's decision is a major wake up call for the $30 billion Linux community," said EFF Co-founder John Gilmore. "If Judge Kaplan's reading of the DMCA holds, then it will become illegal to build open source products that can interoperate and/or compete with proprietary ones for displaying copyrighted content."
(Yeah, this is redundant. But it's worth repeating.)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Here's part of the definition given in the injunction, what constitutes deCSS :
;-)
(c) "DeCSS" means any computer program, file or device that may be used to decrypt or unscramble the contents of DVDs that are protected, or otherwise to circumvent the protection afforded, by CSS and that permits the
copying of the contents or any portion thereof.
"any device that may be used to decrypt or unscramblw the contents" hmm, isn't that what any DVD player has to do... (and yes I can copy the content to S-VHS or something)
Does that mean that 2600 have to give back all their DVD players
Frank
If you don't think your posts are worth +2, then check the box that says "No Score +1 Bonus", Check my user info, and you'll see that most of my posts are +1, but this one is not... see?
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
What is wrong with you?
The encryption provides NO protection against copying, with or without DeCSS.
A normal DVD player cannot read the entire disk with normal DiskIO functions. Only when the movie is played can the data be recoverd. You can bit-for-bit the encrypted stuff, but it isn't going to do you any good without the key part.
I know this is pretty much common knowledge around here,
Yes it is, witch is weird, beacuse its not true. In order to get a true bit-for-bit copy, you'd need to rewire the DVD player internaly, or build your own.
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Yes, 56-bit encryption called not safe enough by German court. But a skeleton lock is not safe enough, but does not make lockpicking legal where it is illegal. Unfortunately, common sense is not common enough.
The DVD CCA's purpose is to stop anyone from bypassing their efforts. Control is their business. You can only alter their behavior if you join the DVD CCA and change their purpose. Or if their other members tell them.
I guess that's a good question, but isn't an injunction different than a final judgement? I thought the idea was to stop whatever is going on because you convinced the judge you are suffering irreparable harm, yet to be proven -BTW, so they shut you down until you have your day in court. Sucks, but I think that's the idea, knock it off for now until we decide if you're really breaking the law because if you are wrong, there's no way to stuff the shit back in to horse that comes out for the two years that it takes to decide the case. If you end up winning, and you've been shut down all this time, oh well- too bad.
Course, if you've wrongfully siffered financial harm because of the injunction, do you have grounds of a counter-suit?
>and, just why is this post rated score:2 ?
Because of the karma system and the moderators actions on my posts, I have a stupid amount of karma which adds a +1 to every post I make (see my new sig)
This seems (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) to be the first real 'butting of heads' between the 'Internet' and 'The Real World'. At the very least its the first time that it is effecting enough people that your average power-user cares, and is taking both an interest and a stand.
I hope it ends better than this one... but I do wonder less and less about the sentiments.
"When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
-- Preamble to the Declaration of Independance
---------------
Colleen:Its a black-hole.
Hunter:Is that a good thing?
C:It is if you want to be compressed into oblivion.
H:Oh.. coooool.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Several other people have called for people to join the EFF and ACLU, but they forget the most obvious connection.
Subscribe to 2600! Today
Hell, take just part of the cost of DVD player you've put off buying and buy a lifetime subscription to 2600, then send a copy of the check (with an explanation) to the MPAA!
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
AFAIK, it *IS* possible to bit copy DVDs, in principle. Reading Andreas Bogk's comments, (http://www.eff.org/ip/Video/DVDCCA_case/dvd-bogk. html) duplication of DVDs was possible without DeCSS). Of course, the copied content isn't plaintext, (its still encrypted) but saleable to an unsuspecting consumer.
I'm sure the *real criminals* who try to make money from pirate DVDs have factories where they can whack out thousands of copies a day.
cheers,
-pbk
IE just ate my original lengthy response to your comment, so I'll be brief. (I typed an URL in a different window, and it decided to open it in this one for no apparent reason... Grumble.)
Despite the prevailing opinion on Slashdot, it's my impression that you can't actually do a bit-by-bit copy of a DVD. The DVD reader hardware simply won't allow you to read the decryption keys off the disc. (It will only use them internally.) So if you tried to simply copy a DVD, you'd end up with a whole lot of encrypted data and no keys to decrypt it.
Of course, this assumes that the hardware enforces the security. I don't know how hard it is to find "rogue" DVD drives, or to modify standard drives to allow copying, but I suspect it's not very easy... Correct me if I'm wrong.
Disclaimer: The MPAA / DVD CCA is still wrong. Illegal copying is by no means the primary purpose of this software, and it certainly isn't the software's only use, which I believe is what the MPAA's lawyers would need to prove. We should just bear in mind that allowing easy copying of DVDs is a necessary side effect of open source DVD playing.
MSK
Based on the information in the article, it still seems to me that a DVD drive will only provide an encrypted key for a particular player, based on that player's own key, and will not under any circumstances provide the entire key area. (Which you would need to copy an encrypted DVD.)
Actually, as I read Bogk's comment again, it seems that his point is that you do need a "crack" to copy DVDs, it's just that DeCSS is not that crack. The analysis of the key exchange system that appeared anonymously about a year ago was sufficient to break the copy protection.
If my understanding of that is correct, then it may have interesting legal implications for the DeCSS case, but my basic point is still true: Assuming strong encryption and a bug-free implementation (neither of which actually happened), CSS should, in principle, prevent DVD copying.
MSK
I've seen this too, on a lot of discs. The DVD standard doesn't require that anything be encrypted at all. In my experience, only the main feature is ever encrypted (as opposed to trailers, menus, etc.), and even then it's usually only used on Hollywood movies.
My PC is a bit of a mess right now, but I made a cursory attempt to play a segment of Free Enterprise off of my hard drive. (Incredible movie, by the way.) I ran into a lot of unhelpful error messages, although my Creative PC-DVD player did tell me that "This program cannot open a file that is copy protected." So it isn't quite that easy to bypass CSS.
MSK
My mirror is still here
--GnrcMan--
Gee, I could be a criminal already without having done anything I wouldn't normally be doing. (That was probably true before all this started, but we'll bypass that for now.) See, my web page has links to about half-a-dozen search engines. That means I'm at most two clicks away from the DeCSS code -- put "DeCSS code" in the text entry box I set up to do direct Google searches, click the Search button, and one of the 100 links that shows up will probably take me straight to the code.
Even if you never used a search engine at all, how many degrees of separation do you think there are between some random home page, the pages it links to, the pages THEY link to and so until you finally hit what is probably now one of the 5,552,463 pages on the Web hosting DeCSS? I'll bet there aren't that many. And I have links to a bunch of pages.
But wait a minute! This discussion thread has links to the DSS source code in it -- in fact, it has portions of the code itself -- and it's stored in my cache! In fact it's probably in the cache of everyone who uses any kind of browser and didn't specifically disable the cache. That means, my friends, that every single one of us is now in direct violation of the law.
So now I might as well put the code right on my home page on the theory that if you're going to be hung for a lamb, you might as well be hung for a sheep.
--
Someone you trust is one of us.
(i posted this to an earlier thread, but it seems relevant here too.)
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
It's interesting though. It brings to light some facets of the internet that are uncontrollable. People mirroring and posting code like this as an act of civil disobedience can not be stopped. All they can do is sue the larger bodies involved to try and recover "damages".
(whether I support this particular cause or not is besides the point)
What you are really talking about is stenography.
No, what he was talking about was steganography. "Stenography" is the process of taking shorthand. :-)
Other than that misspelling, your description was accurate and informative.
Having been in a meeting with some of Sony Pictures corporate types just yesterday, I can tell you they haven't appeared to have read ESR's blurb on the positions of the open source community.
The movie industry is rightfully worried - they make money off of home video, and don't want to see it disappear. They saw all the trouble the record industry had (and is having) with the whole MP3 debacle. They don't want a repeat, and they see DeCSS as something akin to a CD ripper. They don't see DVD on a hard disk as harmless - even if it is prohibitive to download several gigs today, they know it won't be in a few years. And they don't want all their movies out in the clear when that happens.
Thing is, if what's-their-name had just encrypted their key in the first place, this crack never would have appeared. Kind of like NASA mixing up English and metric.
-----
Klactovedestene!
Once upon a time there was a hacker named Derek Fawcus, who in 1999 did duplicate correctly.
In the village square, Derek greeted his friends by saying "This code may be used under the terms of Version 2 of the GPL"
"But Derek," asked his good friend #include quote css-auth.h unquote, "what about typedef unsigned long u32?"
Before he could answer, the static void engine peren-ed "int varient, byte const asterisk input, struct block star output peren semi".
"Don't give me that foreign gibberish!" grumbled void CryptKey. "Why in my day, peren int varient..."
(It's time for a little collaborative writing)
I'm cool like a fool in a swimming p-p-pfft-pool
If the MPAA really wants the DeCSS code to stop being propogated, there's one thing they should do:
Write (or get someone to write) a full-featured Linux DVD player.
That's it. A large fraction of the people who are up in arms over this issue don't really care about free speech, constitutional rights, etc, they just are Linux users who want to be able to watch their DVDs. There will still be some smaller fraction of us who will stick it to them, but I suspect the majority would be placated.
Of course, it may be too late... if they'd been able to get something released back when DeCSS first was created, it wouldn't have exploded everywhere the way it did. Hell, if something had been available before DeCSS was created, it might not have even been created. But now that everyone's really upset and wants to prove to the MPAA how wrong they are, that might not even save them.
[TMB]
I could define 'Whacko' as a nation on the Department of State's 'Banned travel' list; This would include Libya, Cuba, Iraq, and Chechnya. I could define it as a country who's political philosophy is currently at-odds with the US; This would give us Libya, Cuba, Iraq, Chechnya, Iran, Vietnam, and possibly China.
But as a whole, you are probably more correct than either of my definitions.
Please note; I have no particular feelings about the citizens of any of these countries. People are people, regardless of nationality. Their leaders, however...
.sig: Now legally binding!
Um, you might want to try a nation that the US government is on better terms with. You don't want laywers pointing fingers at you for being sympathetic with a Whacko nation.
What about a demand based rotation system? Alternatly hand out two mirrors, and then rotate those mirrors to the back of the stack after a certain random number of hits. Assign 'bonus points' to servers on fast connections or in untouchable countries, and have them 'rotate up' more often. Additions to the list could be made real time, and deletions just seconds before the link was to be used, i.e., ping the site to make sure it is up before rotating it in, delete from list on timeout.
Yeah.. I had a mirror here, but they've had a RAID failure and have everything after 't' down for a day or so.
.sig: Now legally binding!
A thought experiment:
What if there were a lot of moles? And whacking a mole didn't do anything?
Step 1: Create free web based email account. i.e. hotmail.
Step 2: "Make" website at one of the many free (20M) website factories, i.e. geocities, fortunecity etc., using the email addy from step (1).
Step 3: Mirror whatever it is the authorities are trying to halt there.
Bonuses: each email address can get you many such sites on any given server. Most of these sites even subscribe themselves to search engines for you.
WARNING: This could be considered a form of attack. You are lying about who you are, and you are taking up room on a companies servers with possibly illegal software.
DISCLAIMER: This is just an idea. Don't blame me if anyone actually goes and does this.
/dev/psychic: No medium found
It seems like they're resorting to scare tactics in retaliation for fear of something they do not understand.
Their first attempt at this injunction totally failed... So their second attempt should bring "immediate imprisonment"?
This is an entirely unconstituional scare tactic. I hope to see DECSS posted on every Geocities site by the end of the day.
They should be countersued for pulling these ludicrously lame tactics again and again. The whole suit is a source of misinformation the likes of which we've never se...
Well, ok, so we see it all the time. Time something should be done about it, to give the victims of ridiculous crap like this some sort of legal recourse.
Wasn't there some suit where a bank was found liable for negligance after encrypting some sensitive transaction with only 56-bit encryption? I thought I read something like that. It seems like a reasonable precendent -- sooner or later, the content owners could figure out that it's going to be impossible to keep the code under wraps (you can buy it on a t-shirt at copyleft), and file a class action lawsuit for negligance on the part of the people who implemented the "hack-proof" DVD encryption system.
I don't know if that sort of thing would be a "win" for the world at large, though.
splitting the code and making 1/3 available at one site, other 2/3 at other sites?
or maybe adding a 3 to every third place in the code making it something like:
loa3d f3ile3
and then leave it to the user to figure out the pattern?
that way no one would be posting the code but it would be useable
$var = <STDIN>
$var =~ s/\\$//;
this is slashchomp
The judge obviously has no understanding of the technical issues involved. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the RIAA had hand-picked this guy. He seems overly sympathetic to their rhetoric. Fortunately, the case will still have to be tried, giving EFF lawyers time to prepare a defense. Lawyers out there: Is there any way to request that a judge take himself off a case? This guy seems somewhat partial, if you ask me...
--
Prior to the 1980's, if a sufficiently talented electrical engineer wanted to build his own audio equipment (and many audiophiles DID do this) he was free to do so. In this case I am specifically talking about a turntable/record player. There was nothing prohibiting a talented electrical engineer from building his own record player which would allow him to play and LISTEN TO his record collection.
This example could be extended to reel-to-reel tape machines as well as cassette decks, and yes even music CD players, today. For that matter, someone out there is even capable of building a Sony 3348, 48-Track 24-bit, 96Khz pro studio multi-track recorder. And if these people have done their job right SOUND will actually come out of the speakers that the device is hooked to. I'll say it again:
Anyone sufficiently talented is capable of building a device which will render an intelligible playback for whatever media they have chosen to build a player, audio or video
UNTIL NOW.
Now, if I were inclined to do so, I could buy various components and build a DVD player, but without prior knowledge of the encryption algorithm used to encrypt the data on the discs, and a valid decryption key, I would be unable to actually watch and listen to the DVD that I put into my machine.
What has suddenly changed, that no longer allows me to play a DVD that I purchased in a store and legally own? It would seem (to me) that this is the crux of the issue.
As I was composing this message, something else occurred to me that distills my point into a far more palatable and less wordy argument:
Over the length of my entire life, I have yet to purchase a book whose text was encrypted.
Ignore Alien Orders
In most states, I think you'll find possession of lock pick tools is very illegal. Generally only licensed locksmiths can have them. For your own reading , check Arizona's lockpick tool law. I think the intent element is pretty easy to prove... if DeCSS is a lockpick tool as you say, of course you're using it to break in (or you're distributing it to others who are...)
BUT, go back to the original argument. The MPAA wants to corner the market on PLAYERS. Their security, weak and insecure as it was, was aimed at protecting the ability to play back the files. This is not COPY protection, because you could still copy the entire contents, and get a MPAA player to decode them.
You're not picking the lock on the home. You're taking the "protection" off something you lawfully purchased, to use it in its intended use, but in your own (slightly different) manner. I can't think of an analogy that works really well, but here's a try - it's like buying a foot pump designed to inflate car tires. You use a tool to put on a needle the nozzle, and use it to inflate a basketball.
The overbreadth argument works for me. The MPAA is controlling the viewer market, but like the theater owners did in the 30s and 40s. They are prohibiting independent filmmakers from using the technology to be seen, by forcing it into the hands of a few blessed resellers.
The trade secret is out of the bag, MPAA. You need to sue Xing for the damages as a result, not the holders of the once-secret formula. (Those damages will be hefty, too.)
==
"This is the nineties. You don't just go around punching people. You have to say something cool first."
It's important to remember something about America and our Judicial system:
In America you can sue for almost anything. That doesn't mean you'll always win.
Since the judge acknowledges that he doesn't forsee a victory for the plaintiff, that should be a good indication that the system won't fail us in this case. Granted, our courts have their fair share of problems, but I still have faith in them. This temporary injunction is simply a necessity to appease (and protect) the plaintif's rights while the case is being decided. Were the outcome to actually find against the defendants, then the damage done to plaintif in the interim (between now and whenever this is resolved) could have been irreparable. Since the system doesn't usually allow to take such precise matters on a case by case basis, injunctions such as this are a godsend to those who have a real case being brought before the court.
The complaint against 2600 was for violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which makes it illegal to circumvent a protection system that controls access to a copyrighted work.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
part of me wonders why the industry and their lawyers bother, but another part of me realizes that (digital) democracy doesn't come easy.
Part of you should also realize that the lawyers get paid no matter what happens (although, granted, more so if they win), and that the industry at large still has no more respect for our culture than for the homeless guys outside its offices. And, obviously, it thinks it can deal with us the same way it deals with them -- send a few security guards out and scare them into moving across the street.
// zyqqh
Check out this story on wired. Can you say judge shopping? Hope EFF is already working on an appeal.
Join EFF. Join now.
People are going to need all the lawyers our donations to EFF can buy.
If you dont fight this sensibly how long is it before international providers are required to delink countries because they dont follow these stupid american laws?
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
So what this is doing is just taking the input stream and rearranging it to construct an output stream. Now suppose the output stream just happened to look an awful lot like a gziped tar file of the DeCSS source code.
Which part of this system is illegal? Is it my home movie? Is it the filter program that simply processes some instructs and transforms a file. Is it the instructions? Or is it the combination of all of the above? What if these pieces are kept on different machines, who is the one providing the illegal content then?
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
From the Wired article:
The same article also describes the judge complaining about the defendant's lack of preparation, even though he denied their request for a postponement. The 2600 news section bears this out as well, describing how they had just 8 hours to talk to attorneys and prepare their case. This has all the signs of a travesty of justice in the making.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
1. It's important to understand the difference between the California case and the 2600 case. The California case is a theft-of-trade-secrets suit, which is unlikely IMHO to succeed. The 2600 case is a suit under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which specifically prohibits decryption devices, even when they are constructed through proper reverse engineering. It is much less clear IMHO that DeCSS is not in violation under the DMCA--argument for the defense hinges on the question of whether DeCSS is or is not *necessary*, and has as its *sole purpose*, to acheive interoperability with other DVD players.
2. In some ways lower-court rulings in favor of the DMCA are likely to be of benefit in the long run, because they will accelerate the process of getting higher-court review of the constitutionality of the DMCA. Many legal experts believe that the DMCA is not constitutional. It takes court cases lost in the local jurisdictions in order for this to come out in the legal system. Thus, the most important thing now is to support 2600 and the EFF to continue the fight so that eventually the whole DMCA can be thrown out. Somebody has to be the test case, and it's better if it happens sooner rather than later IMHO. If we won every local case brought under the DMCA due to technicalities, the DMCA and its horrible ramifications would remain in force. Better to lose some small and meaningless fights in order to defeat the DMCA.
This particular fight is about as meaningless as one could be, since there is no practical effect on the Linux or DVD world at large from the ruling. Only the defendants and their contacts are enjoined, so DeCSS distribution is not limited in any important way. Plus I'm sure 2600 is happy for the press coverage.
You can read the DMCA here.
Here's a quote from the injunction:
(c) "DeCSS" means any computer program, file or device that may be used to decrypt or unscramble the contents of DVDs that are protected, or otherwise to circumvent the protection afforded, by CSS and that permits the copying of the contents or any portion thereof.
This could be argued to cover anyDVD drive and software, and indeed anyDVD player that has a video-out jack (you can plug it into your VCR to make a copy -- Macrovision may screw it up some, but some portion would be copied).
Now, the injunction applies not just to 2600, but to anyone with contact with them -- so here's what they do: go visit as many retailers as possible selling DVD players (especially those that also sell VCRs, i.e. all of them) or DVD viewing software and talk to the sales folks. That's the contact. The stores thus fall under the injunction. 2600 obligingly reports all this.
Now, I doubt that the judge is gonna throw all those folks in jail, or tell them that they can't sell DVD players anymore. It might (mind, there's no telling about the intelligence of judges, especially in New York) get him to better realize the implications, though.
-- Alastair
Indeed, sites like that are no friends of the legitimate users of DeCSS. If they've been actively promoting DeCSS as a tool to aid piracy then they've lost their case.
(And DeCSS can be used in such a way. There is a special part on a DVD which is not normally readable/writable that contains the CSS information. With DeCSS you can presumably write a DVD without getting/altering DVD equipment to allow you to read/write to those areas)
I for one won't be sorry to see them 'sent down'. However what we (via online discussion and articles in tech-friendly and even mainstream media etc) need to do is make clear that the vast majority of DeCSS users (and would be users like myself) simply want to use it to play DVDs on our systems, which amounts to noting more or less than interoperability reasons.
We must make clear that the targets of the recent cases to do not characterise the general DeCSS using (and would be using) community.
We must make it clear that a win in these cases means nothing to the larger DeCSS community. It's just a win against a few individuals whose crime was to abuse, or promote the abuse of DecSS for illegitmiate means.
We must show that there is a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate use of DeCSS, and that the legitimate users far outnumber the illegitimate users, thus the primary purpose for DeCSS is indeed for interoperability.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
It's at copyleft.net
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Okay, I know this was rather rapid but did anyone publish the where and when for this case?
I work about 4 blocks from the court houses in Manhatten and would definately have dressed up and wandered over if it was likely to help.
When is the actual hearing going to be?
Colleen:Its a black-hole.
Hunter:Is that a good thing?
C:It is if you want to be compressed into oblivion.
H:Oh.. coooool.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
well in some respects this isn't much of a surprise. if its one thing lawyers (and their clients) like to do is make (serious) threats.
of course part of the campaign is that 2600 is not your average web site, and if anything, the name alone should be enough to encourage people to setup mirrors all over the nets as soon as possible.
part of me wonders why the industry and their lawyers bother, but another part of me realizes that (digital) democracy doesn't come easy.
so how many of us run servers, and how quickly can we work to ensure that information remains free?
Here is a quick pasting of the article:
01/21/00
Today would have been a very happy day for us here at 2600. After nearly five years in prison, this is the day that Kevin Mitnick is finally being released.
Ironically, that development is overshadowed by a very immediate threat to 2600, the hacker community, and people who value freedom everywhere.
At 5:40 pm on Thursday, the Motion Picture Association of America was granted a preliminary injunction against us - and everyone we've ever had any contact with - prohibiting the distribution of the DeCSS source code. As a result we have had to remove our mirrors of DeCSS, css-auth and related information from the November article. Last week's complaint was filed at the last possible minute on a Friday before a three day weekend. This calculated and bullying move minimized media coverage and ensured that any publicity was only from their perspective. Not to mention of course the fact that the corporations that make up the MPAA collectively own just about every major media outlet in the country. Meanwhile the EFF legal defense team was busy preparing for the Tuesday DVD CCA hearing in California and we were busy preparing for the Mitnick release. We were given a grand total of about eight hours to consult with our attorneys, look for evidence, and write a declaration. Despite our having never been properly served, the judge only granted a continuance of a few hours making it impossible to assemble any evidence in time for the hearing. The judge essentially ignored our arguments and granted the preliminary injunction.
Hehe. I doubt they'll do that, but I'm a bit concerned about anyone "affiliated" with 2600. I run the Maryland 2600 page and we had been mirroring the DVD files, as per Emmanual's request. I'm still waiting to hear clarification, but the initial response from 2600 makes it sound like the injunction is aimed at 2600 and it's affiliates. I am a bit concerned that this could mean inclusion in the suit.
I know Emmanual is gung-ho about fighting this and I support him completely, but I'm just a lowly recent college grad-type guy without the backing of a legion of fans and the EFF, etc. I don't have the time or the $$$ to fight it in court, and I doubt most of us do. Is it really wise for us to be suggesting that people mirror files haphazardly? I'd say mirroring them on "anonymous" sites, like geocities is safer (though not without hazard).
I know a bunch of folks who had their own, personal (thus easily tracable) sites on the 2600 mirror site a few weeks back. I'd hate to see a bunch of people wind up in jail because they got too wrapped up in what they THINK their rights are. In reality, an injunction means your ass belongs to the Man if you don't quit what you're doing. And for 99% of people that would mean a nice fine and some jailtime, rather than a glorious media-filled battle for "Constitutional Rights."
Enough rambling. I'm just worried that we'll wind up with a nice-sized pile of martyrs here if we aren't careful.
According to the Wired article here http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,33816,00 .html The judge said "I don't think there's the slightest question that plaintiffs have a very good chance of success," Judge Kaplan said in issuing his decision.
Here's my worry: DVDs will be judged as *software*, and not as *movies*. Why not? DVDs have a UI, APIs, input devices (remote control!), and a sorta-OS. Legally it could be good enough. This could be positive: If DVD movies are shown to be software, then reverse-engineering the software is no problem for interoperability. The downside: End User License Agreements for DVDs. I really, really think it's critical that the Judge in the case be well-educated on this: the DVD movie is the at-issue copyrightable content, but the CSS encryption system is *software*, and the deCSS utility is being used to provide for interoperability of said software, not a a means to harm the copyright rights owned by their respective holders. Otherwise, in the future... *everything* could be considered software. DVDs... eBooks... how about that electronic newspaper? And everything will have shrinkwrap rules governing the use of what's been judged as software, and THEN free speech is in real trouble. There are some very serious, broad issues at hand here. --Neil
--Neil
Too far down the message chain to be read, I suppose, but some of the defendants in this case were NOT smart about the whole thing, and hurt the cause, I believe. Take, for example "www.dvd-copy.com" which tells you "What you need to trade Moviez online" and "Bastard Greedy Companies - eBOMB their servers!" and "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!"
This doesn't help. Sounds like the judge never gave the defendants a chance (with comments to the plaintiffs along the lines of "I can give you a runaway train on this one, if you'd like" - see http://jya.com/crypto.htm ) but the quotes above are not the way to go. The whole argument is that CSS is not copy protection, that DeCSS is not intended for privacy, etc, loses credibility due to sites like dvd-copy.com. I actually *support* this type of action against people who are proponents of illegally trading copyrighted material on the DVDs, because it hurts legitimate organizations like LiViD.
----
i was posting something last month suggesting we start some kind of blue ribbon campaign-style thing, where everyone put up a little logo image and a mirror of decss.
someone [no idea who] replied by pointing out a simpler alternative: simply use the standard GIF comment blocks to distribute the DeCSS code. Distribute a GIF banner image type thing with the DeCSS code in it and have people put it on pages.
everyone who visits the page breaks the law.. -_-
i'd link to the discussion, but it's long gone now.
Now take a moment to remember Martin Luther King Jr., and what he said about peaceful civil disobedience to facilitate change of an immoral system of law..
-mcc
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
http://drowned.cx/decss/
:P)
:) ) you can go ahead and put either on any web page you may have with a little note about how the person viewing the page has just broken the law by storing illegal information about defeating copy protection in their browser caches. But, i still think this needs to be more organized.
well.. i don't know if i like how these came out, but here they are. I went ahead and made them for some reason. I don't really like what they say. "This GIF is illegal" maybe isn't the best way to put it. I'm not quite sure. And it may or may not be true depending on your definition of "illegal". (And they maybe oughta have the LZW compression removed via ungif, just so we can all have rhetorical purity.
The idea behind these images (spread public awareness, a la the blue ribbon campaign) only works if it's somehow centralised-- i mean, if images like these wind up in widespread usage, any usage of them should link to some central page that explains what the MPAA is doing and why it's wrong. In which case the "this gif is illegal" should be added to with "click here to find out why". From there it could probably explain what source code is, why it should be considered speech, the purpose of DeCSS, the purpose of CSS, the reason DeCSS does not help piracy (seeing as you can pirate DVDs just as easily without DeCSS just by copying the dvd without decoding or writing a fake video driver before playing it in windows), the reason the MPAA/DVD forum brought this on themselves (by refusal to give any support the unices, the one group most likely to understand how to reverse-engineer), the constitutionality of the Digital Millineum Copyright act with regards to the first amendment and the copyright clause of the constitution, and how the DVD forum in general is basically trying to prevent the spread of information. Y'know, how they are absusing the legal system to try to prevent people from distributing information about how to defeat a copyright protection measure (which sounds to me like it should be covered by freedom of speech and freedom of the press, even if said speech is in the language of C++ and said press is printing on TCP/IP packets instead of paper), or even distributing the location [URLs, links] of that information (which i know is speech, and which there is no basis whatsoever to prevent talking about.) Oh, and maybe some stuff thrown in about monopolies, the sherman antitrust act, and the fact that crushing DeCSS is clearly not to prevent piracy and protect the MPAAs profits and help the artists involved, but simply to preserve the MPAA's power as a political entity/robber baron. And everything else i forgot; what the MPAA/DVD forum is doing is wrong on so many levels you could go on for pages about it. We know all this already, you could do it solely based on compiling slashdot posts, i could write it myself if i weren't so damned tired and i didn't have to go to bed so i can take the SATs tomorrow.
As for the GIFs themselves, the kind of murky colored stuff in the background is actually the DeCSS code itself, with the ASCII interpreted as raw color values. Kinda nifty how the hex values at the end come out as just patterns of lines. On the big one i enlarged it and blurred it over a bit to fit more text, but i wouldn't use that one if i were you cuz the file size is unneccicarily large (like 40k.. i think it's better as small as possible). As promised, both contain the entire source code to DeCSS in their comment fields. If you feel like it (hell, do whatever you want-- they contain GPLed code, so they're GPLed images, so i have no control over what you do with them
Please excuse the poor writing in this post. As i said, i am tired.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
"This is a case of theft. The posting of the de-encryption formula 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."
It's not a valid analogy. It would be more appropriate to compare DeCSS to a set of lockpicks. Lockpicks are legal to buy and to use in your own home. The only thing that's illegal is when you use them to break into someone else's house.
Similarly, DeCSS should be legal for distribution and personal use. The only thing that should be illegal about DeCSS is using it to crack DVDs you don't own for personal gain.
Simon
home page
Main Office Address:
Motion Picture Association of America
(MPAA)
Motion Picture Association (MPA)
15503 Ventura Blvd.
Encino, California 91436
(818) 995-6600
*out*
Here's a copy of what I sent to the 2600 guys. What do you guys think? Is my logic correct?
---begin quote---
- From the injunction:
3. Certain terms use in this order are defined as follows:
(a) "DVD" means digital versatile disc.
(b) "CSS" means the Contents Scramble System used to encrypt,
scramble or otherwise protect the contents of certain DVDs from being
copied.
(c) "DeCSS" means any computer program, file or device that may be
used to decrypt or unscramble the contents of DVDs that are protected, or
otherwise to circumvent the protection afforded, by CSS and that permits the
copying of the contents or any portion thereof.
Under the above restraining order, *any* product that can decrypt CSS
and play back its contents is so termed "DeCSS" which means that all
hardware DVD players are "DeCSS" and thus must not be distributed.
Likewise, under this injunction, it seems that Xing, Creative, et.
al. cannot distribute their software DVD players.
For example, my Philips set top DVD player:
1. is a device
2. decrypts CSS encoded DVDs
3. plays them back over a unencrypted output ( the video/audio
connections ), thus allowing me to copy them to any device that
accepts video input e.g. my RCA VCR, my computer via my Pinnacle DC30
capture card, et. al.
and thus , being that it fits the description in 3.(c), is "DeCSS"
Hmmm. Interesting, eh? Contact Circuit City and tell them to cease
and desist selling all DVD players that putput an unencrypted video
feed, otherwise they are violating the restraining order. You might
want to forward this insight on to whoever at the EFF is doing their
defense. This is way too wide and could be overturned quite easily on
the basis that this document includes the licensees of the CSS
decryption method present in DVD players and software.
*Disclaimer*: I am not a lawyer. I never will be. I just thought
through this logically, and saw a large hole.
See Ya
----end quote----
XenoWolf The Original - Since 1993
Presto: the protection is compromised, and the DVD coalition is vulnerable to their (erstwhile) partner's legal fury. The content owners could sue the DVD makers right into their pockets for failure to come through on the protection of their content if the DVD coalition doesn't nip this in the bud..
Now, you and me know that there's no way that they can nip this thing in the bud, that they should not have tried to sell disk encryption as part of the DVD package to the content people, but that's moot as far as they are concerned. In the long run, they are screwed, and they just want to take "us" down with them.
2600 is calling for demonstrations against the MPAA, and I for one agree. We need to educate ordinary people on the fact that their right to free speech is in serious jeopardy thanks to the greed and stupidity of an organization (the MPAA) that fell for the DVD-security snake oil and can't admit that it's been had.
This and the Etoy lawsuit are probably the most significant fights to hit our commmunity since the Clipper Chip fiasco. The lines are drawn, ladies and gentlemen; we need to fight with everything we've got to prevent Internet from becoming nothing but a huge, suburban shopping mall. Get involved in an historical fight and have something that you'll be proud to tell your kids and grandkids about, twenty years from now.
TOYWAR!!
Finding God in a Dog
I can hardly wait for the MPAA to try to go after a legitimate site (sorry, I don't think 2600 counts) or company. For example, VA Linux Systems hosts DiBona.com, which posts a copy of the DeCSS code, yet oddly enough VA hasn't been a defendant yet. Who cares about VA taking over SGI? I'd rather see them sue the pants off the MPAA; maybe they'd give up Disney to settle ;-).
While they're at it, I'd like to see them sue Sima, who market this neat little gadget that defeats Macrovision I and II (save cash by getting it from these guys). It also cleans up the picture my DVD player puts out (tip: use the S-Video inputs whether or not you use S-Video for output; this stops you from using the bypass switch if you use the composite out, but that's a small sacrifice). Let's all watch the MPAA get laughed straight out of court when they go after people who have nothing to do with the WaReZ culture...
(I'd also like them to sue someone who's running for Congress and who's posted several links that apparently violate the DMCA. Bring it on, MPAA; I could use the free publicity...)
My Blog. Sela Ward can sell me long distanc
Sounds like time for a chain letter.
Any body want to get it started?
Hi! Please send this source code to your ten closest friends. If you do, The Justice Department will search your computer for free!
Better yet - what about an Outlook Express virus that propagates the source code???
(I can't believe I actually just suggested that. Must be the drugs. I had surgery the other week & I'm still in recovery.)
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Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
Clear, Dark Skies
Repeat after me: it was never copy protection.
It was playback protection.
DVDs must be decrypted to VIEW them. Therefore, only "sanctioned" players - ones that the MPAA had released a decryption key to - could play them. The encryption provides NO protection against copying, with or without DeCSS.
I know this is pretty much common knowledge around here, but more of the mainstream media is starting to read this site. So they should hear it again.
SEAL
to join the EFF. I just did. Time to put those RHAT, CORL, and LNUX profits to good use.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)