Slashdot Mirror
DeCSS Source Included in Public Court Records
doc_brown writes "I noticed on www.hackernews.com that the
DeCSS Source is included in the lawsuit filings. As these are now public records, should the court's and district archive sites now be included in the lawsuits? The lawsuit (with source) is available at cryptome.org " Mirror early, mirror often.
er.. well... if I link to the court documents am I in violation of the court order?
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
I am fairly sure that, unless the film industry can get them sealed under the industry/trade secret clause, all the court documents will be made public under the freedom of information act. Watch 'em scamble to try and stop it :P
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Matt Singerman
Matt Singerman
http://matt.vegan.net/
the Freedom of Information Act
Some time ago, in (IIRC) Switzerland, CoS filed a lawsuit against an individual for disseminating their "trade secrets" (basically their 'doctrine'). They don't like people to read this 'doctrine' unless they've been properly prepared (they tell the members that if you read it before you're ready, that it will kill you - just a note to all you potential Scientologists... I read them, and I'm still around :o)
Little did they realize that in order to do this in Switzerland, they had to enter the documents into the public record, so (in essence) anyone could go the the courthouse and get the full text of the documents.
IIRC, the US allows such records to be kept confidential if the plaintiff's request this... so I have to wonder - why didn't the DVDCCA ask the judge to do this?
what i really dont understand is : [a] To copy a DVD one must be able to authenticate to the drive. decryption doesnt really matter. [b] The authentication code was posted to the livid mailing list waay before the decss code. [c] the 90 day period for DVDCCA to protest has passed for the *authentication* code. [d] DVDCCA is claiming the DeCSS code can be used to pirate DVD's but has not stated *anything* about the authentication code. [e] You must defend *all* violations not just one...so why hasnt the case been thrown out ?
This is just great. It's the first time a Slashdot story had my laughting out loud at work.
So now we no longer have to worry about distributing a "trade secret" that was obtained illegally, we are simply mirroring a public court document.
Once again, stupidity has saved the day. Am I wrong in guessing that this pretty much destroys the case against us?
earnestdesigns.com/dvd
Finkployd
Bill Gates: "Innovation"
Reminds me of Ed Meese's congressional report on illeagal pornography. It was a publc document also, and became one of the most requested publications from congress.
James F. Bickford
Sys Dev Assistant
Electronic Interface Support
pronoblem
FWIW, it was actually in Sweden. Read all about it here.
As I understand it, slashdot is one of the named defendants, and is covered by the injunction (CMIIW). What is slashdot's oficial response to the injunction? can Mirror early, mirror often be interpreted as such?
That's got to be among the funniest blunders I've ever heard of. Court records, as far as I know, are public, and have to stay that way. So by including the DeCSS code in their filing, the DVD-CCA managed to destroy its own trade secret! Probably without even realizing just what it had done! And while DVD-CCA may be able to argue that posting DeCSS on the Net didn't destroy the trade secret, certainly publishing it in a court document destroys it.
Ooooooh, I get the feeling there's a lawyer who's going to be looking for a new job after news of this gets out...
And now, all involved will disappear in a puff of logic.
It's very disturbing when a court filing actually negates the substance of the actual case. Maybe the military is involved here somewhere, 'cause I can't see any other way for things to get quite this stupid.
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
Hmm.. this begs the question: how would you prosecute trade secret theft w/out getting the "secret" into the public records?
Forget about the DVD bullshit for a moment. Suppose Joe Schmoe breaks into my office in the middle of the night, shoots the security guards, blows open the safe, and takes a single sheet of paper that contains the formula for Miracle Ingredient #666. As the cops follow the blood-drip trail back to his secret hideaway, he places the sheet into a copy machine and presses copy.
The cops nab him, and in addition to the various legal problems he's facing, I decide to prosecute him for trade secret theft. If I do that, then is the Miracle Ingredient #666 formula going to end up in the public record? Sounds like maybe I should just let it go.
Suppose he didn't shoot anyone or blow up any safes. What if trade secret theft was the only crime he committed, so that I either had to nail him on that count only, or else watch him go free. What to do?
It's fun to laugh at the DVD jerks, but it sounds like this current problem that they're having, could happen to anyone who has a secret.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Or if they're just stupid.
Probably the latter, really - their whole approach to this thing reeks of businessmen more interested in their own power than in the realities of the matter, and snake^Wlawyers who can see a nice big pile of cash coming to them whoever wins . . .
Actually, part of the problem is almost certainly the fact that the DVD standard isn't simply American - it's international, and thus the laws governing it aren't so much confused as contradictory . . . The businessmen who are running the show aren't at all sure of how much power they actually have, so they're trying to lay claim to whatever they can possibly get. The problem is, they haven't really thought through the consequences of their approach. This is _exactly_ like the Cult of Scientology's screwup in Sweden - they didn't think through the consequences (or didn't do their research - same thing, really), and basically fucked themselves over . . .
Of course, this case being tried in the US, the DVD-CCA should have had a much better idea of what would have happened - they either have incompetent lawyers, or the lawyers have no control over the situation.
Whatever the case, the DVD situation is becoming a farce. I can see these cases effectively defining copyright protections and rights (on both sides) for digital media, and I can't see it coming down on the side of the DVD-CCA. These cases are naked and incompetent grabs for power - I think even a place as politically corrupt as the US will eventually decide in favour of `reasonable' laws. At least, I hope so . . .
himi
--
My very own DeCSS mirror.
I like the "state of mind" of the hacker community--like we have only one mind, and we all agree. Further, some of the quotes are offered to show that we all knew certain aspects of the law which frankly I, as a drone in the hive mind, was not made aware of by the hierarchy.
Further, the declaration makes a bunch of assumptions about how individuals must have known certain things, because they were posted by anonymous cowards here on
Ah, well. It's stupidities like this which make me a little, ah, itchy around some lawyers...
I think we should revise results of the DeCSS distribution contest. Here's your bell ringer.
.dll files and "Win98" and "WinNT". I think the linux decrypter is CSS-auth or something (do I have this right). Anyway, this would appear to me to disallow the "DeCSS is solely for interoperability with linux" arguement under the DCMA 1201(f)(3) reengineering for interoperability exception. Perhaps CSS-auth is ok but DeCSS is not ;-] One more reason to use linux over windows.
On a more serious note, it looks like this form of DeCSS is refering to
It looks like everything depends on the five keys which are called in DeCSS by the names CSStab[1-5]. I propose a new contest: Obfuscated code to produce these keys.
I've heard it alluded to that subsequent to the original hack of the keys, a better understanding of the CSS methodologies has produced a more efficient key-producing algorithm that doesn't depend on any prior knowledge. Such an algorithm seems like it would meet the 1201(g) exception for cryptographic research. Can anybody provide more details on this?
it's borderline - most computers use a C compiler that produces object code (and yes, it IS machine code, but you can't run it directly) then feed *that* into a linker that adds in standard libraries, puts "how to run me" headers and tailers on as needed, then saves it as a ready-to-run file. you might not see it directly (some compliers hide the passes they make) but most go though this two-stage process.
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-=DaveHowe=-
I don't really mind that - what I *do* mind is that they are pulling individual phrases (not threads, not even entire posts, but phrases) from a huge wad of posts and using them selectively to push their point of view. I am surprised the defense didn't insist they produce (and the court consider) the entire thing, huge as it was.
As for payment now, I am not sure court evidence is bound by the same rules as a magazine.....
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-=DaveHowe=-
Perhaps those postings by the Anonymous Drones were really postings by the DVD association. :)
I like the "state of mind" reference as well. Perhaps we should introduce the complete harmony of thought amongst RMS, Perens, et. al.
Awaiting further directive from the Slashdot Collective.....
-Slak
I think the DVD case is a different matter - this wasn't a case of `theft of trade secrets', rather one of legitimate reverse-engineering of the technology.
Which doesn't answer your question . . .
ObIANAL, but it seems to me that you don't have to submit your trade secret in evidence - if you're prosecuting for theft of a trade secret, you'd have to completely stupid and incompetent to do so, actually. The court doesn't have to know _what_ was stolen, merely the fact that it was. If the defence tried to submit what was stolen as evidence, then they'd pretty much be admitting guilt - "Hey, we didn't steal anything! And here's your proof - this is what we didn't steal . . . Oh, er . . . ". And you could surely object to the tabling of the secrets - after all, the whole idea of prosecuting the theft is to retain control of your secret, and the court would have to be insane to ignore that.
No, this is a stuffup extraordinaire . . . Someone in the DVD-CCA or their legal team did _not_ think before they wrote this, and will probably be fired quite soon after the head honchos catch on. I almost feel sorry for him/her - it's probably a bored intern (or whatever they call them) who didn't even think about it before writing the document. This intern might even have been a tad sympathetic with the defendants . . . Definitely not legal material, in that case . . .
himi
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My very own DeCSS mirror.
Public domain and public record mean very different things. Patents are a perfect example to illustrate - a patent is information about an invention/mechanism/process that is publicly disclosed. Patenting such an invention/mechanism/process -specifically- excludes that information from the public domain - that's what a patent -is-.
There is plenty of information that is on the public record but specifically not in the public domain - absolutely anything that is written and published, for example. You write a book - the information is public record - but the book is copyrighted. Unless you specifically place it in the public domain, the copyright gives certain exclusive rights to the copyright holder.
So what's to keep someone from making a compilable version of these court documents?
Just put all the excess text (lawyer-babble and such) into a comment block, and presto instant compilable court record.
On the cult's side, reasons for the merger included $cieno infiltration into Hollywood for the past 20-30 years in order to provide a sheen of legitimacy for the beleagured cult, as well as a surplus of Operating Thetans out panhandling for money now that org revenues have crashed following the CO$'s "Operation Foot Bullet" and public buggering on the Internet in recent years.
On the MPAA's side, they cited a need for individuals with experience in controlling the dissemination of dangerous information embedded in court documents, and "The Cult of $cientology was the obvious choice; they've got experience in these sorts of things that nobody else has."
The MPAA appears to have already started to put the Cult's Operating Thetans to good use; at least one lover^H^H^H^H^Htrusted confidante of Cult Leader David Missedcabbage was quoted as saying
The merger has resulted in a shakeup on the board of the MPAA; the new board will be composed of executives who have all proven themselves "more capable" than conventional executives through $cientology training, which traditionally starts with a "Communications Course", and goes upwards from there. When asked for comment, the new Chair of the MPAA managed to splutter
Members of the Cult of the Dead Cow, opon hearing the latter part of this outburst, are reputedly planning an IPO next week, proceeds of which will be used to sue the newly-merged MPAA-CO$ organization into oblivion on grounds of trademark dilution.
The CdC has neither confirmed nor denied plans to use a portion of the proceeds to purchase a thermonuclear weapon, and in a joint venture with a new orbital technology from Gold And Appel Transfers, Inc., dust off from Occupied Clearwater and nuke the site from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
(Background: For those who don't know the story, yes, the CO$ really did send cult members to court libraries, and had them sit at desks all day long, looking at the cover of the library's sole copy of the court documents that contained their sekrit skripturez, in order to prevent "unauthorized" people from reading them, copying them, and posting them to the 'net. The effect this had on the distribution of the court documents in question was, of course, about as good as the effect the MPAA and DVDCCA's suits have had on the distribution of DeCSS.)
People here might be interested to know that the DVD lawyers printed out an entire Slashdot discussion (comments and all) and included it in these legal filings.
Couldn't help but laugh when I saw a slashdot forum among all these hundreds of papers full of legalese. :)
I love how you were able to cloud your racism as fact. My stepfather is in the clan and the propaganda material they produce wasn't as eloquent as this.
The American public is not allowed to see the criminal files on Martin King because the files contradict the image that the government wants to aclimate us to.
You state this as fact as opposed to the other two cases you cite as possibility.
may call into question the findings of the Warren Commission and embarrass many still living politicians.
Although the documents in question are very likely to tell us if she was innocent or really guilty
I'm sorry but as much as I try to objective about your post as informative, I cannot. It is thinly veiled Oliver Stonish conspiracy thoery wrapped in KKK propaganda. I'm worse off for even responding to it.
Side note..I'm caucasian, don't believe in affirmative action and don't think that MLK day should be a government holiday but I don't go around spreading false truths to influence others.
Racism bites.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
"Your Honor, I present plaintiff's Exhibit A"
"Objection!"
"Yes, Mr. Stallman?"
"DeCSS is copyleft, your Honor.
"Copyleft?"
"You know, it's free."
"So what?"
"That means the source must be made available. Here, read the GPL."
"The GNU Public License?"
"No, 'General'."
"Please refer to me as 'Your Honor'"
"Yes, Your Honor, no, I mean, yes... it's the General Public License, Your Honor."
"Oh [reading]..., yes, you're right, it does say the source must be made available. Objection sustained. Plaintiffs? Where can I get the source?"
"We charge for it, your honor."
"But he says it's free..."
"Objection!"
"Yes, Mr. Raymond?"
"He meant 'open', like a bazaar."
"Objection!"
"[wearily] Yes?"
"No I didn't."
"This is bizarre. 'No you didn't' what!"
"No, I didn't mean 'open', I meant 'free'"
"Overruled. Plaintiffs, the bailiff can't seem to get the source from this URL you gave him."
"It's slashdotted, Your Honor."
"What's 'slashdotted'?"
"It means a bunch of people who should be working are listening to MP3s and downloading right now. They came from a free/open advocacy website called Slashdot."
"Oh? Open? Can I get the source to it, too?"
"Damn it, Your Honor, not for another day, now!"
"Your Honor, the Bill Gate, sir, to present this amicus curiae sudsum, a friend-of-the-court [wink] free beer."
"Now we're getting somewhere! Thank you. [grabbing beer] This court will stand in recess..."
It's called sealing court records. When the DVDCCA submitted the printout of the CSS source code into evidence at the original hearing, they asked that the court seal the record. That way, they get it their way. They get the evidence in the court record and they make it so that no one can go to the courthouse and retrieve a copy.
I sincerely doubt that the DVD CCA or MPAA lawyers are so stupid as to allow unsealed CSS source into open court records. I looked at the site where the story came from and all I can suggest is that the people who posted it are misinformed.
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
Seeing as how CDs came out in the mid 1980s, hard drives may have been as large as 20MB. My first personal computer (ie. not one my parents bought) was purchased in late 1991 with a whopping 106 MB HD. I certainly remember my parents' first x86 machine being a 286 with a 20 MB drive in either '87 or '88. Talk about truly infeasible!
Also, as the original poster failed to note, you can rip CDs into mp3s, but it is wholly illegal to email/ftp/post for download/etc. that mp3 to someone else without consent from the music company (good luck getting that consent, BTW). Similarly, (IMO only) the DVD-CCA was trying to 1) prevent widespread piracy that is fairly commonplace with music CDs and 2) milk their cash cow as long as possible. 1) is certainly within their best interest. 2) however, is downright despicable, especially given their tactics (selective prosecution, attacking links to information, which, contrary to a certain NY state judge, is covered under the first amendment, etc).
Take this all with a mighty big grain of salt. Most of this is certainly just my take of things (except the discussion of HD sizes, of course ;)
Eric
I, the honorable Sen. Wellstone would like to read the following statement:
unsigned int capital see capital ess capital ess tab zero left bracket eleven right bracket equals left curly bracket five comma zero comma one comma two comma three
ad nauseam...
And yes, I know, it doesn't have to be 'Read' but it's a funny thought...
Photos of bits of the past hiding in the present: afiler.com
1) It doesen't look (to me) like this is legally "public" yet. The cryptome page says that the document is based on hardcopy from an anonymous source. Normally (if I remember from my time as a cop beat reporter way back when) all the documents in a civil case only become public at the end of the trial, if there is one, and still may not be completely released then.
This is important as the argument that the judge is somewhat buying from DVD CAA so far is that, while the code has already been posted a lot of places, the information came from an illegitimate source that should have known better, and was posted by persons who should have known that this was not public information. If this is an otherwise confidential court document, posting it does not defeat trade secret protection for DVD any more than any other posting has.
If this is actually a confidential court document, whoever released it doesn't just have DVD CAA to worry about, they should be consulting a lawyer on what the civil contempt rules are in California.
2) FOIA is no help. The federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) does not apply here at all. "The federal FOIA does not, however, provide access to records held by state or local government agencies, or by private businesses or individuals." This is a civil filing in a state (California) court.
"You will be copylefted, and your technological distinctiveness will be added to our own."
When Kessler (counsel for the plaintiffs) started reading the comments at the last hearing it was all we could do to keep from laughing.
"Your honor, we have evidence here that an 'Anonymous Coward' called us 'cocksuckers' on slashdot."
I was reminded of a time when my little sister ran to my mother and said, "Andy called me a poo-poo head!"
Kessler read (from the record) for about an hour and a half in a ferocious speech that left most of us wondering why he had bothered.
-- Defendant #2
Now, what if the defendants entered a different exhibit, containing also the source code, but without asking to seal it? Afaik, that was what happened in the scientology case: the secret was actually entered by the defendants
Look more carefully at the affidavit appendix and I think you'll note that Appendix A is not the source code for DeCSS, but notes regarding the same.
Actually, IIRC, the CD was invented in 1978. The Apple II had only been around for a year. Hard drives didn't exist, at least not for personal computers. It would have been hard to imagine back then that in 2 decades, we'd have multi-gigabyte hard drives and a way to transfer music at near-CD quality (or even CD quality, if you have the bandwidth) to anywhere in the world. Although currently transferring a DVD at full-quality is hard to do, in only a few years, I'll bet it'll be as easy to do as transferring MP3s today. I'm not siding with the people who want to ban DeCSS; I believe that everybody should have the right to use their DVDs as they want for their own personal use. However, copyright protection is a bigger issue today than it was in 1978 because in the forseeable future, it'll be feasible to give pirated DVDs to other people, something that would have been almost science-fiction when CDs were created.
If anyone is interested in learning the truth about the of Cult^h^h^hhurch of Scientology, go here.
What really pisses me off is that in the "president" of the DVD-CCA's little Affidavit, we get the following:
23. Gilmore goes on to state that "[o]ne major reason [for making such copies] is to allow Linux developers and users to watch their DVDs on their non-Windows computers." (Id. at 10). Linux is an alternative operating system to Windows. It was developed as an "open" system which is available at no charge to the user. To date, no person or entity has taken a license from DVD CCA or its predecessor to use CSS in a Linux application. If a person or entity were prepared to take a license on the same terms as existing licensees, such a license would be granted. At that point, Linux users could lawfully view motion pictures on their non-Windows operating system. Until then, Linux users have no "right," via a "hack" around other software licenses, like the Xing license, to gain access to this proprietary technology.
So right there the truth comes out, this is what they're after all along. We have the right to buy the fucking DVD's, but we have no right to PLAY them without also buying a fucking player? We can't make one ourselves? What kind of logic is that? Why isnt the FSF legal team helping the EFF in this? Why isn't many other organisations helping in this effort? It affects us and them alike!
Next thing you know we wont have a right to make our own OS for our computers.
-- iCEBaLM
Actually, it's root@megami.ORG.
If it had been written by someone named in the case, it would be quite damning, but it wasn't. First off, www.megami.com is a page devoted to Japanese Animation.
See above, but the .org page serves the same purpose.
Besides that, anyone who posts to /. as root probably isn't the brightest bulb around.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'posting as root'. On /. root is just a nick like any other. How is this better or worse than someone who calls himself CmdrTaco? I fail how to see how this justifies decreeing me to be 'dim'.
At least 50% of all slashdotters have root access somewhere, and it doesn't impress anyone.
"Impress anyone?" Who said anything about that? My nick matches my email address, which gets routed automagically to my regular (non-superuser) account anyway. You're making a *lot* of assumptions here. Lighten up! It's just a nick!
I don't mean to flame root@megami.com, but presenting his/her sloshdot post as representative of the entire "hacker community" state of mind is insane.
The lawyer made that tie, not me.
I don't think there *is* anyone who represents the entire "hacker community". We're all going to differ on some issues. As far as my comment, I stand by it. Even if MoRE hadn't came up with DeCSS, someone, somewhere, and regardless of local law[*], would've reverse engineered or just plain extracted the css code from one of the software players and posted it to some public forum. Once that happens, its supression would be impossible. Had the secrets of DVD crypto stayed locked exclusively within hardware decoders, it would probably still be a secret today. Allowing software decoding at all, meant puting the code to do it on every software player sold. That is the true distribution and disemmination of the knowledge that led to DeCSS. MoRE just turned it into something a bit more readable.
[*] It is, of course, this "someone, somewhere" who possesses the "f*** the law" attitude I mentioned, and will rip the css code from some player and repackage it as a module, source, or incorporate it into something like DeCSS, and not an attitude fitting my own personal beliefs. Yes, I'm backpeddling a bit, but if I'm gonna be quoted in front of judges here, I wanted to clear that up. I still do support, and think that it is not too late to do, a proper "clean room" reverse engineering of the css code, just as Compaq did with the IBM BIOS code, that enabled them to produce the first PC clone. IBM sued, much as DVD lawyers are sueing now. They lost. Hmmmm. DVD clone players? Would there be any difference?
Color me cynical, but has it occurred to anyone yet that the DVDCCA may not *want* to win this case? I'm sure the lawyers that are arguing the case are trying to win. But, do the people they report to, further up the chain of command, really want to win???
If they do win, DVD goes the way of DAT. It dies.
But if they fight a lengthy, *losing* court battle. They've got headlines in every paper. On all the TV shows. They've branded the DVD trademark. And they have encouraged the geek horde to embrace DVD technology.
Consider how many people owned VCR's last year and didn't know what DVD's were. Or thought, "Why should I buy DVD's, when video tapes are so cheap..."
Now run a search at the New York Times, or your favorite local paper on "DVD". How many articles have there been in the past month? Even Microsoft can't buy marketing like this.
So for the life of me, I can't tell if these are ignorant old-schoolers fighting a losing battle against technology. Or some really brilliant marketers trying to insure that DVD succeeds where DAT failed.
There's this page which has a lot of commentary (ranting) about the Meese report. An online copy of the actual report is elusive.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Just that it makes general sense that if you assign specific rights to licensees and they sublicence it, they can't give those end users more rights than they themself have.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
That won't work when trade secret is at issue, as long as the original person describing what the code does has access to what's alleged to be a trade secret. (It wouldn't work for patent either.)
It does work for copyright, but only because copyright inheres in the exact representation of an idea, not the idea itself. So if you can write a piece of code that's compatible with something copyrighted, without reproducing the copyrighted code, you're free and clear of copyright concerns. (The clean-room technique basically is to make sure there's no legal question that the implementor used copyrighted code, because in the clean-room situation the implementor never *saw* copyrighted code.)
But this case isn't about copyright - no one alleges DeCSS is actually a copy of someone else's software - it's about trade secret. And a trade secret is still a trade secret, whether it's described in C or English. So doing a clean-room clone of CSS won't help here, there'll still be a trade secret problem.