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DeCSS Author Arrested
TyFoN sent us a link to a CNN story where you can read that the author of DeCSS was arrested for violating copyright law. If anyone can find something in English, I'd really appreciate it... the usual translation engines seem to be less then enchanted with norwegian. Update: here's an English version of said story.
Well, things are starting to get a bit out of hand. Before I mumble on about real issues I would like to ask a question. What is the best way to protect your personal possessions from theft, 1) Buy good locks for your doors and windows, or 2) Leave the door open and sue anyone who steals anything.
This is no longer about Jon Johansen, or the cracking of DeCSS, this is about Abuse of privilege. In any country the legal system is paid for by the people and is there to protect the people and other legal entities (including corporations). The legal system is not there to replace adequate safe guards, do we complain when prisoners start law suits at the publics expense because they got the wrong kind of peanut butter? Do we complain when able-bodied people call an ambulance to take them for a checkup? The answer to this is yes (I hope) because it's abuse of the system. In the same way we should protest that entities like the MPAA think they can throw their weight around at the public's expense due to little more then their own failings, yes I know they pay for their own lawyers but the courts etc. all come from the taxpayer.
The issues surrounding the right to access legal acquired information etc. have been covered in other posts, but I would like to bring to people's attention another abuse of the CSS system. The CSS system is there to protect against piracy and to enforce the region coding system. I am angered by the abuse of the region coding system, a DVD disk costs about twice as much in the UK as it does in the US, and quite often does not have as many added extras (interviews, clips etc..). The region coding system forces us to buy often inferior products at always exaggerated prices. Naturally a booming market in imported DVD's and 'chipped' players sprung up but the MPAA lobbied the British government into a large scale crackdown of the 'Grey imports'. Once again taxpayer money wasted in support of big business screwing over the overage joe.
For these reasons I will continue to host a mirror at http://www.exaflop.org and urge other mirror owners to email me and pass on their URLs to aid in the construction of a larger list of mirrors. The MPAA and it's members need to learn three lessons, 1) Attempting to control legal use of a legally purchased product is futile, 2) They cannot continue to abuse privilege, 3) There is no putting of the baby back into the womb once it has been born.
I just heard on Norwegian radio news that Jon will not be held economically responsible, which must be a great relief. As for the Norwegian CNN article, it doesn't hold much more new information. It does though, as most other Norwegian media today, "point out" that the main use of DeCSS is to copy DVD discs illegally (of course it never mentions the price of blank DVD disks, the price of burners, and the size of the actual movies).
:)
I also completely understand it if "outsiders" get the idea that most Linux users are ruthless piracy freaks, after reading all the mindless articles around.
Jon is even on the front page of the largest (I think) norwegian tabloid paper today. Our "economic crime" police division (ØKOKRIM) shows it's pathetic servile attitude in doing anything that the mighty Americans tell them to. One can only hope that this tragic case opens the eyes of people to what a fight for people's rights it really is!
A norwegian Linux related page runs a petition for Jon, and it seems to be going really well. The wheels are in motion!
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
The point is: the guy didn't do anything illegal. He just created a program which could be used for something illegal. If he's arrested for copyright violation, then all manufacturers of any kind of weapons should be arrested for murder.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Ok so this guy is being prosecuted in Norway, but this action no doubt was prompted to influence the case(s) in the US.
If it is decided that DECSS is illegal due to being illegally reversed engineered, the reason being the person doing the reverse engineering clicked on a licence agreement, well will it not effect the whole of the shrink wrap software industry.
How does company A get thier software to write the file format of company B. Well by reverse engineering it of course. This is one example, but there must be hundreds of precidents of reverse engineering of software and hardware with the standard shrink wrap licence.
So does this mean for example Microsoft can be sued by the makers of Word Perfect as to use the software they must have clicked on the licence agreement first. Or Microsoft can then sue anyone that tries to write software that can write thier file formats, or interface to thier protocols.
It makes you wonder, doesn't it, replace the words DECSS and the two parties names by any large company and any peice of software and you can see the simularity.
Maybe the software industry will realise this and rally behind us.
Or maybe they would like to see application barriers to entry being backed by the legal system. In the short term this is great for the corporations but in the long term it will hurt them and also the consumer looses out totally.
Ice Tiger
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
If I woke up as CmdrTaco and found this news I would post it too before having seen that it was already posted during the night. Its an emotional issue, probably the most important one ever to have the Linux and Slashdot communities at the center. This fight is about our right to be who we are, and persecution 16 year old - for no other reason then that he and his friends were smarter than a multi-billion dollar industry - must never be forgotten.
The article from Norwegian CNN looks like the same one that was linked from the last thread from Norwegian newspaper VG. Someone posted a translation here. It is a pretty good article, and includes Jon correction that DeCSS is not "a crack that allows copying of DVDs", but "a crack that allows _playing_ of DVDs". We have to continue to spread that message whenever we talk the press. This is not, and was never, about piracy.
This does mean war people, and it is just the beginning. The Information society _cannot_ both preserve the flows of information and enforce the appropriation of it, and as long as industry and government continues to kling to this contradiction, the costs to freedom will be without limit. As of yet, these are only a few paranoid associations who have not yet been actually threatened to the life: and yet they are ready to take it to the level of abusing the rights of a 16 year old. When the shit truly hits the fan, everything we love here stands to be lost.
I'm very afraid that when the overhyped overpriced Internet companies of today cannot live up to the growth and revenue they have promised, we will become the scapegoats. If your information company is loosing money, blame piracy and try to get the punishments lifted. If your Internet company is loosing money, blame cacheing, deep linking, and the use of Agents until it becomes illegal to link to a page on the WWW without permission (a violation of the very idea behind the media, not to speak of Freedom). If your tech company isn't making money, try to increase the already outdated patent laws beyond any possible rhyme and reason.
Can they win? Of course not. The genie is out of the bottle, and now that we have had glimpse of Freedom, we will never be giving up. The question is how much damage they can do to the world on the way down, and the answer is frightening.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Second, the film industry is reneging on it's deal with the DeCSS people. The letter (published on Slashdot) made it clear no action would be taken against people who removed the source code from their site. This is sheer naked hostility, far beyond anything DeCSS could possibly warrant.
Third, IMHO, this is because of the Californian judge ruling against the trade secret motion by the film industry. I think they wanted blood, and went where they could get some. In short, it's legalised revenge for loosing in court. (I think this is what we should fear the most. It means that they believe themselves outside the law, and will seek revenge for every defeat they suffer in the courts.)
Lastly, this goes waaaay beyond DeCSS, the potental for piracy, or anything else. This is Corporate Government. Those who fear the "New World Order" of a World-wide government should open their eyes. It's here, but it's not the UN, the EU, or the NSA. It's Microsoft, Hollywood, AOL, and the other multinational giants. THEY are your "New World Order", not some dweeb in a suit who got voted in for that afternoon. By fearing Big Government, people put power into the large multinational, faceless Corporations. And they have become more powerful than any elected Government has ever been. What's more, you can't vote them out. Your representitives can't vote for impeachment. You are powerless. And the amusing thing? This was all possible, because people were scared of a few jelly-bean addicted nuts, stuck in an oval office with nothing to do but make prank calls on the radio.
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)
This might have been suggested before.
In the cases where the law can do nothing to help us (perhaps even inhibit us) with our own internet rights, the only action the internet user is capable of generating against corporate bullies is to raise awareness.
In the same way that we boycot spammers with the RBL and the UDP, a list of websites owned by communities who infringe the rights of net users that could be accessed by all net users could benefit. How many people actually KNOW about Amazon/Etoy/MPAA/etc? Probably the population of slashdot readers. How it should be implemented would have to be described, but if web proxy software could pop up "warning, you are about to enter a website of a known abuser of peoples rights, click here for the reason why", it would certainly gain attention.
When they ask me for my reason for returning it, I'll simply say, "They threw a Norwegian kid in jail for figuring out how one of these works. I'm not going to subsidize their lawsuits, so I'm boycotting DVDs and DVD players."
I really, really hate not having a cool toy like a DVD player, but screw it--I despise the behavior of these companies and I will not endorse their behavior by paying them for this technology.
I wonder what all else I'll have to stop using or buying, and I doubt I can make a difference, but so what? I'm not going to pay these companies to "protect" me from this kid.
--
This is not my sandwich.
I just took a look at the Norweigan article...at the bottom is a link back to the slashdot article:
h tml
;)
/their/ link back to the article, as an Anonymous Coward, the posts are all in flat mode at threshold 0. Consequently, of course the first posts I see are Anonymous Cowards posting people's email addresses and web sites and proclaiming that we should all "e-mail bomb" these people. I think that is the last thing we want to present to the public at large. Perhaps you could change the default Anonymous Coward threshhold to something like 2, to avoid presenting ourselves as wackos to the casual reader/public?
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/01/24/2024233.s
So apparently we have slashdotting reporters in our ranks
Anyway, when I follow
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
But we will win the war. Here's how...
1) Start a new project, the "CSS Documentation Project" (or CDP for short) This project's stated goal is to document the techniques used by DeCSS for playing DVD's on Linux. Where will it get its information? The DeCSS source, of course. But not just any copy of the DeCSS source. You see, when DVD-CCA filed its nice little lawsuit against DeCSS, it included the DeCSS source in its filing. The court has to release that filing to the public, and did so. That filing, and everything in it, are now in the public domain, if I am not mistaken. What an excellent little loophole to slip through...
2) Now, this is very important: no actual code can appear in the documentation that the CDP creates. This is just to make sure MPAA and DVD-CCA can't do a damn thing about it.
3) Using the CDP's documentation, a new piece of software is written. It should probably pay homage to the original DeCSS in some manner or another. The point is, it should fill in the two holes which MPAA exploited:
That would be a constructive way of fighting the DVD-CCA. Of course legal funds for the DeCSS author are also good, and should continue to be pursued; he shouldn't have to suffer when he's committed no crime. But we need to work on this as well; a new version of the software that can't be attacked like DeCSS has.
Now, all we need is a real start for the project. Any vounteers?
If you ever read the Masters of Reverse Engineering text file about The Truth about DVD CSS cracking by MoRE and [dEZZY/DoD] that came with DeCSS and that can be found on:
www.lemuria.org/DeCSS/dvdtruth.txt
You can read the following very interesting statement:
Lately, Jon Johansen of MoRE has been pretty much all over the news in Norway, though he had NOTHING to do with the actual cracking of the DVD CSS protection. Yes, it was MoRE who did DeCSS, but the actual crack was not a team effort, MoRE didn't even exist back when the anonymous German (who is now a MoRE member) cracked it...