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Crackdowns, Fools and the MPAA
werdna was one of many to submit a Motley Fool column which takes the MPAA to task, neatly summarizing the events to date. But the best DVD story so far has to be this Linux Journal article, Crackers and Crackdowns. The author has some personal experience with crackdowns, and offers tips on what you can do to fight them.
Let's ignore the expense and difficulty of this step for the moment. The plaitiffs are out there portraying the defendants as pirates. If we walk into court and demonstrate piracy, then we make the plaintiff's case for them.
The case is not about piracy. To address that is to fall into the trap that the DVD CCA and the MPAA have placed. The case is about fair use and freedom within the context of respect for the principles of copyright. The only demonstration that needs to be done is to play a DVD on a Linux system.
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
Somehow we grovelled through several thousand years without movies prior to their invention around 100 years ago. I'm sure we can do without them again.
But it may not be necessary. Here's how to really hurt the MPAA in the long run: Work on tools and technologies that decrease the upfront investment required to make and distribute a movie. Cheaper and better cameras and lighting equipment. Digital storage and projection technologies that make it less expensive to create and distribute 'prints' of a film to theaters. When the advantages that money can buy diminish, the power of large companies that can muster enormous financial resources diminishes, as well. I don't see large movie production companies being rendered as thoroughly irrelevant as large record companies probably will. But certainly some of the wind will be taken from their sails.
Actually,as someone may have pointed out in a previous thread, the actions of the MPAA place the movie industry in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust act. Being a mass of apparent competitors, this only goes to prove that while they are theoretically competing against one another,they are also involved with each other through treatise.
The Sherman Anti-Trust act was constructed originally not only against a one-corporation hold on a market,but also against the possibility of a corporate oligarchy.
It is against this act for corporations of the same industry to form a trust,which is exactly what the MPAA in itself is.
Not only is JWZ right on target, there's the other factor to consider.
Suppose everyone boycotts DVDs and it DOES work. Sales plummet. What will MPAA announce? "Sales are down x% since the eeeevil pirating program DeCSS was released. Obviously everyone's pirating now, and for the good of the world we must put Johansen on death row!". It's just like the RIAA's announcement last year when 1998 record sales were down the MP3s were responsible. That rhetoric's nowhere to be found now that 1999 CD sales hit an all-time high.
The Motely Fool isn't the only investor's info source to cover this. The Wall Street Journal had an article on the situation, including quotes from Chris DiBona, last week.
RIAA's members "create" (publish) or manufacture or distribute 90% of the recorded music in the USA.
What is left? Can anyone name some of the 10% of albums neither published, stamped, or distributed by RIAA members?
>one, say $25million (US).
So people like Michael Dell just have to up and retire when his assets hit $25 million, and Dell computers would have to be liquidated. No company run by its founder can grow beyond $25 million in value. The guy who founded "Virgin airways" should never have had a chance to found "virgin games" or any of the dozens of other companies.
And of course the people who have proven themselves successful at creating and running profitable companies should by no means be allowed to continue doing it. All companies should lose money, or at best break even.
Like most simple utopian strategies, this betrays a profound a vivid lack of understanding of the situation. (Communism, case in point.)
Rob
Has anyone here actually *read* the transcript from the New York hearing? The judge wasn't nearly as biased as he's being portrayed; a couple of really good points got made. The EFF lawyers actually infuriated the judge by not addressing the complaints of the suit directly.
The injunction was regarding the actual Windows program called "DeCSS", NOT the css-auth code, the algorithm whitepaper or any LiVid code. The judge himself says outright that "programming notes" are not being acted against in any way, and that he has no evidence that non-Windows clients even exist.
The secondary issue of controlled playback is being handled as exactly that - a secondary issue. The real issue here is the right to reverse engineer, and whether or not specific permission from the copyright owner is required to do so. *That* was the point that Ms. Gross and the EFF failed to address, and what pissed the judge off.
The most important point, though, is that this isn't a case of copyright infringement. It's a case of DMCA infringement under the "reverse engineering" and "copy protection circumvention" sections. This is a very important point.
Finally, the "giving them a runaway train" comment never in fact happened. The actual quote was:
"I do bear in mind the defendants' interest in speed here and in avoiding a prolonged duration for the preliminary injunction, and so, within the limits of my schedule, which is pretty clear at the moment, you can have a trial pretty near whenever you want.
So when do you want your trial? I think I'm free to start Tuesday."
Page 79, lines 23-25, and page 80, 1-4.
Read the transcript yourself at www.2600.com.
The email mirror at findcss@usa.net is still operational. Email a request for code, a mirror list or the whitepaper detailing how the algorithm is done. All emails will be deleted from the mailbox after the packages have been sent.
If the MPAA succeeds, they could simply Subpoena the list.
A better solution would be for every one to get DeCSS(This is just the windows exe), and if worse comes to worse, pass it along individually to every one you know.
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I'm actually more than half-serious here. Can't any shareholder attend the annual company meeting and question the management about their actions?
So why don't a few thousand OSS supporters buy a single share in each of the companies supporting these lawsuits, and then turn up to stage a 'shareholders protest' against them?
see subject
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I find it amazing that people could be so blind, so steeped in doublethink as to not only believe that DeCSS is can only be used to play movies in Linux, but to outright attack anything that doesn't conform to whatever it is they choose to believe.
You've been called a Troll because you misrepresent what is being said here.
No one here thinks or says that DeCSS can only be used to play movies. The comments that you have misread are that the or intent of the writers of DeCSS was to help design a DVD player for Linux. Other comments that you misread say correctly that it is economically foolish to use DeCSS for piracy. I suppose you can reencode it as a VCD and (illegally) pass it around, but why would you want to? CVD has terrible quality. You get better results by defeating the Macrovision and recording the movie on a VCR.
I've already posted that DeCSS should be allowed to die because it has fufilled its purpose and that css-auth should be mirrored, but the legal case against DeCSS needs to be defended because css-auth derives from it.
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
Its good that you had a picture of the Keg, otherwise we would not have been able to picture it ourselves
Two, beyond a doubt. You see, this was began by Xing but the blame would also fall on the DVD cartel because it was their gross incompetence that made the cracking so easy. If they were using a decent encryption algorythm, we most likely would still only have Xing's key, which could easily be removed from future movie releases. The fact that they used 40-bit encryption (that can be brute forced in less than eighteen seconds on an average desktop system) is what made brute-forcing the remaining keys so easy. There is going to be a lot of ass-covering going on as they attempt to shift the blame to evil pirates.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
ConsumerRevolution is one guy who, with the help of a few friends, is slowly trying to make a difference.
/. login doesn't work consistantly.
The original posting (and possibly this one) was from Anonymous Coward because my
There are many more effective ways of collecting random email addresses than trolling. Anyone who chooses to leave their email address on the current ConsumerRevolution place-holder page will receive an email acknowledging their having done so. They will get another email when the site is ready for testing and again when it goes live.
Morris Schneiderman
the MPAA is the motion picture Assoc. of america. The MPA is the Motion Picture Assoc. Got to MPAA.org to find out more
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The masses seem to be content with media being force fed to them by 20-second sound bytes and corporations that (for example) are capable of manufacturing, recording, distributing, and playing the music of an entertainer (for lack of a better word) under one corporate roof.
I was content too, until I grokked the 'Net and learned how to scavenge, gather, and interpret my own information. I think the best course of action is to make sure we continue to have an open and free media source. As more people move to it, the chances for education improve tremendously.
Don't forget the powerful of personal involvement either. I can't count the number of "real" conversations I've had about a wide variety of Internet issues. In almost every instance I have to educate them on what the issue is before I can go into my spiel about what it means. It takes time, patience, and empathy to overcome ignorance and apathy. Be patient, but never stop pushing.
+&x
That sounds like a great idea for an icon. A campfire with a copyright symbol superimposed on it! Anyone with the skills to do it, please make one for slashdot
Judging by your copying philosophies, you must not produce software or any other information form, because you'd just give it away.
You mean like linux?
If I slaved away on a book for 2 years, I would be pissed as hell if the whole world copied it for free.
Well, I wouldn't If the whole world was copying my book, and millions, billions, of people were reading it, I'd be pretty fucking happy. But thats just me.
Anyway, the reason that we do this is altruism. We don't care about the record/movie companies, but we do care about are frends. Also by trading mp3s/warez/moviez we get more in return. I hope this answers your question.
Although some people belive in the Ayn Rand Capitalist Utopia, others do not.
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
is it like the cluetrain?
+&x
... as is shrink-wrapped licences. So, *plonk*
Remember, a EULA does NOT have the force of a law. You can not be prosecuted in a criminal court for violatin a EULA. At least no according to the law. It's an entirely civil matter known as Breach of Contract. And that's VERY VERY VERY difficult to prove with a EULA as there is no way of knowing that the person every saw the license agreement. Especially if the software was preinstalled on their system. It's illegal to ask someone to agree to something without letting them see it, so there can't just be a 'You agree to all EULA's of any software installed on this system' clause in the purchase of the machine.
So no, you can not prosecute someone as a criminal because they violated your EULA, and in fact you can't prosecute someone under 18 for violating your EULA at ALL as they are not of age to enter into a binding contract.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I read the transcript of the ruling cover to cover and while the judge is certainly predisposed against the defendants, the defendants lawyers did a very poor job of presenting their case. They are relying on some pretty subtle nuiances of the law as their defense. To the layman reading the law, the decss program does indeed seem to be in obvious violation, and let's face it, contrary to his statement that he is not a moron, the judge clearly knows nothing about the internet. He did not even understand the distinction between linking and posting. Furthermore, he clearly did not want to spend the time to become educated on these issues.
That said, I did find a big loophole that the judge left wide open. He made it VERY clear that the programmer's notes (in this case source-code comments) we clearly protected speech. I have reviewed the DeCSS source code and it is a fairly simple short piece of code. I would think that some programmer out there could write 'enhanced' comments that described everything the code was doing to the point that it would allow somebody reading said comments to reproduce the program.
The 'code comments' could then be posted prominently on any website without fear of being sued. I have not quite figured out how the keys could be described without it looking like code.
That said, all it will do is preserve the knowledge, ultimately we will need the right to distribute the executable for our goals to be practically met.
He gets it.
Why retire; just reduce their wealth to $25million if they make more, i.e. spend it, get it back in the economy. Big companies? Time to spin off divisions if they get too big.
Success tends to entail a good deal of luck anyway. Wasn't it Paul Getty who said, when asked how to get rich "Rise early, work late, strike oil"?
That's ok. The first place I saw "Whack a mole" was on usenet, refering to shutting down spammers.
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
Great. It's wonderful to be altruistic, when you have another job, programming or web designing or whatever. Some people actually produce work that they would like to sell in order to get paid. Why should all software be free? THe Linux movement is nice, and is a way of combating MS, but people who write software for it as a means of making a living still need to be paid.
Actually, I think that boycotts *often* work, but
the myth that they don't is suprisingly wide spread.
Just in the last few years: _Global Exchange_
(a small non-profit with a few dozen employees)
led a boycott against the Nike corporation, and
Nike did ultimately back down (they've now
instituted minimum age hiring practices, etc.).
More recently, the same suspects started going
after the Gap/Old Navy/Banana Republic because
of the way they're running their operation in
Saipan (briefly: conning women from Asian into
indentured servitude). Soon thereafter, I noticed
in article in the business pages about how the
Gap's sales had gone flat. Notably this article
proposed a number of possible causes for this,
but didn't mention the boycott...
In any case, I think the chief barrier to getting
a boycott to work in this place is coming up
with a short, simple explanation of the issues.
It's obvious to *us* that this is bullshit,
but how do you make it obvious to everyone?
What's the slogan?
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Atomfilms
+&x
That's exactly how I see it. I own a great DVD library, but the lack of DVD support in Linux has kept me dual-booting with Win 2000 on my personal machine.
To MPAA et al.: I'll stop using DeCSS the minute I find a complete Linux DVD solution.
I've searched high and low, checking recent distributions, to no avail. I just put on Mandrake 7 (finally with USB mouse support! Yeah!) and I noticed it installed a DVD player, but it seems it's just not in the cards quite yet.
--------
Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
Who is the weakest?
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
There is such a bloc -labor unions. But those who run them are just as corrupt as corporate or government leaders.
Well, you read one, you've read them all. Let me summarize:
DVD CCA = Bad
Defendants = Good
There. Anytime the urge to post another DVD piece strikes, simply link to this post instead
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
Socialism doesn't start with concentration camps, that's where it ends.
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I don't think so.
ConsumerRevolution will be a site where you can read about other people's experiences (not opinions) with a 'Brand Name Product' or a 'Provider of Goods or Services'. You will also be able to post your own experiences, good, bad or otherwise.
Morris Schneiderman
Some people believe that it is economically unfeasible to pirate a DVD at full quality. And yes this is probably true right now. However, with better (wavelet?) compression, fatter pipes, and bigger hard drives, in the future it will not be.
I've read through all the source I could get my hands on, but I wasn't sure if what I was looking at was DeCSS or css-auth. The source files said 'css-auth.c' and css-auth.h' etc, so I'm not sure. Is this css-auth, or DeCSS? (or is css-auth just a part of LiViD)?
And as for pirating VCDs, trust me, its happening. I got a copy of American Pie 3 weeks before it came out in theaters. I got my 'good' copy of the matrix about a month before the DVD release. A friend of mine, who at the time still had an analog modem would go to public computer labs and span the files on 10 or so zip disks. Go to #vcd on efnet and tell me then that it isn't happening.
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Jon and his group MoRE (Masters of Reverse Engineering) managed to break the encryption scheme, apparently intercepting the data as it passed through a piece of hardware unencrypted(due partially to a design error on the part of the hardware manufacturer)
go after them, they are the ones that were originally trusted w/the information and screwed up.
they are just trying to make an example of him. get a life MPAA.
As it stands the DVD CCA cases are a mess of misinformation, mostly perpetuated by the non-techo-savvy press. Now, more stories are flying around about the orgins of deCSS and how the law applies to it.
It's been quite some time since I last slept, at this point I don't know how to sort it all out. Maybe sleep will help.
But I am keeping track of all this mess.
Visit http://welcome.to/bloodrose to see what I have compiled so far.
I'd apperciate anyone who decided to pay the site a visit, any clairifaction on any point regarding the DVD cases.
-b
This was a very good summary of the events so far. But it makes me feel better for one reason and for one reason only: The MPAA/CCA does not have the Motley Fool, a bunch of investors, under their spell. Maybe they're not mainstream media, but it's certainly a start, and a little heartening.
I like his idea about commoditizing it. You can bet they'll fight tooth and nail. But you know what? I bet that's where it's all headed. And the MPAA/CCA can either lead, follow, or get out of the way.
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
I'm happy to have read the Fool column. When I first got a DVD player on my PC a few months ago, I thought, cool, I can buy DVDs in the US (I'm American and live in France). Then I read about this region stuff, spent time on DVD FAQs, and had these reactions:
1. I was disappointed,
2. this felt somehow very wrong
3. I started to think of ways I could get around it
4. I started to feel like I might be cheating or stealing to get around it.
I'm happy now to read stuff that explains this is just STUPID!
Too many people confuse fascism, oligopoly, mercantilism and fraud with actual fair trade. (A truly free market requires informed consumers, not passive drones; but we cannot force everyone to be equally intelligent, nor expect everyone to be equally desirous to live freely.)
Groups can never have more rights than the individuals which comprise them -- the individual is the smallest minority. The privileges of a private guild conflict with the inalienable rights of individuals? Too bad; the latter trumps the former.
A lot of so-called "capitalists" have swallowed the CCA/MPAA lies hook, line and sinker. They think it's about piracy. It's not. What IS it about? A lot of things which can't be easily condensed, as the last few weeks of discussion here have shown. Meanwhile, lots of hackers see "capitalism" as the problem, when it's fascism, mercantilism, oligopoly and the like that they're really upset about -- they just don't realize it.
You already know the State claims you don't even own yourself? Now private guilds are ready to violate your rights just as thoroughly, and abuse the legal power of the State by using sovereign national's police forces as their enforcement arm. Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines "property" as
When you lawfully purchase a DVD, do you really own it? Do you only have the right to expose your eyeballs to its images and ears to its sounds? How far may ownership be abrogated -- and by what process is this happening?In the good old days, you were lucky: If you opened the case, all you did was void the warranty. Now, you can be declared a criminal. This harkens back to medieval days, when everyone had "special knowledge" and people were routinely exiled from the guild or killed by its members for revealing the secrets of smithing, healing, or even reading and writing.
But lawful behavior (fair use, reverse engineering and the like) can never be made unlawful, by any amount of legislation. It can only be declared illegal.
Of course it's easy to see how capitalism gets its bad name, given the retarded poster children that get all the press. Steve Gilliard once said, "The reason that some of us are more worried about government power than corporate power is that Coca Cola rarely strafes the villages of Pepsi drinkers." Unfortunately, a lot of groups out there seem to be eagerly competing with governments everywhere to see who can violate the rights of the individual more efficiently and thoroughly. Disney and other companies get together to extend copyrights, while every two-bit jackass who throws together a CGI script slaps a patent on it and sues anyone running a web-based store...
The future, where your only freedom is the freedom to make money (but not too much); where tools like compilers and debuggers are restricted to an elite, privileged and licensed class; where it doesn't matter whether it's government or a corporation giving you the shaft, because they're fascistically intertwined so thoroughly you can't tell one from the other.
"Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory."
Have a nice day, citizen-unit.
-dj
the problem with an information superhighway is that everyone wants to be a traffic cop
Fuck Slashdot
LOL!
The MPAA's site has one (and only one) email address, which is to be used to report instances of piracy (excuse my smiling). It's hotline@mpaa.org and I would guess email might be read by a team involved in the fight against actual movie piracy. Such a team might be interested in this argument: the resources being wasted on the DeCSS fiasco are now not available to comabt genuine piracy.
ben_ the technologist and platform agnostic
Rabid capitalist that I am I find myself agreeing with you simply because of the fact that it makes sense. I mean, even in most video games there is a 2 billion dollar limit on the amount of money you can have. So why do we need so much more in real life? I think 25 million is enough to buy an ungodly large home, a couple dozen cars, servants, and anything else you could want. And perhaps at the end of each year an amount of cash equal to the amount over 25 million you are worth would be taken from you and placed in an area of common funds which would be used for road building, and other infrastructure, or perhaps research and development... Who knows... But I imagine taxes would be reduced to almost nothing very quickly given a reasonable group of people in charge. And that would encourage the wealthy to spend money, the more money the wealthy spend the more other people become wealthy. So it's just all good. And I don't think anyone can argue that 25 million isn't enough money....>:)
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
The contents of those DVDs are the property of the studios and they have the right to determine who uses the product. You have no right to say I want to see these movies running under Linux. They are under no moral or legal obligation to make their product available to you.
Yes and no. No one who knows anything about this issue is denying that it is the DVD CCA's exclusive right to decide to whom they license CSS decryption. If they don't want a license issued for a Linux DVD player (and that's not the case - it seems that no one has applied for one) then there isn't an issue. They're completely in their legal rights to say so.
That doesn't mean that someone who has bought a DVD is without rights. According to U.S. law the consumer has "fair use" rights in regard to copyrighted material; there are limits to the rights the owner has. For example, if you buy a software package, it is considered "fair use" to make backup copies for your own use. That is not a right given to you from the benevolence of the copyright owner - that is considered fair use under U.S. law.
This entire issue has to do with fair use. Do you have the right to watch a DVD you legally purchased on your Linux system, even though you have not bought a license to do so?
Or, even more to the point: you have legally paid $35 for a DVD. The physical media is considered to be your property - if someone broke into your home and stole it, the police would regard it as your property. Should you have to pay a license fee in order to watch it? That is effectively (albiet indirectly - the player manufacturer pays the fee, which is most assuredly passed along to the consumer) what you are currently doing with this DVD CSS licensing scheme.
This is not only a copyright issue, it is also a consumer issue. People need to start realizing that.
Defendent #46
www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Po rt/3224
I actually didn't know that studios made most of their money at the theatre. I love the movies too, but I'm pretty sure that I've got enough self-restraint not to give money to these guys if its got a chance of being effective. It'd be good to be able to let them know that their dip in revenue is due directly to this though. Anyone seen any co-ordination happening with some sort of on-line petition/pledge not to go to the movies?
Found another email for mpaa on their site (but the anti-piracy one might be better). This is from the "related sites" page and asks if readers have any other sites that might be usefull.
mailto:pegge@mpaa.org
Perhaps some sites with the source. . . ?
So people like Michael Dell just have to up and retire when his assets hit $25 million, and Dell computers would have to be liquidated. No company run by its founder can grow beyond $25 million in value. The guy who founded "Virgin airways" should never have had a chance to found "virgin games" or any of the dozens of other companies.
And of course the people who have proven themselves successful at creating and running profitable companies should by no means be allowed to continue doing it. All companies should lose money, or at best break even.
Like most simple utopian strategies, this betrays a profound a vivid lack of understanding of the situation. (Communism, case in point.)
Rob
Wrong, it simply requires that he continue to spend the money, to use it. Also, the value of the company would be divided by the # of shareholders (Seems reasonable to me) and then if that exceeded 25 million per person they would need more shareholders. No one is suggesting that once the person reaches 25 million they must STOP. However the extra could be skimmed off if they couldn't spend it fast enough. I mean, come on, if they can't spend the excess in a year then they really don't have any use for that kind of money, do they?
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
How many more must die until we live in what you'd call Utopia?
How many more have to die before you admit that things could be better and that we should strive for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Don't be smug.
You going to regulate that?? Want our already overburdened government to do it?? Can we really trust the government to do it?? Would you be suggesting to do this if you were the one that was collecting such wealth??
Sorry folks, but more regulation is not the answer!
you seem to have the impression that the current regulations would remain. That is incorrect.
I say remove the entire current government, it performs mostly useless functions anyways. And create a new government, a new system. Give that government explicit rights, make sure it can not act beyond those rights. It's feasible if you are building a nation from the ground up. Or have the cooperation of the people currently in power. I'd say the best hope is to get a colony on the moon or mars and design your own political/economic system.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
This happenned a little earlier in this discussion, I held off then, but this time I thought I'd join in. It warms my heart to see fellow anarcho-socialists come out of the woodwork. A significant proportion of Slashdot posters tend towards anarcho-capitalism, "libertarianism", with it's flawed defence of lassaiz faire market economics. It doesn't matter if this is a "free" market or otherwise. Traditional communism, as shown by historical events, is merely state capitalism, imposing only a slightly different form of market economics. The problem with both these forms, as well as the current form of western market economics, is the collusion between government and business to protect the power and wealth that they hold.
The recent action by the RIAA and the Norwegian state, show how effective, and just how deep, this collusion is. The question remains, what do we do about? The first thing we do is say that it is wrong. We say this to everybody. We defend this position, and work on our exposition. It is our responsibility to answer our critics, and those who would like to become better informed, coming to us to hear what we have to say about the subject. Sometimes people listen and are convinced. This falls short of suddennly politicising the masses and deposing global capitalism, but it is a neccessary stage. The longest journey, does indeed, start with the first step.
-- "This is the Space Age, and we are Here To Go" - W.S.Burroughs
A long time ago (more than 2 years, less than 5?), when DVD was being hashed out by two different consortiums of manufacturers, why didn't we "step up to the plate" then?
I mean, I remember the talk going on about region encoding way back then, and the possibility of an encryption scheme. I also remember, at the time, of talk that the whole format may just be released as a larger version of a CD-ROM, and talk about how it should only be used to hold data of any type (and not, as we have now, DVD for data, DVD for video, DVD for audio, blah). Maybe I have that last bit wrong (I mean, thinking about Audio CDs and CD-ROMs, there are similar parallels there).
Why didn't we (and the public), stand up for our rights to these consortiums then? The info was on the internet (a little), and in the mass media (papers and magazines)...
Perhaps we need to take this as a lesson - when a new tech is promising, before a product is even released, we should hash it over thoroughly and complain loudly about the parts we don't like, prior to it becoming a product - only to complain about it later (like we should be doing now with nanotech)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Supreme Order of Nazi Yakuza
It's interesting but this conversation is starting to sound a lot like one that's been going on in B.C. for awhile: http://www.bcprojectionists.com/ These guys have been locked out for over a year now for not taking a 60% wage cut and have been going through the steps of organizing not only pickets but also boycotts and getting out information about the studios and theatre chains. Cross pollination anyone ("The enemy of my enemy is my friend... or possibly my mother's brother's sister's aunt, I'm not sure which.")
As was stated in this article, we often find ourselves having to work within the bounds of the industry; possibly using tactics similar to theirs, but for our causes.
Perhaps a method of working around the software patents problem would be for the FSF to obtain and hold patents for new algorithms and software invented within the opensource community that need to be protected.
The FSF would obtain these patents, and then allow OpenSource hackers to use them (obviously). They would then step on the big corporations should they attempt to profit from using the intellectual property.
I don't know much about law, so I am unsure of how feasible this idea is, but the problem I see with this idea is the part that involves selectively slamming down on certain organizations, but not others.
Overall I do think algorithm and software patents are silly, and should be chucked out of the window ASAP. This idea could be the next best thing, should getting rid of software patents prove to be unfeasible within a reasonable time period.
There are always the classic methods (demonstrations, letters to politicians, etc) of getting things changed, but I get the impression that most politicians care more about big corporations than people like us, so some of these methods may not work so well in the future, especially on a matter as big as patent law.
It is very heartwarming to hear of the success of the Etoys vs Etoy matter, however, it only involved one big corporation. Similar domain names, is a rather trivial matter when compared to some of the obstacles we are and will be facing in the future. As a result, the OpenSource community will need to look into and research other means to our ends.
I have to admit I have not run DeCSS (I'm not buying a DVD drive until I can run it under Debian) and depend on comments on /. and other sites to be accurate.
/. and other sites, except this:
Neither am I a lawyer but it seems that DeCSS/css-auth exposes an unexpected contradiction in the DCMA.
DCMA 1201 says, "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." This is where the MPAA bases its lawsuits, and if DeCSS merely decprypts a movie, then it SEEMS to be a violation.
Ah, but a few paragraphs down, DCMA also says, "Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, _including_fair_use_, under this title." and I assume this means I can still make my own copies of material on DVD for my own use.
And then DCMA allows, " 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...[yadda yadda yadda]"
I give MoRE and everyone involved with open source DVD the benefit of the doubt that they are doing what the linux community has always done; reverse-engineering software to port a function to linux, and used the web to disseminate and develop the code. Maybe the courts won't agree; congress seems to have expected an electronics manufacturer to do the R-E in a locked lab rather than the wide-open environment of the web.
Everything I could say here has been said already on
If MoRE and the open source community develops a DVD player that, as an intermediate step, decrypts the movie before playing it and that opens the door to a piracy exploit.. tough luck for them.
They had the option of working with the open source community to develop a player that kept their encryption intact, but they chose to keep their 'secret' locked up tight... or at least so they thought.
Moral: Don't try to keep a genie in a bottle. It can't be done anymore.
My metamoderation cancels your moderation
Warner is part of Time-Warner. Try a copy of Time Magazine for an address of another subsidiary. Send the message to them too. Oh yeah, and isnt AOL buying Time Warner too? Of course nobody on slashdot uses aol *duck* but putting the message out on aol ought to reach a lot of people
"The internet changes everything". The internet changes very little, actually. It just changes the frequency of what's done, not the things that are done, or their legality. All of these issues *including linking* are well-covered by case law. The language and medium with which I communicate an idea does not affect its First Amendment protection. It just changes the likelihood that someone will use the information.
Nobody, not the US DEA, the FBI, or anyone else, would think it illegal or even much wrong if I put a note on my front door stating:
To make LSD, follow the recipe found on page XXX of the Armchair Anarchist's Almanac, which is found on shelf Y of the Ithaca Public Library at ZZZ State Street, Ithaca, NY.
(I'm too lazy to fill in the blanks above, not too cowardly. Maybe it's Buffalo Street now that I think about it...).
That's all a link does: it gives your browser the instructions of where to go to get the information. Even if it's an inline picture, the browser, not the linking site, is getting the picture, creating the page that's viewed. The server with the bits is making the copy and giving it to the client with the browser. The bits travel over communications channels that are almost certainly more direct than through the linker, and in fact different bits may follow different paths through the net to get to the client and be reassembled. The linker is not part of the copying transaction. The bits never touch the linker's computer. The linker is not a party to the transaction and should not be a party to the lawsuit. End of story.
If you're a content provider and you don't want someone to link to your page, give it password protection. Require user registration and login. Don't want to restrict access to your server in that way? Afraid Anonymous Cowards like me will laughingly refuse to make an account and go elsewhere? Well, that's tough on you.
What I find strange is that with all the discussion of whether DeCSS is illegal, few seem to be paying attention to the suits against linkers from a technical standpoint. Since the passage of the First Amendment, we have been allowed to *say* what we want. All a linker is doing is saying where to get something. If that's now illegal, it's by extension illegal to say the name of the software with your voice, since the user can then use a search engine instead of a browser, and get the same information from the same source in the same manner.
So MPAA, go ahead and sue all of us here. We said "DeCSS".
--jh--
[...]
.h ?) does not provide access to the movie - it's "how-to build the decryptor" instructions.
it is still pretty easy to argue that the DVDROM/CDROM device driver can work just fine with other programs without descrambling CSS. You have to go outside your computer to the program that encodes information onto the DVD media to show that CSS is required for interoperability, defined as the exchange of information.
A DVD movie is nothing more than data in a particular file format. _ALL_ programs can be expressed as taking some input data, operating on it, and producing output data.
I listed three programs that taken together, AS A SET, will not interoperate correctly when the input file consists of the data in the DVD movie data file format. At the device driver level, this data is no different than any other data and can be read.
DVD movie data > DVD/CD-ROM device reader ## succeeds - correctly read media
DVD movie data > DVD/CD-ROM device reader | mpeg2play | video driver ## fails - error or jibberish
DVD movie data > DVD/CD-ROM device reader | DeCSS-compiled | mpeg2play | video driver ## succeeds - you see meaningful stuff
DVD movie data > DVD/CD-ROM device reader | DeCSS.c | mpeg2play | video driver ## nonsense - DeCSS.c is not executable
I raise the last point to hammer again the point DeCSS.c (or is it
Again, how is this ANY different than Star Office reading MSWord files?
This whole thing reminds me of a little story:
One day, the marching band instructor was watching that day's practice when he noticed that Smith was out of step with everyone else.
"Smith, march in step!" Said the instructor.
"I am," said Smith back.
"No you are not! You're completly out of step with everyone else. Sometimes your too fast, sometimes you too slow."
"But I'm marching to the beet! Everyone else is out of step!"
Hey. I'm sure someone has done this before, but since I'm certainly not the only one who skims unthoroughly through these responses, why don't all you americans (I'm in europe so it's not toll free for me) overload the MPAA's hotline for piracy: 1-800-NO-COPYS (1-800-662-6797). and tell them this has nothing to do with copying. After all they key point here is decrypting DVD doesn't make it less difficult to make dvd copies does it? I'll have to satisfy myself with hotline@mpaa.org
Together we stand, divided we fall!
Nothing exists exept atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
blah blah blah....
We need to destroy this image. Most of the 'hacker' types I know are great people, who do many positive things for society.
I have a DVD player and want to use it. I'd like to use it under Linux, and I believe that having paid for it I should have the right to view it in whatever form I want.
The Linux and Open Source community needs to organise some press on this one. But not on Slashdot or the other OSS sites, where the audience is already positive to the issue. Can't we show to the world that the multinationals are acting in an immoral, 'evil', way. They've arrested a sixteen year old for being intelligent and spending his time in a productive way. That can't be right.
No, but if they started printing in a gratuitously new alphabet, or switched to left-to-right scanning direction for no reason, he might have something to say.
The web is changing for no reason. For many years, it has been trivially easy to make a web page that shows whatever information that you want to, and it will always look perfect in any non-buggy HTML 1 browser. Why isn't perfection good enough for some people?
It's an article. If they wanted to present a shockwave video game or something else that wasn't around in 1991, then maybe doing all this new-fangled weird shit would make sense. But this is just a series of paragraphs of text. Why shouldn't it be readable under Mosaic 1.0? In what way does gratuitous incompatability make this article more readable?
The justification for using computers to print books is that it is easier and cheaper than wooden type blocks, and results in higher quality print too. It is a true technological advance. The justification for including browser-specific typesetting commands in a web page is ... nothing. It is not a technological advance.
In fact, it is a regression and rejection of technology. It is the web browser's job to render things and make 'em look good. Web page authors that try to assume that responsibility are taking away the browser makers' motivation for improving the software. That's probably the biggest reason that mainstream web browsers have not significantly changed in the last 6 years. The only reason people upgrade their browsers is to get compliance with all the latest bullshit, instead of to get better browsers. I guess we're all just supposed to be happy with our wooden blocks, and marvel at the fact that they can now print flashing type.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
This movie rocks !!! This is a really funny movie, and Verhoven does a great job with his paradoy of a militaristic world. Of course this movie is for people who understand 2nd degree humor (people who didn't see a 2nd degree didn't paid enough attention to the commercials inside the movie, which are inspired of the WWII US propagenda effort).
No, but if they started printing in a gratuitously new alphabet, or switched to left-to-right scanning direction for no reason, he might have something to say.
The web is changing for no reason. For many years, it has been trivially easy to make a web page that shows whatever information that you want to, and it will always look perfect in any non-buggy HTML 1 browser. Why isn't perfection good enough for some people?
It's an article. If they wanted to present a shockwave video game or something else that wasn't around in 1991, then maybe doing all this new-fangled weird shit would make sense. But this is just a series of paragraphs of text. Why shouldn't it be readable under Mosaic 1.0? In what way does gratuitous incompatability make this article more readable?
The justification for using computers to print books is that it is easier and cheaper than wooden type blocks, and results in higher quality print too. It is a true technological advance. The justification for including browser-specific typesetting commands in a web page is ... nothing. Therefore, it is not a technological advance.
In fact, it is regression and a rejection of technology. It is the web browser's job to render things and make 'em look good. Web page authors that try to assume that responsibility are taking away the browser makers' motivation for improving the software. That's probably the biggest reason that mainstream web browsers have not significantly changed in the last 6 years. The only reason people upgrade their browsers is to get compliance with all the latest bullshit, instead of to get better browsers. I guess we're all just supposed to be happy with our wooden blocks, and marvel at the fact that they can now print flashing type.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Can we join forces and get CNN, MSNBC, ABC, BBC, everyone and see the (Microsoft like : ) bulliness that is eminating from these big corporations?
I was pleasantly surprised to read this CNN story on Jon Johanson's arrest. It's one of the very few times a major media source hasn't done an article screaming "evil pirate hackers copying DVDs!" right off the bat.
Information wants to be free -- but informants want to be paid.
This is a very important point - the crack was actually done by a German. I had a look at the German law, and it's definately very grey in this area (aside from the fact that it's in legal-speak).
-- Steve
So how many things do you own?
Great Windows SFTP Server!
The media does not listen until you can provide something sensational that will fix Joe Sixpack in his chair during the commercial before the actual news article or make him read the frontpage before the sport one.
:-) Nevertheless, I do believe that technological explanations will not gain public sympathy, nor attention for that matter, regardless of the form. Tell them that the whole DeCSS lawsuit thing is to cover up that they are continually ripped off, then they'll listen.
As long as the community tries to come up with technical terms, the greater public will not listen. Most people could not care less about whether you can watch a DVD with Linux or not. They will not understand the need for decoding to watch but not for copying a DVD and they don't care either. I believe that the non-technical community's perception is that a Norwegian hacker, who is a member of an underground cell tried to rip off Holywood and ruin the Great American Dream singlehandedly. Fortunately, the police managed to stop him in his evil doings before all Holywood studios were about to close for good.
Public listens to tales, not technical arguments. The more dramatic tales, the better. There's no drama in a crappy encryption scheme that was designed to generate extra profit by a bunch of cryptographically challenged engineer. Who cares ? On teh other hand, The Scandinavian Terminator Who Wants To Kill The Whole Movie Industry, now that's drama for you.
Public attention can be achieved when the public is explained that it was ripped off, media attention can be achieved by the above public going mad.
I'm probably dreaming but I would envision a campaing in which the "DVD consumer community" in the US (and maybe in Europe) is informed that they could mail-order the same film from any developing country half the price but they can't play it on their DVD player because the MPA made the US DVD players not to play the same movie if it was not sold in the US. If the fact that this is actually against the law is also published, with much emphasis being placed on the extra profit the movie industry makes, the dramatic explanation of designing technology to rip off customers would cause quite some stir. You can also get immigrant groups into the picture explaining them that although they have a DVD player in the US, they could not order (zone locked) films from their country of birth because it would not play on the zone-1 locked player.
After all that stir and public outrage there would be lawyers out there who would smell some money - a class action lawsuit might be in order. If zoning is indeed against the law and easily provable to unlawfully generate profit at the customers' cost, with defendants capable of paying billions in damages - well, I'm sure there would be cases. Now *that* would give as much media attention as it gets.
IANAL, so I might very well be off course. Maybe it's just a geekish wet dream, all those bad boys sweating in the courtroom and hackers grinning all around
Kocsonya s.k.
This action on the part of the MPAA is completely stupid. It goes against one of the founding principles of capitalism - that of giving the customer what they want. Because of this someone else has taken action and now they are trying to wage an underhanded dirty war against them.
I mean the very action of raiding a teenagers house, arresting, intergating and charging his family - based on the lie that he created a bit of software that can copy DVDs is - well I don't have the words.
In return we show our disgust and mount a protest against the MPAA and the corps it represents. By which they recieve bad publicity - leading to falling share prices - decreased customer loyality - unhappy share holders and effectively damaging themselves.
What they should have done was realized the potential market place of a DVD Player for Linux and created and supplied one.
Again the same action as the record industry have against the mp3 market. These companies are missing out on probablily a potentially huge gold mine. Instead they want to try and destory the market - but because of the way capitialism works they can't and now they are losing out.
As a person who loves listening to music but who doesn't like the hassle of changing the CD to listen to another artist - mp3 is the perfect medium. Also I don't have the time to go into the center of the city, park my car and go shopping for a CD just so I can listen to one song on it. It is far more convient to download it of the Internet. Yet the record industry simply doesn't get this - outstanding.
The question, what do all you pirateers do for money?
The only people claiming that the "other side" (i.e., us) are pirateers are the MPAA/DVD-CCA lawyers. You actually have two camps here, and for the most part they're completely separate.
The first one are the pirates. They're the kiddies with their "warez" sites and the "stick it to the man" attitude. They're the ones mirroring the DeCSS binaries; there aren't too many of them taking an active interest in the legal proceedings. Many of them are outright advocating breaking the law.
The second group are the Linux-DVD people, which make up a much larger group. For the most part they have no interest in pirating DVDs; they just want the "fair use" rights that they are entitled to under U.S. law. They simply believe that if they pay $35 for a DVD, then they should be able to play it whereever they want to without paying an additional licensing fee. They're the ones who are showing up in court and are mirroring the css-auth and LiVid source code. They realize the binaries don't mean anything; it's the source code that matters.
The strategy of the MPAA/DVD-CCA seems to be to paint all of us with the same broad brush - "they're all warez kiddies, every last one of them, they all want to rip us off". They want you to believe that we're all in the first group, because if the public begins to see that there are real consumer issues here, they'll never win this.
Get informed on this. Be smart enough to realize when you're being manipulated. Just because you're popping open the hood of a car, doesn't mean you're hotwiring it.
Defendent #46
www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Po rt/3224
I am saying this argument is required in order to get through the judges thick skull...
DVD encoder > DVD mopie data > DVD media > DVD movie data > DVD/CD-ROM device reader | DeCSS-compiled | mpeg2play | video driver ## succeeds - you see meaningful stuff
vs your argument of...
DVD movie data > DVD/CD-ROM device reader | DeCSS-compiled | mpeg2play | video driver ## succeeds - you see meaningful stuff
The above is not sufficient because the programs listed are obviously interoperable without DeCSS, as the following example proves...
MPEG data from a DVD-ROM > DVD/CD-ROM device reader | mpeg2player | video driver ## succeeds - you see meaningful stuff (no DeCSS).
This is non-css encoded MPEG data from say a game DVD or soemthing. Given this example it is obvious that the DVDROM device reader, mpeg2player and video driver are interoperable without DeCSS.
Is the previous argument facetious and stupid?? YES!
Is it the sort of argument that could be made in court and stick? YES!
Do I agree with it? NO!
So, for the purposes of the court case I think the argument has to go all the way back to the program that originally creates the encoded movie data. Then, it is obvious and indisputable that DeCSS (or whatever library) is required in order to allow interoperability between the DVD encoder and my computer. And, therefore it is protected under the DMCA.
Dastardly
I'm sorry, but as one who runs a retail trade I can tell you you havn't cost them anywhere near that much. What you have done is deny them that amount of money short term gross working capital. This is different. This is annoying, but not that costly really. If Amazon were a traditional brick and mortar operation like my own you would have hurt them a bit more because of the higher overhead involved regardless of sales. Point of fact is, and some have put forward this plan facitously, if you wanted to COST them money you would have to buy a lot of things from them. Amazon looses money on every sale. They make up the loss by generating further investment. In point of fact by shopping at Amazon you are hurting them financially while getting their investors to partically subsidize your purchases. I'm not being cute here. I'm telling you as a retailer this is EXACTLY what is really going on. There have been times in my own business carreer where I have actually prayed that customers NOT walk in my door and buy somthing! Does this mean I shop at Amazon? Of course not. You see, what you HAVE done by boycotting them is to potentially STRENGTHEN their competitors, perhaps drawing some of Amazon's investors away. Of course the other thing you've accomplished is avoiding doing business with scumbags. The movie industry on the other hand makes HUGE profits on every DVD sold. If they can sell them in India for a few bucks and find that profitable while selling them in the us for 20 or 25 you get an idea of the harm that a boycott could cause them in their bottom line. Of course, THEY are such scumbags that they're claiming if people won't do business with them it's because WE are pirates. Just goes to prove they're scumbags I guess.
I've been thinking about this whole DVD thing and it seems to me that this is really really about who controls a encryption key system. 1. DVD players expect encrypted disks. 2. To encrypt your movie you need a key. 3. If the keys are tightly controlled, you need to buy a key to encode your movie. This would explain why the major movie companies have been reluctant to get into DVDs, they don't want to buy the keys! It also explains why the movies and the players are so expensive, it has nothing to do with technology, it's just another monopoly tax. What a scam! Signed, myname17@yahoo.com
In my post yesterday I used the analogy of a book locked in a safe. I feel it was a pretty good analogy. For starters, the whole legal battle is going to eventually revolve around the rights to * the combination.* Think about that for minute. We could WIN the DeCSS battle and loose the war. What if the reverse engineering held up as far as the decryption code is concerned BUT the actual key was held to be protected under copright? The algorithm is pretty worthless without the key to work on. This could actually happen. As for how this applies directly to you, the people in the news group are right, DeCSS *is* just an electronic lock pick, i.e., the combination to the safe....BUT, you own the safe and the book inside it. Is it illegal, or even immoral, to pick your own lock to view your own property? Bounce that one off of them. How about this? I buy a car but the dealer locks the keys inside it when they deliver it. I call them up and ask them to come back and open it up but they want to charge me a $100 service call to do it. Is there anything illegal or wrong about my picking the lock? How about throwing a brick through the window? Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman was well known as an accomplished lockpick and safecracker. He wasn't a theif! kfg
To understand why that would be applicable to a Norweigan you need to understand the first principles of the US Constitution.
If you read the Declaration of Independance you will find that all Rights come from the Creator. By this claim all people regardless of where they live have these rights. The Constitution does not grant any rights, it just protects them from being infringed upon by the government. This is a very important concept, and one that is not understood by many people. Therefore someone in another country has these same rights regardless of the government they live under. The government may deny them, but they are still their rights.
This is not a legal arguement however, but a moral one.
Peace.
Damn, forgot to hit plain text. I'm truely sorry people.
In my post yesterday I used the analogy of a book locked in a safe. I feel it was a pretty good analogy.
For starters, the whole legal battle is going to eventually revolve around the rights to * the combination.*
Think about that for minute. We could WIN the DeCSS battle and loose the war. What if the reverse engineering held up as far as the decryption code is concerned BUT the actual key was held to be protected under copright?
The algorithm is pretty worthless without the key to work on.
This could actually happen.
As for how this applies directly to you, the people in the news group are right, DeCSS *is* just an electronic lock pick, i.e., the combination to the safe....BUT, you own the safe and the book inside it. Is it illegal, or even immoral, to pick your own lock to view your own property? Bounce that one off of them.
How about this? I buy a car but the dealer locks the keys inside it when they deliver it. I call them up and ask them to come back and open it up but they want to charge me a $100 service call to do it.
Is there anything illegal or wrong about my picking the lock? How about throwing a brick through the window?
Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman was well known as an accomplished lockpick and safecracker. He wasn't a theif!
kfg
Everyone should also read the transcript from the NY hearing.
...to 'circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner.
1201(a)(2)(B) is what I assume will be the MPA[A]'s reponse to the defense that DeCSS was written to bridge the gap between DVD and Linux -- they'll make an effort to show that the possible illegal uses of DeCSS, regardless of its intended use, mean that Johansen should go to jail.
Indeed, reading the transcript above, the judge makes it clear that 1201(a)(2)(B) is the strongest arguement for the plaintiffs. Moreover, he notes this is not a 1201(b)(1) claim (this section bans distributing technology for copyright infringement as opposed to technology for circumventing access controlin (a)(2) ). In my opinion, cries of "Piracy!" would be (b)(1) claims, whereas "unathorized playback" would fall under (a)(2). The "Piracy!" claims are thus designed to mislead and sensationalize the issue.
We must hammer this home: DVD licences "for home viewing only" and "fair use" both show that linux playback is not unathorized access, and thus no circumvention occurs to allow a claim under (a)(2). The playback right you purchase with the DVD, not with the player, and no "tying" can legally occur. Indeed such tying is anti-competitive and anti-consumer and perhaps runs afoul of antitrust laws. Even if access isn't authorized by the copyright holder (which it was, despite attempts to retroactively retract it) it is AUTHORIZED BY THE FIRST AMENDMENT which forms the basis of "fair use" exceptions to copyright.
A better arguement still is that source code alone does not perform access. Perhaps compiling the source code in some case might be illegal, but the source itself does none of the activities bannable under (a)(2). Source code is no different that an instruction on how to do something.
the following section will probably be DeCSS's defense [...] (f) REVERSE ENGINEERING
Surprisingly, the defense did not go to town on this. In fact, they didn't even raise it very forcefully. Worse, the plaintiffs submitted a brief mentioned in the transcript (I don't have a link for this) in which they argue the bizarre idea that 1201(f) was only meant to protect computer programs and since movies aren't computer programs, the exception doesn't apply. Worse still, the JUDGE BOUGHT IT !!!! Uh, duh CSS is a computer program and a DVD contains computer files and so even under this compeletly bogus reading of 1201(f) it's allowed. Indeed reengineering of proprietary file format protocols is EXACTLY what is at hand.
This point was VERY POORLY ARGUED for the defense during the preliminary injunction hearing.
I stronly urge people to read the transcript in it's entirety. The judge came across as extremely biased. He seems to recognize that the code is speach but for some odd reason believes that copyright protections outweigh this EVEN THOUGH HE WON'T DISCUSS "FAIR USE".
I understand 2nd degree humor. I "got" all the second degree humor. I understood every single little subtle nuance of every infinitesimal pixel from the begining to the end.
The movie still sucked rocks.
Maybe it's just because I'm an old fart who's seen every real idea in this movie done a billion times better over and over again.
You want to see a REAL movie on these themes? Go rent Catch-22. Better yet, go READ Catch-22, AND Starship Troopers for that matter.
From the Fool.com article:- 'Each applicant gets their own secret key with which to unscramble the DVD so it can be played. And if one of those keys were to fall into the "wrong hands," then future DVD disks could be made so that key wouldn't work on them anymore.' Does this mean that if the MPAA decides that e.g. Panasonic had broken their licensing agreement, then newly released DVDs would simply stop working on their players? Surely this level of market controll is ridiculous. Sorry if this has already been discussed...
Whoa there. Perhaps we've all been misinformed. One way or another, it looks like there's some confusion here. I wonder which side it's on.
Are you sure the RIAA is suing mp3.com for beaming music that was bought from mp3.com? My understanding was that mp3.com was beaming other music too, which they didn't have the distribution rights too. (e.g. Beaming music by artists that are not signed by mp3.com, and without their permission.) My understanding was that mp3.com's justification for this was that they used some kind of software that runs on the receiver's machine to verify that the receiver already owns a copy of that CD. (And of course, we all know that it would be impossible for that software to be reverse engineered or connected to a fake virtual CD drive that reports arbitrary CDDB information.)
If any of the above is wrong, please flame away. Otherwise, it sounds like mp3.com screwed up big time, and they are not fighting the true MP3 fight. mp3.com was once a fresh and legitimate music publisher, with a cool distribution scheme. But now they're trying to turn into a w4r3z server, and I think MP3 advocates should distance themselves from this company.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
>If someone has less, you rip them off for less.
>That makes it make sense?
If you are trying to end up with the most, yep.
This really cracks me up. One of the main contributors of decryption code to DeCSS and Livid was DoD, "Drink or Die - Warez Bearz from Russia and beyond". They are the piratingest pirates you ever did see, releasing major commercial business packages across the Internet warez distribution channels.
I'm sure the Windows versions of dodsrip and DeCSS were nothing to do with piracy, coming as they do from such non-pirating people.
We must hang together gentleman, or most assuredly we will all hang seperately. -Benjamin Franklin
Works for me. Can still watch independent films I guess. Bring your own munchies too.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I realise that this is off topic, but FYI spam proofing your email in the header and not in your .sig is a bit counter-productive ;)
You need to read more carefully. As the Fool said, there have been tools since 1997 that just grab the decrypted signals going to the video card and save that.
Really, you don't need to understand CSS to copy CSS encrypted stuff. It is needed if you want to make players without paying licensing fees. And that is what this case is about.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Note that Etoys stock fell 20% just yesterday. Not do to lack of business mind, they're another outfit that looses money with every transaction, they did record business and suffered record losses.
Boycott Etoys, buy EVERYTHING from them!
I decided to post a poll on my site asking the obvious question:
/. community are...please take a moment to jump over to The Swindle and register your vote. I promise to post a followup with the current tally tomorrow.
Are YOU boycotting DVD?
I'm curious to see what percentage of people in the
Because The Motley Fool is investor-oriented they have brought out some important points which we have been ignoring on /.
DVDCCA has defrauded investors and content-providers by telling them they have a copy-proof technology (when we now know they had a third-rate encryption system). They got people to give them money on false pretenses. They got people to put content out in their format by lying to them.
They also got people to buy DVD players on the premise that the players would be able to play all DVDs. Now, they are threatening to release a new encryption system which would make all current players obsolete. Even if they didn't do this, the companies which have agreed to release material on the format are being harmed by the court actions because those actions restrict the market for their material.
The Motley Fool brings out the real issues by showing that it is economic reasons, not technical reasons, that prevent illegal copying. The article even shows why that will continue to be true in the future.
All of this suggests better strategies for fighting these idiots. Boycotts are all well and good, but only a small percentage of the moviegoing public is going to understand these issues. (Taking back your DVD players and demanding a refund or boycotting the player-makers may prove more useful since geeks are much more likely to be the target market for these kinds of tech.)
How about a class-action lawsuit against the DVDCCA on behalf of everyone who legally owns a DVD but is being prevented from using it legally?
How about suing on behalf of investors who were lied to and whose interests are being undermined by the phony DVDCCA lawsuits? If DVD goes the way of DIVX because these guys are overplaying their hand, some people are gonna lose some big-time money.
How about a lawsuit on behalf of content-providers who were defrauded and then had their markets curtailed by DVDCCA legal actions?
I know most slashdotters are morally opposed to things done by lawyers. I share a certain amount of disdain for some parts of the legal profession. But this may be a time when the courts are the right venue.
Certainly, plenty of lawyers ought to be willing to try it on contingency. It's an easy case. The tech issues are straightforward, and the economic issues (as demonstrated by The Motley Fool) are pretty simple.
Maybe it's time to fight fire with fire.
Any lawyers out there interested? If you've got the credentials, we can probably get you an unusually long list of named plaintiffs for a contingency-based class action. (Remember, this could be a very high-profile case and function as pretty good PR.)
BTW, what about a volunteer lawyer in Norway for Jon Lech? I don't know what the laws there are like for malicious prosecution, but there could be some big money there. Maybe a legal fund isn't even needed.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Labor unions are definitely not the right kind of power bloc. They have different goals than what we're talking about here. Their membership is miniscule compared to what is needed too. The corruption problem is a tough thing to deal with. Anywhere you have power, corruption is sure to rear its head. But we need power in order to create some kind of balance. The only thing that we can do is try to minimize the potential for corruption by keeping things as open as possible.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Yes, I have the DeCSS source code. Neener-neener.
If someone has less, you rip them off for less.
That makes it make sense?
Incidentally the people who engage in import-export to try to smooth out said prices are called the "grey market". Which is legal but under the table.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
If you boycott movies completely, my hat's off to you.
Like many people I think that the MPAA has stepped way over the line on this one. Each corporation has the responsibilty to protect their shareholders intellectial property, but that property is not this stupid so called "trade secret" that allows them an unfair monopoly, a monopoly which gives them godlike powers over where, when, and how there product is used. Their property is the movies they make and for the most part we want to see.
I bet that the media outlets that participate in the MPAA make the overwhelming majority of the movies sold in the United States. This loose orgranization has been the legal club which has been ineffectively whacking at the DeCss moles. This organization has nothing to do with free markets, just the opposite it seems like they are guilty of collusion.
This backroom price fixing is what really needs to be investigated...
The consumer thrives in a capitalist market when it is easy to compete in it, or more accurately when there are a lot of people (companies) competing, since the competition will tend to decrease the price of a product until it is just possible to make money selling it. Conversely, to make lots of money in a capitalist market, you have to be doing something few other people can do. In this case you can take a good markup on your product since not many people can beat your price.
There are a few ways to achieve such a monopoly, and CSS was one of them. DeCSS should enable a lot of competition in DVD players, thereby making the market MORE free (free market = capitalism), to the consumers' advantage, of course. So DeCSS benefits the capitalist system Kevin seems to so dislike, and in so doing benefits everyone but the people who held the CSS power.
Regarding the negative comments on the WTO: free trade benefits everyone. If you can make steel at $200 per ton, but import it for $100 (if the government allows you to, by not using import duties to raise the price and protect the local steel manufacturers), then you should import it. The jobs created by the fact that anyone in the country can use steel at $100 instead of $200 will always far outweigh the jobs lost because steel is no longer produced locally but imported! It is crazy to say "I would rather buy at $200 than $100" instead of "Thanks, you just saved me $100!, I see my growth rate going up by x %". The WTO is supposed to help break down trade barriers - just wish it could do that as well as the net has! Funny thing is that it works both ways - you are getting richer and the guys you are importing from are getting richer.
Ah.. the letter vs. the spirit of the law. Thanx for the good explanation. I guess such a thing exists in just about every country, but the wording was a bit vague for me (not being a native english speaker)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
If that is their point, hooray!, take a look at this translation of the original Norwegian law text: http://linuxguiden.linpro.no/norlaw.php
As you can see, the points about reverse engineering for functional operation with other programs are something which no agreement can circumvent.
Case closed.
The Speedy Viking
Subject: What my boycott costs you
Hello,
Since I am boycotting Amazon.com for its abusive patents policies I would like to let you know how much my boycott has cost you so far (I now make my purchases through other retailers on the web but I originally intended to purchase through Amazon):
$299.99 + $459.99 = $759.98
Regards,
TNN
You can of course capture the pure digital unencrypted MPEG by decoding it with a legal software player and piping the output to your hd instead of your video card.
Perfect copy. No loss. If you already have the DVD drive and software no more cost than DeCSS.
I don't see anything you wrote as being riot inciting. It is actually very well written, and I pretty uch agree.
I do believe the judge has one opinion that is not valid, and that is that a DVD movie is not a computer program and therefore does not fall under the interoperability section. The defense needs to argue during the trial that a DVD movie is information created by one computer program and transmitted via DVD media to another program where it is deciphered and played. Therefore, DeCSS is required to provide interoperability between the program that created the DVD data and the users computer. While this argument still would not have stopped the preliminary injunction (which basically says let's maintain the status quo until a decision is made), it would probably be helpful in the trial phase.
I think the defense was very disorganized, but since I suspect that they are also defending the California case they probably had very little time for the preliminary injunction, and would have been better served by presenting a few concise arguments for the record, and letting the preliminary injunction go, then worry about the trial.
Dastardly
Dastardly
hey
has anyone noticed how the mainstream media -i.e. news sources- are owned by the very same people behind the mpaa? i've seen reports in recent days where time/warner (owner of the warner bros. movie studio, which is a partner behind the mpaa) was bought by aol, which owns an ungodly amount of companies. emi (recording company) was also purchased last week by this conglomerate-which also owns cnn. what mainstream news source could be trusted to not reflect what the corporate people want?
peace,
lpc
Be a moderator, not a brick.
I sent e-mail to Jason Kroll asking him to clarify the issues I raised in my Slimy, yes. But unconstitutional? posting. He replied promptly, and asked that I post the following clarification:
So there you have it. Since I publicly challenged Mr. Kroll's article, I would now like to publicly thank him for responding in an expedient and professional manner. As he quotes Gandhi, "Truth never damages a cause that is just," and a questioning public is a critical component of an enlightened, free society.
Stupid Sloppy!
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Work on tools and technologies that decrease the upfront investment required to make and distribute a movie. Cheaper and better cameras and lighting equipment. Digital storage and projection technologies that make it less expensive to create and distribute 'prints' of a film to theaters
This sounds like a positive strategy. As a check on how realistic it is, the music industry ought to be a fore-runner of this - I'm surprised that there aren't more indie bands putting up web-pages with mp3s. Also surprised that there aren't any centralized distributors for them - but then I'm pretty ignorant on that side of things.
IIRC the annual movie industry mutual backslapping fest, the Oscars, will be soon. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to wave some placards. Personally I'm a few thousand miles too far away but people in the area might like to turn up.
Sorry, I made a pretty big typo in that post.
Basically that DeCSS Copying the encrypted data off the disk gets you nothing!
The word DeCSS should not be in that sentance at all.
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Sorry, I actually meant to apply that statement to the lawsuits in CA, NY, and NJ brought against the three men whose names at the moment escape me.
enmity.
Capitalism and the socialist anarchism you seem to be suggesting are both good ideas in theory, but they both fail to take account of evolution, each in a different way.
Capitalism fails to take account of the fact that evolutionary systems only optimize for the deciding factor - money, in capitalism's case. Hence true laissez-faire will always gravitate towards the most stable state: one ruler-by-force and everyone else as slaves. Laws that get in the way of this can be made, but they need co-ordinated creation and enforcement. One that happens, you have a government. So it would be more accurate to say that capitalism optimizes for greed, and greed necessitates government
Socialist anarchy on the other hand fails to take account of a certain product of evolution - the instincts of humans. Territory, heirarchy, the desire to make war for more territory, all are instinctive. Any social system that ignores them will inevitably rip apart - or in fighting so hard to suppress them, morph into a police state.
To put it another way: what is the first thing that an anarcho-socialist commune nation would do? Coalesce around and hero worship the dominant heroic types who led the revolution. Follow the leader. Form movements and *isms. Establish enmities and alliances with other groups. Engage in feuding (whether conceptual, arguing, fisticuffs, or thermo-nukes).
No system that depends on humans behaving in a totally non-heirarchical non-invasive territory-less way will ever work. For a better idea of what would work, read Nietzsche.
(Attributed to some major Englishman before Blair, I think).
The Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists, by Ida Mett, Pietr Arshinov, Nestor Makhno, Valevsky and Linsky.
These were mostly survivors of the Bolshevik purges who realized that while they valued individualism they needed some sort of collective action in order to overcome their enemies. Similar conclusion were reached by the Friends of Durutti in the wake of the Stalinist and Socialist betrayals in Spain.
I'm guessing you may be familiar with all that already, but if you're not you might find them interesting.
If you read the the text of the judge's orders sealing the records & shutting down the web pages with the he was very carefull to only shut down the source code. He explicitly allowed the discussion about the topic as well as links to other pages. Rather than treat this code as some holy relic lets build a full understanding of how the logic of this system works. That is one genie that can not be put back in the bottle. The open source community is strongest at doing engineering out in the open lets pour the spotlight of the open souce community on how this puppy works. At one time it was said that only great corperations could write a *nix. Open source has changed all that. Once the whole world knows how this system works there can be no trade secret. We have the technological power to change the world lets use it! So lets get those copies of Schneir out and get cracking.
...has condemned the action as a violation both of the Human Rights Accords of the United Nations and the First Amendment of the US
Constitution. Almost ironically, Jon's reverse-engineering rights are specifically protected by the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which itself is probably unconstitutional).
While I agree with the article on most points, I wasn't aware that the First Amendment could be enforced in countries not part of the US. Same goes for the DMCA.
A public boycott, if intended to cause action, is a publicity stunt. Sometimes publicity stunts work well.
A personal boycott is more of an ethical action.
"Selling some crappy Bruce Willis film for US$35 in the US, $55 in Germany and $15 in India is what they're doing, and sooner or later, the MPA is going to find their names after the "v." in some lawsuit. But not one started by the US government. "
Indeed.
And it should be in Europe, where we get the biggest rip off.
I hope somebody in Norway is reading this!
Javier
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
I don't see how the two actions are mutally exclusive. I think we can put economic pressure on the movie studios (and thus the DVD CCA) via boycotting their products and at the same time we can work to lower the barriers to entry in to the movie business.
A multipronged attack, when executed properly, generally increases the chance for victory.
--
Gellor
Sorry folks, but more regulation is not the answer!
Nothing exists exept atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
blah blah blah....
Read the damn post. Chris Elam, the Fool support person admitted himself in his reply to the complaint that they had deliberately configured their server to send this stylesheet to netscape browsers, and to netscape browsers only
Not only do I not find this idea stupid, you'll find I suggested this yesterday in the *BEHOLD thread.
I made the further addition that you then demonstrated that your bit for bit copy *retained* the CSS encodeing by showing that it wouldn't be played in a non CSS enabled machine.
You could also demonstrate that anyone with a *legally* obtained decrypter could capture the bit by bit data stream to make a decrypted copy and so anyone with *legal* software has the power to pirate as well, thus showing that all the DVD CCA really has the power to do is force people into paying them the nominal fee for the ability to pirate.
This demonstrates that DeCSS dosn't in *any* way make pirating easier, it just makes it about 50 bucks cheaper.
Something else I pointed out yesterday, if you already HAVE a *legal* decrypter, perhaps a peice of software that came with your DVD drive, you have every license neccessary to view DVD by any legal definition and should be able to freely use DeCSS.
I have no trouble reading Motley Fool. I have Verdana installed, though. Get xfstt; it makes web browsing more pleasant.
It's MUCH easier to overwhelm a small, splintered group, than to confront a large, united group. This is, in fact, a lot of how the DVD group is trying to destroy US! By attacking piecemeal, it's hoping to be able to overcome an opponent that is simply too great for it, when united.
There is only one way to defeat this - splinter them, first. Focus, as you say, on MGM, or one of the others. Seperate it out. Castigate it. Throw on all the mud you can. Get the spotlight on it. All the negative press that can be mustered. Chances are, it'll fold - the risk to it's shareholders and it's profits is too great.
With one company under interrogation, the other companies are likely to distance themselves. They aren't equipt to handle united struggles against adversity. They're RIVALS, for the most part. It's not in their blood to try and rescue a cornered comrade.
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)
MP3 files are ~3-5 MB in size. DVD's are 3-5+ GB. That's three orders of magnitude. Even if Moore's Law applied to communications bandwidth (and I do not believe that it does) it would take 10 doublings of the current most common network connectivity (56k modem) to bring DVD's into the same realm of tradeibility that MP3 currently enjoys. Applying Moore's Law that would imply that in 15 years we will all of the equivalent of a dedicated OC3 coming into our homes.
A more realistic figure for doubling of widely available consumer bandwidth would seem to be 5 years. To achieve the 10 doublings that we're talking about would require 50 years. If DVD isn't entirely obsolete by then, I will be really surprised.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
Now lets say they invent a new media format and put a "Person Lock(tm)" on it.
This would allow them to charge each individual a different price.
They could use the excuse that if you buy classical music, they can use the money to "support" (I mean rip off) classical musicians instead of this noisy rock bands, or they could give "student discounts" so if you are a student, you can still buy media.
well that is what they are doing at a different scale!
Javier
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
BZZT! Wrong! RAH was writing about how a society of people who are held responsible for their actions from birth would be a good thing! While I can see how Mr. Landley might get the impression he has if he had only seen the movie, if he had indeed read the book, he would have no such misconceptions.
OK, go ahead and moderate me down as offtopic...
www.eFax.com are spammers
"It's like prohibition in the 1920s. That's not going to work. It's not even a holding action, it's just... dumb."
This is not strictly true. You see there is a method to the madness and I can explain. Let's forget DVD copying ( you are right ). This is about players. So what we have here is prosecution by proxy.
I.e. The real defendants are not in the courtroom and only one of the real plaintiffs is there too. What these people want is for a court somewhere ( any court, anywhere ) to say that DeCSS is an illegal piece of code and should not be allowed to exist.
What do they get from such a ruling ? They have a president that can then be used to bludgeon Diamond or RedHat into not writing, building or distributing players that use the new code. That's why the central people in the case are the people most likely to have a ruling entered against them.
People like www.2600.com which after crying "free Kevin" for 5 years is roundly hated by every judge on the bench, or that little boy who after you bash his computer and harass both him and his dad for a whole day ( 7 hours straight ) you tell the mother that "look, if he signs this thing to the effect that DeCSS was illegally created we will leave you all alone ).
Effectively what they are trying to do is Retroactively create a patent for DVD encryption. "It's out there. You can look at it but you can't use it". A court might just buy that crap too.
So yep, It's the MPAA in court but Sony and Panasonic who are the real plaintiffs. It's a bunch of websites and a few little boys on trial but they really care about corporate defendants who are nowhere near the courtroom. Frankly I would tell LI to bankroll the defense and file a counter-suite of some kind.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Sounds similar to www.epinions.com. Not a bad idea overall.
This is true--property is a part of this life. When people say things like, "property is theft," they represent themselves as being unaware of the realities of life. Others start to think the person who said it is a utopian;this is what makes the flashing light go off.
In all the arguing over the Jan 21 ruling in New York, no one has seemed to notice a point that Kaplan made. It's a damned important point, and if it holds it could mean big things to the open source community.
Read the transcript and look at page 77, lines 7 to 25.
This case is not about css-auth, but about DeCSS, a Windows binary executable. Kaplan makes the firm distinction between "programmer's comments" and "machine instructions". The distinction he makes is that one is directly executable - and therefore is closer to a "device" than an intellectual expression - and the other is not. His point is that a set of machine instructions has limited expressiveness, as it is primarily meant to be interpreted by a machine and not a human being. It is therefore not, in his opinion, necessarily protected as free speech.
The important distinction here is that source code is not directly executable by a machine. It must be compiled; until then it is no different from a written mathematical formula. Source code is not directly discussed in this hearing transcript - the debate is between executable code and "programmer's comments". But even if Kaplan's reading of the DMCA holds, and direct executability is the critical factor, then source-only distribution is protected as free speech and the rest is paperwork.
Just something to think about.
Defendent #46
www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Po rt/3224
Just to address a small aspect of the whole argument.... It's been pointed out that it's simple to copy the encrypted data from a DVD, but since the region of the disk where the CSS keys are stored is pre-zeroed on blank DVD's, the resulting copy can't be played in a conventional DVD player. Well, what if someone hacks the device driver of a DVD drive in a PC so that attempted reads of the key data are intercepted, and valid key data is returned? And how difficult would it be to develop a mod-chip for a hardware DVD player? (Yeah, too many models) Or what if some evil manufacturer starts selling blank DVD's with key data pre-burned?
Not that any of these things help the DeCSS case. They just illustrate how unworkable copy protection really is....
if you read the the text of the judge's orders sealing the records & shutting down the web pages with the he was very carefull to only shut down the source code.
The California case is moot. It's a trade secret case that doesn't have impact outside of California. It's the federal DMCA case we really need to be watching; that's the scary one.
What's extremely interesting is that Judge Kaplan in New York is applying the DMCA only against executable code; he's making the distinction between machine-readable executable code and "non-executable programmer's comments", which can be argued to be a fair description of source code. He's essentially saying that machine-readable code is not covered as free speech and that no one is asking to crack down on "comments".
The line he seems to be drawing (page 77-78 of transcript ) is at direct executability. If that holds, it's even another ace for open source - source code will be considered free speech (i.e., not a "device") under the DMCA.
Wouldn't it be ironic if it turns out that the most-hated DMCA actually becomes the best friend the free software community ever had?
Defendent #46
www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Po rt/3224
the well written motley fool article
will probably be the first wall street,
and the stockholders of the big media
companies will ever hear of this. This is
a very good thing. a few years ago these
guys were ignored by TPTB, but they are read
by financial people now. they get quoted
in financial circles the way slashdot gets
quoted (and is unoformly read by) the tech
journalists.
Long range this may be the turning point between
where the Great Unwashed thinks cracking css
is crimal and where they think it's obvious that
MPAA is in the wrong.
I, for one, was very glad to see this.
garyr
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
FASCISM
Boycott Matsushita (Panasonic). They own and license CSS through the DVD CCA.
For example, during the days of the anti-apartheid movement, when people were calling for divestiture it was common for the libertarian-types to point out that the economics of this was dubious: if you talk HP into selling an electronics plant in South Africa, the plant is still there, only now it's locally owned (and possibly with less enlightened management than it had previously). So why should anyone in South Africa care if every US firm "divested" and sold off all of their plants at a bargain rate?
I think what this hyper-rational viewpoint missed is that the whole divestiture controversy was a tremendous publicity generating event, and it got to the point where no one from South Africa could travel anywhere without being treated like a pariah.
Buzz is the goal. You don't need to worry that much about details like "do we boycott the whole MPAA?"; "do we go after subsidiaries too?"; "do we ban DVD players", etc. None of these details matters that much... it doesn't even necessarily matter how many people support the boycott (though if you can get it up to even 1%, I guarantee they'll cave immediately, and start looking for someone to fire).
You just want to get it to the point that whenever a Disney exec plays golf he gets sick of hearing people ask if he's worried about those silly boycott.
The question is, is a boycott really to "do anything" in the first place.
I've never actively participated in an orginized boycott, but I still refuse to business with many people and orginizations. Some of those people and orginizations do in fact *have* active boycotts ongoing against them as well, that is incidental.
I suppose that some people may boycott because it "makes them feel good." Myself, I boycott those that it would make me feel *bad* doing business with. It's a personal moral and ethical judgment.
I won't buy a Charles Manson painting, not because it "makes me feel good" to not buy one but because BUYING one would give me the creeps!
Do you know what Gandhi said was the next best thing to nonviolence? Vigorous self defense to the utmost of one's ability!
Kind of contradictory to what most people think of Gandhi, eh? How does this work? Gandhi believed that nonviolence was a personal point of view, that it was simply right to be nonviolent. If you didn't feel this way then by all means, protect yourself. Not to do so would meerly make you a hypocrite.
The point of nonviolence, and of boycotting, shouldn't be to "do anything" but rather to *be somthing!*
In the word of Henry David Thoreau, " Any man more right than his neighbors already constitutes a majority of one."
We've been screaming this until we're blue in the face, but the media hasn't been listening too much. I consider The Motley Fool to be a lot more mainstream (read: folks who wear suits) than /., so this could mean that our message is finally getting out. It's also good to see they're looking at respectable sources from our sector (Eric Raymond instead of the flaming ACs) for a rundown of the situation. I have a bunch of friends who aren't exactly /. types, and it took a lot of explaining to convince them that DeCSS was legal. I think they'd give it more weight coming from Dan Rather, so it would be good if the message can keep expanding into the rest of the population. The DVDCCA is out to cover their asses, but if they realize that they'll piss off millions of customers by furthering these ridiculous lawsuits, they might back down, saving us all a lot of trouble, and legal bills.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Here's the deal:
The CCA got the major studios to sign on to DVD because it convinced them that DVD was safe from piracy. The studios, of course, loved that because they'd never had that protection with VHS cassettes (they didn't have to worry much about piracy via laserdisc, either, but that's a very small market). NOW, somebody develops a piece of software that lets users POTENTIALLY bypass their copy protection. Knowing the battle that the RIAA (a completely different issue that also deserves some social action) is fighting over a similar problem, the CCA rushed to try to "put the genie back into the bottle" as quickly as possible.
SO...(at least the way I see it) the real enemy here is the CCA. Now, what's the best way to let them know we despise their actions?
Choice A: boycott DVDs. No - this makes the motion picture studios think that DVD was a bad investment and leaves a bad taste in their mouths for the next awesome format that comes along.
Chioce B: boycott the motion picture studios. OK, I know this sounds extreme, but here's my thinking. We can't seem to put pressure on the CCA. We've been trying - it doesn't work. Their heads are jammed way too far up a particular orifice for them to be able to hear us. However, I'll bet they'd listen if the studios got on their backs - and I bet they'd do that if we stopped watching their movies. :) Everyone knows that studios make their money best at the theatre. Well, I'm not setting foot inside one until this problem starts being solved. Only the hand that feeds them can control the CCA.
What do people think? I enjoy movies. I don't want to stop watching them. But I will, if people think this will work.
(alecs@vt.edu - I couldn't remember my password, so that's why I'm posting as anonymous coward)
After reading the articles, I agree that the MPAA has gone too far in their tactics of trying to stop the use of DeCSS. Boycotting these movie studios so that they won't have the funding to go after anyone else is a good idea. However there is a major problem. The majority of /.s may end up boycotting businesses that use stupid lawsuits to try and stop the flow of free information, but how we able to to convince Joe Blow from AOL on the why's of our boycott.
To many peole I've met, DeCSS and mp3's mean more than just a way to watch DVD's on Linux or listen to an entire cd collection without lugging around hundreds of cds. The use of DeCSS or mp3s mean the ability to simply grab what they want without paying for it, and the last time I checked stealing meant that you were getting something you wanted without paying for it. Before everyone comes after me for that last sentence, I will admit there are people who use DeCSS and mp3 for legitmate reasons.
However the bad outweigh the good in this matter and that means Joe Blow will end up talking to more people that would rather grab an entire cd in mp3 rather than pay for it. Yes it is alarming that the MPAA has become so powerful so quickly but without help from the average person we are doomed to simply being a drop of good sense in a sea of stupidity.
But there'd be no question they'd get their asses handed to them in a subsequent legal proceeding. One of the contractual agreements they enter into to get access to CSS decoding and other technologies is that they'll never make a program like this (and region codes are more and more being enforced as a condition as well, imho the real reason for the DeCSS suits even more so than so-called 'piracy' or any profits to be had for player licensing.
You are absolutely correct that the 1201(f) point was very poorly argued by the defense. I just finished reading most of the injunction transcript, and the relevant portions of the DMCA. And, a simplistic reading pretty much shows that legally DeCSS is screwed, at least given the arguments that the EFF Lawyers are using. The reverse engineering clauses do not apply directly to decoding DVD because the language does specifically state that reverese engineering is solely allowed for the interoperatbility of computer programs of which the content of a DVD is arguably not.
Luckily as you stated 1201(f), and specifically 1201(f)(4) is an out. There interoperability is defined as the ability of computer programs to exchange information. A DVD must therefore be described by the EFF lawyers as the medium by which the program that the DVD manufacturer uses to place data on the disk exchanges information (a movie) with other programs i.e. a player. Therefore, it is perfectly legal to reverse engineer the Xing player in order to independently create a program that exchanges information via the DVD medium with the program that places information on the DVD.
The other point that is completely missed is the word 'effectively'in 1201(a). CSS does not effectively control access to copyrighted work. Exact bit by bit copies of a DVD can be made, and the decrypted video stream can also be recorded, therefore CSS does not EFFECTIVELY control acces to copyrighted material. and therefore does not fall under 1201(a). Note: none of these other options involve circumventing CSS.
Dastardly
P.S. And, yes I admit this is backseat lawyering, so feel free to tear this apart, but at least read the injunction transcript and DMCA 1201 section first.
Don't forget "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman, same time as Starship Troopers but more anti war.
I haven't seen Catch-22 the move but the book rates as one of the best I have ever read.
That's about it. Remember to act like reasonable adults, and be ready to give reasons to anyone who asks you "Why are you boycotting?" We've got the moral high ground here; let's act like it. It's like Linux advocacy: if you maintain your cool and act reasonable, many more people will listen to you than if you shout and scream.
Briefing's over, ladies and gentlemen. You know what to do. Now get out there and execute Plan Boycott! They'll never know what hit 'em!
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
Let me repeat all this: The deCSS program is neither designed nor necessary for copying DVD movies, which isn't economically feasible anyway and not technically possible with the partially prewritten blank disks being sold today. In any case, a tool to copy DVDs would be legal for personal use.
If the matter can be summarized to this two sentence paragraph, why in the world is this even an issue??
I have to read The Motley Fool more often, and so should lawyers, judges and execs.. Poor Jon Johannsen.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I submitted this message to the Fool.com webmaster yesterday.
[ Forwarded message displayed below ] -------------------------
Subject: Verdana
Friends,
That Verdana font that you are using it *really* tough to read on an X-Window machine. You will have a tough time getting anybody that uses Linux as a desktop to go to your site.
Is this something that you would consider changing?
Vanguard
[ End of Forwarded Message 1 ]
And I got this response.
Thanks in advance,
Vanguard,
My name is Chris and I handle Technical Customer Service issues here at the Motley Fool.
We serve a different style sheet for every browser, in order to optimize the content for that browser. However, we do not currently have any specifically made for Linux browsers yet. The thing that will facilitate this is an increase in the number of requests for this new style sheet. I will pass along your request and add it to those they already have.
I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
Chris Elam : )
The Motley Fool
Quality Assurance Team
http://www.fool.com
techhelp@fool.com
"Fools learn nothing from wise men, but wise men learn a lot from Fools."
If you think it's worth it, send them an email asking them to create a stylesheet that's easier to read on a Linux machine.
There's an old joke often told about politicians or lawyers. The punchline is that you know they are lying to you when their lips are moving. Well the MPAA is trying to use governments and lawyers to protect an encryption scheme that they say prevents copying of copyrighted movies. It is painfully clear that they are lying. And since that point has been made in court against them, they know it is a lie. It hasn't slowed down their persecution of everyone involved in deCSS.
Let me put bluntly what they are afraid of. This encryption scheme allows them to restrict two things. First, they can restrict who can manufacture a DVD player and under what terms they can sell it. They have the power to do it. If the evidence that they have done it can be found, it is a clear case of price fixing. I won't say that they have done it because I don't know. They have the ability, and the open source community has made sure that they, and the courts know that.
Second, they can control the conditions under which you can play the movies you bought. That was why DivX died. When I have bought the player and legally own the media and the software, as far as I am concerned, any restrictions on my right to play that movie that were not made clear before I purchased it are illegal. Nowhere on my DVD player or movie did it say that I was only allowed to play movies with specific software under a specific OS. If their copy protection prevents my right to use the product I bought, they have violated the implied warrantee of merchantability that many jurisdictions recognize.
First of all, it is NOT A CONTRACT, nor can it be. It is an End User Licence AGREMENT.
A contract requires "consideration" prior to entering and almost always involves legal documentation of the event. EULA's are simply not contracts.
It is very unclear and untested law whether an agreement such as a shrink wrap licence has any significance. For example, you and I could agree to go to lunch. I am free to change my mind and not show up. Too bad for you.
is it perhaps time to take a more firm stance against the mpaa in the form of denial of service attacks ?
active versus passive resistance
is it reasonable to use force to oppose an injustice which is greater than the attack? unjustified shutting down of websites through denial of service is surely unethical. however this is not the case, making an active protest in response to a greater crime is surely justified. it follows that since there is a real concern, we should protest in the most effective ways possible. and that passive resistance might be shunning responsibility. this particular situation, in which a doubtfully criminal activity was stomped by the mpaa's abuse of power, demands a swift and brutal punishment in return.
ethical questions.
you own the internet. neither the big corporations nor government should have iron fist control over the internet. it is first and foremost community run and owned. since there is no firm authority over the internet power lies in the hands of its users, should they chose to wield it. the companies connecting to the internet should be forced to obey the common reasonable unwritten rules which place privacy and rights of the individual at the uppermost tier. since they are connecting to our network and not obeying our rules they must be forced into compliance with the community. otherwise everything worthwhile about the net will go to the dogs. by this i mean the free exchange of ideas between mature adults, without interference or censorship. we cannot allow our network to be overrun. if ignorance prevails, eventually it will be.
everyone of us should question our own ethics and the laws of our soceity. one of the most important human characteristics is our reasoning ability. every individual should decide what he thinks is right based on careful consideration and discussion with others. we should not blindly follow the laws of our particular soceity if they are bad laws - laws which enable individual freedoms to be ridiculously restricted by government or corporation. we shouldnt be afraid to fight for what we think is right, as long as we have carefully considered the situation and arrived at a reasonable conclusion.
think of a dos attack analogous to a street protest. with enough participation, in perfectly legal ways, traffic can be stopped, or access to certain places hindered. the action often inconveniences others but this cost must be outlayed in order for the effect to increase. imagine the message sent by shutting down mpaa websites for a day and continuing to do so until lawsuits against DeCSS are dropped entirely.
we are responsible if the community doesnt act to protect what it values.
getting caught.
the adage safety in numbers holds true for launching a denial of service attack. an enormous amount of traffic to a site would be generated from large numbers of individual untargetable users all over the internet. furthermore, it is impossible to counter a large diversified attack. unlike a street protest, it will be much harder for individual protesters to be nabbed and made examples of. in the unlikely case a single user is targetted for prosecution the amount of traffic they generated couldnt be construed as damaging to the site. united we stand...separate we do little.
dispelling the myths.
there is no big brother in government or in industry. after all, these organisations are staffed and run by individuals. there is no evil sentient being with an hidden agenda for the world. what happens however is that the majority of people blindly support organisations which may undermine more valuable rights. the organisations continue to exist because of their popular support. think of the average consumer. they are a complete product of their environment. the world arrived in the situation where advertising and money rule supreme. how this occured is fairly incidental, suffice to say that it has occured. we now grow up in soceity where it is expected of us to spend as much money as possible and to make as much money as possible irrespective of the cost to the environment, other people and even ourselves. the world isnt a bad place, but if enough people stop trying to make improvements it will rapidly become one. we must reverse the downward spiral before the situation becomes unbearable.
the situation must not be oversimplified. it is naive to think there is a distinct evil foe, and even worse to think that somewhere there are some righteous protectors of justice which will step in when things get too terrible. the onus is on us to do what we can. in this case, there are particular targets because it is the corporations who are clearly bringing forth legal action. it appears that the extreme police proceedings are a result of pressure from the mpaa also.
I agree with you!!! We should pick the two poorest/weakest and intimdate them!!! When the back away, we attack the next weakest!
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
I really think it makes no difference in the legal status of deCSS, and especially of css-auth and LiViD.
However, the last thing we need is to look like we're covering things up, and being the 'bad guy'. We already have enough credibility problems in a dispute with major media corporations without making demonstrably false statements that can be used to make us look like liars. Not to mention if people *know* about this and still repeat the flawed knowledge it's immoral.
I really think the MPAA and its various tentacles are engaging in enough immoral behavior to go around, don't you? No need for any of us to join in.
Ah, but a few paragraphs down, DCMA also says, "Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, _including_fair_use_, under this title." and I assume this means I can still make my own copies of material on DVD for my own use.
Yes, there's a contradiction, but it's not the one you think.
The DMCA will make it illegal to actively break the copy protection on something even when you have a right to copy it under copyright law. That language about not affecting defenses to copyright infringement is so much twaddle, thrown in to make you think you are not losing anything of value (like, say, your freedom).
Why is that? Because when you actively break the copy protection on some prerecorded item which should not have been copy protected in the first place, to make a Fair Use copy, you will not be guilty of civil or criminal copyright infringement, but you will be guilty of the new crime of breaking the copy protection! (The movie industry was especially keen on this. One of their spokesmen made an announcement to the effect that an alternate bill was unacceptable because it only outlawed breaking copy protection in connection with copyright infringement.)
Catch-22! (Can we still say that freely, or has MiniTruth banned ... no - not the rats! NOT THE RATS!)
Nothing exists exept atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
blah blah blah....
Another day
Same MPAA DVD story rehash.
BLAH BLAH BLAH
what's new.....NOTHING
'm surprised that there aren't more indie bands putting up web-pages with mp3s. Also surprised that there aren't any centralized distributors for them - but then I'm pretty ignorant on that side of things.
mp3.com is an example of a centralized distributor of MP3s from indie bands. I doubt very much that it's the best that can be done, but it's a start. I know that I HAVE bought a CD from one of the bands (who I had never heard of before) as a result of a download from MP3.com.
On the movie front, it's starting to happen, but has a ways to go. This could be an excellent opportunity for film students to get wide distribution. Computer generated effects are becoming more commonplace and are getting cheaper. When done in Hollywood, they're mostly expensive because of the artist's time and effort. Easier to use and more automated modeling software will help. A sort of GPL model library wouldn't be a bad idea either, it's a lot easier to make customize an existing model than it is to create a new one from nothing. Expanding use of DSL and cable internet will help the independants immensely.
"Our DVD profits have been decreasing ever since we started this lawsuit. Obviously, people aren't buying DVDs because they're copying them with DeCSS and distributing them illegally over the 'internet'. This 'internet' is a threat to our business and must be shut down immediately."
In any case, a morality tale about the proper role of the military in society (for or against) was turned into "Melrose Space".
Rob
>spend the money, to use it.
As in investing it in stock and running the day to day activities of a corporation? That's how most rich people ARE rich. (It's not cash. Michael Dell doesn't have billions of dollars of cash lying around. He may not even have very many millions. He has a whole lot of Dell stock. To spend it, he has to sell chunks of his company to other people. If he lost too much of it, then he wouldn't be in control of it anymore, he wouldn't be running it.)
I write an article about how what the DVD idiots are doing is profoundly unenforceable, and one of the responses I get is that we should pass a law requiring all rich people to move to another country if they want to stay rich.
Why?
>No one is suggesting that once the person reaches
>25 million they must STOP.
Case in point: Suppose I want to build my own colony on mars. I dedicate my entire life to this from age 18. I start my own company, etc etc.
A space shuttle costs (pulling a figure out of a hat) 100 million dollars. The colony itself would take maybe 5 billion. So I can't ever have enough money to even START to fund this.
Imagine if Ford has hit $25 million and quit before he ever came out with the Model T. If you can never go any higher than where you are now (enforced by law), there's no reason to try.
This system has been tried before in Russia, you know. It didn't work there either. Telling the cream-of-the-crop corporate types they can't accumulate money anymore is like telling the cream-of-the-crop programmers (Linus, Alan, etc) that they've submitted too many code patches and they should give somebody else a chance to get their name into the kernel list.
Rob
At the risk of the bandwidth of my box, here's my true type font tarball. It contains the MS readme.txt and EULA.txt as per their licence agreement. I've lower-cased all the names of fonts. It's free to distribute, AFAIK:
:-)
:)
True Type Fonts
If you're going to download it, and you run a website or FTP site, please mirror it and help others get good looking usage from their browsers under Linux
Note: you have to change Netscape 4.x's prefs in Appearance -> Fonts so that Variable font is Times New Roman [ttf] and Fixed width is Courier New [ttf].
M13 seems to not need any modification out of the box
xfstt works by listening on a Unix domain socket (or TCP socket), just add it to your font path as per the instructions in the tarball from ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux/slackw are-7.0/contrib (also get the xfstt.txt file).
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
where you ask yourself: What would Brian Boitano do?
Err besides screw a man, I mean!!!
Well said, but someone's gotta put up something to link to, so:
here's My Mirror:
http://www.xmission.com/~devildog/index.php3
>regulations would remain. That is incorrect.
>I say remove the entire current government, it
>performs mostly useless functions anyways.
That's hilarious. Really. When Thomas Jefferson said that a revolution every few years was a good thing, I'm sure he had you personally in mind.
Go look up the phrase "armchair quarterbacking". Then go watch the movie 1776, and the Ken Burns documentary series on the Civil War.
In the mean time, I'm not entirely sure what chemicals you've been sniffing, but please don't share them with anyone else.
Rob
The linux journal article claims CSS was reverse engineered by watching hardware decrypt a DVD.
Everyone else thinks it was Xing's software DVD player that was reverse engineered; in fact, this is part of a crucial point in the prosecution's case against DeCSS distributors because of Xing's EULA that specifically forbids reverse engineering.
Which is it?
The amount of discussion that is going on about this topic that is just plain nonfactually based is appalling.
Your are right of course. Jon didn't crack the code. If he were charged with cracking the code and cracking the code in Norway is illegal he could be in trouble.
There is a great lack of basic logic in these threads as well, and lack of attention to detail.
There is no doubt at all that Jon did *distribute* the code! If he is charged with distribution and distribution is illegal he could be in trouble.
The two issues are legally completely seperate.
I posted this recently, but I'd like to post it again, because the Linux Journal article is related to my point here. I think that, no matter whether linux users choose to move that way, we will be pushed towards stronger radicalism, in our beliefs, our tactics to retain our right to free speech/code, etc.
The good thing is that, unlike most activists and radicals, we're in a *very* strong position, because the stock market, and the economy in general has bet the farm on the industry we work in...
Imagine what were to happen if, in protest of the recent attacks against the linux community, we were to coordinate a general strike?
Even more powerful is another possibility, what if great portions of the industry took large paycuts in order to work on free software?
We may not always be at the forefront of our economy, IT jobs may move wholesale to India where wages are much lower. If you don't think it'll happen, I'm sure I could introduce you to a GM worker in Flint, MI who thought the same thing about his job in the 70's. But for the time being, we are a very strong force in the economy, and because of that we have a responsibility to protect freedom.
In any case, here's my post from a while ago. Think about it, and remember that whether you consider yourself a right-Libertarian, a liberal, a conservative, or an Individualist Anarcho-Syndicalist, you and your peers (the linux community) will have your freedoms attacked, and it will radicalize you. Think about it...
--
Which means you should prepare to face a barrage of court orders, attacks on individual freedom, attempts to bottleneck the Internet, and arrests of prominent Open Source gurus.
It's quite possible. I'm not saying it's definite, but the possibility exists. Keep in mind that Food Not Bombs gives away free vegetarian food to anybody who's hungry. Their reason? Because "food grows on trees."
Despite this wonderful example of altruism, they've had numerous encounters with the police, and are a constant target of brutality and harrassment. Strange, no?
Maybe not. Food Not Bombs are very progressive and radical (as opposed to being liberal, and just whining about poverty), and have decided to take matters into their own hands. Becuase of this, they also use the opportunity to hand out flyers, organize protests, meet other social activists, etc. Most probably, this is what scares the government and corporations into repressing them.
Probably open source's saving grace is the fact that most of it's members are not equating the sharing of code with political ideologies. Regardless, it will be targetted by the corporations it threatens, but in the first wave of repression, you'll see very IP-oriented attacks (such as the actions by RIAA), lobbying to forbid the use of open source software in government institutions, along with future attempts to use the antiquated patent and intellectual property laws against the open source community. As this begins happening, you will start seeing open source advocates becoming increasingly more radical in order to challenge the powers that be.
More protests, more electronic civil disobedience, etc. Once people start using the freedom of open source as a point of advocacy towards a more free and equitable society is when you will see the real repression by the elites. Not because giving away code (or food) is inherently dangerous to them, but because it represents a flaw in their dominance that they will go to great lengths to conceal. What is that flaw? That we don't need them!
One of the popular Linux slogans has been "Welcome to the Revolution." So welcome - and welcome to the front lines. Prepare to duck!
Make no mistake, Open Source is a revolution, but what most "Linux zealots" don't realize is that the people in control never welcome a revolution of any kind.
--
gcc -o -Wall society.cc
society.cc: Classes 'government' and 'capitalism' not found!
society.cc: Derived classes, 'greed', 'oppression',
society.cc: 'hierarchy', and 'violence' will no longer
society.cc: function.
Proceed with compilation? Y/n
Michael Chisari
(Someone check my acronyms on this, I'm not sure who's attacking the internet anymore nowadays...)
Think about it: Why didn't the DVDCCA start taking up this whole issue on the whole from the get-go? If they would have gotten the preemptive strike, the Cult of the Media and it's followers would worship it's new tomes of information like the Bible, or the Koran, or whatnot, as it always does. First to news gets the followers.
Instead, they tried to keep it under wraps, it seems. Does this tell anyone else something? I can only see it as the DVDCCA isn't serious about this. How could they be? Their war cry of "Piracy! Piracy! Piracy!" doesn't seem to be reaching outside the internet community.
But now, here comes the Motley Fool, a reasonably respectable money news source. People read this stuff from time to time. They're pointing out the idocy of this whole mess. That's the first kind of media attention I've seen this whole fiasco get at all.
Guess what? It seems like we got the preemptive strike. Now doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?
------------
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
The Fool article talked a lot about the CCA but they didn't mention the MPAA. They are filing different lawsuits. It seems like an important detail because the MPAA is made up of all the large American movie stuidos.
And the reason it won't work is something worth thinking about. It's like trying to boycott Windows, only worse. You can boycott Windows, but you'll never be able to run any Windows-based programs--and there are still quite a few programs that run only on Windows and on no other OS.
The same is true for DVDs. The MPAA includes all the major producers of movies, and DVDs are the only currently viable digital movie format. If you boycott the MPAA, you won't be able to see any movies, and if you boycott just DVDs, you won't be able to see any digital movies. It's like only-runs-on-Windows, only it's only-produced-by-MPAA-members or only-runs-on-DVD. At least on Windows there are some programs that run on other operating systems, and there is some meaning to replacing a program with a different program that does the same thing. But there's just about nothing not produced by the MPAA, and there's no replacement for a particular movie. You can't boycott a monopoly that has even less competition than Microsoft.
My second point has to do with how even friendly DeCSS articles don't quite get things right. It hasn't been *impossible* to play DVDs under Linux without DeCSS; there were free DXR2 drivers out (though nobody's ever used them; it's not the most popular card).
But the big error in this article is about the region coding. Just as it's possible to copy a DVD without using DeCSS, it's possible to break the region coding without using DeCSS. Programs to break region coding for Windows have been around for a *long* time. Also, you need to have region-free hardware in order to break the region code in software at all; newer RPC-2 drives have region coding in hardware and the region coding on them cannot be broken in software (under either operating system).
I believe that region coding is a red herring here. It's licensing costs that they're probably motivated by; if DeCSS is available for free, they will not be able to make money licensing out the specs.
And I have nightmares about someone from the EFF reading those articles and trying to claim at a trial that the MPAA is opposing DeCSS because of the region coding. A lawyer from the MPAA then demonstrates Remote Selector or another similar region-code-breaking Windows program which does not use DeCSS, and the EFF starts to look very bad in front of the judge.
And the law doesnt work the way you just described because your ignorant of the facts.
I find it funny that just because Linux users want something they think it's ok to get it by whatever means they deem necessary.
This is such an ignorant blanket comment I wont even take the effort to highlight the obious bias here.
The contents of those DVDs are the property of the studios
Correct.
they have the right to determine who uses the product
Yes, whoever purchases a legal copy of the intellectual property on the DVD. Which is almost every DVD owned on this planet.
You have no right to say I want to see these movies running under Linux
I sure do. And I do want to view these movies under linux. The MPAA has no obligation to ensure a player exists for linux users, but if a solution is legally reverse engineered, we can use it, and its perfectly legal.
They are under no moral or legal obligation to make their product available to you
Nope, but they do, because they make tons of money doing so. To users on any medium.
As far as the authors statement that they went against the US Constitution that is BS
Read the damn law, you are obviously overlooking the point of this whole mess, and have drawn your own biased conclusions.
that person does not LIVE in the US was not arrested in the US and the US Constitution and the Digital Millenium ACT have no bearing in his country
Whis makes his arrest even MORE disturbing if you understand what is happening.
Open your eyes.
(General disclaimer: IANAL)
You quoted 2 of the 3 sections of DCMA that I quoted, and the part you _didn't_ quote was the part that has relevance to JJ and the DeCSS case; reverse engineering.
Reverse engineering for the purpose of ensuring DVD player compatibility is specifically allowed. So, although you personally might be in violation of DCMA for having the unmitigated gall to actually want to play a DVD you bought, a developer of a DVD player may not be.
From this, I suspect a major part of the defense could be that JJ was a developer and therefore exempt. Whether the court will perceive open source DVD player development as a bunch of kiddie scripters swapping warez or a as a new alternative to the Cathedral is anybody's guess.
Maybe you're right that if you personally break the encryption and then play your DVD on a linux box, you could be subject to arrest.
You didn't do that, did you? You did? You BASTARD!!!
My metamoderation cancels your moderation
What about the communities that are involved here starting a class action suit against the MPAA? I mean hey, rather then always defending why not start the legal attacks ourselves?
Well, I did go an submit a letter to all these fine people (MPAA, studios, etc) using their email addresses or "submit" forms.
:)
Of course, I used my HotMail account as it's a convenient "public" bag.
Surprise surprise, I checked my email today and the SPAM level has gone about by - ooooo - at least 80-100%
What a vicious form of revenge they have, no?
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
Has anyone (not just /. folks) contacted the ACLU about this and how the MPA is trying to limit the expression of ideas?
Anyway, I suppose you could try to get the NRA, PTA, and AARP behind the cause. I just hope our senior gun carrying retired teachers just don't put up with this kind of stuff!
No, you don't have to STOP, you just go find 10 people and say, ok We need to have X amount of cash, and you all start spending money and investing in a company. Why must you have all of the money yourself?
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
JustShootMe (anonymous for obvious reasons)
That's hilarious. Really. When Thomas Jefferson said that a revolution every few years was a good thing, I'm sure he had you personally in mind.
Go look up the phrase "armchair quarterbacking". Then go watch the movie 1776, and the Ken Burns documentary series on the Civil War.
In the mean time, I'm not entirely sure what chemicals you've been sniffing, but please don't share them with anyone else.
Rob
I'm sure you believe that the people in power are the most competent available and should not be questioned as they posess some sort of knowledge not available to the common people. But I have no such illusions. It doesn't take some kind of special insite to look at the government of any random country and see corruption, see misspent money, see programs that don't actually help anyone or do anything useful.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
And, a simplistic reading pretty much shows that legally DeCSS is screwed, at least given the arguments that the EFF Lawyers are using. The reverse engineering clauses do not apply directly to decoding DVD because the language does specifically state that reverese engineering is solely allowed for the interoperatbility of computer programs of which the content of a DVD is arguably not.
What are you talking about? The programs which are interoperating include at a minimum:
1) linux DVD/CD-ROM device driver
2) mpeg2player program under linux
3) linux video device driver
The DVD medium contains information in the DVD movie file format that is not displayed properly by the above programs working together without DeCSS. That is, they don't interoperate correctly. This is exactly the same thing as Star Office (among others) using MS Office's word document format.
Luckily as you stated 1201(f), and specifically 1201(f)(4) is an out. There interoperability is defined as the ability of computer programs to exchange information.
Above you say "a simplistic reading pretty much shows that legally DeCSS is screwed" here you argue (correctly) that the DCMA definition of interoperability allows DeCSS. Would you like to clarify or revise your comments above?
Personally, I'm waiting for a subscription service that lets me view 20-year-old episodes of Dr. Who (or the Dilbert episode I missed last week) through the Internet for maybe 25 cents per half hour, or even better, for a flat monthly fee. That would eliminate piracy by making it no longer worth the effort. Access to a huge library of video is a service I'd certainly be willing to pay for, and keeping video on my hard drive or passing it along to friends would then be a complete waste of my time even if it was as easy as breathing.
I don't think this is exactly true. Some pirates (although probably not many) actually *do* pirate for philosophical reasons. For example, many people pirated Windows 98 when it came out. Why? Because they felt it was basically a patch for Windows 95, and the idea of paying $89.99 for it really pissed them off. Microsoft could have sent the product to their door and charged $0.25 for it, and still people would have pirated it because they had issue with Microsoft.
Another point is that people are cheap. Even if the TV show was $0.25 per half hour, people would still make copies for their friends and trade shows around, maximizing the return on their $0.25 investment. I mean, people steal candy bars! By the time quality video streams hit home PCs, everyone will (necessarily) have high-speed bandwidth. So passing off the TV shows to your friends would also be "as easy as breathing". Which would you rather do: breathe for free? or for $0.25?
*/offtopic* */rant*
I find it funny that just because Linux users want something they think it's ok to get it by whatever means they deem necessary. The contents of those DVDs are the property of the studios and they have the right to determine who uses the product. You have no right to say I want to see these movies running under Linux. They are under no moral or legal obligation to make their product available to you. As far as the authors statement that they went against the US Constitution that is BS. First off that person does not LIVE in the US was not arrested in the US and the US Constitution and the Digital Millenium ACT have no bearing in his country.
Ethlicly. no.
but ethics get in the way.
why dont we go ahead and start rerouting some DNS?
PimpSmurf
Stupid people do stupid things... Smart people outsmart each other... --System of a Down
The crux of the argument against the MPA suits is that they do not have the right to control playback media and platforms, especially since the legal restriction of usable operating system is tantamount to requiring payments to Microsoft or Apple for the privilege of watching the DVD one already paid for (and such a similar statement was made by Judge Kaplan in the New York case when he said that playbility on a Linux machine was not necessarily a factor because "there are alternative bases that [he] already [has] outlined" -- meaning Judge Kaplan thinks Windows boxes are good enough for all of us [http://www.2600.com/news/2000/0121-tra ns.txt]).
One comment in the Linux Journal article that I found interesting was the comment about the new, encrypted CD's. They said:
I'm not the tiniest bit convinced that the manufacturers consider this to be a problem at all. The consumer electronics industry depends on constantly shoveling new technology down our throats, which is where we got lousy ideas like quadrophonic sound, 8-track tapes, minidisks, and the advanced photo system. They positively hate things like old-fashioned LP's that remain technically adequate for decades. I am sure that they'd like nothing better than to force everyone to buy new players to play their new encryped CD's. The truly sad part is that all they have to do is A) stop putting out the most popular music in the old format and B) provide some thin shell of an argument for the technical superiority of the new system and gullible people will start buying.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I'm surprised that there aren't more indie bands putting up web-pages with mp3s. Also surprised that there aren't any centralized distributors for them - but then I'm pretty ignorant on that side of things.
Check out mp3.com.
As for bands putting up their own pages: The artists themselves are mainly good at writing and performing pieces of music. Promotion, distribution, and all that other ancillary stuff isn't usually their strong point. Really, this ancillary stuff is why record companies exist.
That the artists themselves are focused on music rather than promotion and distribution will be every bit as true in a world where we download our music as it is in one where we buy it at Wherehouse. So the coming of net-distributed music doesn't mean the end of record companies - there will still be room for companies that handle the ancillary stuff for artists. But the barrier to entry for this market will be so low (and thus, the threat of competition so much stronger) that they won't be able to hold the sort of power that they do currently.
The Motley Fool reaches a great mixture of society. Regular consumers from all walks of life have just been exposed to the deplorable behavior of the MPAA. It shouldn't take many more articles like this from a variety of media before the consumers revolt.
Thanks Fool! You continue to provide your followers a great service!
Some of these picture companies are only subsidiaries of larger companies which can easily be targeted.
Sony Picutures is SONY, maker of TVs, Computers and a new PSX2 which looks only half as cool if this is what they are going to do to Linux users. People can buy Dreamcast, if that's what it's going to take.
The Disney Company operates theme parks and clothing stores worldwide. I'm sure we can do without any of that for much longer than not going to the movies.
Don't you see, I'm sure the MPAA is about as competent on financial fallout as they are on technology and law. Hollywood really has few competitors, but the parent companies have plenty of competitors. That's where to strike.
Also, these companies have Chairmen of the Board and major stock holders. Send them a letter. Let them know that their companies proxy, MPAA, is out of control.
A well publicized list of vulnerable products and markets where the parents or various subsidiaries of the picture companies ought to get the message across. I suspect that SEC filings might hold lots of information in that regard.
I don't know where else to look, but there has to be somewhere to get info on this inbred web of companies.
To start out with, I generally have good faith in US judicial system, and from what I've read of Judge Kaplan, I think he's a decent judge with 30 years experience and an impressive base of knowledge about the subject (for example, he knew that the acronym DVD had been changed from Digital Video Disc to Digital Versatile Disc.) I think he's a fair judge to try this case before. And I disagree that he's biased -- first, it's reflected in the transcript that he has worked with the plaintiff's law firm before (page 80 line 24), which would explain his congeniality. Second, his curtness (especially with defense atty. Robin Gross) is understandable given some of the arguments the defense tried, and is best summed up on page 28 line 25:Gross, in leaving out words as she read a section which, edited, helped her case, committed, in my opinion, one of the worst sins of legal debate.I merely think the defense could have been much better were it more organized and better prepared. Unfortunately, that could not be helped, as this injunction hearing was held a mere six days after the lawsuit was filed. But don't look at that statistic as if it were solely intended to put the defense at a disadvantage; I'm sure the plaintiffs lost little sleep over leaving the defense scrambling, but the primary purpose of an injunction is to issue a 'cease and desist' sort of order to stop an activity perceived as destructive that otherwise wouldn't end until after a long, possibly drawn-out trial, by which time the plaintiffs claim the damage would have already been done.
I don't think this hearing could have gone any other way. The judge had a good, working knowledge of the DMCA, arguably a much better grasp of it than either side's lawyers. I noticed few arguments made by the defense which I agreed with, after going over the text of the DMCA again while reading the judge's interpretation.
I was incredibly impressed by Judge Kaplan's handling of the DeCSS link issue (page 85 line 1) as different enough from posting the content itself that he refused to include linking in the injunction (for now.) And I think his almost equally curt treatment of the plaintiff's lawyers during that discussion helps further reduce the notion of judicial bias.
I noticed this on 2600's lawsuit news page:Though this exchange does look pretty bad, you have to realize a few things: first, Levy's teleconferencing from California. It's not good legal practice to take a statement from a "technology expert" over the phone; I'm sure anyone who's ever called any kind of tech support agrees with me on that. Second, this is a hearing, not a trial -- there are no witnesses. It's nothing more than a discussion between both parties' lawyers and the judge. It's really not as bad as it seems.
In fact, most of this hearing wasn't as bad as it seems. The court granted an injunction -- so what? That just means that DeCSS may pose a threat to the DVD industry, and Judge Kaplan is giving them the benefit of the doubt, since he decided the injunction was consistent with the doctrine of prior restraint (one of the exceptions to the First Amendment that allows the courts to preclude certain types of speech) and thus does not pose a threat to the defendants' First Amendment rights. However, that can all be overturned, whether it be trial, appeal, or judicial review. Don't let the injunction get you down -- it's just something to shut the MPAA up while the defense gets to work.
enmity.
Filing pre-emptively in the other federal juridictions to test the law under the DMCA and to test the Cert Authority's parters' rights regarding claims on reverse engineering would have put the current defendants in a much more positive light, and probably would have impressed the court. Even if the courts declined to hear the test cases, the prior filings would have already been present, likely affecting much of the nature of any future case the MPAA would submit.
It would have also left the MPAA spin machine totally off balance. Rather than making themselves out to be defender's of content rights, they probably would have ended up looking fairly foolish to the average layperson. It's kinda difficult to characterize someone as a pirate when they have already taken the initiative to proactively prove the constituitionality of their rights (rather than merely defending them).
'Hail Eris, baby, hail Eris...pfffffffttt.' *cough* 'Yeah.'
This is exactly what we need- an investor commentary pointing out the plain issue:
MPAA SUED ITS OWN CUSTOMERS FOR WANTING TO BUY THEIR PRODUCTS.
Once more and more of the general public and investors realize this, the studios will be in deep trouble. I espeically like the way he compares DVD CCA to DIVX-- these companies had better watch their stock prices once they start being compared to Circuit City!!
Huh? It looks fine to me.
I apologize for the confusion. The simplistic part was basically playing devil's advocate to demonstrate the MPAA's argument. The later part basically showed a more in depth analysis to show that the simplistic reading isn't enough. The problem is that the EFF lawyers didn't tear apart the simp`listic and rather broad methodology that the EFF is using.
I believe the interoperability argument you have could be torn apart by the lawyers.
What are you talking about? The programs which are interoperating include at a minimum:
1) linux DVD/CD-ROM device driver
2) mpeg2player program under linux
3) linux video device driver
CSS descrmabling is not required for an MPEG2player to interoperate with a linux video device driver. This is easy to demonstrate by playing any MPEG of a hard disk. The DVDROM/CD-ROM device driver interoperability argument is more difficult, but I think it is still pretty easy to argue that the DVDROM/CDROM device driver can work just fine with other programs without descrambling CSS. You have to go outside your computer to the program that encodes information onto the DVD media to show that CSS is required for interoperability, defined as he exchange of information.
The EFF lawyers need to make the point that a DVD is nothing more than a media for transferring information between two programs just like the internet. And, therefore falls under 1201(f)(4). This is necessary because of the judges narrow viewpoint that the reverse engineering clause only applies to exchanging information between two programs. While it is a stupid viewpoint and should be argued against, as lawyers they need to be prepared for that line of reasoning to go against them.
Well, sorry fo the previous confusion. We basically have the same view I am just trying to find a way around what the judges interpretation of the DMCA appears to be based on the injunction transcript.
Dastardly
I agree that the first thing is trying to find out what is wrong and explaining why it is so. Unless there is a general,shared understanding of the problems then there can be no concerted democratic action to fix them.
Cheers
Crush
"Whack the mole" on a grand scale (if you're the Slashdotter who came up with this phrase, let me know so I can give you credit because this will be the technique for civil disobedience in the information age
:P
Great. The last thing we needed was to add to Signal 11's already bloated ego
In all probablility I read 1984 before your parents were old enough to piss their own diapers without someone rubbing their belly first. Your thought processes seem to be so full of their own double speak you can't formulate a coherent argument. Lot's of people have telling you this. Use it to buy a clue. I'm sorry for being rude, truely I am, but I feel forced into it by your seeming selfimpossed obtusnese.
You are absolutely right. DeCSS does nothing but copy the unencrypted files to a hd.
Question, so what? If nothing else the MF pointed out that the copying process is perfectly legal anyway. That's why the DVD CCA hasn't charged anyone with using DeCSS to make a copy. They'd get shot down in flames in any case and part of their stratagy is to obfuscate the fact that this is the case.
Of course DeCSS is a Windows program. Again, so what? I fail to see what you think this has to do with anything. The DVD CCA hasn't made any claim that legality or nonlegality of DeCSS has anything to do with the operating system it's compiled to run on. They are attacking the legality of distribution of the *source code* which is a set of instructions *and a propriatary code key* that can be used to decrypt the data on ANY operating system.
The legal issue at stake is the whether DeCSS is legal under ANY operating system. Last I checked both Windows and Linux fell under the heading of any operating system.
Yes, if you copy the files directly from the DVD to a hd you have nothing but encrypted files. Again, so what? What the hell IS your point? This is a legal act. If I post those files on the net it becomes piracy. Whether the files are encrypted or not has nothing to do with it.
Get this, under copyright law the state of the data has *nothing* to do with the legality of copying or distributing somthing. Get that, *nothing.!* If I use a commercial press to copy a DVD exactly I leaving the disc undistinguishable from the original I have done no wrong. If I break the encryption and copy it to a DVD in plain MPEG format I have done no wrong. If I paint my room with the ones and zeros that comprise the unencrypted data I have done no wrong.
If I give away the *perfectly encrypted data* I am a pirate in violation of the law.
Do you understand this point? Piracy is only TRANSFERING the data to another party. As long as I don't DISTRIBUTE I can do any damn thing I want with my legally obtained code. Hell, I could say that every one is a red dot, every 0 is a black dot and lay it out in checkers on my livingroom floor. I could then rearange those dots in any damn way I wanted. If one of those ways happened to corrospond to the unencrypted version * I have done no wrong.*
So the basic issue here isn't even really whether I CAN legally decode a DVD but whether the DVD consortium has right to make arbitrarily HARD for me to do it.
Show me any clause in any copyright law that piracy has anything to do with ease of making a copy. It dosn't, it only has to do with illegally *distributing* a copy.
By the way, of course I could copy the DVD onto another DVD. Oh no, not with a DVD-R. With a commercial presser and commercial blank DVDs I could. I can buy these. So can you. Cost is a bit prohibitive but as you yourself have vociferously pointed out *cost is a specious argument* because the cost will plumet. Yes, even for the commercial product.
Also by the way, most of here don't lack a technical understanding of what DVD is and DeCSS does. Most of us here, and the people at MF, consider your explination the "baby" version and is the explination we use to describe it the technically unsophisticated. Most of us here *have read the source code.*
Ok, I'll give you that a lot of the kiddies here are just shooting their mouths off, but then that's really just white noise, isn't it? From my perspective though you're just being a somewhat precocious kiddie with whom I little knowledge is getting your panties in a knot about things you yourself don't really grasp.
I'm sorry, that's not a very complimentary thing to say, although looked at in the right way I've said I consider you above your peers.
...with the instruments of your rhetoric. How many more must die until we live in what you'd call Utopia?
There is more to life than DVDs.
Here an unfortunately small list of links to independent films. Please email me at perez_enrique@yahoo.com if you know of any other web sites with independent films or legally available video downloads.
ifilm--Streaming Independent Film
The New Venue
The Sync Online Film Festival
Yet another lame-ass boycott demand. Why do these people fail to realize that as long as the nerd population is 1% of the total population, no social action (short of violence) we can undertake will have any effect at all on the studios' bottom line?
Much better to work to lower the barriers to entry in the motion picture business, as this poster suggests. Technology is already starting to empower musicians to break free of the record companies.... it's time to do the same for film.
Wonder if these guys have ever heard of plain old HTML like the rest of the universe.
Down with style sheets!
________________________________
Of course it's easy to see how capitalism gets its bad name, given the retarded poster children that get all the press
It seems to me that capitalism gets all the good press round here and that Socialism is attacked and vilified at every turn - look at the original article, it lumps socialism with fascism, what sort of goonery is that?
A complaint that capitalism is not getting a fair crack of the whip in the media is untrue - I'm sick of hearing free-market rhetoric that challenges to shake off the reigns of governmental control (my government!) and to let business blindly run the world with it's invisible hand. No thanks! The results of that laissez-faire mentality were exactly what stimulated Engels (a capitalist himself) to investigate how a better society could be run.
I really sympathize and empathize with the Libertarian emphasis on freedom and the dignity and sovereignty of the individual but I don't believe that these can be achieved through business. They can only be acheived through ensuring that monopoly and aggregation of resources unto indviduals is prevented by the common, agreed will of the people.
PROPERTY IS THEFT!
as Proudhon declared and I heartily agree with him. A world which denies that we all have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a world that endorses the mad policies of the free-market that allow the accumulation and sequestration of capital unto individuals by cheating and exploiting their fellow humans.
To return to the topic of this article, I fully support the call to take action against the motion picture companies. Is this best achieved through a boycott?
I think as the writer himself points out that it is impossible to boycott effectively. It is far more effective to purchase ethical alternatives - rather than buy nasty Starbucks coffee, purchase from Bridgehead by mail, bring your own coffee to work in a flask etc. W.r.t. the movies...hmm..pretty centralized industry there - are we strong enough to go to no movies? Or are there independent alternatives that we can support instead.?
The future, where your only freedom is the freedom to make money
Well, isn't that what the free-market is? No? Then you must be talking about introducing some sort of regulations - sounds like government to me.
Do you work for the MPA[A]? :)
enmity.
What bothers me about the DeCSS mess isn't that the geeks are mobilizing...it's that the geeks aren't learning. Let me clarify that statement...
The geeks have been cracked down on repeatedly the last 20 years with example cases. In just about every case, the govt and plaintiff were able to make their point (you are bad, you must be punished, we've taken your toys and your freedom; see how we punish). Whether the geek was exhonerated in the end didn't make nearly as much impact on the non-geeks as the crackdown did.
So the geeks now are better at mobilizing when the crackdown comes. So what! The point has already been made. It is already sticking in the backs of the non-geeks heads- geeks now have a two front battle of proving they aren't pirates to the court, and fixing their already dubious reputations with their own communities.
What the geeks need to start doing is heading off the problems when they see the problem at the outset - think of it as a good security policy for your community network (rather than your LAN/WAN). You see a nibble, you do a check, and if you find a hole, you plug it in as many places as possible.
The geeks, after the first filing, should have pre-emptively filed in EVERY federal jurisdiction. This would have headed off most of the mess going on now, and forced the MPAA off balance (disrupting their entired choreagraphed passion play to the media). What really gets me is this- nobody suspected that the first LAME attempt at a suit filed in California was just to test the waters, and to come up with more defendants for a case that HAD to be in the MPAA's works prior to the Copy Authoity's original filing.
So while everybody here is congratulating themselves on what the suits might think about how righteous we geeks may be, what is anyone doing to ensure we don't get a repeat? Volunteering to rebuild your local Congressperson's network/website to get their ear on tech issues? Finding new resources to work with on future problems that WILL come up? Even following current bills and measures being deliberated at the local level?
We may be laughing at how stupid the lawyers may look because they are technologically inept in regards to these proceedings, but how do you think the geeks look for leaving themselves open to this kind of stupid-ass suit in the first place? Do something, but don't just sit there.
'Hail Eris, baby, hail Eris...pfffffffttt.' *cough* 'Yeah.'
You're saying "No one is going to think what these guys did was wrong, really." That isn't true. I've spent a couple of hours over on alt.video.dvd trying to convince people that DeCSS is more than just an electronic lockpick.
With the MPAA and CCA throwing around terms like "piracy," "copyright violation," and "theft," it's pretty clear that the geeks have lost control of the relevant memes. In assuming that the rest of the world sees through their rhetoric, you couldn't be more wrong.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Hmm, I think the big film producers want us to buy M$ win and use some crappy "...this software comes with no guarantee, neither expressed or implied... if it suck blame yourself, not us, for having wasted your money..." or else buy their ultra HI-TECH (barf!) decoder-player and make money out of every step of a film's life cycle... They are rightly scared about this deCSS affair as it shows pretty clearly that they are just a bunch of sloppy pickpockets: they can't make decent films (the good ones they buy from independent outsiders, all the rest is just as good as a cheap porno) and they can't make decent software tools to help us consume their produce (God, how I HATE to use these terms...) All they can do is mob away anyone who crosses their path... they should ask the kid how he did it and make humbly correct
their INSECURE protocols not tagging someone competent as a PIR8! This is plain savagery. The brutes have landed on the net and are ready to claim all the claimable as 'THEIRS' The same thing happens with the VISA code cracking... History repeats itself: the ignorant greedy bastard is all too happy to shoot the native in the head and take possession of his wives, house and property. Well... I am not Geronimo, but they won't get my grey matter in their mincemeater! As far as DVD is concerned... well, I am not such a great CONSUMER and I dig VHS 'cause I can happily PIR8 the things. HaHa! Come on RIAA come and get me...
come on sucker, leave that poor fella alone, It's the real Anonymous Coward you want to pinch... crushing some innocent's bones is useless...
the poor fella probably even bought his DVDs... you should give him a medal (BIIG GRIN)! I won't go white for this lawsuit... I'll simply install my PIR8 copy of windoze... install my latest twilight copy of the super-buahaha DVD reader (the previous version was a 'wee bit' buggy and have a big cowardish laugh at your bullying... you can't get me... I can rip you off at my desire in the privacy of my home.... Have a nice day and yes... you aren't omnipotent... I'm out of you reach... hehe!
cheers...
When will the big corporations realize that copy protection is impossible? For some reason, they think that switching to a new encrypted medium will somehow prevent people from copying music, videos, and software. Isn't that how CDs started out? Sure it couldn't be copied then, but now everyone has CD burners. Now DVDs burners are out, and programs like DeCSS that decrypt them, allowing people to copy them. Same thing with software. No copy protection has worked, from bad sectors on CDs to Safedisc, Laserlock, and others. Companies should realize that nothing will prevent people from copying and should find another way to make money. The fact that piracy is illegal does nothing to stop it either; as soon as one bootleg website is shut down, five others pop up in its place. Of course, if music, video, and software companies just charged reasonable prices, nobody would find a need to pirate. But for some reason they think that charging higher will increase profits, while all it does is encourage piracy.
My theory is that if we assemble as a massive group, without a clear leader (that could potentially break our momentum), then the bad guys won't know where to start.
A lot of people that feel strongly about this issue are in a position to make a difference, wether it's at a university or in a corporation. These people should make a small effort. And make it now.
Basically, the more people that get into the herd, the less chance any one member has of being targeted.
When I found out I was being attacked by the MPAA in a landmark case I was shocked. Since then rather then being able to scream about it I've been poked and prodded by the press to no avail. I've also found out that MANY people submitted news on _my_ case many times to slashdot.
I have a feeling that this isn't going to make the plain `ol 'press' until one of the little guys makes a fuss. The bad news is that I'm the little guy...
-------------------------------- |ct2600 | http://www.ct2600.org| --------------------------------
Other activist groups have used this technique for focusing media attention on nasty corporate behavior. For example, GE over the last 20 years has seriously polluted the Hudson river with carcinogens. They've spent the next 20 years trying to get away scott free. When the EPA wouldn't let them, they started bullying the EPA, making some very large campaign contributions to politicians, etc.
Anyway, a few months ago, a catholic nun (who happens to work as an environmental activist) showed up at a GE shareholder meeting and made a motion that GE would publicly apologize for their disgusting behavior and would pay to clean up the mess they made in the Hudson valley. The CEO was so outraged at the nun's audacity that he totally blew his top yelling and screaming at this elderly catholic nun wearing her habit and everything. All the new york newspapers carried it the next day (CEO attacks nun!).
In addition to informing the big investors and board members of whats going on, you also get to inform the press. We really should try this.
needed to hear this.
Veranda is a free font. All you have to do is head to MS's FTP site, or get it from another place, and unzip or untar it. Heck, I have a big bundle of true type fonts I have archived in a tarball so that I can get at them when I install Linux on a machine. Then you just install a TrueType font server for X (like xfstt in the Slackware contrib dir on ftp.cdrom.com).. Freshmeat has a bunch of them, too..
The page looks great in M13 and Netscape thanks to it..
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
>Robert Heinlein once wrote a morality tale about how an overly militaristic society can be a bad thing,
Actually, Heinlein thought this was a good thing. IIRC he wrote ST as a response to the US backing down on some cold war issue, I think he took out full page ads in news papers as well. "Liberty or Death" sort of attitude.
I always thought of the hollywood version as "Melrose Space" though :)
And might I also suggest posting the URLs here? :-)
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
"The mastermind of a piracy ring has been arrested in Norway for hacking DVDs, breaking their copy protection to make illegal copies of DVDs"
(Stock footage of hidden camera in some Asian market stall, panning rapidly by what may or may not be illegal DVDs)
Saw countless other examples in newspapers today. Just plain untruths, attempts to demonize Jon, and Linux or Xing never being mentioned once.
Personally, I think slashdot should drill this issue as hard as possible - because anyone who becomes convinced that the reality has to do with people wanting to run DVDs on the OS of their choice is NOT being reported. It's much juicier for them to say that some 16 year old screwed over the power elite of Hollywood through some nefarious scheme by an embittered nerd genius - and that's what they're running with.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
>The encryption would allow the industry to put
>regional codes into DVDs, preventing American
>DVDs from running in Europe (where movies come
>out several months later and at higher
>prices), or preventing Indian DVDs (which cost
>less since India has less money) from
>running in America.
Huh? Indian DVDs cost less because India has less money? Y.
These articles are merely relections of the authors' feelings of sexual inadequecy. By slamming the CCA, they hope in some way to increase the size of their respective genitalia, therby increasing their attractiveness to the opposite sex.
Why should this concern the gentle Slashdot readers? Because this same feelings of "penis envy", combined with an advanced form of what's known as the "Oedipus complex" is repsonsible, directly or not, for many of the posts, comments, and articles on this site. Think about: If I flame you, I am asserting my superiority over you, thus increasing the size of my methaphorical member. When CmdrTaco posts an article, it is a subconcious cry for a return to the "open source" (that is, the womb). Comment posters who seek high levels of "Karma" are doing so to increase their visibility, and thus their suitibility as a mate. "Ask Slashdot" is really nothing more than a forum for those with personal feelings of failure to seek the help of a guide or "savior", and is thus in the same spirit as that psychological force which underlines all religions. Likewise, it is primarily answered by those "with all the answers", viz, a severe messiah complex. Therefore, in it's own right, it forms sort of a "Church", as one might say.
As you can see, the metaphysic behind Slashdot is sex, plain and simple. Keep this in mind, and it will make sense.
Think about it, and remember that whether you consider yourself a right-Libertarian, a liberal, a conservative, or an Individualist Anarcho-Syndicalist,
Anarchists fall into three main categories:
The last two are perhaps more similar than the first group. Yes, this is a rough, very-arguable typology but the essential point is that Anarcho-Syndicalists are NOT reasonably called Individualist. They believe in "One big Union, One Big Strike" an extreme form of collective action, using the allowed forms in our society (examples IWW=The Wobblies, SAT (a Swedish Trade Union). Individualists tend to be more inspired by the ideas of individual action and the writings of Max Stirner (The Ego and Its Own) and William Godwin (Enquiry Concerning Political Justice) and in the latter part of the 19th C. in the U.S. Benjamin Tucker.
Communist Anarchists exist in a state of tension between the demands of community and individuality - examples (Spain 1936-The Friends of Durutti, post-Kronstadt-Libertarian Communist's "Platform of Libertarian Communism" by Ida Mett, Pietr Arshinov et al, also Peter Kropotkin identified himself as Anarcho-Communist)
Food Not Bombs are cool though - ideology in action!
Imagine what were to happen if, in protest of the recent attacks against the linux community, we were to coordinate a general strike?
If it were effective it would be smashed by the police unless there were enough people in the whole nation behind it convinced that there was a different way of organizing the world. Things are this way because most people believe in them.
Note, I am not being defeatist, just warning that strikes that challenge authority in a half-assed manner usually end up being squashed unpleasantly and then, rather than being radicalised people are frightened off. Even situations where there is mass popular support (Allendes' govt) can be squashed by the plutocrats (admittedly with US help).
Open Source is a revolution? I hope so. I like your spirit! DOn't listen to me! Fight on!
I don't understand what you mean here. To me, "unlawful" and "illegal" mean more or less the same thing. Could you explain what you mean by these terms?
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
We should print up a batch of "Free DVD" stickers. Something with a slogan to the effect of "A player for each OS" or "Equal Rights to viewing for everyone". And distribute them. And tell everyone what evils the MPAA is doing.
And, (perhaps sadly), since this concerns someone maybe paying a bit less for a DVD (as opposed to someone incarcerated for almost 5 years without trail), maybe more people would care. Bad publicity will probably sink the MPAA faster than an iceberg sinking the Titanic...
-=- SiKnight
I'm starting up a list of people holding copies of DeCSS, and I want everyone to sign up!
Here's why this is important:
Nerds know that the legal proceedings are farcical. MPAA is spawning emergency court proceedings, preliminary injunctions, and police raids. But no judge, no lawyers, no Norwegian police can make DeCSS go away, because thousands of decent foks are fuming and patting personal copies of the code.
But the media and the courts don't know that litigation is only a black comedy; they don't understand that DeCSS is *out of the bag* for good.
So I want to unambiguously *PROVE* that DeCSS is so widely distributed that further legal action is silly. I want to give the media hard numbers on DeCSS proliferation.
That's why I'm starting up a list of people holding copies of DeCSS. You can help stop the MPAA rampage. If you hold a copy of DeCSS, please sign up and get your friends to as well.
Today those people whose predecessors "led invasion armies to colonize and plunder the world" aren't only the corporate leaders, but also the politicians they work with. I recently have started reading "the story" (I know, not much of a title...), something of an introduction to Neo-Tech (what is it? sorry, can't help you on that one yet). In this quote, the young, idealistic son of a successful self-made buisnessman is debating his socialistic (? - the guy promotes a heavy hand by government in business) economics Professor. He was about to accept defeat this epiphany strikes him:
(from Chapter 13): "`You, sir, in your support of politicians and bureaucrats, represent the politician. I, teenage son of a well-known self-made entrepreneur, represent the up-and-coming businessman. I'm at a young and tender age, as you yourself put it. You graciously approach me with your hand out, your mouth grinning, your voice hypnotically endearing, and you encourage me to join you on a journey. You and me together. You the politician and me the young businessman, we team up and tacitly become partners in this complicated real world...made complicated by people like you -- the politician and regulator! Sure, I can surrender my innocence and my drive to create greater values at cheaper prices like my dad, and I can come into your world of dishonest collaboration between politicians and political businessmen. The politician gets his monetary connections and unearned power; the political businessman gets his political connections and unearned advantages. And together we could reap easy money and power and make the world a very, very complicated place for everyone else with all those regulations and taxes that choke off the real competition. A nice and happy team we'd surely make, politician and businessman. But through our joint journey of feel-good smiles and seemingly compassionate regulations, we're the bloodsuckers! Let there be no mistake! Dr. Rosewall is right: the real world is very complicated. The more complicated, in fact, the more opportunity for politicians, bureaucrats, and political businessmen to multiply and flourish. All I ever wanted to do was to get out there and work my tail off to create exciting values and to figure out ways to get more and more of my creations around the world through creative marketing and price reductions. But you come along and seductively say, come with me innocent youth; there's an easier way to go through this harsh, complicated world. To make it out there, you must join with me. Then you reach out to me.'"
How much time does government as we know it have left? When will we reach the next stage in the evolution of "government", so called? Some problems will have to be care of along the way if "government" is to progress to a higher state, such as dealing with super-corporations that behave like their only responsibility is their bottom line. I doubt that problems regularly seen on /. in recent months, including copyrights, software patents and fair-use, will be satisfactorily resolved as long as a system of "dishonest collaboration between politicians and political businessmen" exists. Some will say that the association between politicians and buisnessmen doesn't have to be dishonest, I think that it can't be anything but. What I see here is "a world in which a whole community in violation of a law" created by buisnessmen for buisnessmen.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Anarchists fall into three main categories:
Individualist/Philosophical/Egoist/Libertarian
Communist
Syndicalist
Erm, I had a long-winded response, but then I remembered that this isn't usenet.
But in any case, back to the point...
Food Not Bombs are cool though - ideology in action!
Definitely, they're one of the reasons I've never identified with Liberals. I don't like whining about problems and not doing anything about it. Food Not Bombs actually *does* something about hunger. Very cool.
Note, I am not being defeatist, just warning that strikes that challenge authority in a half-assed manner usually end up being squashed unpleasantly and then, rather than being radicalised people are frightened off. Even situations where there is mass popular support (Allendes' govt) can be squashed by the plutocrats (admittedly with US help).
I wasn't really referring to a *full* general strike throughout all industries, just a general strike within the high tech industry, where we basically all strike for a certain amount of time to scare the hell out of the people in charge...
Open Source is a revolution? I hope so. I like your spirit! DOn't listen to me! Fight on!
Nothing short of a revolution. I think a couple of decades down the line we're going to look at open source software and Linux as being one of the greatest unintentional social experiments of all time.
And I'll definitely fight on.
Speaking of, my little brother just told me that they're installing eight video cameras and hiring two security officers to watch the cameras all day at his high school, because of Columbine. I'm going to be doing my best to be helping him organize a little (civil, possibly) disobedience at his school so they can't do it.
If anybody feels they can help me out in any way possible, please email me at mchisari@usa.net. Thanks...
Michael Chisari
You guys can see the process. The Revolution being born. pcp.lanl.gov/MEMES.html
Please don't give them any ideas.
---
Oper on the Nightstar
Warning: The monks in alt.sysadmin.recovery might LART me for giving out useful information, so I'll approach it tangentially: You Have Been Trolled. Hope This Helps. Have A Nice Day.
Fuck Slashdot
If you REALLY understand what this fight is about, you won't be doing this.
What the hell is there to stop you from selling (or, since you've got the list posted), from the MPAA to get that list, copy down the names of everyone on it, and send out a giant big-ass friggin' lawsuit with everyone on it? If I got a copy of the DeCSS source, mirroring it is one thing, but making an open confession that I have it, and signing my ass away on someone's shit list? HELL FSCKIN' NO.
The idea, is that we make sure that the DeCSS source is as widespread as possible. AND we want to make sure that people can grab the source and hide it, with the plausable deniability that they ever had it. That way, there will always be someone out there, and the expense to track and hunt down everyone with a copy of the source will make it financially impossible for even someone like the MPAA. A centralized list will only help them in their work.
-=- SiKnight
>tough to read on an X-Window machine. You will
>have a tough time getting anybody that uses Linux
>as a desktop to go to your site.
I make an annual pilgramige to Fool HQ (most of the time I telecommute) and there are more NT machines there than you an possibly imagine. They have a site license from Microsoft.
Microsoft markets itself to its investors at LEAST as much as it markets itself to its customers. It's really hard to convince an investing web site to take any sort of objective stance towards MS because "they've made so much money, they must be wonderful". Let's see, they have to have a better product because they charge more and have exclusive distribution contracts over which they've been in federal antitrust court on and off since 1994... Makes perfect sense.
Sigh...
Rob
(Their message boards run on Active Server Pages. When the load gets high, they flake out. Guess how they solve this problem? Of course: buy more servers to keep the load down! Well, there's a great first response to scalability problems.)
It should probably read "because Indians have less money". That is the whole point of region locks. If you are the sole supplier of some sort of product (a movie, a music album, a book, a car, etc), you can charge what you want for it.
.au equivalent of RIAA) started a big advertising campaign in opposition. They claimed that if parallel import was allowed, then they would have less money to support local artists (personally, I believe there will always be a market for local music -- the same way there will always be supporters for local sports teams. By taking a small cut off the profits from some bit name artists, they could easily support a local music industry). This campaign did not really educate people about the issues, to the extent that a lot of musicians didn't know what ARIA was on about.
You may decide to sell the product for one price in Australia or America, and at a lower price in a poorer country since you figure more people will buy it there if it is cheaper, so you will make more money. You can do this because no one else can sell the product to the customers.
Now you have a problem if someone decides to import quantities of the product from the poorer country and starts undercutting you in the richer country. To prevent this sort of thing, the Government has tarrifs and other measures which help support your `right' to sell the product for different prices in different places, or even withold it from certain countries.
Of course, occasionally governments do stupid things like introducing laws to allow parallel imports. A while back they did this in Australia for CDs, and ARIA (the
To get around these government `mistakes', a lot of new forms of media have region locks. This way, even if parallel imports are allowed, you can keep your profits high since the stuff your competitors import doesn't work!
This is what it looks like from the corporation's side. If you are a consumer, region locks allow big companies to screw you for as much money as possible without having to worry about competition.
This is one of the reasons a lot of consumer watchdog associations don't particularly like the idea of region locks.
Socialism and capitalism were, at heart, fighting the same thing: power imbalance. Nobody likes their rights and freedoms encroached, nobody likes opportunties to improve their life removed. Socialism and capitalism are both about providing opportunities and rights to everyone. Both were wrong about human nature, both are alive, both are dead.
Many of the demands set out by Marx in the communist manifesto are things we consider rightly part of civil society. Most of the freedoms demanded by capitalism as well. Marxism underestimated the human need for individualism and property. Capitalism underestimate the human need for security and cooperation. Both underestimate the ability of power to corrupt.
Violence, money, knowledge; the ability to restrict people's physical actions, the ability to induce others physical actions, the ability to deploy violence and money efficiently. Violent power is (in the west) ideally under democratic control. Knowledge is largely public domain. Money, however, is still the source of the biggest power imbalance.
How do we address this imbalance without removing reasonable freedom and opportunity. It's fun to be rich; it's fun to get rich; it motivates a lot of our human activity; money, once you have enough to survive (and most people do in the west, even if they get money from democratically controlled sources) is fun. How do we keep the economy alive, and generating wealth, while preventing excess and abuse from power imbalances?
I propose democracy, and a wealth limit. A high one, say $25million (US). Why that much? In the west, that's enough to lead a very comfortable life. Even at 1% interest a year, you're basically set. It is not, however, even at 8% a year, enough to hire a dangerous number of people, own a dangerous number of things, or unduly influence the democratic process over a medium period of time. It is a limit high enough that 99.999% of the people in the world will never be affected by it, and can lead free and motivated lives earning money and having fun.
All sources of assets as accounted for by Generally Agreed Accounting Principles would be used to arrive at the figure.
Yes, people would cheat, little schemes would crop up, but the principle would be in place and in the end such events would simply become fodder for the tabliod press. Yes, there would need to be broad agreement in the western world to the principle for it to work. Can you see the campaign posters: "But, I need my billions!"? I think the referendum would pass...
Same idea for corporations. I suggest $1billion net worth limit, $10billion turnover. Again, enough to allow a fair degree of efficiency and economy of scale, not enough to dominate a market. In combination with the $25million personal wealth limit, no fewer than 40 individuals would hold the stock of big corporations, ensuring a healthy set of conflicts of interest should dreams of conspiricies arise.
We may notice that in cases like roads, power generation, and telecommunications (fairly well understood activities), that a well managed corporation under democratic control does a better job anyway. Examples are out their to show that it can be done. Just as in business it's a matter of hiring the right people. If something has the ability to affect a lot of people, it belongs under democratic control anyway: we all need a say and not just about whether we buy a particular end product.
Thus violent power would continue to be under democratic control; knowledge could continue to be our collective human property; and wealth would cease to be a source of abuse, continue to grow and remain a source of motivation and creativity.
Hi, I do not live in the USA nor I know much about US laws.
Here is something I have been wondering about. We are constantly arguing that DeCSS is NOT used to COPY DVDs but its just an aid to VIEWING DVDs.
However, how will you show this to a judge in USA?
Isn't it possible for defendants to bring a DVD Recorder in court, copy a DVD bit-to-bit *LIVE*, play the copy and show the judge that DeCSS is not about COPYING since it has not been used in the process?
Then, if the ruling says that DeCSS is illegal, I believe, DVD recorders should be outlawed as well.
Can something like above be done in a US court?
Dont flame me or something if the above idea is just stupid.
Sincerely,
Simpleguy
Maybe this will effect the MPAA companies stock values the same way, at least a little bit. Maybe that will make someone realize this battle isn't worth fighting.
That's like compiling a list of Jews with their last known addresses to help them in the case of a Nazi invasion during WWII
fellow citizen-unit,
meny thank you, for the info...
but i seem to remenber reading in some of Bucky Fullers books (before he was deemed crazy-werd (you would never see me doing unaproved activies...)). he called corporatism LawCap. that is Law and Corporate intrest interwinding...
As this citizen-unit sees it there can be no exit but LawCap. because LawCap will just incorporate you, or cut off your supply of DOPE^hDollers. thus we all no, there will be no just say know. here is a test, just how manly , us citizen-units will Boycott Everyone?
my bet us: 0 lawers: 50 MPI: 23
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
- Anyone know the physics of DVD tossing? Is it the same as CDs? I've gotten pretty good at tossing them AOL CDs against the brick wall in our tech room. (Good for calming my nerves)
- Is this legal?
- -or- Should I get a new prescription to calm me down and keep my precious DVD collection??
Bob.Know who you're boycotting, and boycott thouroghly. A true boycott may well mean limiting yourself to PBS and MP3's, but I for one am willing to do it, and am doing it. Which, incidentally, explains why I'm here of all places at this hour. I'm working on a letter to send to the MPAA, TW, Viacom, Disney, Sony, MGM, Universal, and Fox explaining what I'm doing and why; and am proselytizing my friends and relatives - a long list of names at the end can only help. I recommend doing something similar, if only for the sheer thrill of actually doing something about this. (besides donating to the EFF, but you already did that, right?)
fh
PROPERTY IS THEFT!
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY!
WAR IS PEACE!
IGNORANCE IS STRENGHT!
Yeehaa!
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Being replied to with a troll of this quality is more gratifying than any amount of positive moderation. Thanks, AC. You put a genuine smile on my face. Now if only you'd worked in Natalie Portman, grits and a Beowolf cluster...
Fuck Slashdot
Not that there's anything wrong with boycotting something because it makes you feel good, or with one-handed exercises in general. But do they actually effect social change? My guess is: never.
I'd like to hear suggestions for how to combat this kind of nonsense that sound a little more effective than sticking out your tongue at the corporations and saying ``yeah well I'm taking my toys and going home!''
I disagree. A good boycott should pick just one studio, say MGM. Reasons:
they'll make an effort to show that the possible illegal uses of DeCSS, regardless of its intended use, mean that Johansen should go to jail.
Just out of interest how does this US law apply to Norwegian citizens in Norway??
OK gang, so we're talking boycots and we're talking about how MPAA et al are bastards. Great - even if all of us just boycot, I'm sure we're not going to impact that much (unless we buy lots of DVD's on a daily basis :)
/. are fairly typical in one respect. We'll bitch, we'll moan, we'll talk it up - but when it comes to the crunch, we never quite get around to doing something about it.
:)
:)
:)
:)
:)
:)
:)
So, why not take the time & effort to email/contact them? Tell them that you're boycotting, that you're telling your friends and that you're supporting the DeCSS/LiViD folks.
Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a statement that could be wrong: I'd say most of us on
Don't you just hate that? This is why governments/corporations take notice if 1% of a target demographic respond. For every person who does do something, there are at least 10 who want to but don't get around to it. Thus that 1% represents about 10% and that's enough to count as a vocal majority.
This is also why highly organised groups/cults/sects/religious organisations/etc get the ear of politics/corporates. They manage to influence/order a lot of their consituents to do something, thus inflating the numbers and throwing out the "Total Number x 10 = % population who are annoyed/concerned"
Anyhow, to help you folks tell these people what you think, here's some handy info:
MPAA
Their web site has no "contact us" that I could find. How convenient, no?
If you want to get physical, try their snail mail address:
15503 Ventura Blvd.
Encino, California 91436
USA
Or phone on: (818) 995-6600
Otherwise, email to WareNet (the guys who made their site) and ask why no online "Contact Us" was supplied.
Disney
The investor relations feedback form at http://disney.go.com/mail/investorinfo/ would be a good place to hassle them.
Sony
Go to http://www.world.sony.com/Feedback/in dex.html, select the part of the world you're in and tell them you're so annoyed, you're not going to buy any more PlayStation stuff and you've kicked your AIBO out in the snow
MGM
Fill in the form at http://www.mgm.com/corporate/email/in dex.html and let them know.
Paramount
Send an email to info@pde.paramount.com and ask for information about their logic behind this as you're sure it's not what's being said in public
Fox
Send an email to askfox@foxinc.com and ask them why they're doing this. You might also want to mention the fact that their Simpson's splash page is seriously lame
Universal
Go to http://www.mca.com/fp/contact_form.html and fill in the form.
Warner
No "contact us" in an obvious location, so I gave up - there must be one somewhere here but it's very well hidden
Now, much in all as I'd love to say "Wild, uncontrolled bursts - we do more damage that way" - the reality is that a reasoned, controlled message stating that you disagree with their actions and have commenced boycotting their products will have much more impact than a flame or mail bombing.
Do it right and we get respect. Do it in classic "Script Kiddy, 31337 Wanker Fuckwit Mode" and we're doomed
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
In the Crackers and Crackdowns article from Linux Journal , Jason Kroll <hyena@ssc.com> writes:
The US Constitution? Aren't Jon and Per Johansen Norwegian citizens? And wasn't the "action" carried out by Norway's Econcomic Crime Departement (ECD)? How is the US Constitution relevant here?
Is Mr. Kroll's claim that the MPAA was somehow directly influencing Norway's ECD to suppress the Johansens' free speach, and that since the MPAA is an American organization, somehow the US Constitution has bearing on the ECD's actions? That doesn't make much sense. So what if the MPAA pressured the ECD? That might be an issue for Norwegian law, but I just don't see the US Constitutional tie-in.
Mr. Kroll goes on to write:
Again, why would Jon's rights to do anything be protected by an American law? The Digital Millennium Copyright Act should be completely irrelevant as regards a Norwegian citizen acting on Norwegian soil.
Am I just missing something here?
Don't get me wrong. I don't endorse the action taken against the Johansens. But I do want to understand the basis for Mr. Kroll's claims. If his claims have merit, then I have misunderstood something important and I wish to be corrected. If his claims are without merit, then they are alarmist misdirections that do nothing to help foster rational discussion and debate.
It is interesting how much you can tell about someone's stance on these sort of issues from the words they use. It also gives some idea of what their values are like
:)
The words people choose have a big effect on what people make of an issue. For instance, what should be more strongly punnished: software piracy or illegal copying/copyright infringement? Who deserves a longer prison sentance: someone guilty of burglary or someone guilty of home invasion?
If you read much of what the DVD-CCA/MPA has been saying and take it at face value, you couldn't be blamed for thinking that all people who want to watch dvd's under linux are deviants who enjoy pirating IP and want to destroy civilisation as we know it
It is good to see that some mainstream press is covering the other side of this issue.
You are correct that, until now, people have not had access to the information needed to 'level the playing field' between consumers and producers. But (shameless plug) the ConsumerRevolution is coming soon to a browser near you. And remember that we are all consumers...
Excerpts from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act
full text available here.
Section 1201
1201(a)(2)(B) is what I assume will be the MPA[A]'s reponse to the defense that DeCSS was written to bridge the gap between DVD and Linux -- they'll make an effort to show that the possible illegal uses of DeCSS, regardless of its intended use, mean that Johansen should go to jail. that's kind of like trying to outlaw FTP servers because software piracy can happen there. the following section will probably be DeCSS's defense; however, this probably would not save anyone from the Xing EULA. however, i think that violation of the EULA is a purely civil matter, not a criminal one, and wouldn't involve any jail time -- I've been wrong before though, does anyone else have any knowledge? does the EULA itself say?
enmity.
Not at all, they will sell their product for whatever they can get away with. ie, set pricing in scale with the average income of the suckers they're trying to sell to.
I don't think you should criticize a site that seeks to increase their credibility and public acceptance by improving their visual appearance. It's been happening since Gutenberg developed his printing press. Do you think Gutenberg would say to modern publishers, "why do you use these damn fancy computers and typesetters to print books? aren't wooden type blocks good enough?"
Since it's impossible to stop the process of modernization and improvement, I suggest you seek out a browser that handles style sheets properly. The web site is not the defective element in your unfortunate situation.
i don't know all the /. acronyms, so please fill me in:
"I have been trolled"?
"I hate boring/bad trolls"?
"I have big toes"?
While the Motley Fool points out that the CCA algorithm is no good for preventing piracy, after all you can just burn an image of the DVD, it fails to address the major piracy issue. What DECSS theoretically makes possible is decryption of a DVD into a series of unencrypted MPEGS, which would then be considerably easier to distribute. Given current trends in bandwidth availability, the DVD derived MPEGs would become as easy to trade as MP3s. So this would change the economics of piracy a little more favorable, making the decision to copy a little more casual. Granted, even a licenced CCA algorithm user could write a program to do the same thing. But the point is to make sure that someone trying to play a DVD is in posession of the actual physical disc. The overall point is correct, however: the music & video industries have been used to selling boxes with discs in them at extortionate prices, they now need to get to grips with the fact that they don't really know that much about selling and managing intellectual property.
I just have a question related to the Linux Journal piece. The question, what do all you pirateers do for money? Judging by your copying philosophies, you must not produce software or any other information form, because you'd just give it away. Well, people work on software. For money. People work on recording songs. For money. People write books. For money. This should not be a news flash. If I slaved away on a book for 2 years, I would be pissed as hell if the whole world copied it for free. Software shouldn't be copyrighted my ass! If you want to use the damn thing, why don't you pay for it? If you don't want to pay for it, don't use it. I remember the shareware movement, which kinda folded because of all the good people out there who couldn't be bothered to send the poor schlubs who wrote the software $15 to register the stuff. I mean, come on guys, copy the stuff if you want to, but don't pretend to be philosophical and moral about it. If you don't want to pay, that's one thing, but there is no right to free software, music or whatever. There hasn't ever been, going back ages.
By the way, I asked a big on-line magazine to publish a link to opendvd.org which links to a petition which you can sign. It is a protest against the way Johanson was treated!
Bizar technology?
Where can I get Verdana, Arial, etc.?
MS's typography site now has only self extracting exe's that are quite useless on linux.
Have you ever read 1984?
I read the book just last week; witch may be why it's so prevalent in my thoughts right now. In the past, it always bothered me when someone would cite a fiction book as a reason not to do something (or even worse a movie). But, I'm going to do precisely that right now. Mostly because I feel a little bit like Winston Smith right now, knowing something to be true when increasingly the world around me, and the people in it believes the opposite.
No, I don't like what the DVDCCA is doing; I think that it is morally wrong, both in the suppression of free speech, and the fact that they would knowingly squelch all of our liberties for a few profit points. But it isn't the ever-present Man that's perpetuating the doublethink; it's us.
There was a technical flaw in the fool.com article
"Let me repeat all this: The DeCSS program is neither designed nor necessary for copying DVD movies, which isn't economically feasible anyway and not technically possible with the partially prewritten blank disks being sold today. In any case, a tool to copy DVDs would be legal for personal use."
Or rather, two compound technical flaws.
In reality, DeCSS can do nothing but copy DVD movies. I doubt that many of you have even run the program. If you had you would know that it is a windows program (though, I'm not sure if DeCSS itself had been ported to Linux, of if just css-auth was derived from it by LiViD). DeCSS, or at least they copy I have is a Windows GUI application with only two buttons. One says "Select Folder" and the other says, "Transfer". I've posted my own mirror, if anyone doesn't believe me, they can see for themselves.
The other flaw is a bit deeper, and it comes from a failed technical understanding of what comprises the Movie on a DVD disk. Frequently, and this article as well, I've seen it stated that you can simply copy the data right off the disk with a standard file system read. This is incorrect, you can copy the encrypted data, but there is a fundamental difference between encrypted data and 'regular' data. The DVD movie is an element of pure data. The images and are nothing more then information. When you copy the contents of a DVD with a standard file system read, that is not what you get. Instead what you get is white noise. Worthless garbage. The encrypted data and they key are two halves of a whole, without ether, you do not have a movie.
What DeCSS does is remove the pure data from the physical medium, and into the pure ether of information. What DeCSS does, is copy the MOVIE. In its pure form, unprotected from copying, it can be viewed in Linux, or anywhere with an mpeg2 decompresser. It can also be shrunk down to VCD size and passed around the Internet.
Yes, it is possible to digitize the movie, and get the data that way, but it would require much more hardware then what would be required with DeCSS. Simply dumping the video to the hard drive uncompressed would require a 150 gig hard drive for a two-hour movie. (This hard drive, of course, would be able record at 21.3 megs/second-sustained as well...). Alternatively one could purchase a MPEG encoder card for a few hundred dollars. Along with an external DVD player to plug into
Yes, you of course wouldn't be able to duplicate the DVD image onto a burned DVD, because of the zeroed out pits, but after you merge the two halves to form the movie, it wouldn't be necessary.
Right now a 40gig UDMA hard drive sells for about $350. That's about $40 per movie. And that's bound to get cheaper as the year progresses. Using a data Tape would only cost $10 per movie, and if you really wanted to span 7 CD's the cost would be about $5 per movie. This is hardly what I would call economically unfeasible, and certainly less so then not using DeCSS to copy movies.
I've posted this information to slashdot before, and in several cases, I was ether called a moron or a Troll. I find it amazing that people could be so blind, so steeped in doublethink as to not only believe that DeCSS is can only be used to play movies in Linux, but to outright attack anything that doesn't conform to whatever it is they choose to believe
I've also been told that I shouldn't say what I'm saying, and that by saying it I am weakening our case. But, I cannot deny what I know to be true, and I cannot stand to see these untruths touted as reality.
At least Winston Smith got laid...
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Plausable deniability is always a good thing.
-Pathwalker
(This whole thing makes me mad enough to throw this keg at the MPAA...)
geeks now have a two front battle of proving they aren't pirates to the court, and fixing their already dubious reputations with their own communities. There is a diffrence though, between these guys and someone like Kevin Mintnik. No one is going to think that what these guys did was wrong, really. So people are not going to look down on them to begin with.
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I've had the DeCSS source available through my website for a while, but didn't have a link to it on my site. I linked to it once or twice through articles here on /., but that was about it.
No more! Check out the (admittedly somewhat crude...it was a quick hack) "Screw the MPAA" banner at http://salfter.dyndns.org. If you just want to grab DeCSS (and other DVD-related software for Linux), click here to go straight to it.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
. The GILC, a coalition of civil rights groups throughout the world (notably including the EFF), has condemned the action as a violation both of the Human Rights Accords of the United Nations and the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Almost ironically, Jon's reverse-engineering rights are specifically protected by the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which itself is probably unconstitutional).
I keep reading about the DMCA and various other and sundery US laws, but there is only one problem. Jon does not live in the US, he is in Norway. He does not fall under US law. He can be sued in a US court, but he can only be charged with a criminal act if there are provisions in Norwegian law. In the US, he can argue that he has not committed a crime because he was not in the US when he RE'ed the player. As for the lawsuits, that is for the lawyers to fight out, but he may be able to force the suit into a Norwegian court or an international court ( whether this would be a good thing, I don't know) thus short circuiting the current attack. But above all remember: he is not a US citizen, his actions occured outside the US, and therefore he is not subject to the US constitution, US law (except import/export and IP laws as applied to items imported, i.e. counterfiet clothing, etc), and was not arrested by US authorities.
I'm not compiling a list of self-confessed criminals; I'm making a list of upstanding citizens who are openly excercising what we believe to be a legitimate right, albeit in the face of corporate intimidation tactics.
I do not think that when my rights are threatened by a corporate bully, the proper response is to scuttle down into anonymous skulking until the matter blows over. I do not think this is how personal freedoms are won. Quite the opposite; I think the proper response is to say, "Hi! I'm Eric Lehman, a contributing citizen of the United States residing at 5 Michael Way, Cambridge MA 02141, and I'm not going along with this bullshit." As one person joining the list noted, "Wrong is wrong and doing nothing about the wrong we know about is even MORE wrong..."
That said, I think there are two reasonable objectives:
I think that the first objective is already achieved-- deCSS is too widely distributed to stamp out. But this achievement came at a price: several people are being sued and hundreds are under threat. These people will remain in jeopardy until the second objective is achieved, until the media, courts, and MPAA understand that continuing legal harassment is utterly pointless because deCSS is everywhere. Only then will the people who already stood up to the MPAA-- and paid a price-- be in the clear.
I find it difficult to believe that people on the list could be sued for merely *possessing a copy* of deCSS, as opposed to distributing it. Well, it's crazy, but I guess anything is possible. Of course, I hope your post advocating proliferation of the code doesn't get you sued!
If you feel that joining the list is unwise given your particular life circumstances, I respect your judgement. But I don't think you should mock people who decide to take a little personal risk to oppose the MPAA in an open, forthright way. In fact, I'd like to take the opportunity to thank the people who have done so. I hope enough others will sign up to make a real impact.
Please follow this link: Follow: dvdtruth.txt It will explain what Jon did and did not do. And please stop saying that Jon did crack the dvd encryption, because, according to this, he didn't. He said so himself. BTW: this "new" information seems to make the pending courtcase against Jon even more ridiculous. Imagine: Jon is being accused of doing something which isn't illegal and which he didn't do! Bye, Taliesin. ps.: I am not sure if the information given in that document is true, anyone got more information on this?
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
One of the big newspapers in Norway arranged a netmeeting with Jon Johansen yesterday where people could write questions and he would answer online. See http://interaktiv.vg.no/CGI/intervju/intervju/jonj oh (norwegian) Anyways one of the readers asks: "I just wanted to know if it was Xing which had the uncoded player, so that you could figure it out." An Jon Johansen answers: "The player that hadnt protected its keys was made by Xing, and by the way I do not recomend this player it is of bad quality." -------- Phalse
We geeks actually have a lot of power on the net; why don't we use it? For instance, if you're in charge of a ISP's DNS server, you could reroute the DNS for boycott-targetted domains to a protest page, so any client that uses your DNS server and wants to go to a movie studio's site will be redirected to what you want them to see.
Now, if I can just find a list of MPAA member sites I could start doing this on my own...
In the US, if you're under legal age, you can't be bound by a contract. If the same is true in Norway, even if the no-reverse-engineering license is legal, Johansen could have just voided his end of the deal without penalty.
Even if Norwegian law doesn't save him, the plaintiffs in California could argue as follows:
Does the EFF have some email address for "silly legal ideas from amateurs that might prove useful"?--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
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