CSS: About Piracy, or About Content Regulation?

Linux Today is running an opinion piece which gives an alternative interpretation to the DeCSS saga: CSS is not so much about preventing piracy or enforcing region codes as it is about protecting the current content providers from any new competition (thereby also controlling what you get to know).

Comments

Silver Bullet

[Lord Kano]

I see a perfect way to kill the DeCSS lawsuit.

It comes to us via the Sony Vs Connectix battle. In the most recent ruling the judge's opinion includes the following...

17 U.S.C. S 102(b) (Copyright protection does not extend to any "idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery" embodied in the copyrighted work.). Software engineers designing a product that must be compatible with a copyrighted product frequently must "reverse engineer" the copyrighted product to gain access to the functional elements of the copyrighted product. See Andrew Johnson-Laird, Software Reverse Engineering in the Real World, 19 U. Dayton L. Rev. 843, 845-46 (1994).

What more do we need as ammunition?

LK

US v Paramount (1948)

[bwt]

This article hits it right on the nose. The movie industry is leveraging CSS to create anti-competitive control and to inflate prices.

This all happened before. Everyone should take a moment and read U .S. V. PARAMOUNT PICTURES. Especially the first part and part (5) about block licencing.

In this case the Supreme Count found that the motion picture industry was engaing in anti-competitive business practices in violation of the Sherman Act. They overruled the claim that copyright protection justify their business practices. The practices were:

Then:
A) Price Fixing - Using copyright licencing with strings attached to force theaters to raise prices
B) Tying - Using copyright licencing to sell one product (movie A) contingent on another (movie B)

Now:
A) Price Fixing - Using copyright licencing to inflate the price of DVD's using regional licencing
B) Tying - Using copyright licencing to sell one product (movie A) contingent on another (licenced player).

We're not going to win the case

[MillMan]

Well, here comes my typical rant. You've been warned.

The article didn't say much that I haven't already heard but the author was correct in saying that we aren't going to win this case. The cards are stacked heavily in the plaintiff's favor.

Or, I should say, we can't win at this level. We have to go down a few levels, to where the plaintiff's power comes from.

I've always beleived that the average person has all the power there is if we act together, and that the average person is reasonable. However, people don't support us for a few reasons:

1) In school you are not taught to think for yourself, you are taught to submit to authority, not to ask questions, and not to try and change "the way things are" which leads to #2:

2) Most information channels are controlled by the same type of people who are the plaintiffs, they have the same agenda. With the assumption that the media is a factual source of knowledge, people aren't going to ask questions. Our community is discredited with one word, hackers. This is a very powerful ability. So even though we have all the power, we've already lost because of public opinion.

So what do we do? Organize, protest, and educate. This needs to include a lot more people that are in this community as well, because all facets of society contribute to the problems we have. Our gains might be small but at least we can get the spiral of society to move upward rather than downward. I'm not talking about organizing, portesting, and educating only on the level of this specific issue either. I mean society in general. As long as we have corporations, a government who supports them, and an apathetic population, (ALL 3, simply removing the government solves nothing) these kind of problems will never be solved without having to fight tooth and nail every time with little chance of success.

Fortunatly information channels have opened up a bit, I think the internet was a good part of the reason that DIVX failed, but I think it would have failed anyway. At any rate, it can be a big help, which is why this particular community needs to fight as hard as we can on all these issues.

We won't win the fight now, but the more we can educate, the more press we can get to hear our side, the better chances of succes we have in the future.

Someone "gets it", but you don't

[ecampbel]

DVD players can already play discs without DeCSS encryption. Most porn movies aren't DeCSS encrypted and they can be played in all DVD players, and also there are already numerous programs on all platforms that can play DVD's that aren't DeCSS encrypted. It CSS encrypted media, that freeware players can't play.

You're missing the point of CSS and why it is so valuable to the movie industry. The entertainment industry wants to ensure that only licensed players can play encrypted DVD's so that they can ensure players won't have a, "Save as unencrypted..." or even a "Save as..." option, and will respect the region encoding system. Without control over the players, the region encoding and CSS encryption would be useless since not all players would support it, and people will move to players that don't abide by the restrictions licensed players must adhere to. Region encoding benefits the average person because movie studios can release a DVD while it is still in theaters in other parts of the world. Without region encoding, movie studios would have to wait until the movie is done in all parts of the world before releasing the DVD.

So, before you get into a hissy fit about the monopoly the DVD consortium has, understand content makers are free to release their content without any restrictions on it, and anyone can make a player that plays this content. However, the CSS encryption allows the studios to choose to protect their assets. If you don't support CSS encrypted content, simply buy the VHS tape, or don't buy the content. You don't have the right to unencrypted content, and DeCSS would basically grant you that right.

Court of public opinion controlled by...guess who?

[MAXOMENOS]

This article raises a very good point: the MPAA and its allies are very good at manipulating public opinion. In fact, not only are they very good at it, but they have all the tools to do it. The companies represented by MPAA include Warner (CNN and Time), Fox (news and newspapers), Disney (ABC), Paramount (any number of news shows), &c. You'd be a fool to assume that any of these sources is going to be unbiased about this case. Unfortunately, most people still believe that these media outlets are motivated by the search for truth, rather than corporate policy (read as: greed.)

This is why protests are important right now. The only way we are going to get our side heard is to go out and tell people what's happening. Slashdot helps a lot, but it reaches a very specialized audience. The people whose minds we need to change aren't typical Slashdot readers; they're average joes and janes, who, for the most part, have other things to worry about and don't have time to investigate these things themselves. Either we tell them what's going on, or the MPAA does through its many voices. Which would you prefer?

How to get involved:

• This bears repeating: join the EFF! I did and I am damn glad I did. These are the people who are fighting for your rights.
• Get involved with protests being organized by 2600. Better yet, organize your own protest!
• Join a boycott of MPAA products! Pain in the rear it may be, we need to stop seeing movies in theatres, stop renting movies, and stop buying new video tapes of major motion pictures. OUR money is going to help the MPAA trample on OUR rights. We need to cut off their supply! (This isn't easy and it won't necessarily catch on, but this is the right thing to do.)

Post other suggestions here!

At last - someone "gets it" - almost

[BranMan]

I'm glad to see that someone is starting to "get it" - what this is all about. Unfortunately, they are just a little bit shy of the whole picture.

DeCSS is not about piracy, but about compatability - we all know that by now. You can make the bit-wise copies by other means. The real thrust is controlling the medium - who can make and sell DVD movies.

We are talking about a <b>Motion Picure</b> consortium here. That's the big clue - they could give a $#@# whether we can watch DVDs on our Linux boxes. But to get there we needed to 1) decrypt the DVD movies, 2) store them locally, 3) work on the playback software to the point that the picture and sound look good , 4) put on-the-fly decryption in the player. 5) Done. DVD on Linux.

Step 4 is what has caused the witchhunt. If the OSS folks build a DVD player - do you seriously think they will make it play ONLY encrypted DVDs? Heck NO! It will play unencrypted movies and sound also.

And THAT's the "it". After DeCSS, it is trivial to make a player that will play encrypted and UNENCRYPTED DVDs. They are scared to death of having a DVD player S/W that plays both encrypted and unencrypted DVDs. Ever made a copy of a VHS movie for a friend? Not legal to do so, but hard to stop. If you wanted to do the same with your new spiffy DVD-R (fast forwarding a year) would you try to encrypt it? Heck NO!

Once there is an OSS DVD player application that plays both encrypted and unencrypted DVDs, the jig is up. Independent artists can make DVDs and distribute them without CSS encryption. Your DVD player won't play it? Here's the link - download the freeware player that does.

That Japanese DVD won't let you play it? The freeware DVD player will play ANY DVD, no matter where it came from.

Then we start hacking the "upgradable" console DVD players - so they can play unencrypted DVDs and break the region locking.

Follow the reprocussions to their logical conclusion and it's easy to see why the MPAA will throw everything including the kitchen sink into this fight. They have a whole new medium to lose (not to mention the $$ they spent designing it in the first place, plus the $$ spent on getting the DMCA legislated.)

region controls are irrelevant

[Travoltus]

Check out the Apex AD-600A DVD, VCD and MP3 player.

There are instructions at nerd-out.com for changing the Region ID, as well as the Macrovision options and, ahem, other things, via the secret menu.

LOL. The player costs $199 at Circuit City. People are buying it en masse. I ordered mine already. :)