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More on LinDVD
periscope wrote to us about the Wired story that's currently running about InterVideo's LinDVD. We've mentioned this situation before, but now it looks like something's actually going to happen. As I said before, InterVideo has the CSS license to produce a player that the MPAA won't throw a hissy-fit over.
The real issue - and I feel this is how DeCSS should be defended - is the right to write a royalty-free clean-room DVD player on any platform. Trying to take this right away is really tough - kind of like trying to take away the right to who can make T-shirts.
Given that, there are a few ways to prevent someone writing a player:
1. patent some critical component. this is pretty tough given that DVD is just an encoding/file format. (then again I hear that GeoWorks seems to have patented WML)
2. don't give out the file format, except on restricted licenses. Buy^H^H^H Lobby for laws (DCMA) that make it illegal to reverse engineer software i.e. DVD players (even though this activity is currently considered fair use).
3. even better, 'lobby' for laws that make any reverse engineering - even black box - illegal. period.
As far as I can tell, DeCSS is being fought with #2.
I'm just waiting for the day when corporations can achieve #3. Then, you'll see how cheap CDs and DVDs are currently. Well, actually most of us will see movies for free - only those of you 'privacy' freaks who don't want to share your personal preferences to get enhanced customer service will have to pay for anything.
Ahh, Monday!
This isn't about getting DVD support for Linux. It's about the right to play DVDs wherever you want. How about NeXTos, OS/2, dunno about BeOS, PalmOS (yeah, right, I know), etc? How about "fair use"? It's nice that Linux will be able to play DVDs, but the MPAA well knows that you can keep most people happy by giving them baubles, not rights.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
It seems like there are a few problems with DeCSS, like that it was partially based on Xing's player against a perhaps effective click-through license, and that it was packaged in a way that effectively made it a piracy tool.
An unenforceable click-through license that is also probably illegal in several countries as it does'nt respect the consumers' rights. It does'nt take a lawyer to guess that there must be a few countries where trying to impose an illegal clause to the contractee is illegal in itself.
As a sidenote, drifting topics: I was wondering about the comments I've read lately re: the GPL being unenforceable as no money were changing hands. First of all, were that true, click-through licenses would be even weaker than that, and even shrinkwrap licenses for that matter (you pay BEFORE you're able to read the license, and even when you're allowed to read it, it's so unpractical that it must be on shaky legal grounds). And then, the GPL states clearly "since you have not signed [this license] However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works."
By current copyright law, anything you publish is under your copyright, and therefore falls under its restrictions, namely that you can claim rights to derivative works and distribution. As such distribution and modification are usually prohibited, it's foolish to claim you are not aware of the rest of the provisions in it as soon as you start exercising them.
I wonder how you intend to stop EVERYONE from buying DVDs.
This is just silly. Nowhere in his "60's rant" did he claim to be able to "stop EVERYONE from buying DVDs." You can't even stop everyone from espousing completely rediculous points of view such as neo-nazism or pro-Microsoft FUD, much less take on a huge, well entrenched and well financed trust of media conglomerates.
The poster is encouraging those of us who care enough about this issue to be concerned to not fall for a closed-source trap which will allow the aforementioned trust of conglomerates to deflect public interest from the issues at hand, quite possibly undermine the DeCSS defense, and allow them to continue to dictate terms of usage to consumers in violation of the law[1].
Whether or not you agree with the views espoused, your characterization of his comments to mean he is out to force EVERYONE to abide by his views is simply absurd. He is trying to convince, not coerce. And an ever growing number of us are convinced.
[1]See previously posted legal arguments regarding how (a) the DVD CCA is an illegal trust, (b) how region coding is in violation of international trade law, and (c) how CSS prevents fair use, in direct violation of law in several countries including Germany.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
It seems like there are a few problems with DeCSS, like that it was partially based on Xing's player against a perhaps effective click-through license, and that it was packaged in a way that effectively made it a piracy tool.
... well, perform anatomically impossible actions. A server in a country outside the USA can host the CSS-Auth code, much like we downloaded secure crypto from non-USA sites.
I propose that 'we' should clean-room reverse engineer the spec. It should be just the CSS part, the minimum necessary to let a seperate player play the movie, specifically it shouldn't do any actual file access, or compile to a standalone program.
If we avoid any legal complications, such as possible license violations, or making it a tool to specifically break copyright, we should be alright.
And if it's against the DMCA, well, it's a USA law, and quite frankly, the MPAA can go
But, anyways, cleanly reverse engineer the code, make all details of the process and the end result public.
That way anyone can use it. I'd love to see hardware that ignores CSS. It'd rock to buy a DVD player that didn't just have region bypass, but didn't include the concepts of regions at all.
I will boycott DVDs (the movies on them, not the hardware, or writable, etc) until the MPAA gets the hell out of my business. What I watch, when I watch it, how I watch it, and in what 'region' I watch it is none of their business. I won't let them use my own technology against me.
And when I say 'we', I'm serious. I'm a coder, not the best, but pretty good. I've seen the source to DeCSS, so I shouldn't be involved in that segment, but I'm going to research clean-room reverse engineering to see how much can be known and still have it 'clean', and then I'll start to describe the process, to the best of my ability, for others to use. Supposedly the keys are easy to crack, even if you don't start with a specific key for plaintext, as long as you understand a few of their mistakes. This will be ideal, because starting with a player key might make it harder to claim it was cleanly reversed. In fact, if there's a way to automate this process, and get it down under a minute or so, every player could determine its own key by cracking the ones on the disk when first installed, thus meaning we don't have to actually distribute anything they could object to under international laws.
Anyone in Iraq willing to run a server? (If you can think of any country less willing to cooperate with pushy US megacorps, let me know.)
I don't know if I'm the only one with mixed reactions to this. On one hand it's nice to see a blessed player on the market, but at what cost?
Besides the fact that this is a binary for pay distro that probally won't work a couple kernel and library revisions down the line I'm more fearful of how this can damage the current MPAA cases.
The gov't case against Microsoft was hurt when Netscape was gobbled up by AOL. There's no question that the MPAA's next move will be to say "Hey there's Linux software now. There is no reason for anyone to have DeCSS. There is no reason for anyone to do any reverse engineering. Only hackers use DeCSS. And we all know hackers are Evil." And judging by the beating geeks have been taking in court I'm very fearful of the outcome.
it does nothing about the basic idiocy of CSS, and the ability of the MPAA to dictate where you watch movies, and what players you watch on.
Look at the basics of CSS, and you'll also realize that DIVX isn't dead it's just hiding. All you need is an Internet-connected DVD player with a RAM-based key.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
In your recent article about the protests in DC over the copyright act you quoted the MPAA as saying that "linux DVD players were available". I am dissapointed that the reporter failed to ask what players were available and then communicate that information to the protesters. More importantly, I feel that by omitting the fact that no DVD players for linux are presently available commercially the article was biased towards the MPAA and portrayed the protesters in an unfair light. I suspect your readers (like myself) would have been interested to know that no linux DVD player exists (legally) as a direct effect of the MPAA suing everyone who has created one.
I would like to request that you publish an addendum to the article noting that no linux DVD players *presently* exist. If you would like additional information about the current state of DVD use under linux, feel free to contact me. I would be happy to provide you with as much information as I have on the issue of linux DVDs. Thanks.
Anyone else think this quote is rather unfortunate? I really didn't think Linus would take this "Businessman's view" of the whole ordeal. Granted it's nice, but they've openly stated that a lot of their code won't be opensource, including the navigation code (which has no copyrights or other trade secrets attached to it AFAIK) Quite honestly, it seems to me that Linus might be losing a bit of his OpenSource Edge...
The release of an "MPAA blessed" DVD player for Linux is a bad thing. Here's why:
Most folks don't realize the underhanded tactics of regionalization and pay-for-CSS licensing. They only realize convenience and the 'poor hackers' inability to watch "The Matrix" on their Linux PCs.
The release of an 'official' DVD player for Linux makes it as convenient to watch DVD movies on Linux as it is on Win32. The 'poor hackes' should be satisfied by that - in the public eye.
The fact that regionalization and licensing of the ability to watch your (owned) movies is still there is not a convenience issue, so most people don't care. If the 'poor hackers' keep complaining about 'consumer rights', the MPAA cronies like CNN will just label us 'anarchists', mention kiddie-porn and bomb-making info that is to be found on-line....
Those 'nasty pervert hackers', always causing trouble...
This is not a step in the right direction. This is an MPAA maneuver to remove the one argument that speaks to the general public. What's needed is a FREE alternative on Win32, to show the masses that they do not have to pay to play DVDs.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Now, the article's suddenly been noticed as if it's Hot Headline News, Stop The Presses, and considered hot news, and everyone's commenting on the quote in the last paragraph as if they never saw it before. Oh well.
My take on Linus's quote: Well, Linus isn't RMS. He's never claimed to be. He's not the die-hard ideologue Stallman is--and he's no dummy, either.
Open-source or not, a Linux DVD player app is something that will nonetheless improve the viability of Linux as an alternate operating system. Like the similarly closed-source apps WordPerfect, StarOffice, and so forth, it provides yet another thing that Linux doesn't yet have--and presumably provides it in such a way that people like me, who never could manage to get the DeCSS player apps to work, will have something user-friendly that we can drop the DVD into and go. And that's a good thing for getting more people to use Linux rather than Windows.
Anyway, for all we know the Wired flacks could have cut Linus's quote, or reworded it, to leave out any mention of "I'd rather it be open source, but..." We all know how movie posters and boxes mangle quotes from film reviews to suit their purposes...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
This is an interesting situation; most of us seem to agree that the availability of proprietary DVD-playing software for Linux doesn't really cut it.
Now how do I explain this to my aunt?
Before we could just say that reverse-engineering CSS was necessary to enable us to create a Linux-compatible DVD player. With this no longer the case, we can now say "we need a free/open source DVD player"; but then we need to explain what "free" and/or "open source" mean, and it gets harder; a wrong choice of words could lead someone to believe (mistakenly) that, for example, we're just cheapskates who want everything for nothing.
So here's a challenge: who can come up with a single sentence, say no more than 20 words, which explains why a propietary DVD player for Linux is not sufficient?
Uh-huh, right. Try these scenarios on for size:
- there's no mention that the decoder will be supported for all of the major distributions, let alone minor or alternate language ones.
- What happens if the company is/goes public and a company such as the so-called evil empire (M$, AOL Time Warner, etc. ) buys enough stock to effectively control the decoder. They now effectively also have power to control my access (changing a closed spec, etc.) so as to render any investment I may have made in the DVD player and/or DVD's moot without my having a say so.
- Lastly, a closed source decoder means that I have no idea how well the decoder is written, whether it does other things (like tracking my usage patterns, etc.), how well it obeys system rules, does it work with all video cards, etc.
So thanks but no thanks. I'll vote with my money to continue the fight for a control free solution like deCSS.So if I don't happen to be running Linux on a main distribution,I'm still locked out of playing movies I paid for (if I were willing to buy CSS encoded DVDs in the first place, which I am not --I'm boycotting the damn MPAA until this thing is resolved).
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
<60s style rant>
... in some ways this makes the situation worse. DeCSS was designed to provide a means to create a linux dvd player. However now the battle is more important then the original problem was. The lawsuites and prosocution of innocent people has changed what the battle is over. It started over the desire for a linux dvd player, it has become a fight for some of our fundamental rights.
This seems to be a way for the opposition to change the focus of the battle. Soon you'll hear them say "see if all of the linux users had just been willing to wait they would have had a *legal* means of viewing their dvds." Now fewer people are going to think that DeCSS is important. Fewer voices means less real change. Less chance of our being able to defend ourselves in the future. The outcome of the whole DeCSS problem is more important then if a few people want to watch dvds on linux.
None of us should use this dvd player. Not a single one of us should even buy a dvd. If we do, we are supporting their efforts, their lawsuites, and their PACs. If we want change we have to hit them where it hurts in the pocketbooks. </60s style rant>
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
And not just that. As PC users, we want flexibility. I want to manipulate the video stream. I want to be able to stop a frame, capture it, and perhaps make a parody. In a film-making class, studying such things one frame at a time is one way of learning the craft.
There are just so many legitimate uses of DVD and digital media. I can't even think of all of them on the spot. To the MPAA: You never had any issue with how your movies are used. True, if we publish anything defamatory, you can sue. That not copyright law. Copyright law only extends to distribution, and many of are willing to abide my those laws! Who gave you the authority to dictate use terms upon us? Whatever gave you the authority to choose our OS for us?
And I am not even saying that this is an us-vs-you issue. By us I mean you too, in the future, when your future studios can't and won't be able to use these locked-in materials. Ever think about that? Don't tell me that the Warner-Fox-MGM-blah consortium will remain bed-fellows forever?