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NYT On DeCSS Case
The New York Times has a nice summary of the DeCSS case and the issues at stake with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Reporter Amy Harmon managed to put together the facts correctly, probably because she didn't spend too much time talking to the plaintiff's lawyers. There's a nice picture of Emmanuel Goldstein and Macki from 2600.com (mislabeled as Jon Johansen). See our last story for transcripts and other info from the trial. (Last day to sign up to vote in the ICANN elections!) Update: 07/31 15:32 by michael : The NYT has changed out the single picture of Macki and Goldstein to two separate pictures of Johansen and Goldstein. It's good to know they read slashdot. :)
Because. The DMCA *specifically* says that publishing tools or information as to how to break something that effectively acts as a copyright contorl mechanism is *ILLEGAL*.
Is the DMCA bad? Yes. But it's currently LAW, and that's what they are being charged under.
It's the DMCA that needs to be attacked...
Is this just a non-unique acronym or is this reporter just friggin out of it?
Yes, it's a non-unique acronym. Divx and DiVX are 2 different things. You're apparently thinking of the failed encrypted DVD product, Divx. The article is talking about DiVX, the encoding method that is being used much like the mp3 encoding method to create video files that are smaller and easier to transfer over the net. As I understand it, and I'm sure everyone can tell that I have only sketchy knowledge of what I'm talking about here, it can take a DVD movie and make it fit on a CD or 2 with some loss of quality.
I'm going to ignore the rant and skip to the end now.
Anyways, anyone up for buying out an island, set up our own government with no IP or anti-hacking laws, and filling it with anonymous relay machines? Just to piss these assholes off?
Wouldn't last long. It'd be declared a "rogue nation" and bombed into oblivion or at least occupied by US or UN troops who would shut down all the servers.
They are on OUR TURF :-) Computer networks are ours. We design them, we build them, we maintain them. The geniuses trying to figure out how to keep the masses happy are still trying to figure out fucking wordperfect 5.0.
The problem with your thinking here is the "we" part. Geeks are not of a single mind. They have beliefs that range all over the place, from heavily structured and moralistic to completely anarchistic, and everything in between. Many of them are probably actively working against what you want. They do this because it fits with their beliefs and/or the money is really good.
This is why you don't see any "geek political party" of any significance. Most geeks are either politically inactive (i.e. they mostly bitch about the government but don't really do anything about it), or have taken up with the existing party that most closely shares their beliefs, or they just vote for whomever they think will do the least damage, regardless of party. It may be possible to get a large enough portion of geeks to agree on a few things and perhaps form a lobbying group, but not a political party.
As long as one country either doesn't ban or enforce one of these bullshit laws, we're safe.
Again, same problem as with the island. If you don't play by the big boys' rules, you lose. Of course you lose if you do play by them too, but at least that way they don't beat the crap out of you afterwards. Once the US and EU corporations and governments finish stitching up their control over the masses, they'll be looking to enforce their rules internationally. This will either make it impossible, or at least prohibitively expensive for people to run offshore servers. Countries would be coerced into obeying through the use of sanctions, and possibly the threat of force. The government can always contrive some excuse to bomb someone.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Analogies are like when you try to spread jam on toilet paper.
Slander isn't protected speech, but most potentially offensive things on television, including vulgar language, are.
I'd like to hear from someone else who knows about this though.
In the case of the gun there is no law that says explaining how it works is illegal. So it goes to the default state in English Common law of legal. In the case of DeCSS there is a relitavly new law on the books that seems to say it is illegal. The judge must take that law into account. They can decide that that law conflicts with this other law, and is invalid, or that it conflicts with the other law and the other law is invalid. Or that it conflicts with the constuition ("the highest law") and is invalid. Very rarely is it ever decided that the constutition is invalid (WWI or WWII had such a case). They may even be able to decide that law clearly wasn't intended to apply here, and set it aside. They can (must?) also take into account how other courts have ruled in other relivent cases.
Now if you ask me, it's a stupid law. But I'm not sure what grounds the judge has to overturn it without deciding the free speech protections apply to code, and are compellingly stronger. That just may be a hard road to hoe for this judge.
I don't know. It took many years for the encryption case to decide source code was expressave, and protected as speach. Maybe it takes a few months for this judge to realise that an incomprensable (to him/her) string of nonsense words, english words, and oddly used punctuation is really speach, especally when it also has a functional use (i.e. both speach and an action, or at least both speach and a tool). Maybe they are being rightly conservitave in mulling it over before they decide. It is a major deal after all. It grants a lot of pretection to code, and will make it very hard to regulate in the future.
"I cracked the CSS code and all i got was this lousy T-Shirt."
=)
You know, it's almost funny that I pointed out this story, at a time just before all this exploded.
It was a good point then, too. Check it out.
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
"corporations have been enthroned . . . . An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people . . . until wealth is aggregated in a few hands . . . and the republic is destroyed." - Abraham Lincoln
It's all being masterminded by Honest Abe!
Seriously though, go read this:
http://adbusters.org/magazine/28/usa.html
It should give you a better idea of what motivates the anti-corporate movement (which is not strictly leftist by the way).
what the movie companies are totally failing to realize is that most people aren't going to start watching movies on ther pc's. most people want to kick back on their overstuffed couch, put their feet up, pop a can o' miller and watch a flick on the >19" boob tube, not sit in an office chair and watch a so-crystal-clear-it's sterile movie on their 17' monitor. there's something to be said for the fuzzy overwarm color tones of a good vcr/dvd console player plugged into a regular tv, and i don't think the average consumer has enough time, energy, or patience to rig up a scan converter or start burning VCD's of pirated movies, no matter how much bandwidth they have (where greater bandwidth= more rampant piracy). besides, last i checked, a program like astarte's m,pack for turning mpegs into burnable vcd streams cost $695. the people who pay $695 so they can watch a crappy handycam rendition of the matrix at vcd quality--the mpaa isn't going to ever stop them.
what the mpaa needs to focus on is having dvd permeate the media universe: removal of region codes so that consumers can purchase and playback dvd's anywhere, sanctioned playback software for every platform, dvd-roms that serves a purpose other than slick self-promotion, etc, etc. allowing dvd to be more widespread will make it the consumer's first choice in media, sidestepping piracy concerns. after all, it's going to be a while before the price of burning a dvd comes down to casual pricay levels, a la cd-r.
london is drowning and i live by river
What about the "seven dirty words?"
Go Here
Emerson Willowick: Thinker, Writer, Human Being.
There is a difference between trolling, which is merely annoying, and posting someone's physical location online. Expect not only to be bitchslapped, but to be fed to the legal hounds as well.
With that in mind, his job is to uphold the law and the new law is DMCA, like it or not. He even mention that, if the DMCA conflicts with prior laws, like anti-trust laws, then the DMCA must take precedence in those areas since it is newer.
My prediction: He'll rule that 2600 violated no laws by posting the code under freedom of the press and speech, but that any use of code that gets around CSS is a violation of the law, therefore any use of DeCSS is actionable, including putting chunks of it in any LIVID software.
He'll then sternly warn the MPAA that they better make licenses available for LIVID if they intend that the appelate courts take them seriously.
The one thing I didn't see that was missing was any testimony about the importance of "free" (speech) software. Those of you who hate the FSF better stand up and notice. Binary-only DVD players may end up being available for our fave free *NIX distros, and they may even be free (beer), but they won't be free (speech) and there won't be any free (speech) DVD players available, at least in the U.S., without breaking the law -- and that issue didn't come up in the trial.
Then we'll all be further split into factions and have further arguments about whether DVD players should be in any *NIX distro, why Debian is anal, and on and on. Then we'll see even more binary-only releases or even more "open source" with restrictive redistribution agreements due to license agreements to comply with patents and DMCA issues.
Then again, I could be wrong! :)
Two I can remember off the top of my head that came out _very_ early in the format's life:
... er... 6 I think.
Naked Gun 2 1/2
Star Trek
The liked the idea of cheaper manufacturing. CDs cost pennies, but video cassettes are a pain to make. Moving parts, after all.
It never really took off in this country (UK) but they tried.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Jon Johansen, above left, of Norway, helped develop computer code to crack encrypted DVD's that Eric Corley, above right, posted on his Web site.
Nice of the reporter to use the English language in an ambiguous way. I wonder if anyone checked 2600's site for DVDs? :)
Best regards,
SEAL
Anyone else notice the picture of the t-shirt with the DeCSS code on it... Looks like the New York Times is doing what 2600/Emanuel Goldstein is being taken to court over. Funny how that works.
Ok. Good enough so far.
If code were to be protected as free speech, and law is implemented in code, that opens the door for unjust and unethical laws to be passed (written) and subsequently protected by the first amendment.
Here is where your reasoning is flawed. Laws are written in a particular style of English that is intended to be as disambigous as possible while still retaining some semblence of clarity. Even if laws *were* implemented in code, how would that cause any problems? Laws can be reviewed --- They would just be more difficult to review in code. I doubt any legistlative body would accept code in law, however.
Besides, one can take the view that law is already a type of code. :)
Its the collision of two lawyerly views of code, and the result is quite a mess.
That, at least, I agree with.
You can advise the Copyright Office: submit a comment in the upcoming discussion of first sale and archival copying and the DMCA. The EFF has a copy of the Request for Comments. Comments are due this Friday at 5 p.m.
The first sale doctrine (17 U.S.C. s 109) states that a copyright owner cannot prohibit resale of a copy of a work he has sold, and has traditionally been read to imply that copyright owners cannot control the uses of those sold copies. Does the Digital Millennium Copyright Act give publishers persistent, after-sale control of their works, or should first sale still limit that power?
FWIW, I argue that the loss of control on first sale is an integral part of the constitutional copyright balance that that DMCA cannot abrogate. In exchange for copyright protection on published works, the copyright holder must give public access. (And yes, if they're not willing to give us that access in digital media, studios should keep publishing in analog.)
Join us at Openlaw/DVD for more discussion of the DeCSS cases and these broader copyright issues.
-- Openlaw: Fighting for fair use and the public domain
Since this is an appeals court case, I would think it has some influence on other circuits. In a circuit that has not ruled on similar issues, the courts commonly look at decisions from other circuits. If the circuit has ruled on the same issue, they will usually rely on their own decisions.
But in all cases, the courts will do what they want. If they feel their previous decisions don't hold anymore, they will ignore it.
Fight Spammers!
1) they didn't mention that css DOES NOT actually prevent copying at all!!!
2) they missed that before decss anyone that wanted to play a dvd had to buy dvd player from a company that bought a license from css in order to reproduce the the css algorithm. this licensing scheme is what the mpaa is really trying to protect by claiming css is copyright protection.
The wild card may be Professor Touretzky's testimony, which Judge Jackson said was "extremely persuasive."
Judge Jackson? Wrong case, lady.
--
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
I see one flaw in this argument, not all expression is protected by the first amendment! I can not say certain words and broadcast them over the television. Granted, posted to a web site is not the same as broadcasting, but it's getting awfully close (esp. with the ongoing convergence)
The web is different from broadcast media in one important way. Broadcast media is limited by the number of available channels. As a result, channels are allocated and licensed to serve the public good (that's the actual wording of the statute). The FCC will yank a license for repeated obscenity.
The web does not have the same limitations. As the Supreme Court recognized in upholding the unconstitutionality of the CDA. The web allows anyone to step up and publish their opinion. It is like a streetcorner where you can set up your own soapbox to express your opinions.
Judge Kaplan appears to be struggling with the speech aspects of DeCSS. In the transcripts, he admits that he dosn't have a category of speech that has been dealt with before. Shouting "Fire" in a crowded theatre, burning draft cards, burning flags, the Pentagon Papers are all speech issues where the courts have attempted to balance the First Amendment with public interests. The result of those cases is the "compelling government interest" test. If the government has a "compelling interest" in the speech, it can regulate it but only if it does so in the least intrusive means possible. By those standards, it is impossible for the DCMA to be constitutional if it means what the MPAA claim it means.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
This is slashdot, and I guess that means we can't expect article posters like michael to be the picture of impartial journalists. However, we shouldn't condemn them as such, because we should expect them to be slightly biased in certain ways and the fact that there is discussion about the articles offsets that. The discussion offsets the perils of less than completely unbaised journalism in kind of the same way I felt about running into an old friend of mine at her place of employment today. She hasn't heard much about the DMCA but thinks it's still a good idea despite the way it's being used as a legal baseball bat clobbering relatively harmless programs like DeCSS.
Would you have forseen the proliferation of FREE music as has been the case with mp3s? The MPAA is just looking out for their future, and the DMCA is really the only legal option they have to prevent them from having to wage a legal war against piracy on many fronts like the RIAA is up to now. I never want to take my dog for a walk in the middle of a good movie, but I'd gladly hit the pause button on an xmms session with a playlist chok full of hundreds of both legal and illegally obtained mp3s. I don't have any mp3s that are freely downloadable except for a few songs from a local band, but I do have some mp3s that I copied myself from CDs (so I would have my music in a more convienient format for me despite a decrease in quality). Those are legal under fair use. However, the DMCA might also be used to render even this as illegal as one might see that even an audio CD has some properties that might be seen as anti-copying features. I still might not even take the dog for a walk even when I'm just listening to Abbey Road (I wouldn't want to interrupt that).
It is also interesting to see FreeBSD get mentioned in the mainstream news. It doesn't seem to exist in the eyes of the mainstream press who seem to love Linux like RMS himself. Doesn't anybody realize that DeCSS can be used with FreeBSD as well? The whole non-existant stature of FreeBSD with the general media is much like the way things don't exist in the real world to some people unless they're archived in text form somewhere on the internet to be burried in the bowels of google.com somewhere.
What is important here is that people who buy and watch DVDs are aware that they may soon be in danger of losing some of their rights to watch those movies. Even people who don't have DVD players on their computers must realize this. I would like to have a DVD player in my car for when I spend hours driving on boring endless featureless freeway (read "Michigan").
Ah come on, everybody knows that real doctors and nurses never swear. "Doctor, the patient just had a copulating hear attack!" "Excrement, we have to do something about it! Give me the sanguinolent electric shock!" "Doctor, it's intercoursing broken! " "Shame on it, who the non heaven broke it? Call me that penetrating intern!"
--
Sometimes Jon Katz doesn't look that bad eh? At least he doesn't pretend to be an impartial journalist type.
sig:
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
> I'm writing a script in Perl (using RecDescent) that translates C code to English sentences that correctly describe what the original C code does.
You should also write an "English compiler" that translates the resulting English back to C, or better yet straight to machine code.
Indeed, it should be possible to define a subset of English as a "structured English" that works as a programming language. Most programmers would not like it because of the extra keystrokes (e.g., "times" or "multiplied by" for "*"), but it would be a fun exercise (for a sufficiently warped geek), and it would make a nice point about code-as-speech.
Heck, COBOL isn't too far from what I have described.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I've been working with Lingo a lot recently. It's Macromedia's scripting language, used in Director. I understand Applescript looks about the same.
Lingo is very wordy, using English word structure instead of more concise notation in many cases. For instance, what in many languages would be stated as "mySprite.visible=0" is stated in Lingo as "set the visible of mySprite to false". (There are shortcuts, though. The "set" may be omitted, the "to" may be replaced with "=", the "false" with "0", and in the most recent version of Director, the dot notation is recognised as well so "mySprite.visible=0" is valid lingo code now.)
Lingo is meant to be easy to pick up by people with little or no programming experience. I thought I'd hate it because of the wordiness, but I actually didn't. The large number of characters you need to type to express your intent is offset by the fact that they're mostly alphabetic and your typing isn't slowed much. I imagine a good typist (which I'm not) will actually type Lingo code much faster than the equivalent C or perl code, even if they're used to typing C or perl.
It would be interesting to know how the code-is-expression debate would have turned out if Lingo had been the reference language instead of C.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
One statement stood out as demonstrating the contempt the MPAA lawyers have for the very law they are trying to use as a weapon.
(Paraphrased) The plantiff showed three pictures - of source code, a binary representation of object code, and a tee-shirt with the same source code. The plantiff's lawyers asserted that if the judge found any of these three presentatives non-expressive, he must find all three presentations non-expressive.
The problem, of course, is that programmers rarely work in object code. That work is usually reserved for *very* old systems where source code OR COMPILERS are no longer available.
Emphasis added for a simple reason: OBJECT CODE IS A DERIVED WORK. Nobody (except the MPAA, apparently) claims that a work can only be conderered "expressive" if every possible derived use is equally expressive. Needless to say, I'm sure that they will argue that this rule doesn't apply to their own product. (Visions of various "derived uses" of videotapes and MPAA lawyers running through my head...)
To ask an obvious (to any programmer) rhetorical question, let's assume that the MPAA lawyer is correct. Let's now take the tee-shirt and obscure a single semicolon with pizza drippings. Are we to believe that *poof* the First Amendment Fairies have now touched the shirt and made it expressive since the code no longer compiles into object code - and that the other coders in the room will suddenly turn in shock to the sloppy eater and gasp as they suddenly understand the message?!
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Without reading the story, you can tell what side the NY Times is leaning towards-- just by looking at the pictures. Photographers take pictures from below looking upwards when they want to imply that something is powerful or dominating.. If you look at the picture of Emmanuel, that's exactly the position they took the picture from. Then on the other hand, you've got Mr. Gold frowning and pointing. Not a very flattering picture, eh? I'm not complaining, though...
My prediction: He'll rule that 2600 violated no laws by posting the code under freedom of the press and speech, but that any use of code that gets around CSS is a violation of the law, therefore any use of DeCSS is actionable, including putting chunks of it in any LIVID software.
I agree with you that he has to rule that 2600 is in the clear for posting DeCSS. But wether its use is a violation of the law is still open to interpretation. The law says that any device used to break an "access control" measure. That term is still very ambiguous, but in my interpretation CSS is not access control, it is use control. What is access control? Access control is the sharp-eyed clerk who makes sure you don't walk off with the DVD from the store, the fancy security systems. It is the scrambling of pay-per-view cable channels. It is NOT the encryption of data on a DVD that has been purchased. The DVD is in my possetion - I paid for it! I already have "access".
I sincerely hope they will find that access is better defined as above, and not the overbroad way the MPAA seems to think.
Free speech allows anyone to learn how to conduct biological warfare.
where to find anthrax.
how to collect it.
how to cultivate it.
how to "distribute" it: suggestions on what quantities to use, how to adjust given the weather conditions.
need to make a pipe bomb?
Freedom of speech will put humanity on the line but is waived protect the CSS code.
this isn't even the decss code, but the code that allowed decss to become.
well ... too bad humanity doesn't have the lawyers that the dvd coorporations hired.
now where do i insert this bacteria?
There's also the matter of what a set of words does. Using words to commit a crime (by trying to bribe an official, say) is illegal. Similarly, using code to commit a crime (by distributing, but hopefully not by writing, viruses) will not fall under the 1st amendment.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Source code is a set of instructions. In the case of DeCSS, it's instructions for how to decrypt a movie. Again, you might be doing that for legal or illegal reasons.
Why did the judge have such difficulty finally realizing there might be a reason to protect this form of speech? It's simply a set of instructions, like many others - and it's not even lethal.
What about the "seven dirty words?"
I think it's just an informal guideline. Every once and awhile they break it, like one episode of "ER" said sh*t. If you just go around spewing profanity the advertisers will stop buying ads from you though, not to mention getting flamed by moral people (they're so cute!). All the channels that do spew profanity, like HBO, don't have any ads. Maybe some states have laws about the dirty 7 though, probably Texas.
You should also write an "English compiler" that translates the resulting English back to C, or better yet straight to machine code.
That comes next.
Firstly, what do they mean by "The movies would be sent over the Web with new data-compressing software known as Divx?" Is this just a non-unique acronym or is this reporter just friggin out of it?
Alright RANT mode on.
Secondly, between all this legal bullshit over computer software use on the internet, snooping with carnivore, and basically the constant harassment of geeks by the pools of the ignorant, how long do they expect us to take this? We are the ones who created this network.
Whenever these fools find some little problem, some hype pusher^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hreporter goes buck wild. Porn shown to little kiddies? Give me a fucking break. Welcome to the real world assholes!! But, if you want a solution, try Content-Type: text/html-adult. (That's the jist of an idea I had on the top of my head with no thinking. Please don't try replying with too many plusses/minuses.)
What's going to make me laugh the hardest is when ISPs start realizing the easiest way around this carnivore bullshit is SSL atop of SMTP :-) Or, it'll just push crypto into the MUA. Whee! Way to go fools, you just made your job harder. Don't push us, you don't know what's going on and we do. End of story.
When the gloves come off between the free speechers (who are the most american at the end of the day over these big brother information invasion nazis), and the clueless paranoid (unfortunately the most dangerous and common), do they really think we don't have a solution?
What really gets me is how intellectual property must be protected at all costs EXCEPT when it's private. My email is free territory but I can't store a copy of santana that's played on the fucking radio? OH FUCK YOU.
Ok.. RANT mode off
Anyways, anyone up for buying out an island, set up our own government with no IP or anti-hacking laws, and filling it with anonymous relay machines? Just to piss these assholes off?
If not, remember this my fellow geeks: They are on OUR TURF :-) Computer networks are ours. We design them, we build them, we maintain them. The geniuses trying to figure out how to keep the masses happy are still trying to figure out fucking wordperfect 5.0.
Oh, and we are GLOBAL. Laws passed here do not apply everywhere else. Welcome to the land of offshore servers. As long as one country either doesn't ban or enforce one of these bullshit laws, we're safe. Luckily, there is much chaos out there and big brother isn't that big.
--
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
One side claims that these hackers will be making movies available on the internet. The otherside makes it look like no program will be able to work anything.
The t-shirt and other images of the code was a good trial trick.
I thought that the protectability of computer source code was established with the PGP case.
Fight Spammers!
The reporter mentioned that DeCSS or other programs could be used to rip DVDs. I wish that it had been made crystal clear to the lay audience that programs had existed for quite a while before DeCSS that could rip the content and put it into another format.
They worked by stealing the decrypted content as it was being sent to the video card.
So the main thing that DeCSS adds to the mix is that it allows more fair use. The infringing uses of DeCSS were already possible prior to DeCSS!
Why didn't they go after the earlier programs?
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
"I see this as having a chilling effect on my ability as a computer scientist to express myself," Professor Touretzky said. He was referring to the court's preliminary injunction that barred a Web site from posting the underlying, or source, code for the cracking program. "If the court upholds this injunction, what would happen is that certain uses of computer language -- my preferred means of expression -- would be illegal."
Wow... now that it is a very cool argument for freedom of expression! I must say that is clever indeed. C as a preferred means of expression. I see one flaw in this argument, not all expression is protected by the first amendment! I can not say certain words and broadcast them over the television. Granted, posted to a web site is not the same as broadcasting, but it's getting awfully close (esp. with the ongoing convergence)
kick some CAD
The thing that I found intriguing in the article was the mention of the object code printed on the T-shirt. If 2600 really wants to emphasize the free-speech aspects of this whole issue, they ought to start selling T-shirts with the DeCSS source code printed on them, along with the URLs of the sites offering DeCSS. Let the MPAA try to get that stopped under the DMCA.
Ms. Peters has been weighing arguments by copyright holders who contend they will have no incentive to produce digital material without the assurance of such protection
:
.h, .c, .java files, and binary executables, ISN'T protected?
:
Conversation between Big Media and their programmer consultant, circa 1990
Big time Author / MPAA bigwig / RIAA fatcat
"We'll produce digital material if and only if it is protected by the first amendment and copyright law."
Programmer:
Sounds good. But isn't it hypocritical that YOUR media, when changed into 1's and 0's, is protected, but MY media, which, in the form of
But that would also mean that the digital algorithm used to encrypt your format ISN'T protected, meaning anyone can flat out copy it and distribute it. Rampant piracy wound ensue.
Big time Author / MPAA bigwig / RIAA fatcat
You're right. All digital media should be protected.
Programmer :
In that case, The "hackers" will just reverse engineer your algorithm under fair use and as before, distribute it.
Did anyone guess what the industry fatcats said next?
If you said "Buy legislation that eliminates fair use from digital media" You've correctly identified the DMCA! BOB, TELL THEM WHAT THEY'VE WON!
"If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?" -- Will Rogers
According to the article the companies keep complaining they would have no incentive to produce in a digital format. It occurs to me, after only taking a year of economics, that their incentive isn't protection, but consumer demand -- even if they're not afforded protection, if consumers demand it, the company will fulfill that need or die. They shouldn't need protection incentives, in fact they don't, this is merely a rouse under which to hide from the truth -- they want movies played on players THEY sanction (and probably own a portion of and/or license the technology for). Just my two cents.
--
I'm writing a script in Perl (using RecDescent)
/dev/null.
that translates C code to English sentences that correctly describe what the original C code does.
Here is an early version, which at the moment I am abandoning since it became unwieldy by my neophyte knowledge of Perl. Run it against whatever code you feel like. Set STDERR to
Here is my currently worked on version. (Not even close to running just yet).
"Without the guarantee of that protection, a Warner Brothers executive testified in court, the industry would never have begun releasing movies in digital format."
Then why doesn't Warner Brothers sue the MPAA (or dvdcca) for selling them a dodgy protection mechism that could never have worked? They did get that "guarantee" they're talking about, right?
No matter how hard you try, you can't prevent people from making perfect copies of digital data. You can however prevent people from reading it if you have a brain to use encryption properly (why the heck are they making keys available before people are allowed to use them?)
http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~rheise/
It seems that the judge and others in this case have a hard time thinking of code as being expressive. It seems to me that the courts and the law have already overwhelmingly decided that it is expressive. Why? We allow copyright's on computer programs. Do we allow copyrights on objects which are purely functional? No. Copyright is reserved for things which are artistic or expressive, correct?
If the court feels that code is simply a tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver, why is it that code is deserving of copyright protection when hammers are not? And isn't a DVD just a program? Why does it get first amendment protection, even though by the judges own logic it isn't artistic or expressive?
The simple fact is that virtually 100% of the market and legal realities surrounding computer code treat it as expressive content deserving of both first amendment and copyright protection. It's only when a powerful interest decides to do something just plain wrong for it's own benefit does this stupid argument come up. Last time it was in the case of export restrictions on encryption. Now with the MPAA trying desparately to eliminate fair-use.
If code in non-artistic and non-expressive, I'm sure the MPAA won't mind me distributing an mpeg decoder source which #includes "matrix-vob.h", right?
He'll rule that 2600 violated no laws by posting the code under freedom of the press and speech, but that any use of code that gets around CSS is a violation of the law, therefore any use of DeCSS is actionable, including putting chunks of it in any LIVID software.
Sorry to comment yet again on this topic, but I was reading this post on the OpenLaw forum which says that DeCSS is not a circumvention device after all!!
As I understand it, a DVD contains 2 pieces of information: the actual movie, or video, which is encrypted with CSS and needs a key to decrypt. The key needed for is called the "title key" which is also stored on the DVD, and encrypted differently. To access the title key, one needs a "player key" such as the one in the Xing player.
If you recall the wording of the DMCA, it outlaws anything that circumvents effective measures to controll access to a work. But what DeCSS does is it circumvents the encryption on the title key, bypassing the need for a player key, and then uses the title key to decrypt the movie. Therefore, it is not circumventing measures to control access to the work, but measures to control access to the title key. Note how this is not against the DMCA, because it is preposterous to claim copyright over a particular large number... and the key itself is on the DVD, and signals the authorization of the copyright holder to access the work!!!
Unfortunately for us, I've read most of the transcripts of the case and I don't think this point came out in any of the evidence. It might be useful on appeal, if nothing else.
If law is written in code, then law is a specific subset of code (code > law && code != law). While the actual code of a law may be first amendment protected, it may not violate the first amendment itself (or any other part of the constitution) to become law. ie: You can scream it from the hilltops, you can say it over and over again, but it cannot become law because it violates the first amendment.
-- iCEBaLM
What would really be great to make the real issues apparent is for some consumer electronics manufacturer to produce a standard DVD player. But, instead of getting a CSS license, they could use the source to DeCSS.
Right now, the reality is that a program like DeCSS can be used to pirate DVD's. That makes it easy to paint it with the "evil" brush. However, if there was a hardware DVD player that was functionally just like an "authorized" DVD player, they couldn't use that tact. Provide an Apex-like menu to disable the region controls (but NOT macrovision), and the MPAA would be forced to admit that CSS and DMCA go far beyond copying and piracy.
Let's take the fictional scenario a bit further. Acme Inc makes a DVD player that is just like all the other home players, but doesn't include region controls. It also doesn't have a CSS license. Let's further suppose that the MPAA takes them to court for DMCA violations. What would the arguments look like in this case? If the MPAA said that CSS was an anti-copying mechanism, the question becomes why does Acme Inc. have to use it if you aren't copying the DVD? If they try to claim that the player is a piracy tool, you could point out that it doesn't enable piracy any more than a Sony or RCA DVD player.
So what would this player be doing that's "wrong"? Nothing. Well, almost nothing. By not having region controls, it's a way around the artificial trade barriers that the MPAA are enforcing to enrich themselves. And so the real issue would come to light before the customers. It's not about piracy. It's not about copying. It's about the DMCA being used as a shelf to place arbitrary rules and restrictions on. If this trial was about the MPAA's right to disable the FF button on your DVD player during ads, and the MPAA's right to restrict free trade via region encoding, the public's opinion of the MPAA and the DMCA might be a little less rosy.
Great, I wouldn't mind something like LIVID with a CSS license. It'd be an open source player with closed-source modules. You could remove their closed-source modules and put DeCSS in its place. All the code to play the MPEG stream, etc, would be there, all you'd need to do would be remove their code for decrypting the disks and locking certain controls...
And because the control locking code gets its information from the decryption code, you'd just not implement the part where it tells the player to not allow skipping this track...
I got into DVD decryption when I bought The Mummy and Sixth Sense, both of which come with forced commercials. I swore at that point that I wouldn't buy another DVD until there was a player that ignored those restrictions. Until then, I was neutral or anti DVD-piracy, but now, I figure whatever the MPAA gets, they deserve. If they'd made CSS to stop piracy and nothing more, then I'd side with them, but they used it for this stupid zone control, and to force people to watch trailers and adds... Now I'm turning my friends onto things like DeCSS (in the form of Vobdec and FlaskMPEG, etc). The only issue is the freedom to use the media we own in the fashion we desire.
(If anyone is going to reply and say "You don't own it...", smack yourself upside your head. The only proponents of that belief are the studios themselves. like the only companies saying EULAs are binding are the software companies.)
I would make a distinction here. I believe they are legally in the right, but not morally in the right. The real problem is bad copyright laws.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I'm not sure any court is going to want to split hairs like that. If the MPAA claims that the title key is part of their "access control system," the court is unlikely to override their claim. Therefore, compromising the title key would be considered circumvention.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer