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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. :)
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
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! :)
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
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!"
--
> 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
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?
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!
"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
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?
Actually, I lauded the writer for researching both sides of the story. Probably 50% of the stories about DeCSS have been written by reading the Plaintiff's press releases; another 40% have been written by trying to get both sides but failing substantially; and maybe 10% have accurately portrayed the whole story. This story is in that last 10%, and I was happy.
I should probably avoid these sorts of throw-away one-liners in the future since it seems there's always someone in the slashdot audience who either doesn't read or doesn't parse what I said, or in some other way fails to understand.
I should note for the record that slashdot has had a number of story submissions for stories whose writers had failed to get the MPAA's side; that is, they were essentially rants and propaganda, but written from an anti-MPAA point of view. I wouldn't want to run those in the same way as I wouldn't want to run something written from MPAA press releases - they're both crap, IMHO.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
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.