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Amicus Brief in DeCSS case
e271828 writes "Brian Kernighan, Marvin Minsky, Ron Rivest, and Richard Stallman are among the CS stalwarts that have jointly filed an amici curiae brief supporting the EFF and 2600. The brief, hosted on Cryptome makes for excellent reading." This is to accompany the appeal that we mentioned a few days ago.
A friend of mine couldn't find a free player for Windows, either. There are several software DVD players for Linux now, albeit not with the most efficient software decoders.
If you really don't want to pay for a shareware player, it looks like your only option is to download a DVD ripper (I think FlaskMPEG+DeCSS is the only choice if you don't already have a DVD player software) and make DivX copies of those movies. You can then get the codec installed in Windows (and Linux, thanks to the avifile Wine loader hackery) for free.
But with all the noise about this case I would think they were fighting something "REAL", not just some source code sippets.
Get on an OpenNAP server, search for "divx". There are hundreds of ripped movies out there, although bandwidth is still precious enough that people will only let you trade, not freeload. (Or is fear of authority the problem? Hell, I'm nervous enough to post anonymously and I don't even have any pirated movies)
The MPAA is scared as hell. Thanks to Blockbuster's "DVD per night" rental card and CD-Rs it costs about a dollar to rip a DVD movie. Thanks to cable modems it costs about a dollar more (or zero marginal cost, for people who would get a cable modem anyway and only trade a couple movies per day) to send a copy of that rip across the country. That's a fraction of what the movie would cost otherwise, and only a fraction of that goes to the producers through Blockbuster.
Don't get me wrong, it's still not enough reason to stomp on the First Amendment, but if they weren't trying to destroy fair use rights I'd actually be sympathetic.
I seem to recall a case in the 1800s involving counterfeit music rolls for player pianos. Judgement was something to the effect that, machine-read documents could be protected under copyright law the same as human-read ones.
That judgement, I also seem to remember, WAS the standard by which computer software was allowed to be copyrighted up until the next major reform in copyright law sometime in the 1980s.
Now I want to go a step further. Machine language and people language are equivalent for copyright purposes - otherwise software, and for that matter, the MPEG streams contained on a DVD, can't be protected by copyright! But the MPAA, which THRIVES on the fact that machine and human languages are equivalent under copyright law, wants to separate the two under the First Amendment - and it's gonna be damn hard for them to demonstrate LEGALLY (not financially) why they should be allowed to have it both ways.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
about a ISP that is not backing down to the MPAA threats
news.com
good timing
http://Lenny.com
You obviously don't know much about how the US judicial system works.
Civil suits are between two parties. Everyone else is an observer, even if it's clear to everyone involved that the plantiff carefully searched for a defendant who 1) didn't have many resources to fight the case and 2) seemed to have the best case for establishing broad precedents.
Once the judgement comes down against the plantiff the details don't matter - the precedence has been established and every subsequent court case in this jurisdiction must consider it. (I won't get into binding vs. non-binding precedents, etc.) This is a powerful tool for suppressing dissent, since every future defendant must prove why the precedence doesn't apply in their case.
Needless to say, this create a HUGE potential for mischief. To balance it, courts allow others affected by any precedence established, but not involved in the specific case, to file briefs that may be considered by the court. These briefs usually illuminate points that one party doesn't want brought up - and the other party *can't* bring up because of the rules of the courtroom. This might result in a reversed judgement, or at least the restriction of the judgement to be non-precedent setting.
The MPAA may be fuming about the content of this brief, but there's not a whole lot they can do about it. Any attempt to suppress it would merely serve to highly just how carefully constrained their case is -- and why it must not be used to establish precedence for suppressing such publications.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I paid attention in civics class. If you think I have no right to discuss this (and potentially learn from others) then you believe that either 1) voters are best when ignorant and apathetic or 2) that only practicing lawyers should have the right to vote. Either way, you are no friend of democracy.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
This link should work better than the one at the top of the page.
It's a good brief, and it's especially worth reading if you think no lawyer can write anything except impenetrable jargon.
One of its great strengths is the way in which it tries to connect the subject of the case, First Amendment protection for source code, with things judges know about. Judges (and lawyers) for that matter tend to resist learning about technology. Even if they're willing, they have little opportunity. So you have to talk about it in the way they understand.
Early in the brief, we get a couple of lines of Visual Basic. They wouldn't do much in real life, but they illustrate the point. My favorite part of the brief is footnote 4, which compares source code to legal citation: each is impenetrable to outsiders, but each is a clean, compact, and efficient representation, which is transparent to people who speak the language.
The only thing that makes me sad is that I doubt the court will recognize the weight attached to the names on the brief. We all recognize names like Kernighan, Minsky, and Stallman but there's really no way to communicate that weight to an outsider. It's like those newspaper ads demanding that Mumia be released from jail and appointed dictator-for-life--there's lots of names signed at the bottom, and some of them are connected to impressive institutions, but I suspect that they're adjuncts, or junior assistant professors, or leaders of impressively-named organizations that don't do anything because these people invented them.
I keep seeing people on /. saying "use package foo and bar to watch DVDs under Linux".
People, I feel this is the wrong approach. Until I can use software that has NO legal cloud over its head, I refuse to buy DVDs, DVD players or DVD drives.
One of my machines at home threw a CDROM drive night before last. I went to buy another. I had a simple choice: buy a 50x CDROM drive for $X, or buy a 16x DVD drive for 2*$X. The cost delta meant next to nothing to me - either was an incidental, "do you want fries with that" type of purchase. I waffled briefly over buying the DVD drive, then said to myself, "HELL NO! I am NOT going to give the MPAA any satisfaction on this. I WILL stick to my guns, and wait until the DeCSS is held to be completely legal before I buy a DVD. And if that day never comes, then I will never buy a DVD."
I don't want to come off as an extremist, but this is the BEST way we can make the MPAA change their tune: hit them in the ass pocket. Don't buy their crap. Don't give them money. Encourage your friends to do the same.
Just say NO!
www.eFax.com are spammers
Very well reasoned and argued, as one would expect given the source.
Perhaps the most important quote:
That point cannot be made often enough. What the MPAA wants to do is use copyright in a way completely antithetical to the reason copyrights were granted to begin with.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
wow. this is a great example. blew me away.
4. If "$plain_text = $file_key ^ $xor_block" seems unapproachable, consider what those not trained in the language of legal citation would make of "111 F.Supp.2d 294, 326 (S.D.N.Y. 2000)." Each is meaningless to those unfamiliar with the language; but each is more precise and compact for those who do understand than would be an English narrative equivalent.
no
Do you have an MP3 collection? A directory full of your favorite music in a single easily-accessible place that lets you determine how, when, and where you listen to it?
Would you like to be able to do the same with movies someday, when the necessary storage space is cheap enough?
I'd like to keep that ability (and the right to exercise it without becoming a criminal). And that's why I oppose access-control schemes of all types. They simply don't do a thing for me as a consumer.
I don't like to see the Federal legislative process brought to bear against my fair-use rights. Unless action is taken on consumers' behalf, the lawmaking-by-payola charade that brought us the DMCA will only get worse.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Wait a minute let's get clear that there are two different kind of impacts.
Your father is dead right that in terms of the effect of the JUDGMENT, that only the parties are bound. That is, whether or not 2600 can put DeCSS on its web site is determined by the outcome of THIS CASE.
On the effect of PRECEDENT, that's part right. The trial judge's opinion has little precedential value. Some other trial judges might give it weight, or might not. Again, your father is right that it is not that big a deal for anyone else.
The place where this veers into the land of incorrectness is the impact that the APPEAL will have. This is to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. When the Second Circuit decides this case, that makes the law for all of the federal trial courts in the Second Circuit that includes NY. A federal trial judge in NY will look at the opinion and see one that he is bound to follow.
In addition, the Second Circuit is one of the most influential federal courts of appeal in the nation. Other federal trial judges and appellate judges, even those not bound to follow the Second Circuit, will be substantially influenced by the opinion.
In sum, now is when the rubber really hits the road. Walking away before this step was not a big deal to uninvolved people. Whatever happens with this appeal will have lasting effect on what others can expect when they walk into court.
The most important piece of insight about court cases came from my dad (a lawyer) a few weeks back.
:-)
He pointed out that, when all is said and done, only two parties (the plaintiff and the defendant) are impacted by a court decision. It is in fact meaningless to everyone else. They can interpret the Constitution any rotten way they want, but only two parties are impacted. I bring this up, because at first I thought this kind of crap (banning DeCSS) was going to make being a programmer (my beloved profession) insufferable in 15 years. But it won't, cause the court is only one arm of the government, and is no more or less corrupt than any other. Witness, the election, sure we were impacted because we may care who the president is, but only Bush and Gore were able to receive relief. In this case only MPAA receives relief (though they don't deserve it). Every other piece of code that breaks the DMCA has to have an injunction brought against it as well. This does not stop you from hacking other copy encryptions (even CSS), it just stop DeCSS. Let them ban it, maybe I'll start my own CSS decryption project and they'll have to come after me. Then you write your own, and they come after you. It still doesn't matter. Trials only affect two parties.
And thank goodness I might add, otherwise I might of sat up nights worrying (and I used to think about this kind of stuff alot) about something as insignificant as the judicial branch.
The URL for the Gallery is cited in the amicus brief. I'm proud to point out that among the co-sponsors of this brief there are four Carnegie Mellon faculty, including the dean of the School of Computer Science. MPAA has been keeping a hands-off attitude toward the Gallery, perhaps because they realize how bad it would look if they tried to censor an academic work.