Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

DeCSS, From the Beginning

Posted by michael on from the once-more,-with-emphasis dept.

An anonymous reader sent in a link to a presentation given by Tom Vogt at HAL 2001. He reviews the whole CSS/DeCSS mess from the beginning, which makes a it a nice backgrounder for people who are wondering what the Sklyarov, 2600 and other cases are all about.

1 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ignoring the internet piracy... by coupland · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You are missing the entire moral ground here. Pirating DVDs is *illegal* and no one should do it. Anyone who really understands this issue would agree. But DeCSS is simply decryption code that has a multitude of perfectly legal uses.

    Unfortunately the media giants have pressured the goverment to make decryption itself illegal if the work is copyrighted. Panty-hose can be used to cover your face during a bank heist BUT YOU CAN STILL BUY THEM! Rather than prosecuting people for encryption algorithms they should be prosecuting the people using [ DeCSS | Napster | CD-R Drives | insert evil technology here ] to illegally trade in copyrighted works.

    That is called being impartial. Endorsing the misinformation that the media giants are spewing about the "evils" of DeCSS is not.