DeCSS, From the Beginning

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.

Comments

Public Discourse and IP

[hrieke]

Sadly this story does not get the attention in the media that it really should. Yes there are a few blurs about 'Fair Use' here and there, but nothing that really that is open in the public forum. The only problem is that this is not some simple story, it's a rather hard and complex issue, one that the avg. American wouldn't know about or really give a fuck about. Public apathy will doom us in the end.
Frankly if Sony and Paramount, etc. want to encrypt their media offerings then the should be forced to give a copy of the decrypting key to the Lirbary of Congress to held in escrow. The day that the copyright ends, those keys become public domain. End of story. No endless extentions to the life of the copyright either.
I also feel that copyright should move to be more like patents, 20 years to explot, then 'The End', public domain.

Re:Stealing is stealing

[shanek]

I wonder how all you who support this and the similar BS would feel if someone put out simple instructions for a tool to unlock and start any car, especially yours.

They have one. It's called a lockpick, and it's perfectly legal. Locksmith's use them all the time. And it's also perfectly legal for you to pick the lock on your own car or house if (say) you locked the keys inside.

CSS Encrypter?

[kreyg]

OK, we have DeCSS... do we have code that actually ENCRYPTS stuff with CSS? What if people widely started encrypting their own works with CSS, (not as secure encryption, just as slightly-better-than-ROT13) then there would be an obvious reason to have it.

Could decrypting your own work actually be illegal?