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.

2 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. CSS Encrypter? by kreyg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    --
    sig fault
  2. 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.