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DeCSS' Continuing Saga
blankmange writes "Newsbytes is carrying
a followup on the DeCSS and 2600's court cases: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the First Amendment Project today asked the California Supreme Court to uphold a lower court's decision to permit publication of the source code for DeCSS technology, which circumvents digital copy protection systems." Maybe it's not over yet..."
... the 2600 case will probably never be won... but how many of the general populace even know what decss is?
its all about the information... the people need to know, or we'll always lose...
Seriously, since when did the ??AA's become more powerful or important than national security? Who put them on their pedestal? Who died and gave them the monarchy?
Just shows you where this country's priorities are. Trading freedom for security is bad enough. Trading freedom for entertainment is disgusting.
My Blog: http://nic.dreamhost.com/
in NY, 2600 was told to take down DeCSS.
in CA, Brunner was told he was allowed to keep it up.
Anyone catch that? Two similar if not identical cases have different rulings based on the same law.
Questions --
Have there been other sets of cases that have had the same law interpreted in two different directions? What was the outcome? Are such laws considered ambiguous and thus in need of clarification? Who makes taht decision?
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
The funny part about this (as I understand it) is that its entirely unecessary to have DeCSS to copy a DVD. DeCSS was only to play the dvd.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
"Historically, the dissemination of stolen trade secrets has not been protected by the First Amendment," the DVD CCA wrote in its brief. It said the injunction, "was not aimed at restricting speech, but was intended solely to protect against the evisceration of trade secrets that are the motion picture industry's critical means of defense against widespread digital pirating of its valuable copyrighted works."
This secret was not stolen, it was reverse-engineered! Their argument is bullsh**.
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.... Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
-Abraham Lincoln
Later,
Phil
"Historically, the dissemination of stolen trade secrets has not been protected by the First Amendment," the DVD CCA wrote in its brief."
This "trade secret" was NOT stolen. No one hacked into anybody's computer or broke into anyone's office to steal anything. The encryption technique was reverse engineered which IS legal. Discussing the reverse engineering process and ones findings with others IS legal and protected by the first amendment.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I understand why the MPAA wants to protect its intellectual property, but they need to fight piracy by either making the factory-made products worth buying or prosecute those individuals who pirate them. I want to be able to rip a VOB and play it back on my laptop without having to break the law in the process. I think that the MPAA would rather strip millions of legitimate users of their rights to fair use, rather than spend the money to fight a few individuals who are massively distributing illegal copies of a copyrighted product.
The CBDTPA is actually very good for the movement to bring about the death of legislation like the DMCA. I saw a review of the CBDTPA in a roanoke paper about 2 weeks ago and it was really cool seeing a common newspaper make a big feature in its op-ed section about the CBDTPA. People trust newspapers a lot more than they trust websites. Newspapers cost money to produce (so do websites), but websites don't in the eyes of John Q. Citizen. Anyone can make a website is the general view, even though hosting a major website requires an assload of money to pay for bandwidth, high end equipment and a full time staff. Using the Internet to propagandize is not as easy as people think.
What we need are Win32 and OS X open source or free as in beer cd/dvd rippers that make defeating copy restrictions as easy as installing a new plugin. We need to force the issue by making the cartels so desparate they call for the complete destruction of individual property rights as they pertain to IP. The CBDTPA wasn't quite that, we need to get them so desparate that they propose something that makes it a felony to own a computer that can copy music and movies. We need to make John Q. Citizen so scared of their proposals that he says, "listen asshole, you have two choices, protect my rights or their bottom line. You know where I'm voting now!!" to their representatives out of anger and sheer rage. Essentially we need to take demagoguery to a new level, if you support these industries you are supporting your child's inevitable felony prison sentence for making a custom workout mix cd.
What we can do are the following
We must make these people look like absolute monsters to the public. We must find ways to associate RIAA/MPAA with the same feelings that most people reserve for Fascists and Communists. The average person must start looking at it from this perspective, "he is not advocating compensating people for their work, he is advocating the annihilation of my property rights." Once we have achieved that, we can effectively dismantle modern copywrong law and get it back to being constitutional copyright law.
while( )
...etc...
{ G = 29;
R = 142;
is no more amount of code than: while(){G=29;R=142;...etc...
They both have the exact same grammar, and use the same number of tokens. They both take just as long to execute, but the more compact version takes more time for a human being to read. What is it about Perl that tends to make its proponets enjoy making write-only code?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
This is more like disassembling and tracing and documenting the code, which I am quite sure is against the license for Xing's (and many other companies') products. Even if DeCSS was "reverse-engineered" from this purloined key, it would not really be reverse-engineered because of the method that the key was obtained from.
As for the the DVD CCA's claim that it is a trade secret, as long as those who were involved with the documentation of DeCSS were not in any way responsible for the safekeeping of the code owned by the DVD CCA (like if they were DVD CCA employees, or employees working on a DVD implementation for a DVD CCA licensee), then there's no trade secret violation. Much as the same as if I "discovered" the formula for Coca-Cola(TM) by kitchen experimentation and posted it on Slashdot.
The only gripe the DVD CCA should have here is the way Xing implemented their decryption method. Since Xing was bought by Real, now it should be Real's legal problem.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
The real problem, I think, lies with the inability of business to reconcile itself with an information economy. Groups like the MPAA (and Unisys, and RSA Data Sec.) want to provide information as a product. To do so, they have to control the availability of this 'product' to the end user.
In every other part of the Universe, it is the specific product which is patented. If you make a carbon copy of a Honda Accord, then you'll get sued. If you make a vehicle with four wheels, four doors and an engine, you won't. In academia, if you make a discovery, then some time later another person claims to have made the same discovery, that person -- except in rare cases -- you will be laughed out of town, but reproducing the same result via independent work is okay.
So, reproducing the DeCSS algorithm via independent work is okay via logical extension. As for breaking copyright protection, this is really governed by two laws: the so called "Betamax decision" from which the fair-use concept is derived, and by the DMCA. Although I don't know much about the DMCA, fair-use says that any particular consumer of media content can copy it limitlessly for backup, personal storage, alternate viewing, or whatever. Ripping a DVD to DIVX is perfectly legal, as long as you don't redistribute it and merely use it for personal viewing.
This is just yet another part of the problem of people not understanding linking in general (and one that I'll admit I hadn't thought of in those terms).
I guess the concept of what a URL really is (the difference between information as to the location of a document and the document itself) is just "too technical". Given that what a user sees in a browser is a blue, underlined title (which they've been trained to recognize as something they are supposed to click on) on your web page "turning into" the other document, how could they not think of your page as containing that document?
Is it that they can't comprehend that "All that's actually there is the equivalent of a library card-reference, or an ISBN number, and when you click it, you're asking your computer to use that information, find the other document, and display it in place of this one."? That's the best way I've come up with to word it, but I still see a lot of glazed-over eyes.
But wait -- lawyers and judges (aside from being pretty smart fellas in general, jokes about them notwithstanding) have their own system of references to legal texts. They fully understand how the inclusion in a brief of a reference to a piece of case law, or a section of a statute, or whatever, is equivalent to, but not the same as, attaching a copy of that text, because they know that the reader will (a) understand the conventions used and (b) have access to a law library where they can look it up. Is the connection so hard to make?
Maybe they (back to people in general, not just lawyers and judges) do understand that part, for what it's worth, but just don't see what's so important about it -- maybe the funny looks are not so much "What are you talking about?" as "So what's the big deal?"
The thing is, the whole power of hypertext -- fundamentally, what makes the web so revolutionary -- is precisely the fact that it blurs the line between reference and content. In a world where everyone has at his disposal armies of little gnomes who can, in a matter of seconds and at marginal cost, dash off to the Library of Congress, get a copy of a book, and bring it back to you, whenever you merely give them a reference number, giving someone such a number really is in a sense "equivalent" to giving them a copy of the book.
This does lead to legal issues -- in this case, it's the legality of the linked-to content and the linker's liability therefor; in other cases like deep-linking of articles and images, it's the copyright status of that content. In either case, the response to the conflict depends on one's assumptions and priorities.
Should the policy be: "Well, since we obviously can't restrict mere linking, for freedom-of-speech reasons, and since linking is in a sense equivalent to dissemination, I guess that (to that extent) we can't restrict dissemination either, and if copyright interests suffer, too bad."?
Or should it be: "Well, since we obviously can't allow free dissemination, for copyright reasons, and since linking is in a sense equivalent to dissemination, I guess that (to that extent) we can't allow free linking either, and if freedom of speech suffers, too bad."?
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}