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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..."
#include6 43034b96de9ed60b4e0e4\8 fca8ac21fd999d1004909419 0d898d001480840913d7d35246\4 75dd9dd5044d0d4594dc9cd4054c0 c449559195180c989c11058185\7 074f92da9ad20f4a0a429f53135b8 6c383cb165e1e568bce8ec61bb\6 abeeaee6fb37773f2267276f723a7 a322f6a2a627fb9f9b1a0e9a9e\d 1d5584cd8dc5145c1c5485cc8cc41 5bdfdb5a4edade5f4bcfcb4a5e\1 703878302168286071b7f7bfa2e7a 7eff2bafab2afeaaae2ff";) ^(lf0>>16 ))b=((lf1\+ 1]]^F[key[tb0[i+1]]]^key [tb0[i]];}void CSStitlekey2\[ i+1]]^F[key[tb0[i+1]]]^key\; i++)im1[i]=dkey[i];l ekey2(tkey,im1);}
typedef unsigned int uint;
char ctb[512]="33733b2663236b763e7e362b6e2e667bd393db0
69b57175f82c787cf125a1a52
d2d65743c7c34256c2c6
081c888c011d797df024
3f3bba6e3a3ebf6befeb
1f0b8f8b0a1e8a8e0f15
cace4f53979312069296
typedef unsigned char uchar;uint tb0[11]={5,0,1,2,3,4,0,1,2,3,4};uchar* F=NULL;
uint lf0,lf1,out;void ReadKey(uchar* key){int i;char hst[3]; hst[2]=0;if(F==\
NULL){F=malloc(256);for(i=0;i>2
>>12)^(lf1>>20)^(lf1>>21)^(lf1&g t;>24))lf0=(lf0>1)\
|(a>1)|(b>8)+x+y;} void \
CSSdescramble(uchar *sec,uchar *key){uint i;uchar *end=sec+0x800;uchar KEY[5];
for(i=0;i=0;\
i--)key[tb0[i+1]]=k[tb0[i
(uchar *key,uchar *im){uchar k[5];int i;ReadKey(im);for(i=0;i=0;i--)key[tb0[i+1]]=k[tb0
[tb0[i]];}void CSSdecrypttitlekey(uchar *tkey,uchar *dkey){int i;uchar im1[6];
uchar im2[6]={0x51,0x67,0x67,0xc5,0xe0,0x00};for(i=0;i6
CSStitlekey1(im1,im2);CSStit
In the brief, the DVD CCA argued that, "neither DeCSS nor Bunner's posting of it on the Internet is pure speech." Instead, the group said, courts have treated computer code as "nonspeech" or "mixed speech and content."
All you l33t h4x0rz out there think you're entitled to free speech. That's just fine and dandy with the MPAA. Just remember that you're not allowed to put content into your speech without a license.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Damn, if they make DeCSS legal, my ownership of a T-Shirt with the DeCSS code written on it will be completely meaningless!
Let's hope that the lower court's decision is quashed.
Why not put the deCSS program text in your email signature, so everytime you email a friend you 'polute' their spools, servers, backups, with yet another offending copy.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
The 2600 case was in federal court in New York. They lost the trial, and were also shot down by the federal appeals court.
314-15-9265
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!
That is the problem, and by calling it an issue of DVD copying you further the problem. This is not an issue of being able to copy DVDs or to post code. This is an issue of linking to someone that posts code. The next step is to stop someone from talking about DeCSS. Soon, if there is a crime, the TV news cannot report on the crime -- hearing about the crime might enable someone to commit the crime.
Fight Spammers!
Take a Sharpie marker pen and print one of the CSS descramblers on it. Hey, now you've got a convenient 2-in-1 DCMA infringement device. Somebody get the ThinkGeek product guys on the phone...
As of last week, this was too close to call. Now the DMCA doesn't have a chance.
Thank you, Sony, for the copy protection scheme that outlawed the sharpie! Humanity can not thank you enough for the amount of wasted time you've saved. Somewhere on Sony's recently pensioned retirement roles I just know there is some Japanese engineer chuckling silently to himself. Too bad he can't tell his countrymen how he saved the U.S. from the corporate media monopolies.
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.
Hasn't DeCSS already experience wide spread disclosure. This is kind of like closing the barn door after the horse has left the building.
It is the RIAA/MPAA that are becoming powerless...
If you have a trade secret, and someone posts it to, e.g., Slashdot, that does not give every /. reader the right to republish it on their personal websites.
Now, if you have 400 trade secrets, and you burn them all onto a shiny metal disk, and you sell 20 million copies of that disk, and someone works out from one of those disks what the secrets are, your case is a lot weaker. Independent discovery is, AFAIK, a defense against trade secret violations (and copyright, too, but not patents or trademarks).
--
E_NOSIG
So this guy says to me "#!/usr/bin/perl :::: qrpff
, _) [20]_=unqb24,qT,@_ ; =73;O=$b[4]>8^(P=(E=255)>12^Q>>4^Q/8^Q ))>8^(E>14=8e val
# 472-byte qrpff, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz
# MPEG 2 PS VOB file -> descrambled output on stdout.
# usage: perl -I
# where k1..k5 are the title key bytes in least to most-significant order
s''$/=\2048;while(){G=29;R=142;if((@a=unqT="C*"
b=map{ord qB8,unqb8,qT,_^$a[--D]}@INC;s/...$/1$Q=unqV,qb25,
)+=P+(~Fs/[D-HO-U_]/\$$s/q/pack+/g;
".
So of course I punched him.
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.
How can it be a trade secret if every DVD manufacturer knows it?? Isn't a trade secret is something makes one company more competetive than others in the same or similar field. Even www.dictionary.com (via American Heritage) defines a trade secret as: What is it about the DVD encryption algorithm that gives DVD manufacturers a competitive advantage over, say putting a movie on video tape? If I learn the secret formula for Pepsi, I can make all the Pepsi I want for my own use, and there isn't a damn thing Pepsico can do. But I probably couldn't market a similar brand without paying fees. Isn't using the DeCSS algorithm the same thing?
Now, if I found a secret to making a DVD with less costs or faster, that would be a trade secret. Or if I found a way to improve the quality of the image or put more data on the disk, that would be a trade secret. That is, until everyone found out about it. Then it becomes common knowlege.
Maybe we are fighting this, and other things like DCMA, the wrong way. Maybe it is time to bring unfair trade practice laws to bear and be the plaintiff for a change.
The disadvantage of being a monopoly is you have to play even fairer. Well, maybe in theory anyway.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
This is an issue of linking to someone that posts code
Interesting point. Warning, this is not a troll, this is a legit question that I think is a good analogy here. If sorehands is correct, lets say I have a website that has a link to some kiddie porn. Now I don't host the porn myself, I just knowingly have a link to it. Now is my linking to it illegal? If my site were a kiddie porn search engine, would it make it any more legal since I only provide a service. More interestingly, if my site were a site for parents so they could have a list of kiddie porn sites to say add to their nanny filters, would _that_ be illegal. Does the intent of my site make a difference since the link is there all the same?
One thing I do have a beef about, and that's people who use the "give'em an inch and they'll take a mile" mentality. "the TV news cannot report on the crime", yeah, right. And soon even mentioning crime would be illegal, heck even muttering the word will get you thrown in the slam. Sorry, had to have my little rant there.
Considering that the reporting organization doesn't know that DeCSS gets around the -playback- control mechanism, not the -copy protection- mechanism(since there isn't one), I'd say we're pretty screwed.
The enemies of Democracy are
From the article:
In addition, the court found that DeCSS is "pure speech" for the purposes of First Amendment protection.
Say what you will about CA, our courts get it! This is from the CA State Appeals Court Ruling.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
How can it be a trade secret if every DVD manufacturer knows it??
...
It's a trade secret of an organization called the "DVD Copy Control Association" - or, the DVDCCA.
They license the trade secret to all of the player manufacturers, and in return, the player manufacturers sign a contract that, among other things, forbids them from building DVD players with unencrypted digital outputs, and requires them to include Macrovision distortion in the analog output signal. The contract also forbids the disclosure of the CSS algorithm.
The result is that, prior to DeCSS, if you wanted to manufacture DVD players, you needed to sign the contract and agree to the terms in order to obtain the necessary technology to decode DVDs.
Now, the CSS algorithm is cracked.
The danger that the industry is facing is this. If CSS is deemed, by the courts, to be a legitimately reverse-engineered trade secret, then the CSS decoding process would enter the public domain. If that were to happen, it would clear the way for the manufacture of DVDs without having to obey the restrictions of the CSS contract.
In other words, it would allow companies to start manufacturing DVD players with such desirable features as no Macrovision, and digital MPEG outputs. But it wouldn't allow all companies to do so
... only those companies that had not signed a contract with the DVDCAA. In other words, the entire current player industry would be shut out -- they would be still required, by their DVDCCA contracts, to install Macrovision, and not offer digital outputs. This would be a disaster for the current crop of player manufacturers.
There's a reason that they are fighting so hard to force CSS into the category of "stolen trade secret" -- by sheer force of will, apparently. If DeCSS were to be ruled a stolen trade secret, then the courts would prevent anyone else from making commercial use of the algorithm.
This would be an incredible win for the movie industry -- they would receive what would be in effect a perpetual patent -- the right to exclude others from employing a process.
Note that they are fighting this battle on different fronts -- the DMCA case is to try and outlaw the dissemination of the algorithm. The Trade Secret case is to try and outlaw the implementation of the algorithm. They are fighting tooth and nail to control not the right to manufacture DVD players, but the right to dictate what features may and may not be included in DVD players.
Free speach doesn't mean the right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
Disseminating some information is actually harmful to others (for example, a web page of credit card numbers). The harm caused by the dissemination must be considered.
In the SOF case, there's a secondary consideration, after determining that the ad was harmful information, and that the harm was sufficient to warrent not printing it, then you need to prove that SOF knew (or should have known) that the ad was harmful, and printed it anyway.
-- this is not a
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);}