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2600 Drops DeCSS Appeal
Slashdot Chaplain writes "At the 2600 site, you can see today's details about why 2600 is withdrawing from taking their suit to the Supreme Court." So let's recap the case: 2600 published the DeCSS utility on their website. The movie studios filed suit, and the EFF agreed to assist 2600 with their case. 2600 lost the case in District Court, receiving a tongue-lashing from Judge Kaplan, which ordered them not to post or even link to DeCSS. 2600 appealed. They lost. They attempted to have their case heard again, by the full Appeals court rather than a three-judge panel, and were rejected. And although they have the option of appealing to the Supreme Court, they are saying today that they will not: so Judge Kaplan's decision stands. The case in California is still ongoing. No doubt this will be discussed at H2K2 next week.
Does anyone know what the Canadian stance is on the DeCSS issue?
... and I think they had a tax on hard drives, too, not sure.
I haven't heard anything relating to it, except for the taxes on CD-Rs, DVDs, and VHS tapes
Laws don't define what is made legal....
Money does.
I hope that nobody blames 2600 Magazine for their decision not to appeal. It's plain that now is not the time for such appeals, particularly given how strongly that they've been rebuffed thus far. Perhaps most importantly, Emmanuel lacks the funds (I assume) to take a case to the Supreme Court. Such things involve a tremendous amount of money.
Given the recent 2600-related news (recall that Ford dropped the suit against them over FuckGeneralMotors.com last week), I should point out that 2600 Magazine relies on merchandise sales and magazine subscriptions to stay afloat. For those that haven't heard of 2600 Magazine, I recommend that you check it out. I've subscribed since the early '90s, though it's been published continuously (every quarter) for over a decade now. Whether you want to support 2600's legal work or you'd simply like to keep current on hacker news and culture, I recommend that you subscribe.
-Waldo Jaquith
People who read /. know all about the DMCA. Outside of that, I don't think anyone cares. Windows users buy their DVD-ROM's and WinDVD comes with so they are happy and it doesn't affect them.
I think they're making the right decision here. Losing in the Supreme Court would not be good.
Zoot!
If your case is relatively weak (and you feel you may lose), it is often better to not take your case to the last level, else a national precedent is set. Once this happens, it's often difficult to have it reversed.
So, by not appealing, they leave the door open to a future (stronger) case to set the law straight.
It's a matter of picking your battles wisely. Give up this one battle, but not the war.
This is a tragedy, as this case is a clear cut examply of how the DMCA is unconstitutional because it violetes the First Ammendment. Now we may have to wait years before another sufficiently compelling case can be leveraged to bring down the DMCA.
www.enthea.org
When CNN was covering this case on their site, a year or so ago, they actually published links to DeCSS software...
I still have a screenshot of it in my HD...
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
The MPAA wins this battle... but it still remains to be seen who's going to win the war. So this 'strategy' doesn't work - our fair-use rights are worth fighting for. We need to find new, legal or semi-legal ways of fighting back against the MPAA. Let's take THEM to court. Let's use their laws against them. Let's show them who's boss. The fundamental law of business is that the customer is always right - they seem to have forgotten that, so it's time to teach them.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
I use dvd2svcd.org all the time to irp SVCDs and VCDs. I suppose the only thing possibly illegal is the included auth.dll which allows you to rip it to your drive.
Perhaps in the future a year from now it won't come with auth.dll and another version will be created. In the meantime download away!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is an old subject, but I have yet to get a really valid answer to the question: What are you buying when you buy a DVD (or CD or tape for that matter).
By checking the price tag, you can quickly acertain that you aren't buying just the media.
We've all been reminded a million times that we don't own the content.
The whole deCSS issue has elliminated the possibility of buying the right to watch or listen to the content since we can't legally do this on our own. Note: I realize that you can't simply look at a CD and hear the music on it, but the technology required to listen to the music on the CD isn't illegal to post on the internet.
Okay... so maybe we're buying the right (if you can call it that) to consume the content - but only providing that certain conditions are met - like we've bought some software from a company approved to make it. Well, not really, because if we owned the right to consume the content, we shouldn't have to pay full price for a replacement if we lose or accidentally destroy our DVD or CD or whatever.
So we're buying something that we don't own. Right. My favorite way to spend money.
By the way, where can I find the deCSS stuff now?
I don't agreed with the DMCA. It is probably unconstitutional and at some point it will be overturned. I also fully support 2600's decision, but this statement frm their website:
The MPAA and their cronies went out of their way to choose a defendant (us) that the court system would be prejudiced against.
Is complete bullshit. 2600 goes out of their way to get sued and make test cases. I would venture to say that being in court is the best publicilty 2600 ever gets. A lot of people got cease and decist letters over DeCSS. Some decided not to fight, 2600 decided to thumb their noses at the MPAA and Judge Kaplan, and they felt the consequences.
I'm not saying they deserved what they got, but they are acting like the MPAA came after them with no warning or provocation. When you poke a bear you shouldn't be suprised if it chases you up a tree.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
This is why instead of changing the "under God" portion of the Pledge of Allegiance they should change the last line to "liberty and justice for those who can afford it." Support 2600 and the EFF or the First amendment will be re-written by big corporations.
Americans could not be more self absorbed if they were made of equal parts water and paper towel. -Dennis Miller
Lets think about this for a bit, think about all the stupid ways the court has been ruling on things. (an no I'm not talking about the florida voting thing and school vochers)
I say good game to 2600 and the EFF for not screwing it up entirly for people. let the court change a few seats before someone brings this up again (and it will happen agin if not by 2600 then by someone else).
my 2cents
2600,
Your fight on this case has brought more attention to the issue than any publicity campaign could have ever raised! You more than caried your share of the load for us all. Someone will pick up the fight from here, because our rights are still there, no matter what stupid act, or congress idiot thinks about taking them away, and calling it a Patriot Act.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR EFFORTS.
PS: The only Patriot Act that should have passed was the one in the Superbowl! Go Pats, do it again!
Google readily finds a number of sites, some clearly in the US, with code executables. Are these legal or just not sued yet?
Isn't it great to live in the land of the free!
Nested slashdot comments are cool.
I mean who here does not have a copy of DeCSS? As soon as I read the story here, I downloaded a copy via one of the dozens of links posted.
The MPAA did a much better job of spreading DeCSS than anybody else could have. Nobody would have cared much about this little bit of code otherwise. This code will now live on forever and they can't do a damn thing about it.
For those keeping score at home, current score: MPAA 1, Geeks 1. Round 2 comming soon.
[End of diatribe. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...] - Larry Wall in Configure from the perl
I agree with 2600's decision. The worst thing that could happen here is for the Supreme Court to get the chance to put another nail in the coffin for our rights. The MPAA is doing everything it can to squeeze the consumer, from using anti-competitive region codes to strangling the signal coming out of the DVD player by prohibiting Firewire ports.
I used to work with Andrew a while back in SF and around that time, he had a temporary win which was covered in Slashdot and other media. I have since lost touch with him, but I would like to know what has happened to that case. I dont know what stage it is in (I believe it was High court).
Although 2600 has lost this battle, I wish Andrew would have better luck.
Rapid Nirvana
It's simply amazing that this got them in trouble.
:-)
Google Search Engine
Yahoo has blocked the search of DeCSS
Lycos
Altavista
MetaCrawler
Go. Now Overture. Owned By Disney/ABC
CNet (Search.com)
Add Any I left out
I'll bet that when the XXAA starts suing individuals, they'll have done background checks to ensure the defendants are as unsympathetic as possible.
2600's association with hackers, phreakers, and crackers, etc, did not make it easy for them to appear as angels. Though the law shouldn't be biased, it is hard not to be, especially when you don't understand the jargon.
Of course, its getting to the point that judges that do not become technically proficient SHOULD BE REMOVED FROM THE BENCH. If many judges still held racist views, would they be tolerated? I think not.
Judges must become technically knowledgable. Greater effort must be spent on educating judges about technology.
Explaining technology to someone who doesn't understand it is essential.
Tournament Management Online &
Morals don't define what is made legal... Money does.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
In the judges statement, it defines "DeCSS" as:
any computer program, file or device that may be used to decrypt or unscramble the contents of DVDs that are protected, or otherwise to circumvent the protection afforded by CSS and that permits the copying of the contents or any portion thereof.
By this definition, wouldn't anything that could descramble CSS be considered 'DeCSS' such as WinDVD, or any DVD player on the market. In fact, DVD players permit copying, because I could run the output into a VCR, and I'm sure some dual deck DVD players might be coming out soon, and if those will permit copying, they could be considered 'DeCSS'.
This just seems to be an overly broad definition of DeCSS and could mean anything that can decrypt CSS including licensed programs. Maybe the clincher is that it permits copying, but couldn't anything that's not directly beamed to my eyeballs/brain be copied in some way?
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
I think we all just need to stop buying music period. If we don't give the RIAA our money, then they will not have any money to operate, and hopefully they will just die.
Good idea, but they'll turn right around and say it's because of piracy that people don't buy their stuff. Then they'll get government subsidies and put even higher taxes on recordable media. Oh, and they'll get the money from those taxes too. They've backed us into a corner, it would seem.
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s
I've been to many of their events and know people there: the EFF isn't rolling in money- quite the opposite. It really is a non-profit, and money is their limiting factor: more money = more cases they could take. Far fewer people donate than you'd think, including people who have directly benefited from their work (if you're at a US internet security or encryption company that hasn't donated, try to change that!). They try to be at or ahead of the curve on tech issues, and this means that its harder to get the grandparent sympathy donation(2). And their main donation source- us, the techie crowd- just hasn't been doing to well lately. Unfortunately the number of cases the EFF should fight doesn't go down in an economic downturn, its probably the opposite: Congress is chumming for dollars with Disney / MPAA more than ever.
(1) in the economics sense
(2) If the EFF was a medical nonprofit, they wouldn't be the ones with the big-eyed sick children, they'd be the ones worrying about prions 20 years ago. Harder to explain, but often more important.
Very sad that an obviously biased judge (once worked in a law firm that represented Time Warner, one of the plantiffs) is allowed to hand down a horribly flawed ruling that stands because the clique of lifetime appointed, unaccountable Federal judges close ranks...
It is even sadder that it matters WHO you are, not the merits of your case... The RIAA and the courts wanted nothing of Professor Felten, of Princeton, but have no trouble squashing the "eevilll" hackers of 2600, despite the fact that the DeCSS case was far stronger.
Our government is owned by the highest bidder. The DeCSS case proves it. Sooner or later we will either be completely corporatized, or else line some of these buggers up against the wall. One or the other outcome is inevitable.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
I was thinking about this whole problem about Linux users not being able to legally play encrypted DVDs on their computers because DeCSS has been deemed illegal. We all know that the licenses for CSS keys and DVD playback cost money so a free and legal DVD player Linux is not possible, so with that said why don't commercial Linux distros like Mandrake, Redhat etc apply for licenses and sell it with their boxed set versions? It would make playing DVDs on Linux legal and it would provide an incentive to buy the box-set versions rather than just download the ISOs.
aus.music.scrapbook
Xine (with decss plugin), Mplayer, Ogle, Videolan
Got friends?
Its disgusting that we have reached this point, where the one with the most money ( normally big business, or the actor, musician, politican, etc ) gets justice, not the common man.
Regardless of common sence.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This makes little or no difference at all. Kudos to 2600 for fighting the good fight. But you just can't argue with people who are still in the mindset of the antiquated industrial civilization (ie, these silly judges).
However, it seems like in the long term it is IMPOSSIBLE to prevent the free flow of information. Like the little rock in the big river... People who believe in privatized intellectual property are toast in a world that is packed with Internet connected PCs.
If you think the RIAA, and the people behind CSS are upset now, wait until decentralized P-2-P data warehousing becomes popular, then they'll really be smokin'. That's only if micropayments don't make them wholey obsolete first.
It's much easier to whine about how the DMCA is unconstitutional when you don't have a supreme court ruling proving you wrong.
And if you get sued for a DMCA violation, counter-sue for unfair abuse of monopoly power.
I'd been holding off buying a DVD player (and DVDs) waiting for them to win.
I guess I'll never get one.
For that matter, how does the DMCA inhibit progress on its face? Where is the historical record that shows congress wanted to inhibit progress through its passage?
The Supreme Court isnt in the business of striking down bad laws. They strike down unconstitutional laws. Bad laws are the duty of citizens and their legislature to take care of.
-
That utility has no other specific reason for being than to rip off DVDs. Piracy is wrong. If you don't agree with the system, take part in it to bring about positive change.
funded by progressively high filing fees based on the damages sought after.
SOMETHING has to be done to balance the power.
If Megacorp A goes after littleguy B, and littleguy B is assigned Some Huge Lawyer by the court, and Megacorp would have to cough up a filing fee so large as to cover the costs of Huge Lawyer's bond against the action, then maybe we might see far less of this bullshit.
Just a thought.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
DeCSS at 2600 vs. guns at WalMart: both can be used either legally or illegally. Guns can be used to kill people, DeCSS can be used to steal a minimal percentage of profit from a multi-million (billion?) dollar industry.
My advice to 2600: get the NRA's lawyers.
Kaplan's findings of fact begin on page 32 of:
. pd f
http://www.2600.com/dvd/docs/2000/0817-decision
I don't understand why 2600 attempted to argue the definition of "effectively" as the layman's definition, instead of arguing that the ability to play DVD's on computers at all, with other software permitted by the Plaintiffs, means that CSS does not effectively control the ability to copy (etc.) the material.
I also don't understand why they did not argue this on the basis of the existance of the ability to make verbatim copies of DVD discs indicates that the CSS mechanism is in fact flawed by design, and therefore does not effectively control (etc.).
Finally, I don't understand that they did not argue that the keys used by DeCSS were in fact the important part of the equation, and the DeCSS itself was not therefore a mechanism, without the keys, and that it was the keys, not the scrambling mechanism itself, which constitute the disclosure. That would imply that the keys were trade secrets... and anyone who followed the USL vs. BSDI and UC Berkeley case back in the early 1990's should be able to tell you that, once disclosed, a trade secret is no longer a trade secret.
Can someone shed some light on this for me?
-- Terry
Double freedom irony? My part of EDS' inappropriate use policy blocks thism courtery of WebSense. Nice to know I'm bring protected by the thought police.
Great post... I agree mostly but I wonder though if the constitutional conflict in such a case is provable - there is no need to guess at a President's intent when he makes it so clear in a statement like the WP quote. He isn't just choosing to ignore the Constitution, he is in fact stating openly and unmistakably that he intends to violate its spirit and letter. Unfortunately, the separation of church and state - far more serious a matter than "trampling the rights of atheists" - is not valued highly by most of Congress, so you're right that we're not likely to see any Constitutional remedy here. But there is a remedy - the fury of the voters, who could, at least in theory, elect leaders who do care about that part of the First Amendment. Unfortunately that fury has only been cultivated by the wrong side of this debate, so we're not likely to see that remedy either.
The European version of DMCA is the EU directive 2001/29/KY, which demands that all EU member countries make the appropriate changes to their own legistlations no later than the year 2003.
In Finland the proposal is now ready and will go to the parliament vote in the early autumn, and will be effective as of December 2002.
The directive will, in effect, make the circumvention of digital copy and access restrictions illegal, including the actual process and also hardware, software, products and services that do the same.
--
The world is not what it used to be.
Because the DCMA would prevent them from doing so as Open Source software, license or no license, and that's not a good route to go down when it's in somebody else's interest, not yours.
I've been though a failed inner city school system so I understand what your saying. The inner city school systems do not only hurt the poor of the nation, but everyone as a whole. So I do agree that the voucher program is a good idea, anything to light a fire under the ass of a system that doesn't care.
... the school system does not.
Teachers care
Here is the Zeropaid news thread on this topic: http://www.zeropaid.com/news/articles/auto/0704200 2a.php
"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." - Abraham Lincoln