Slashdot Mirror
DVD Copyright Case Mulled over by Judge
howhardcanitbetocrea writes "news.com is reporting that the judge in a closely watched lawsuit challenging the legality of DVD-copying software said she was 'substantially persuaded' by past court rulings that favored copyright holders, but closed a hearing Thursday without issuing a ruling in the case." This is a case that could very well determine the future of the DMCA, and the article does a good job of summarizing the arguments from both sides.
Amazing, one week we have solid interpretation of digital rights laws and their impact on Fair Use (Grokkster Case), and now this? I admit it isn't over yet, but some one please explain to me how the VCR is any different?
Perhaps it's just me, but the last few years has been painful to watch, perhaps my politically apathetic body needs to get into action...
Ahh hell, I live in Florida, the Mouse rules here with an white gloved iron fist!
Illston asked Zacharia to explain the conundrum of locking up copyrighted works behind encryption and then making the breaking of that encryption illegal, even after the copyrights on those works expire. The judge wondered if it would effectively extend copyrights to keep such works out of the public domain. Zacharia said it would not, because the copyright had expired. "But it's encrypted. If it doesn't stop being encrypted, it's still encrypted," Illston said, adding that such protected works still couldn't be legally copied.
I had never thought of this before. Think about it: If any work now has solely been release to the public in an encrypted form, then if anyone has copied/clipped/fair-use used the item, then the corporation can always go after the individual; therefore, copyright is completely irrelavent since encryption is enforced forever. Maybe I'm the only one who just caught this, but it seems no one has explicitly stated it this way.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
DVD's use variable bitrate MPEG-2 encoding, and even short movies can be >4.5 GB... I think it's being done as form of copy protection on commercial DVDs to sample the video at excessively high rates. I saw a single disc rip of LOTR the Two Towers that was on a DVD-R and the video looked great (it was a DVD rip from a disc submitted to the academy).
Look at movies done with Apple's iDVD (constant bitrate encoding) where 60 minutes can take an entire DVD-R.
.:diatonic:.
OK, so I bought hundreds of records in the 80's and I confined them to the dustbin (or lost them) when CD's became mainstream. Do you really expect me to pay once for tape, again for vinyl, again for CD's, and again for your next format, and the next... ?
The same for the MPAA! I bought a DVD and it developed a crack not through my own fault of abuse. I sent it back to the 'house' that produced it and never received a response.
Oh my question: When we buy a CD or a DVD what exactly are we buying ? (rights to view/listen ? a piece of plastic ? rights to put on another medium ?)
My answer: The right to spend money so these greedy assholes can get million dollar salaries, never answer questions, and buy lawyers!
copy protection is the snake oil used to prevent fair use and to slow incompetent pirates
The DMCA is legal protection of copy protection
Brings up an interesting point. What is the intent of the DMCA? If the intent is to stop the copying of copyrighted works, why go through trouble of making an additional law? If the DMCA is enforced, there can be no legal copying of any protected work. No fair use etc... Why not just ditch fair use and say that any copying of a copyrighted work is illegal?
If they sell me a DVD or CD, I'll do whatever I want to do with it. If I want to copy it, I will, If I want to crack the copy-protection, I will. If I want to sit around the house using them as frisbees I'll bloody well do that too. If they don't like it, then stop selling me DVD's and CD's. Make it impossible to 'buy' them, and start a renting agreement. Then fair enough, I'll pay my money, agree to the temporary license and leave it at that. So stop prenteding you are not selling me something. if you do, then it is mine.
Unfortunately that judgement preceded the DMCA by about 15 years.
Exactly... Isn't that why they call it a precedent?
is that you can split it into two programs. A DVD player, and a screen capture utility, which are both perfectly legal. Of course that would require a reencode, but that is what happens on 4,7gb+ movies anyway.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If they really sold you the physical media, and you were free to do anything you liked with it there would be no problem. (Of course, subject to existing laws, like you are not allowed to hit someone over the head with it and kill them, you are not allowed to violate copyright and sell copies of it, etc etc etc)
But, software publishers especially, (but even book publishers) try to apply additional restrictions, to the point that you don't actually own the physical media anymore, you are instead "licenced" to make use of the product for some period of time. In this scenario, the phyical media is actually irrelevant, it makes no difference at all whether it came from a CD "bought" at the local store or downloaded from the internet. If the CD gets scratched or you accidentally erase your harddrive, it does not affect your licence to use the content. That is, if you can obtain the content from some other source, you are free to use it. Thus, forcing people to pay the full cost of an additional licence just to get a copy of something they already had a licence to use anyway is double-dipping (especially when it is a download with a marginal cost of zero). An analogy would be, if you lost your driver's licence, instead of just charging some nominal fee for the replacement of the card, charging the full cost of a new driver's licence (or even making you do the test again).
Now, I don't necessarily agree with this model at all, but just stating how (some people think) it works.
I believe it is quite legal to copy or scan every page of a book, as long as you do not distribute the copy. I might be wrong though. It doesn't matter much because that is completely unenforcable anyway. But I think DVD's are different in this respect.
Information does not tend toward freedom in the same manner that physical phenomenon tend toward equilibrium. It takes my active intervention to prevent equilibrium - on the other hand, it takes my active participation to spread (and thus "free") any information. Hence, I can just as easily (by your fallacious 'science' argument) claim that information does not want to be free. Neither of us would be right. It can easily be said that it takes more work to make work free than non-free, since I have to actually do something (create & spread) to make it free, whereas if I write it in my book & don't share it with you, that's a whole lot easier - or if I just keep it to myself in my little brain, that's easier still.
Put another way, which "takes more work": distributing a binary only with super-annoying copy protection licensed from some 3-man development shop (un-free) or distributing a binary with the exact snapshot of the source that binary was created with? Kind of shoots a hole in your argument that "closing" information somehow goes against the fundamental state of information, which requires it to be "free."
BTW, people aren't "stupid" because they don't agree with your "clever" philosophy. Maybe they just disagree - or furthermore you could be *gasp* wrong. Or not. But it's worth consideration.
Yes, but doesn't it only protect "effective access" controls? Given that CSS can be decrypted real time by a perl script that is so short it can be written on a T-shirt, surely CSS does not qualify as "effective"?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
If you buy a can opener and it breaks, do you expect to get another can opener for free (ignoring warranties, assume it's been 3 years since you bought the can opener)?
/.ers were alive.)
Different animals. When you buy a 'device' you are buying the DEVICE. When you buy a DVD (Or CD or VHS Tape or Phillips Cassette or Vinyl record) you are buying a License to play the media and experience whatever is on it. The media itself is secondary to the License.
Since the price of the Media is pennies, I would say YES. If you (an industry) are going to charge me 50 times what the media costs because I am buying a license, not a media, I would expect you to replace the media at cost - if not free. Remember, the License didn't expire when the record got a scratch. (We won't go into the Recording Industry and their holdover "Breakage" clause - where they skim money off the top for losses due to the ancient phenolyte disks cracking in shipping. Something that hasn't been an issue since the vast majority of us
Likewise, when the "product" is released on a new media format (without change in the performance - EG. LP to Tape versions) I shouldn't have to pay full price -again- for a "product" I already have the license for. My license didn't expire. Why am I being charged for one again?
I doubt I'm explaining it well, but we can certainly hope we have a clueful judge here. The DMCA is one of the worst pieces of legislature to come down the pike in decades. If this case starts swinging the balance back in favor of the Public, then we have something to look forward to. To me, the DMCA, more than anything else, shows how much the Media controls our lives, our government, and our perceptions.
People don't make Legislators or Laws. The Media bundle them up and sell them to us.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
First, is CSS patented? I mean, it's gotta either be patented or be in the public domain, right? Is there another choice I'm missing?
Anyway, assuming it is patented, then the patent is up in 20 years, right? So, once the patent is up, who can legally argue that you broke the decryption?
Just some thoughts.
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -- Ayn Rand
This is convoluted, of course, since you can't copy something if you can't access it. But legislators never seemed to get that far in their reasoning.
Which in the case of DVDs is absolutely incorrect. CSS is a block encryption method, which means that if you copy a dvd block for block and maintain the position of a given byte on the disc, you never have to decrypt the data. There is nothing physically intrinsic to the original media that is required for decryption.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Why isn't this thing used more often? Seems to me this clearly makes the war on drugs unconstitutional. In what bizarre world is control of your own biochemistry not a fundamental right? How is altering ones mind with drugs any different from altering it with religion, study, or experience? In Madison's day, when *everyone* treated themselves with alcohol, laudanum, and hemp extracts, no one could imagine the absurd situation we find ourselves in today. This is exactly what the 9th amendment was written for.
Offtopic I know. I don't really expect the government to be logical.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Most people consider door locks to be an effective access control method, despite the fact that a circumvention device can be stored on the bottom of a boot. A few quick, forceful applications of said device, and the door pops right open.
Looks like we'd all better be mirroring our copies of DeCSS, DVD2one, DVDXCopy, InstantCopy, SmartRipper, DVD Decrypter, DVD Shrink, DVD95copy, Nero, RecordNow etc. before they get pulled off the web.
;o)
Better still, put 'em on KazaA to really piss off the MPAA
The DMCA/MPAA/RIAA are getting too big for their boots - they think they're some sort of new world government that can do anything if it MAY affect their profits.
#include <sig.h>
While I agree that timeshifting should be totally legal, there are other legetimate purposes.
For example, if I own the copyright to a DVD, then I should have the right to copy it. This isn't a problem for major productions, but what about my home movies?
What about content that has had the copyright released to the public? For example, I believe this happened to the movie 'Heavy Metal'. If copyright lifespans were closer to the original 14 years, this would be much more of an issue.
And yes, the DVD companies will replace a broken disc for the small fee of the original disk ($10-$30). They sometimes view your purchase as a license to view it and sometimes they treat it as a material object, depending on what is currently in their favor. The law is also mixed in this regard, but isn't always as slanted as the content owners would like.
If the purchase were treated as a license, then copying would be sanctioned, as long as you didn't distribute. And getting a fresh copy (from the company, or by coping from a friend) would be sanctioned as long as you had previously purchased a copy. Moving from one medium to another (tape versus CD) wouldn't matter as long as the content was the same.
If the purchase were treated as a material good, then there would be no restrictions on how you display it. Two examples come to mind.
1) You can't play a purchased CD or DVD in a public place, such as a bar, without special permission.
2) You can't build your own DVD player, or bypass things like region encoding.
I'd be happy with DRM as long as it worked in my favor as well. If 'the system' remembered everything I'd ever purchased, and would let me reaquire it in whatever format I want for the rest of my life, then I'd be more than happy to put up with reasonable restrictions. The big record companies don't appear be to capable of understanding why this could be considered fair.
plus-good, double-plus-good
- "primary designed or produced for the purpose"
- "has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than"
- "is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in"
When there's a gazillion CSS-protected DVDs on the market for which the DMCA applies, and just a few where it doesn't apply, then sure, the above qualifications will still cause the tool to be illegal. But the numbers matter, and it makes the application become subjective opinion instead of an objective fact. And the more you manipulate the balance, the more subjective it becomes, until you eventually reach some threshold (1%? 5%?) where you just can't be sure anymore.You can also manipulate circumstance where the majority of CSS-protected DVDs doesn't matter. Suppose a DVD comes with player software stored on the DVD itself. Suppose it's bootable, where it starts playing its own CSS-protected content on your PC right after booting. In that context, it would be overwhelmingly obvious that the primary purpose of the player (at least in the manner it it deployed) is to play that specific DVD.
Imagine this: a Linux/BSD/Hurd/whatever distribution on DVD that also includes a CSS-protected movie. Maybe an interview with Linus. Maybe a "for morons" installation guide. Maybe a "BSD daemonette boothbabes lpmud-wrestling match". Whatever. You boot it, and it asks if you want to play the movie or proceed with installation of the OS.
There's still a lot of potential here.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The question is, can this sort of opening in the DMCA be exploited to make the act self-destruct?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'