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DeCSS Arguments in CA Supreme Court Case
scubacuda writes "According to News.com, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer called DVD-cracking software DeCSS a tool for "breaking, entering and stealing" during a hearing before the California Supreme Court on Thursday. "The program DeCSS is a burglary tool," Lockyer told the judges, adding that the movie studios lose millions of dollars because of piracy over the Internet. (CopyLeft offers this "burglary tool" on a t-shirt)" If you've forgotten what this case is about, see EFF's page about it.
Well... shall we ban any tools that can be used for breaking and entering then?
* screw drivers
* crowbars
* keys
* bits of metal
* credit cards
please, cuff me and send me to the bighouse, i've got a tool shed!
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Didn't they use the same exact argument when VRCs came out?
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
That a tool that allows people to copy their DVD's for their own purposes is "a tool for burglary", yet a gun which allows people to kill other people is a "right"? Null
It may break encryption, but entering and stealing? WTF???
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Gasoline is a tool for ARSON!
I wish someone released a divx of the court procedings.
I can buy slim jims at my local auto parts store.
Best Windows Freeware
California consistently votes Democratic and we get this? Okay, he's sucking on the teat of Hollywood, but still.
sulli
RTFJ.
A crowbar, a credit card, a bottle opener and a screwdriver are also burglary tools, but the legitimate uses are real, which is one darn good reason why the tools are available to the public.
Same with DeCSS -- you can use it to facilitate illegal copying, or you can use it for legitimate purposes, like creating backups, viewing the media on devices lacking a built-in DeCSS equivalent, copy short excerpts you are entitled to for journalistic or educational purposes under fair use, or exercising your public right to copy the works once the copyrights expire.
Ok, so DeCSS is a "buglary tool", fine. And its not legal to make a "buglary tool"? Riiight. If that's the case, then why stop there? How many languages has this thing been written in? Start outlawing the languages because you can make "buglary tools", hell, why stop there, just get rid of computers! Or wait, I have it! Eliminate all traces of human thought, seems to be working well for the California AG.
"Lockyer, who's gearing up to run for governor next year, appeared on the side of the DVD Copy Control Association"
Of course he is on the side of the DVD Copy Control Association, he is on the side of the movie studios... They have deeper pockets and are more likely to win him the election then the technogeeks in silicon valley's burst bubble...
Visualize the world of wine
Computers are a tool for burglary, let's ban those.
...
I expect this kind of nonsense from "the industry". What's terrifying is they have a DA doing their name calling for them!
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
From Yahoo News:
However, in one indication of the money that is at stake, Lockyer cited estimates that as many as 350,000 movies are illegally downloaded from the Internet every day.
Does this even sound reasonable?
If each move filled a cd at 700MB then they're claiming that 245TB of movies are downloaded on a daily basis. That seems a tad high to me.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
Bill "Nightschool" Lockyer is so set on being governor of California that he'll not only carry the Entertainment industry's water, he'll draw it a warm bath and tuck it in bed. Entertainment makes lots of political donations in California.
The argument needs to be made that the tool is necessary to provide backups of data as the physical media will deteriorate before the copyright expires. After all, the purchaser has a license to the copyright material its not just physical ownership of the disk.
Of course the MPAA could argue that copyright expiration is so far in the future that any consideration of post-expiration is ridiculous. And I might agree.
t
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
--Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, in congressional testimony.
Who's burglarizing who? I buy a car, I get the keys. Ford doesn't have the right to tell me where I can drive; I bought the car, and I bought its keys. If they come in and take the keys away from me, am I not the victim of burlary?
Too much intellectual property handwaving. Sellers don't have authority over buyer's uses, as some rather racist folks in whitebred towns discovered as their old homes were bought up by upwardly mobile *gasp* minorities.
--Dan
when he confuses copyright infringement with burglary and theft. This is an alarming show of incompetence by this attorney general.
His incompetence in IT matters could have been excused, but seems to be on the same level.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
It wasn't meant as a flame against guns. It was meant as a flame against hypocrisy.
Null
I think that a huge piece of what's wrong with our legal system is the blurring of facts, charging issues with emotion, and obscuring real issues. By saying things like "burglary tool", Lockyer is taking a piece of software and equating it with something the violates the security of an everyday middle class citizen. Admittedly, this is exactly how you should sway a jury in today's legal system. This is also why today's legal system is so fsck'd up.
The truth of the matter is that DeCSS is no more a burglary tool than a Dremel tool, and a middle class jury, who doesn't sit on media corporation boards, isn't going to give a damn about this case. The only way to make them care is to charge the issue with the illusion that someone is going to be "breaking, entering, and stealing" into their house to abduct their kids.
Unfortunately, although Lockyer is successfully relating the issue to something that the jury may be able to comprehend, he's also hopelessly obscuring the truth, and most middle class people aren't going to know the difference between a codec and a hole in the ground, so they aren't going to be able to discern the deliberate obfuscation.
Judges should be educated about technology before trying cases like this, and then prevent counsel from either side from making misleading statements like this. This would greatly even the playing field in the legal arena, and probably stop many of the misinterpretations of the DMCA. If all judges who deal with technology could be educated to at least being literate with the terminology, they would be able to dismiss legal actions that try to use the DMCA in a way that it wasn't intended (if there is such a thing).
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
Holy shit somebody just had an epiphany. Both parties suck. I laugh at people who bash Bush and say he shouldn't be President because all I have to say is "Would you rather have Tipper Gore in the White House?"
Unfortunately, both the Democrats and Republicans brought us the PATRIOT act.
Good post, but it's more muddled than that.
When I buy a DVD, I've bought a DVD. I haven't licensed it.
However, I can't play my property on my Linux-based computer. Enter DeCSS, which allows me to use my property in a way I see fit.
Now, wait for it.. Wait for it.. Here's the problem.
All this digital crap. Perfect copies and all that.
Because you can theoretically make a perfect copy of a DVD, and give it to your friend, while still keeping your current property, DVDs don't fit into old school 'property'.
This wasn't what people were thinking of when laws and precedents were drawn up a century or two ago. Back then, if you bought, say, a can of yams from some farmer, the farmer was confident you couldn't use them and give them to someone else at the same time.
You could give em to a friend, sure, but you wouldn't have any yams. You *could* try to both utilize the yams, and copy them, but humans are analog and made an imperfect, rather brown and smelly copy of the yams.
Yeah, I just woke up. Uh, right.
Let me try to rephrase that. Old School == You couldn't give away your property for free and still hold that property. Thus, no one really cared much if you gave it away. If you wanted that property again, you'd have to buy it again.
New school == "Here's a copy. Go home and watch it, and I'll watch the original here, and we'll make funny comments to each other over the phone."
Or some shit like that. Bah, damn the man, eat more broccoli, carrot juice consitutes murder.
The basic reality, and it does represent a problem for the business models of the mediaopolies, is that the vast majority of people don't take the transgression of illegal, non-commercial duplication seriously as a crime.
And this is the thing: I think copyright law is a good thing, by and large, it creates a lot of economic activity and can protect and enrich the artist who is wise enough not to give up that right, but the DMCA is a whole other thing. Controlling access to "burglars' tools" is one thing, but this is more like telling me I'm not allowed to go to the hardware store and get a duplicate key made for my own house.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
If that's true, then why was there ever a problem in the first place? Surely this was brought up so many times back when this first started with 2600. Even the MPAA must realize that DeCSS is not necessary for copying DVD's. So while the MPAA and their bribed politicians are claiming it's a burglary tool in court, the reason they went to court in the first place is probably something else. Like that fact that with DeCSS you can watch a movie on an UNLICENSED player.
For the MPAA (though they won't say this in court), this has nothing to do with copy prevention, but everything to do with the when, where, and how you watch a film you paid for. Obviously this is important to them or they wouldn't have dreamed up Region Codes.
How the hell do you get to be a State Attorney General and not have the mental ability to see straight through this?
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Crap.
CSS has not a whit to do with piracy. Piracy is the bogey man that the MPAA trots out to camoflage its agenda. CSS is about control of when you can watch a movie.
Without CSS the DVD consortium wouldn't have "officially licensed" decoders. And without those licensed decoders they couldn't carve the world up into zones. Those Intl zones keep a European DVD from playing in the US. More importantly, from the MPAA's point of view, it quashes the possibility of an Int'l gray market. Everybody has to by the disks in their own zone. No one can send them to their relatives "back home" and expect them to play.
CSS is there purely as a legal manoeuvre: "See, we have encryption!" The real point is to keep as absolute control of every disk and, ultimately, every viewing of that disk as is humanly possible.
Disney's decaying DVDs are the next step. You can expect the price of regular Disney DVDs to go way up once the decaying ones hit the market.
The closer you are to the code, the happier you are. - Ancient Geek Proverb
So let me get this straight. I can sit in my home, with a DVD I purchased in full, and by the act of playing that DVD on my Linux computer, I have forcibly invaded the private premises of the media industry and stolen their property?
We've known for years that words like piracy and theft are intended to have an emotional effect, (unless, of course, groups of Scandanavian teenagers are storming container ships on the open sea and stealing DVDs) but burglary?!
The only support for the application of the concept of burglary is phrases such as "hacking into mechanisms to protect trade secrets". Does this indicate that the man who may one day be governor of California believes that a copy of a DVD is to be considered the private property and premises of the MPAA?! And what trade secret is violated by skipping the forced commercials at the beginning of the video? It is shocking that someone would walk into a courtroom and have the gall to suggest that a DVD in my own home represents homestead rights and privileges of the MPAA! Regardless of the outcome, I have to wonder about a world where someone would even attempt to make a point so utterly devoid of reason.
Can somebody please tell me that he is just being stupid? Please, someone post something about attributing to evil that which can be explained by incompetence. I really need something like that to get me through the day.
I can't believe so many people have replied to this, and not pointed out -- DeCSS IS NOT ABOUT COPYING DVDs!!!
DeCSS is about watching DVDs that I paid for on machines not approved by the MPAA, for example my two linux machines.
It also gives you back the fair use rights that the movie industry is trying so hard to steal, but the primary use for DeCSS is to watch movies on linux.
The only way DeCSS even helps DVD copying is that it allows you to do lossy compression you couldn't otherwise do. DVD "copy protection" doesn't in the least keep you from copying a DVD. I can easily copy a DVD and view it without using any unapproved decryptor.
There are no juries in a state Supreme Court. He was making the argument to a justice, who can be expected to understand issues enough not to fall for such rhetoric.
The "middle-class jury" you so disparagingly reference is not making any major policy changes; they're deciding on findings of fact and leaving the actual legal maneuverings to the trial judge. Beyond that, most sweeping decisions are appealed.
Judges should be educated about technology before trying cases like this, and then prevent counsel from either side from making misleading statements like this.
To a large extent, judges ARE educated about technology before trying cases like this. And why should they "prevent counsel from either side from making misleading statements like this" when they could simply RECOGNIZE them as misleading and NOT BE MISLED?
Yes, the system may have its faults, but the ignorance of your post makes it abundantly clear that you're not one to prescribe fixes.
There are so many metaphors for DeCSS being thrown around that I hardly know where to start. Most of these seem to be subtlely incorrect, not implying the proper levels of ownership and copyright respect. Consider:
DeCSS:DVD::Crowbar:House
Close, but no cigar. We presume that for this use of a crowbar to be legal you must own or have rights to access the house. It is unclear which is meant simply because a house bears no resemblance to intelectual property. In other words, this house is real property...it can only be in the hands of one person at a time, that person has the right to access his property.
DeCSS:DVD::Criminal:Victim
Not even close. Besides the fact that DeCSS is a process and Criminal is a person, A criminal's victim is presumed to have rights. What rights does a DVD posses? None. As with the previous one, this analogy *also* fails because of the differing nature of intellectual property and IP crimes to real property and real property crimes (theft).
Hmm, so what *are* the properties of the items with which we want to relate?
IP:
the property held by IP owner (the content)
protection method:
CSS, a protective wrapper around IP stored within a DVD.
circumvention method:
DeCSS, a utility to allow access to "wrapped" IP
content media storage:
DVD
content access method:
DVD player
the DVD represents two distinct things. Both the protected media and the right to access it are conveyed by the ownership of a DVD. This is an important distinction. No, i'd go so far as to say it is *the* important distinction. Consider the implications of it being otherwise.
Consider a theatre. The provision of media and the right to access it are separated (ticket and auditorium). I would expect it to be *clearly* indicated if purchasing the ticket (right to watch) did not also purchase access (access to watch). Wouldn't you? I suspect that ownership under every law in every common law county implies both rights simultaneously. Not doing so probably requires a special contract which specifically retracts the right to access for the property.
Since I have never signed (nor have I even seen) such a restricting contract governing my ownership of my DVD's, I must assume that my purchase of a DVD includes both the right to watch and access to watch.
The owners of the IP contained in DVD's are trying to obscure the fact that they want the courts to revoke an implied right. These IP owners want to separate these two rights, placing the right to watch with the DVD and the right to access with the dvd player. Where did I give up my *standard* (IP) property rights which would allow this?
Lets try a more coherent comparison. We need to find a system where right to access and right to view are separable. I posit that the standard book is a fine example. Suppose:
I enter a book store, pick up a book, read the first page and decide I'd like to buy it to finish reading it. I go to the counter with the book and pay for it, getting a polite "thank you" from the store owner. When I get home, I go sit in my favorite chair, open the book to find that all the pages are blank. In confusion I search the book for the reading instructions. Finding none I call the bookstore, where I am informed that I can only read the book under a special kind of light. The bookstore just happens to have those lights installed. The store owner kindly offers to sell me a lamp so I can read my book, seeming confused at my annoyance. I however look online and find out that a massive tacheon flux through the book causes the ink to become visible for 24 hours. I do a bit more research and find a diagram showing how to create a tacheon emmitter using duct tape and chicken wire. Now, I can read my book. Have I committed a crime?
IP:
the content of the book.
protection method:
special ink
circumvention method:
tacheon emmitter
content storage media:
book
content acc
This entitlement attitude really pisses me off, it has for many years.
They didn't lose a dime. They may not have made a dime, but they have no right to assume I'd pay for something just because I'd take it for free.