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.

Comments

No surprise

[DrTentacle]

Bunner said he originally posted the code so that people could use it to play their DVDs on the Linux operating system, a practice that was all but impossible at the time.

Unfortunately, with no large corporate backing at the time, legitimate uses such as this would of course be ignored. When large corporates think they are losing money, the government will come down on their side time after time.

Let's hope that uses such as this can be viewed as more legitimate now that the OSS movement has some large backers - IBM and the like.

Confusing Burglary with Circumvention

[Anti Frozt]

Mr. Lockyer seems to be confusing the act of Burglary with that of Circumvention. DeCSS is not a tool for stealing or copying DVDs, but a tool for decoding a DVD for use in a DVD player, i.e. one created for Linux.

This would be like accusing someone who breaks into a car, but doesn't take anything, of grand theft auto. I think Mr. Lockyer needs to spend a few more years in Law School or at least read over the criminal legislation.

The irony, as they say, is priceless.

[janda]

The advertisement I got when I come into the comments page was for the Intel C++ compilter.

If DeCSS is a burglery tool, Intel, Microsoft, and other assembler/compiler makers should be charged with "aiding and abetting".

so now it's a trade secret?

[anonymous loser]

An interesting point from the news.com article:

During Thursday's hearing, DVD CCA attorney Robert Sugarman told the seven-judge panel that the software is designed "to allow individuals to steal a trade secret and, by virtue of that, hack into a system that protects the trade secrets of motion picture makers."

How did this go from stealing copyrights to stealing trade secrets all of a sudden? Exactly what part of the DVD is a trade secret? It can't possibly be the encryption, because nobody's interested in that part, they want the content. The content itself is certainly no trade secret, since it is widely distributed and available to anyone with a Blockbuster card.

Re:Not purchase: license

[Effugas]

It's not as backed up by law as you think it might be, or there wouldn't continue to be fights about Right of First Sale that the industry kept losing (i.e. sales of used CDs and DVDs.)

The industry can think what they want; the moment they put their product in a retail outlet, apply sales tax appropriate for a consumer good, and advertise using slogans like "Buy it today!" (Blockbuster), they sold it.

Imagine if every purchase you made came with a list of conditions. Imagine how often you'd ignore that list.

--Dan

Hahahahhaha

[dh003i]

Yea, sure. Just like the EULA's on software. Oh, wait, those are having trouble being upheld in court.

If the consumer perceives it as being a sale, and isn't told otherwise, then it's a sale. As in, they now own that DVD in the same sense that they own a book they buy.

Not only is their license invalid, and thus it's just an ordinary sale, like the sale of a book, but their license is also completely unenforcible, which means irrelevant. Encorfing their license would mean violating the privacy of millions of Americans and stepping into their homes, to prevent them from watching DVD's on GNU/Linux. No court is going to allow that. So, in other words, the MPAA's "license" is moot on two terms.