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Legitimate uses for DeCSS
Tabercil writes "Interesting article at the Washington Post, which among other things points out that DeCSS does have valid uses, and that the industry's paranoia over DeCSS is overblown." A reasonable mainstream summary of all the DVD related legal hype. Interesting that the libdvdcss folks have never had a bump with the law, but instead DeCSS takes all the brunt even tho nobody uses it.
they could convince the MPAA.
"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it" - Voltaire
the TRUTH is that there is no LEGITIMATE use of CSS on the first place
OMG! YOU STOLE MY WORDS! Bastard! You know all text is Copyright 2003 Anonymous Coward. Now Slashdot is contributing to this infringement! I shall sue you all!
Don't give them any ideas.
This is all about visability more than anything else. If you ask your average lay man they might know about DeCSS and taking a stand against it gets a message across. Most lay men won't know anything about libcss. Its not a techincal issue rather more one of believed usage
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
People have known that there are perfectly legitimate uses for DeCSS for how long now? I see this as a mixture of good news and bad news. Good news that the mainstream media are figuring this out, bad news that it took so long. And will it make any difference? The media as a whole seem to be eating out of the *AA's hands. Witness the article about music piracy in Time....
Uh, this is first post, how can this be 'redundant'?
Oh... you mean 'obvious'. Well, there's no 'obvious' mod, so get over it. Use your mod points to mod things up, not down.
Thank you
Legitimate uses?
Thank God! I've been looking for a few good excuses^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hreasons to tell the MPAA when they come to my door.
There's no place like
I (and many other linux users) have known for a long time that DeCSS/libdvdcss is a necessity for those of us who like movies, but refuse to run windoze. I find it heartening that a media outlet such as the Washington post recognizes valid uses for the same. Maybe now the various distros out there won't make their users jump through hoops just to watch a dvd.
actually, I had posted the first post by an AC... forgot to allow cookies and it didn't log me in. Thanks for your input though.
"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it" - Voltaire
..if the MPAA is going to sue the Washington Post for the same reason that they sued 2600. I doubt they've got the chutzpah for that legal fight, but it would be quite interesting if they did.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
CSS is to encryption, as MTV is to music.
they both suck!
If you strike the (and anybody else), you got it right. Copying to friends and family is a fair use right in Eurpoe (but it will probably not last).
- Ost
---- Sig. gone.
I've had no problems playing DVDs using videolan on windows, but no luck whatsoever with a variety of closed source programs such as powerdvd and windows media player. Same DVD, same drive, same operating system. Fully licensed commercial crap = don't work, open source = works beautifully and will even rip it for me, add subtitles and make an SVCD out of it so I can watch a German language flick with my American friends.
Glad to see the Post gets it.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I think that we should allow what we of weak taste call "movies and music" studios to succeed. Allow them perfect control of everything. You will not be able to do anything without paying them but run a Commodore 64 that is disconnected from the Internet.
The result?
The complete, total and utter collapse of the above Industries. People will not be able or willing to afford even to buy a book online because of crippling proprietary formats and greedy prices. No one will be interested in anything digital anymore, disconnected we will peacefully slip back to telling stories by the fireplace (reading them off the C64's screen that is).
Or maybe not.
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
One huge difference: While your copy is physically loaned out to a friend, neither you or any of your other friends can use it. You're not making a new copy, you're just passing one around.
Doing the IRC thing, OTOH, you're actually making additional copies which can then be used concurrently. Big no-no.
Oh sure. Whats next?
Legitimate uses for Mp3s?
to play DVDs that are from outside my native region. The MPAA will pry my hard-drive containing libdvdcss and my region 2 DVDs out of my cold bloody fingers.
The problem is not using some ripping technology, but using some technology which is not copyright-aware. You should be able to burn your work in CDs, DVDs, [whatever]. The only problem is that you have to let the system know that you are the copyright owner. Simpl, right? But I think the free-riding OSS community needs a system that skips copyright ownership.
It is copyright law that is illigetimate.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Yeah. Why don't we make them explode and chops your fingers off when you try to RIP them or lend them? Maybe there should be a poisonous surface that realeases the poison after it has been Ripped, therefore killing the perpetrator.
I find this very fascinating. In fact , since the US still has the capital punishment in effect, why don't you fry their asses in case the poison does not work or it is "libDePoison"'d?
And naturally, the company will be legally covered with a warning label on the DVD that would say something like "Infidels risk mutilation"
Very nice idea indeed.
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
Or when it detects the DeCSS rays it could send out an army of robots to take the pirate into custody.
liar!
To those who say that DVDs are indestructable, I suggest you let your 3 year old play with them a few times. Parenting techniques aside, I have found one good use for decrypting... we have purchased several children's educational DVDs but each only has about 30 minutes of material. Rather than continuously swapping them out, I decrypted them and copied a few of them onto one DVD so they play end-to-end. Can you think of a better "fair-use" example?
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
There are legitimate uses for nuclear weapons, too. There are legitimate uses for guns. There are legitimate uses for Dubya, for crying out loud. Does that mean these things should be tolerated??
Just because you can dig up one excuse doesn't mean it's okay.
It probably comes down to the publics perception of who's doing the reporting and what's being reported. Just like the NY Times and Wired News weren't sued for posting a link to DeCSS in their past articles, the Washington Post won't be either.
I can't walk roud the supermarket without hearing people talking about DeCSS.
Wise up, sunshine, I could ask 100 computer programmers about DeCSS and none of them would know wtf I was on about.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
actually what the USA will probably do is simply poison everyone at birth, and an antidote will be doled out over you lifespan based on the quality of your citizenship and/or the volume of your consumer purchases.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Of course there are legitimate uses for DeCSS. They're called set-top and Windows DVD players. Furthermore, what if I want to rip a DVD that has 40 seconds of non-fast-forwardable commercial trash a the beginning and burn just the movie's video track to a DVD-R?
i dont know if you have ever actually read the back of a dvd. some of the ones i have read actually say that you may not lend, rent, or borrow the dvd.
> "I allege that SCO is full of it" -Linus
Here's an example of a ligitimate use of DeCSS... I'm do damned poor or too much of a cheap ass to get a new dvd drive to replace mine that barely reads. So every time I want to watch a dvd (DS9) on my computer (only dvd player in the house) I've got to rip it onto a hard dive then play it back skip free. It does play regulary somewhat but the audio is skippy because the data rate transfer is too slow. So yes there are ligit uses.
Why the fuck should I spend $59 for a DVD TV player, when I can watch it for free on my computer? Also, my TV isn't going to go with me wherever I go. My laptop is.
Fuck off, asshole.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Back in the days before DVD, whenever I bought a new VHS video for my collection I'd do a few things during my first viewing of it. First, I fast-forwarded through all the commercials at the beginning of the tape. Sometimes this would come out to more than 15 minutes worth of crap. Next, I took the tape out of the player, cut the labels at the cartridge seam, removed the screws from the cartridge, and opened it up. Then, I carefully removed the take-up spool, and cut the tape. I unspooled all the crap from the take-up spool, pulled out the little retainer clip, and threw the crap in the trash. Finally, I reconnected the remaining tape to the take-up spool and put the retaining clip back in, and put everything back together. Voila! My tape was now configured the way it should have been from the getgo: no commercials.
I'm pretty sure I was well within my legal rights to do this to tapes I had purchased legitimately, and that no *AA organization or anyone else would even think about going after me for it. All this has changed with the DMCA and digital formats. IANAL, but it seems pretty stupid to me that physically hacking a tape I bought is perfectly legal, while digitally doing the same thing in a much less invasive manner to a DVD is not.
Loading...
#!/usr/bin/perl
2 5,_;H=73;O=$b[4]<<9& (Q>>12^Q>>4^Q/8^Q))<<17,O=O>>8^(E&(F=(S=O>>14&7^O) T ,"\xb\ntd\xbz\x14d")[_/16%8]);EG ^=12*(U-2?0:S&17)),H^=_%64?12:0,@z)[_%8]}(16..271) )[_]^((D>>=8T ,@a}';s/[D-HO-U_]/\$$&/g;s/q/pack+/g;eval
# 472-byte qrpff, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz <sipb-iap-dvd@mit.edu>
# MPEG 2 PS VOB file -> descrambled output on stdout.
# usage: perl -I <k1>:<k2>:<k3>:<k4>:<k5> ; qrpff
# where k1..k5 are the title key bytes in least to most-significant order
s''$/=\2048;while(<>){G=29;R=142;if((@a=u nqT="C*",_)[20]&48){D=89;_=unqb24,qT,@
b=map{ ord qB8,unqb8,qT,_^$a[--D]}@INC;s/...$/1$&/;Q=unqV,qb
|256|$b[3];Q=Q>>8^(P=(E=255)
^S*8^S<<6))<<9,_=(map{U=_%16orE^=R^=110&(S=(unq
^=(72,@z=(64,72,
)+=P+(~F&E))for@a[128..$#a]}print+q
At least that's what the MPAA and CCA among others like to think and that's because people tend to imagine that others are minimally dissimilar to themselves.
I use and only ever have used OSS because it has always been the only choice for software development, mathematical and scientific software that I can reasonably afford.
I bought a DVD drive some years ago and have since spent a lot of money on DVD movies. I have no intention of turning my PC into an industrial scale pirating machine, I don't even copy DVDs to hard drive - why would I bother?
None of my friends has ever asked me to copy a DVD for them and I don't expect they ever will since they know I'd just say "Buy your own you tight fisted git!"
Do I sound like a normal consumer of entertainment media? Aren't almost all people who buy DVDs like me? I hope so because I might be afraid to go outside if the streets are full of the kind of people the MPAA/CCA thinks they are. If they want to catch pirates then they can use something like unique watermarking together with investigative, forensic and epidemiological methods and cease trying to gain absolute control over each and every individual consumer from within their steel and concrete fortresses.
If the entertainment and publishing industries succeed in their Orwellian objectives and make it impossible for me to watch DVD movies on my GNU/Linux box I'll no longer be buying 3 or 4 movies a month, I might even be so angry I don't go to the cinema any more. But one thing I'll never do is castrate and lobotomize my PC by installing software on it that suits not my interests but the interests of the corporate megalomaniacs.
the TRUTH is that there is no LEGITIMATE use of CSS on the first place
What? You want to go back to table layout and <font>!?
Somebody who went to school with me made a crypto module for the Mono platform based on the Skipjack cipher used in the Clipper chip. I wonder what it'd be like if DVD CCA's CSS were re-implemented as yet another general-purpose stream cipher for a popular platform's crypto interface. Interchangeable modules, each with a substantial non-infringing use, make it harder for the DMCA police to point a finger at a guilty party.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Copyright can be used in a greedy fashion. But kindly keep in mind that most open source and free software licenses, including the GPL, depend on copyright. Those works (the Linux kernel, GCC, Mozilla, libdvdcss, and thousands of others) have been given to the community by their authors without the expectation of monetary compensation. This is a non-greedy use of copyright.
CSS (and Macrovision, and region coding) is used by the movie industry to attempt to control our movie-watching behavior by dictating where and when and how we can watch movies that we have paid for. That is a legitimate use in the eyes of the industry, though I'll agree that it has been misapplied.
But those same techniques could be used in good ways; for example to protect your own privacy. Say you have a digital camera, and you make some risque films with your lover. You could then burn those to DVD and use CSS, Macrovision, and region coding to try and make sure that no-one but you and your lover are able to watch those videos. Mind, it probably wouldn't work very well -- the techniques are too well known and too easily broken. You'd be better off encoding it to DivX or Xvid and then encrypting the whole file with PGP.
Anyway, my point is that copyright and DVD technologies are neutral: it's how they are used that makes them good or bad.
> Interesting that the libdvdcss folks have never > had a bump with the law, but instead DeCSS
> takes all the brunt even tho nobody uses it.
Thanks to you, you stupid mother fucking leeching slashdot troll, folks that make libdvdcss will have to stop their project. You STUPID MORON. HOW STUPID ARE YOU!!
if your post didnt scare me, I would have found it very funny
I think its time to look for my antidote... I helped an old lady cross the street today
I tried installing vlc and libdvdcsss on my laptop {Packard Bell 4450 == rebadged NEC Versa E400. Celeron 1500, 128MB RAM, Debian 3.0r0}. It worked once, with a Region 2 disc. I tried a region 1 disc, which crashed the machine thoroughly enough to need an emergency power off. Now I keep getting the same effect with every DVD I have tried.
.....
:-)
Has anyone else experienced this? Do I need a newer version? Is there something I need to compile into my kernel? Or is my laptop's DVD drive bust? I hope not
I have had no such trouble with vlc and libdvdcss on my Athlon, but I'm running Mandrake on that with a horribly bloated stock kernel and extra stuff running. With 2GHz of speed and 1GB of RAM, that matters less
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
CAUTION - EXTREME DREAMING - Consume with care, and a little flight of fantasy.
If I had to use the analogy of a battle with RIAA and MPAA, I would say bring 'em on, and let them open another front in the legal battle. Sue another company or another individual. Stretch them thin by forcing them to go for many many small and diverse legal cases - but never letting them bunch the many cases into a single class-action lawsuit (or, should I say, reverse class-action?). Inflict pain on them at their thousands points of legal cases, and drain their lawyers and their coffers. Then, we should all go in for the kill, and change their business model.
It can all be done by employing simple mathematics in our arsenal.
RIAA and MPAA get a small share of each CD/DVD sold, most probably, indirectly through membership dues being paid to it. The rest of it goes to the studios, middlemen,etc. ( more here for the mp3's)
What if, as we draw the RIAA and MPAA to file thousands of civil cases (trying to avoid criminal cases), a part of us starts showing support to the defendents in these cases. Donate, not a small share, but ALL the price of the CD or DVD not bought from the members of RIAA and MPAA, for the defense in these cases. As our contribution, on a per person basis, will be at least 15 times (probably much more as I don't think RIAA and MPAA are getting dollar from every $15 disc sold) more in value than the crowd buying CD's and contributing to the RIAA's and MPAA's coffers, we just need to be 6.7% of the people in the music consumming community to take on the RIAA amd MPAA lawyers on an equal financial footing.
And if more than 6.7 % of the music consuming community can be brought together we shall have more funds to beat the RIAA and MPAA and their members on their head. And, once we cross the threshold, there is no way to reverse this growing snowball heading in their direction. The logic being that they get a share of the CD or DVD's price to attack us, we array the "complete" price of the CD or DVD against them.
Mathematics, luckily says that a share can never be bigger than the complete. So, the RIAA and MPAA are bound to be finished.
DREAM OVER. Thanks for sharing the journey.
What can we do next? Can we do something else ?
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
This should have been modded Insightful, not Funny ... the U.S. is WELL on the way to doing just this sort of thing in ways that put even Hitler to shame. The new Patriot II Act will make it legal for secret arrests, imprisonment and EXECUTION of anyone including American citizens, that the executive claims is involved in terrorism. Hitler may have done these types of things but he NEVER dared to actually put those "rights" for himself into the law.
OK, why don't see the whole copyright/drm matter from a viewpoint of blatant democracy? There are more people interested in free^H^H^H^Hgratis entertainment/software than people interested in preserving the copyrights. Case closed.
Minority protection? Yeah, like that ever was working as it was meant to work. OTOH, one could say that high finance is indeed a minority deserving special protection.
And don't forget there is enough content to get us over the next 20 years. Note my emphasis on the word content, as its usage provokes exactly the attitude I am displaying/caricaturing here.
I can only assert a moral high ground in people breaking copyrights which are mainly there for the profit of megacorps. If they declare war on their customers, the rules of total war apply: every loss of the enemy our gain. They played by those rules long enough it seems.
What about forming a cult that voluntarily attends n concerts for every m CDs worth of music "pirated" (at n=formula(m) that makes artists break even)? ;-)
BTW, I do support technical copy protection: Technology is a much fairer and pleasant fighting
ground than law.
Could someone please explain to me what good I (as the end consumer) should see in this law? All I see right now is greedy media companies trying to loophole themselves eternal copyrights (or any effective analog) of a sort that independent creators are prevented from sharing that term of protection. They are using otherwise reasonable-sounding arguments -- such as "director's vision" in the case against CleanFlicks or the (now tired) complaint of piracy against Studio 321, and at one time I might have found myself agreeing with those complaints -- but when I realized that they are pushing a campaign for eternal control of media even to the destruction of fair use ("it's not a sale, it's a licensing -- laws reguarding sales do not apply"[link goes to a .PDF]) and that they refuse any middle ground or quid pro quo, those arguments lost all meaning with me. I fear that the DMCA may create a modern, digital stationer's guild, and the thought that the *AA may have exactly that in mind frightens me.
Do you like Japanese imports?
Using DeCSS is illegal simply because you are supposed to license the technology. Bypassing this licensing shows a blatant disregard for IP, and discourages innovation. It's amzing how people on slashdot ignore IP when convenient, but then are outraged when the GPL is violated. At least be consisent in your beliefs people.
Vote for Pedro
The CSS in DeCSS stands for 'content scrambling system' rather than the 'cascading style sheets' the parent troll is using it as. They're two completely different things.
There are no lawful uses for DeCSS and by using it your are sponsoring terrorism.
I've used the encryption algorithm from CSS when I've needed a weak system that I'm sure won't get the export control people or the NSA pissed off at me. :-)
I've worked in IT for MANY industries and have never heard this technology even mentioned; much less witnessed widespread paranoia.
the weak encryption provided by CSS would be useless from a standpoint of securing your data.
That's exactly what they want you to think. The forms of crypto used by kids on the playground (monoalphabetic substitution ciphers on secret decoder rings, language games such as Pig Latin, etc.) are even weaker, but they do the job they were intended for. A 40-bit cipher such as CSS may prove useful in countries that ban private use of stronger crypto.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Of course, immediately after making the stylesheet one-liner, he returns to the crypto meaning and provides a substantial legitimate use subject to 1201(b).
Wow. A very succinct blast into reality.
Quit cying in your beers about being persecuted by bad law. Programmers are a minority and bad laws have targeted minorities for decades.
My dick has uses other than practicing makin babies and I'm sure that pussies do too. But generally if some woman wants to do a little practicin for a few bucks in most parts of the world she faces an unbeleiveable thorny patchquilt of laws designed to control what she does with her body.
Similarly, programmers must realize that they are now becomming subject to laws that create mental slavery juast as previously there have been laws that sexually enslaved women.
Don't look for the cops for help... as one cop turned hooker explained: "She wanted an HONEST job".
The legislation and litigation are all about power folks... their power over you and me.
is a major impedment to OEM linux computers. DVD drives, while not really important to most consumers, are essential added value for an OEM. If the choice came down to a linux pc without dvd and a windows pc with, many consumers might be willing to shell out the extra cash (yes, even if they have a stand alone player).
:) with css support, let alone using it effectively. Lindow's solution is pretty bad. You've got to reboot every time you play a dvd, and you lose the cost savings from using free software.
Linux's best edge in the OEM market is all that software that OEM's shell out money for (dvd players, office software, spam filters and pop up blockers, not to mention the OS) is free. Remove those costs and you improve profit margines nicely.
While you can add the software yourself later, I'd guess most Walmart shoppers would have enough trouble just installing mplayer (the only linux dvd player with full deinterlacing support, that I know of anyway
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
None of the DVDs I own have unskippable commercials. But then, the DVDs I buy are almost entirely anime plus some SF stuff (Red Dwarf, Babylon 5, etc.) I don't think the Princess Bride or Army of Darkness had any, though.
;-)
Many of them do have the stupid FBI warning as unskippable (Excel's version of it is priceless, though - "Ilpalazzo is watching you!"). Nearly all of them stick the previews in the extras section, which I much prefer. Also, I've watched far more trailers by clicking on them in the extras section than at the start of a DVD, especially the ones with good theme songs.
You make an excellent point. Even if software were not copyrighted, individuals and companies could release binaries, and we would never see the code. Although the GPL more or less annuls copyrights, it is this idea of "hidden code" that is at the heart of the matter.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
that put even Hitler to shame.
Yeah, look at the mass graves full of Jews we have in every city. They dug one in my front yard too!
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
"The DVD CCA has never tried to reach the VideoLAN team about our development of the libdvdcss library," developer Sam Hocevar wrote in an e-mail. "
Until now...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
This tells us two things: (1) attempts to restrict our fair use of [fill in the blank] is evidence that some very powerful people don't understand copyright law; (2) some very powerful people are willing to sacrifice the freedom of those who don't break the law (legitimate gun owners, legitimate users of CD/DVD-copying software, etc.) in order to dissuade criminals.
That's called taking the easy way out. Com'on, guys, we elect you to cushy jobs where you get paid $130,000+ (tax-free) so you can be creative and actually get stuff done for us!
That's the point here---even if you oppose copying/redistributing DVDs, there are plenty of good reasons to use DeCSS. So, even if you think software for copying/redistributing DVDs should be illegal, DeCSS shouldn't.
There are reasons why democracy does not work nearly as well as capitalism.
-- David D. Friedman
Showing copyright material to somewhat is perfectly legitimate. That is, for instance, showing or reading to someone a passage of an article or book, or inviting a couple of friends over to watch a movie. It's making a transmittable copy of something and sharing it that is criminal according to copyright law.
Don't repeat my mistake and comment to a forum you've moderated. I wasn't thinking. Just because the system lets you do it does not mean there won't be a penalty for doing so.
I won't do this again.
Please don't waste your modpoints on this.. there are way too many deserving posters here.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
All novel did is remove a copyright description from a file with a copyright desription with a statement saying it could not be removed. Yep and they lost where FreeBSD came from. So far no one has been foolish to take GPL to court since this makes is very hard. Of course there are ways to steal GPL and a have a legal chance. They manly cover GPL people not puting the a min licence at the start of all there files. But I still would not like to be the first.
From the Washington Post article:
"The DVD CCA has never tried to reach the VideoLAN team about our development of the libdvdcss library," developer Sam Hocevar wrote in an e-mail.
3....2....1.....
-R
You should have sent the offending material back to the studio and requested a refund for the part you didn't want. :-)
...being able to WATCH your DVD movies at all
And I do not mean watching them on oure "pirated-from-Sco"
GNU/Linux systems, but actually being able to watch them.
It seens that the latest generation of DVD Drivers (the
"legitimate", DeCSS free stuff), will simply not play any DVD
if your PC has got a working TV Out video card.
I saw this in an e-mail of a friend the other day, and just checked google for it: Here
I can see it was not a thing with my friend computer.
-><- no
that's wishy-washy. you could just make a jesus-like declaration that everyone is your "neighbor" in the server disclaimer.
Repeal the DMCA!
Some Universities "allow" (= don't do anything about) filesharing within the university network, because some form of social relationship exists between all the students.
- Ost
---- Sig. gone.
What do people think about DVD Regioning?
If I live in a country for 5 years and buy DVD's while there, it is technically illegal to bring them to a country in another zone and change/hack the Region on my DVD player to play it years later. Of course this is to protect the rights of the companies who buy distribution rights for a region. In my country they only _enforce_ the prohibition in retail, and not overseas purchases.
However, what about the company who owns the rights, but won't release the DVD for a year or more because they are re-running the movie at cinemas? I have seen this before, and the DVD is aavailable already in other countries.
What about Macrovision? Doesn't that stop fair use rights to backup the movie (even if it is to lesser quality VHS)?
Wow... the Patriot Act II. It almost sounds like a Hollywood movie! "Bigger, Brasher, More Almost-Naked Women... It's the Patriot Act II."
No, the thing Hitler didn't get was subtelty. You have to make these changes in a slow and controlled way. You can't just take a whole civilisation and lob them in death camps - you have to persuade them that it's for the good of the nation and patriotism and all that cock-n-bull first.
Of course, wiping what mental capability they have is useful first, and that brings us back to Hollywood...
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
Why do you think it is necessary to convince the MPAA? They know full well that decss has legal uses. They just don't want it to exist, or be legal anymore, that's all!
TV-Out doesn't work by default because Windows Media Player uses Video Overlay by default.
When you turn this behavior off, the image replicates fine to the TV screen on the TV-Out port. Otherwise, you get the exact symptoms described in the post (everything is visible on the screen except for the media playback, which is just a black area).
As a random aside, I saw Metropolis in the theatre last year. Now my wife and I own two rather different copies of it, that tell slightly different stories with differing quality and moods throughout. Neither of them (or both together) prepared us even remotely for the experience brought to us.
We saw the single most complete version of the film (more complete than what most of Germany saw in 1927, in fact), painstakingly (and beautifully!) restored to a degree I didn't think was possible, with the original German intertitles. English translation was done live by a woman sitting in the theatre. The soundtrack was performed live on portable pipe organ, synthesiser, and theremin!
It looks like this restored version is now available. Get it! Even better though, see it with a live organist if you can. It's an amazing experience.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban