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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.
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.
No reason to make your own. Check out vcdhelp.com for information on what DVD players can be hacked. Some are more work than others. I never buy one without checking there first.
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.
Second, as to proof of current substantial adverse effect, the evidence on the record in this proceeding clearly establishes that it is not just a handful of titles that are affected. 66 individual consumers submitted comments to the Copyright Office in support of this exemption. These comments describe their first-hand experience of encountering non-fast-forwardable promotional material on over 40 different popular titles. These titles included Lilo and Stitch, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Toy Story I and II, Monsters, Inc., A Very Merry Pooh Year, Bob the Builder, About a Boy, Blue Crush, American Pie II, The Sixth Sense, Ice Age, the Red Violin, Shawshank Redemption, the Bourne Identity, Baby Mozart and Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.
An assessment of the substantial adverse impact on consumers requires consideration of both the number of titles which may contain UOP blocking, and the number of units of each of those titles that have been sold to consumers. All of the titles I mentioned are extremely popular and were high volume sellers. According to the 2002 Year End sales report from Video Business, in 2002 Monsters, Inc sold 11.8 million units, Ice Age sold 7 million units, Lilo and Stitch sold 6.6 million units in the last three weeks of December 2002 alone, and Beauty and the Beast sold 4.3 million units. In total, there are - just for those 4 titles alone - 29.7 million units in consumer households that may have been affected by the inability to fast-forward through commercial advertising. This is hardly an insignificant impact.
Third, in assessing the impact of these technological measures on noninfringing use, the nature of the harm to individual consumers must be taken into account. In the case of each of the 66 consumers who filed comments with the Copyright Office, the harm was significant, and rose beyond a mere inconvenience. They were not able to avoid the objectionable material. The harm was redoubled when they were not able to prevent their children from viewing the objectionable material on various Disney titles. A number of parents commented that they had specifically purchased DVDs as a means of controlling their children's exposure to commercial advertising, and were understandably upset when they could not fast-forward through that material. This is not a mere inconvenience.
(Emphasis added by me.)
Carousel is a lie!
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
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
Just curious here, but what viewing fees did you have in mind about watching DVDs? Do you mean the fees that are paid by the software authors, or some fee I have never heard of that is paid by the end user?
Do you like Japanese imports?
Track down an Apex AD600A...there's nothing that's unskippable on one of those.
Unfortunately, the picture quality on this model is awful. It was among the earliest models that used standard off-the-shelf PC DVD drives along with an on-board decoder (as opposed to a custom-made design in most big-name DVD players). There is a noticeable difference in picture quality when playing almost any DVD on this player vs. another player - this is the reason I sold mine.
However, there are plenty of other hackable players that let you fast forward through the junk. Most of these are cheap Chinese players like the Apex AD600A, but not all, and even the cheap players these days are perfectly acceptable. My Daewoo DVG3000N (a Chinese player sold under a Korean brand name) lets me skip through everything after replacing the firmware chip, and its picture quality is far superior to the AD600A. Look around for a player made for sale in Hong Kong (just do a Google search for "region free DVD") - these don't need to be hacked, have no region-protection and generally no macrovision, and the vast majority of them will let you skip through anything as well.
One more oddity about the AD600A, though, which is back on-topic - its hidden menu let you strip CSS. I have no idea what you could use this for as there didn't seem to be any way to actually hook up a PC to the machine, but the option was there, strangely enough. I haven't seen this feature in another home DVD player.