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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
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....
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.
It is copyright law that is illigetimate.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Why yes, convenient playback! (though Ogg Vorbis and AAC are superior)
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.
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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
Um, I know that's what the copyright statement says, I'm saying it does not make sense though. That's the point! :)
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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.
The whole DeCSS thing was a big publcity stunt\scare tactic to try to frighten people into not developing thisngs like it. It just didn't work.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It might be an interesting academic exercise, but the weak encryption provided by CSS would be useless from a standpoint of securing your data. The only practical use for CSS as a general-purpose encryption/decryption unit would be the decoding of DVDs...and that's where the Media Mafia gets the inclination to bust your kneecaps instead of leaving you alone. For protecting your data, you'd rather use something like Blowfish or RSA.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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?
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!