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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.
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
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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.
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
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.
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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.
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?