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.

Comments

DeCSS a necessity...

[maharito]

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.

Re:Visability

[Saint Aardvark]

Agreed. I had a conversation with a friend last week, and he offered to loan me a DVD. I told him that I didn't have a player, and wasn't planning to for a while until I could cobble together one of my own that would let me get around the restrictions. He asked what I meant, and e was surprised to learn the sort of things you're not supposed to be able to do (get around region encoding, the unskippable bit, back up to HD, etc.).

It's not that he's cluless or anything -- he's quite an intelligent guy. But this sort of thing never (well, rarely -- kudos to Mr. Pegoraro for his article) gets mentioned to people shopping at Walmart for their DVD player, or explained in terms that make sense to them. Information wants to be blah blah blah, and people's eyes will glaze over. But try telling them they're not allowed to skip the commercial/FBI warning -- Warner Bros. sez so -- and they'll get mad, all right.

My childrens' videos...

[Keebler71]

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?

Re:self destruction

[small_dick]

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.