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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.
the TRUTH is that there is no LEGITIMATE use of CSS on the first place
..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.
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
Wait. You can't skip the commercial? I can understand the FBI warning, its not even that intrusive, but the freekin' commercial? There shouldn't even be a commercial on a DVD or VHS that you buy. You pay for a DVD so that you can watch it commercial free and on demand.... /grumble
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
But try telling them they're not allowed to skip the commercial/FBI warning...
I get turned off every time I come to an unskippable part of a DVD. If DVD quality wasn't so much better than VHS, I wouldn't bother with it. The lack of control the customer has over their own purchase is ridiculous.
Another good use for parents can be the removal of Macrovision protection. It allows you to put the DVD on VHS so you can give the kids the movie in a format that's a little less likely to be destroyed in ten seconds.
If you have a DVD burner, you could also give the kids the back-up version instead of the original to avoid the same problem(loss of the original).
Solution one is probably beyond most parent's computer ability, and solution two is pricey(DVD burner ~=$300). However, in comparison to having the kid ruin the originals it can be cheaper since X x $20 = Big bucks if your kid scratches a movie every other week.
The movie studios want to have it so that you only own the disk, but restrict you like you only license the content. If you are paying "only" for the disk, you should be allowed to back it up. If you only payed for the content then the studios should replace the disk no matter what happens to it since what you payed for was "the right to watch the movie when you want to."
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?
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
I think that you are giving humanity a little too much credit when it comes to the "anonymous" crimes. Especially when it is against some entity(sp) that well feel has evil profit motivations. You even weigthed you argument by using the projoritive "megolomainiac".
To be completley honest I fear where this is all heading either way. If the companies have their way then we will all own lobotomized machines instead of the wonderful general purpose machines that we see in front of us today (honestly, people from the early days probably even feel that these machines have been disabled for economic reasons)
If the people win there is a real possibility that piracy could destroy a few industries that do provide some use. One could argue that there could be a new P2P like move production/distribution scheme, but to tell you the honest truth, I don't have the time to wade through the crap that the average filmmaker would produce to get something worth watching. (I do not watch many theater movies, so maybe it's all crap now and the studios deserve to die)
One problem with slashdot (and people in general) is that we really cannot seem to honestly appraise the damage that we cause when it flies in the face of our immediate desires. Society has address this problem with our moral code and the immediate shunning of the criminal element. However this doesn't not exist in the cyberworld, the anonymous nature allows people to regress back to the theives and pirates that we seem to be. Really almost everybody in the forum have pirated some piece of software/digital media and have a completly clear conscious. Yet a far fewer number could ever muster up the courage to steal this directly from a store.
My main point is that both sides of this argument seems to ignore what the other side is losing. Inject some hair trigger politicians into this and you have reached a dangerous fork in the road where I feel we are screwed either way.
ps. I use mostly OSS software because it gives me the libertity of using my computers without having to become a theif or pirate.
Track down an Apex AD600A...there's nothing that's unskippable on one of those. Most of the time, pressing PBC OFF twice and then pressing DVD DIGEST will take you straight to the root menu, past any ads/FBI warnings/etc. On the rare occasions that they're part of the movie VTS and not a separate VTS, you can turn playback control off entirely by pressing PBC OFF, then skip around to wherever you want to go. Mine has the latest firmware and an upgraded loader (read: 16x IDE DVD-ROM drive) so it'll play DVD-Rs and -RWs...it'll play damn near anything I can throw at it.
You won't find them in stores anymore, but I'd guess that they turn up on eBay from time to time.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
So I meander to Walmart and pick up a $25CDN DVD disc, bring it home, and I'm now not allowed to watch same because I don't run Windows on my workstation or own a DVD player? Also, I fail to see the illegality of doing so. I did pay for the right to watch my purchase, did I not?
That's funny, I thought copyright laws dealt with the re-distribution of copyrighted materials. Why is it anybody's business if I want to have 200 copies of Resevoir Dogs lying around my house? (Maybe they make great beer coasters ... )
Illegal? You mean, the contracts/licenses established between the movie studios and the electronics manufacturers are now somehow legally binding on the end-user (who, I might add, not only had no foreknowledge of said contracts, but was never even once consulted on, or asked to agree to same, letalone sign one with a witness present)? That's some magic law you've got there.
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