Slashdot Mirror
DeCSS Loses Free Speech Shield
JohnGrahamCumming writes "BusinessWeek/CNET is reporting that the California Supreme Court has ruled that 'a Web publisher could be barred from posting DVD-copying code online without infringing on his free speech rights.' They also say that 'the state Supreme Court ruled that property and trade secrets rights outranked free speech rights in this case.'" According to the article, this "...overturned an earlier decision that said blocking Web publishers from posting the controversial piece of software called DeCSS, which can be used to help decrypt and copy DVDs, would violate their First Amendment rights."
The "knew or should have known" test should not have been applied to the original trade-secret violation case. It appears that not even Norway's prosecutor "knows", and its court certainly thinks not. How would some kid who's never been there be expected to "know"? The only outcome that would not embarrass California's courts any further would be to decide that there was no remaining trade secret at the time of the original filing.
Don't host it on a website.. in the US.
There are plenty of other countries that don't have such a crazy legal system.
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
So this means we're going to have to buy the DVDs? nope.
People will miss you! Hey, we have some nice places here in Europe. Come join us! :)
Could someone post a link to it? I'd like to know what it is. :)
... so here's a "from the gut" reaction.
Ah, shit.
Sometimes, the continued reporting of how our rights as consumers are being eroded makes me want to put slashdot in my barred hosts file. And then move to a cave. I'm sick of this crap, I really am.
You win again, gravity!
Notice that the decision is based on the code being a trade secret. The lower appeals court can still decide that the code is not a trade secret, and it could still be published
i find this decision surprising, but from an article on CNET an EFF attorney indicates that this wasn't a total loss. the court ruled that the revelation of trade secrets is not protected speech, though it isn't clear if DeCSS is a trade secret (because it is so widespread). nevertheless, the ruling sets a bad precedent, and i'm sure the supreme court will be appealed to.
smd4985
Dows this mean they have to stop selling the t-shirts too?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Mr. Cox...come on over to California for your MBA.
Does this mean that DeCSS isn't protected under "fair use" either? Bastages.
Maybe it's good reason all the tech jobs are going overseas. At least in India/Russia they have the freedom to post security related software without going to jail...
Let the puritans and corporate fascists fight it out.
Now that I think about it, it would be nice if the EU guaranteed, in the very best "socialist" fashion, a job and a house for all of you. I'd be ready to pay for it. As a payback for the Marshall Aid, you know. We still owe you for that.
This link leads to a story about a related case. I know, it's no laughing matter....
..it's no surprise that their supreme court should follow.
Move my grave to a free country!
George Washington
What does that mean? Correct me if I'm wrong, but last I checked, there's no such thing as "trade secret rights". Trade secrets are secret because you keep them secret (via NDA or whatever). Once they escape, they're public knowledge, end of story. I wonder how long it'll take before trade secrets are lumped together with patents, copyrights, and trademarks as "IP". *sigh*
That's balogna, and everyone on Slashdot knows it. Just because the orginization is called the DVD Copy Control Association doesn't mean that the encryption used has anything to do with copying the DVDs. I can easily and full "cp /dev/dvd ~/copied-dvd.iso" without DeCSS. But you need DeCSS to access the content, which has nothing to do with copying (well, permenantly), only playing.
Anyway, what kind of trade secret is it, if everybody knows it?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
See, that's why I just ignore laws like that. I bought the DVD. It's mine. I own it. If I want to crack the copy protection, it's my choice. Since, you know, I own it and all. If I wanna take a razor and scratch up the surface, it's my choice. Since, you know, I own it and all.
I really don't understand how it came to be that if you buy something it's still not yours.
Then again, I live in canada so that DeCSS ruling probably doesn't effect me... yet.
I am a filthy pirate.
- I should be able to say/print whatever I want! I am teh 1337!
- The US and all it's USians are heading towards a nihilistic semi-fascist state!
- DeCSS only breaks something that wasn't secure in the first place, who cares!
- Six posts of people willing to host mirrors of DeCSS code
- 4 geeks are going to comment on their DeCSS Perl t-shirts!
- One militant troll is going to suggest we bomb MPAA headquarters
- Someone's going to post DeCSS here on
/. to see if they can get the comment removed. - 3 or 4 trolls who have no idea what DeCSS is are going to ask anyone if they know how to disable regions on their DVD player
- Requisite flames will be posted telling the posters from the last bullet to STFU and RTFA. Or something.
- One or two GNAA trolls (seem to be a dying breed, yay)
- One page widening troll (oh wait, he hasn't shown up lately)
Correct me, mod me, flame me, whip me, beat me. It's all good, you just aren't that important. Should you post something funny/insightful, I might give a shit.Of course, all those pirate DVDs that are printed en masse in places like China, New York and LA are going to be put right out of business.
Heaven forbid people pump the video from a DVD component output into a capture card and make a DiVX copy that is smaller, almost as good and without copy protection.
IMHO, DeCSS was litigated not because it allowed copying/viewing of DVDs but because it was a major embarrassment to the industry. Their best and brightest were humbled by a kid from Norway. Oh the shame!
DeCSS was written for, and mainly used for, watching legally purchased DVDs on Linux computers. Was the DVD industry ever able to come up with examples of DeCSS being used to pirate DVDs? There are probably more pirate DVDs stamped in China in one day that were EVER made with DeCSS.
Loss of face. A shame the idiots in charge just didn't commit suicide and get it over with.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Why is it that we can post the directions for how to properly murder someone or build a bomb (In fact, this seems to be the topic of most movies made today), yet we are barred from posting DVD-copying code?
Can a case be made that posting DVD-copying code and directions on a website makes people more likely to copy DVDs, while there is no correlation to how many people are more likely to build a bomb or murder someone after reading the directions online?
the state Supreme Court ruled that property and trade secrets rights outranked free speech rights in this case.'"
If this is in fact what they said, it'll never hold up. Freedom of speech is the First Amendment to the US Constitution (for those of you who don't live here). It cannot be "outranked" by property and trade secrets rights. No state or federal law can "outrank" the Constitution of the United States.
The article may have misinterpreted the decision, but if that indeed was the decision, it will be overturned.
8565078965 7397829309 8418946942 8613770744 2087351357
9240196520 7366869851 3401047237 4469687974 3992611751
0973777701 0274475280 4905883138 4037549709 9879096539
5522701171 2157025974 6669932402 2683459661 9606034851
7424977358 4685188556 7457025712 5474999648 2194184655
7100841190 8625971694 7970799152 0048667099 7592359606
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8139147979 5551339994 9394882899 8469178361 0018259789
0103160196 1835034344 8956870538 4520853804 5842415654
8248893338 0474758711 2833959896 8522325446 0840897111
9771276941 2079586244 0547161321 0050064598 2017696177
1809478113 6220027234 4827224932 3259547234 6880029277
7649790614 8129840428 3457201463 4896854716 9082354737
8356619721 8622496943 1622716663 9390554302 4156473292
4855248991 2257394665 4862714048 2117138124 3882177176
0298412552 4464744505 5834628144 8833563190 2725319590
4392838737 6407391689 1257924055 0156208897 8716337599
9107887084 9081590975 4801928576 8451988596 3053238234
9055809203 2999603234 4711407760 1984716353 1161713078
5760848622 3637028357 0104961259 5681846785 9653331007
7017991614 6744725492 7283348691 6000647585 9174627812
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8448700470 7725524970 6044465212 7130404321 1826101035
9118647666 2963858495 0874484973 7347686142 0880529443
extract it with:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::Simple;
use Math::BigInt;
my $html = get("http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/curios/48
my($prime) = $html =~ m{
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
According to the article:
"Monday's Supreme Court ruling will let companies protect their legitimate trade secrets from online distribution while still holding out the possibility that DeCSS might ultimately be deemed too widely distributed to qualify for that protection, some attorneys said. "
So the solution to all of this is to widely distribute anything you want to be free speech and eventually the protection will cease due to the wide distribution. So, with the widespread use of MP3s, shouldn't they no longer be considered protected and be freely available as free speech?
Why do I h8 apple?
Does this ruling apply to people outside of California? Does this ruling apply to say Matthew Pavlovich, who was removed from the law suit, because he had no connection to California? In a related note raise your middle finger if you think this isn't going to be appealed to the Federal Court system?
This doesn't change the fact that the DVD code became public and now is. Being that manufacturers provided discs with the DVD code on them to the public for a small fee, I don't see how it could have been avoided.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
what about that t-shirt i got from think geek a while back? should i be nervous? ;)
R.I.P.
The thing is that the constitution doesn't specific mention this sort of case. Intellectual property should and is protected at the same level as property. Such a level where choosen by the founding fathers becuase they discovered that the the intellectual property is vital to a growing economy. In other words, this dessicon is correct under the constitution.
Proud patriot and republican voter.
Right, because you know, since property and trade secrets rights are guaranteed in the Zeroth Amendment to the Bill Of Rights, they outrank the First Amendment, don't they?
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
/*
* css_unscramble.c : unscrambling function
* Copyright (C) 1999 Derek Fawcus
CSS does not prevent people from copying CDs illegally, what it does prevent is perfectly legal uses of DVDs such as playing them in countries other than that in which they were sold, and playing them on operating systems for which CSS decoders might not exist. Now our government wants to compromize the 1st amendment to defend their right to stop us from doing something that our laws specifically entitle us to do?
All laws which seek to limit two or more people's ability to willingly share ideas and information will ultimately be seen as being just as rediculous as witch burning or the Spanish Inquisition. Our right to effectively regulate our governments, which requires that we have free and open access to knowledge, ideas, and information, is being sold off based on the wrong-headed dogma that treating everything as "property" will improve efficiency.
Having said all that, I think we should welcome this ruling - since it is perhaps one of the clearest examples of how the 1st Amendment is being corroded by laws which increasingly serve only to stifle innovation and prop up monopolies to the detriment of science and the useful arts.
Funny, I wasn't aware that propety and trade secrets rights were in the Constitution.
Anything you might ever need to say about anything has already been said better by Penny Arcade.
I'm curious as to what's next? DeCSS is so far out there now, I don't see how it can ever be retracted. I know that without it, my HTPC would not be possible. I use DVD Decrypter (www.dvddecrypter.com) to rip all my purchased movies to my HDD so I can output them at 1080i.
For the more educated when it comes to CSS, Is there a way, other than changing the entire standard of encryption, to fix the damage that has been done? Someone please post an 'informative' post with some information please.
If I'm not mistaken, this code wasn't stolen, it was reengineered from scratch, wasn't it? If that's the case, what does it matter if the code was "meant to be" public? It became public the minute its author wrote it. Is the court really saying that the manufacturer's intent bars me from writing original descriptions of a product?
PS I realize that this may be an issue of the code containing "stolen" trade secrets such as keys. If this is the case, would the decision still apply to a truly "clean-room" version of DeCSS?
Two questions from a non-US citizen:
- Are property and trade secrets rights a constitutional right?
- Can anything outweigh a constitutional right?
I Denmark we have something called "Grundloven" (translates to something like "the basic law"). NOTHING can surpass what's written in this law. I sure hope that's the case too with your constitution...
I thought trade secrets were not subject to protection? If I buy a chicken dinner from KFC and figure out what the secret "11 herbs and spices" are, I can tell anyone I want to. As a matter of fact, this information is published in a couple of books and is widely available on the Net. To my knowledge this has always been held as a "trade secret" by KFC, so what gives the the MPAA any special protection for DeCSS?
This lawsuit was specious. DeCSS had/has nothing to do with illegal DVD duplication as described by the plantiffs - the DVD pirates of Asia don't use it, and never had. They didn't need to.
All it's done is solidify a bad law and provide PR for the DVDCCA and MPAA. Large scale movie piracy will continue, untouched by this ruling, in factories all over China, Russia and Vietnam.
But US citizens will now be unable to exercise reasonable fair-use on DVDs they own.
This is *fantastic* news. Sure, in the short-term it looks bad, but in a few years time the consumer backlash will be a sight to behold. It'll happen, once Joe Sixpack realises he has to buy a seperate copy of "American Wedding III" for each media player he wants to watch it on.
Property rights? I didn't know there was a restrictive license on DeCSS.
What property rights are being violated?
Trade secrets only exist as long as it is a secret. It isn't anymore.
#!/usr/bin/perl # 472-byte qrpff, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz # MPEG 2 PS VOB file -> descrambled output on stdout. # usage: perl -I :::: qrpff
# where k1..k5 are the title key bytes in least to most-significant order
s''$/=\2048;while(){G=29;R=142;if((@a=unqT="C*",_) [20]&48){D=89;_=unqb24,qT,@
b=map{ord qB8,unqb8,qT,_^$a[--D]}@INC;s/...$/1$&/;Q=unqV,qb2 5,_;H=73;O=$b[4]>8^(P=(E=255)&(Q>>12^Q>>4^Q/8^Q))> 8^(E&(F=(S=O>>14&7^O)
^S*8^S>=8
)+=P+(~F&E))for@a[128..$#a]}print+qT,@a}';s/[D-HO- U_]/\$$&/g;s/q/pack+/g;eval
nope, all ok so far.
your turn: go out into a major city with a broomstick in your hands and shout "allah is great! allah is great" and see how long you last.
From the article -
Under the previous ruling, a disgruntled employee might be able to post a company's proprietary code online and claim free speech rights, for example.
Forgive me for being naive, but this incident is already covered by Copyright Infringement laws. No need to bring Free Speech into the picture.
This judgement leads us down a slippery slope to a point where any form of reverse engineering is illegal - just claim "trade secret rights" (whatever those are.)
In the Corporation vs People, the Corporation wins. Which is the natural outcome.
One down, nine to go.
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Am I trolling or is it that my frustration surfacing? I feel helpless watching common sense distorted by people who are capable to interpret laws in any way that fits them.
The more numerous the laws, the more corrupted the state. Yes, indeed.
By the way, what good does DVD encrytion do for me? Or even for the DVD business... has it stopped someone from copying/backing up a DVD (which by the way SHOULD be OK and easy).
Damn, I am really starting to fear an Orwellian future. Yes, I am an Anonimous Coward.
Does anybody know if this also applies to libdvdcss and libdvdread? If so, that means it could once again be illegal for someone to watch an encrypted DVD in Linux. This makes it really difficult or impossible for someone to build and sell any Linux PC or HTPC capable of playing DVD's.
Oh well. Screw the DVD-CCA. I'm going to keep doing what I want, and next time I go to a movie theater, I'm going to hand out free CD's with a bootable Linux-based DVD player on them.
A solution to the problem with music today
but a briefcase full of cash and a pre-screening DVD of the Return of the King sure do...
("This DVD is a pre-screening meant to bribe Judge Joe, any other viewer of this video is in violation of...")
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Ahhh, *very* interesting. This I didn't know. Thanks.
- Are property and trade secrets rights a constitutional right?
NO.
- Can anything outweigh a constitutional right?
MONEY.
I think this paint a worryingly (it's a word now) exact picture of the US today. You can tell people how to build a bomb, but not how to copy a dvd.
I refuse to buy any product from any company who assumes that I am a criminal and refuses to give me the benefit of the doubt. Do I run Windows or Office? Nope. Do I watch DVD's? Nope. If I could watch a DVD without a DVD player would I? Usually not.
The point is that the MPAA (and now RIAA, Microsoft, etc.) make it a point in assuming that their customer base is a part of their problem. Fine. Then I won't be a part of their customer base. End of story.
Somehow I don't think I am alone. THe recoding industry started seeing additional losses after winning their battle against Napster, and although most of it is explained by simple economics, I have known many friends who felt very torn whether to buy an album by an artist they liked-- if they buy it, they are lining the pockets of an insdustry they felt betrayed by, but they still wanted to support their artists.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Remember Monday August 25, 2003 as the day that freedom of speech was lost in America for corporate profit. There is no legal definition for "IP". Soon, companies will be calling EVERYTHING "IP" and will be stripping away more and more rights. If "IP" is infact stolen from a company, then yes, freedom of speech should not allow that stolen "IP" to be spread. However, if that "IP" is gained by legal reverse engineering, then freedom of speech should in fact have more weight over "IP". In this case, nothing was stolen, the DeCSS code was created NEW from reverse engineering, which is totally legal. If a corporation does not make efforst to protect their "IP", then they have no right to later call it trade secrets. It is a sad day to be an American for me.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
your turn: go out into a major city with a broomstick in your hands and shout "allah is great! allah is great" and see how long you last.
A lot longer than someone preaching Christianity in Mecca.
SF Gate also has a story on this here more or less the same information ..
Nazi?
I don't seem to get arrested so your view of Europe is a bit of. But I'm convinced you're not speaking about laws that forbid you to to use sertain words but rather laws that forbid you to release "Mein Kampf" and to make rasist remarks. Even thou I will touch a sensetive point I would have to agree with you on that too some extent although I'm sure you have some regions in the US with similar laws.
If it's hatelaws you speak about you do have them in the US as well.
So much for the fun-loving, freedom-to-choose state. Remember for every Cole Valley, there's a Encino in CA....
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Would Arnold put up with this garbage if he was on the court?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Now that there is another trump suit over the right to free speech (I guess that "national security", "libel", "slander" and no "Fire! in a crowded theatre are additional reasons), I have to wonder whether there will be cases where free speech is suppressed for less than reasonable cause.
For example, the Co$ has maintained that certain of its documents are trade-secrets.
Corporations could shield a great deal of signficant information under the guise of trade-secrets, such as advice that Enron executives gave to VP Cheney concering energy policy (the US federal government has already dismissed attempts to release those conversation under the FoIA).
Judges pretty much try to interpret law. What this ruling indicates is the need for legislative review, debate, and possible modification of the law:
If IP is taken to an extreme, there will be issues cropping up where information, as coded in genetic expressions, will become someone's intellectual property and "reading" it by overcoming some supposed obstacle would be a crime.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
At the same time, those who produce these DVD's should not have a monopoly and charge 15x what it costs to produce the product. And they should not release the same DVD over and over and over again to make 20 dollars * 3 times. First comes the DVD with no extras, then the special edition, then the collectors edition.
If you view this from an emotional standpoint, I can see why some would want to screw the movie industry.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
If the software has already been public for some time now, how can it still be a trade secret?
HELLO?!?
. . . here
Note that it may be in a data superposition until you actually observe a page to decode into be the DeCSS source!
To put it in simpler terms, I can copy coded/Chinese text by hand without ever knowing what it says. DeCSS is a codebook or Chinese-English dictionary. Dictionaries don't help you copy stuff.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
See, Europeans misunderstand something about free speech.
How free is it, if only the majority opinion gets heard? Of course, it's assinine to hear racist literature being read aloud on streets. But to take the right away from them is even sicker.
can outweigh the second ammendment when making some money by being a monopoly outweighs the first?
I don't think "free speech" should be used to allow copyright infringement or other illegal acts. I much prefer "being reasonable" over blindly following things written in another age like a regilious fundamentalist. I just wish that courts were reasonable and sensible all the time, not just when it meant protecting profits.
The very purpose of patent protection is to provide an incentive for the inventor to make public his invention in the form of a patent filing, thus allowing others to build on his work. In exchange for this service to society, the inventor receives exclusive rights to its commercial use for x years, where x has been around 15-20 years, currently 17 years from the date the patent is granted (iirc).
In that sense, patents are beneficial to society in that they promote the disclosure of inventions that would otherwise be kept secret. Unfortunately, the patent application, granting, and enforcement processes have gone horribly awry.
You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.
nt
In Monday's decision, the state Supreme Court ruled that property and trade secrets rights outranked free speech rights in this case, because the DVD code was never meant to be public.
Exactly when are trade secrets "meant" to be public ? Does this ruling really place "trade secrets" above free-speech ? Unreal.
Nor did the code itself contribute significantly to a debate over whether DVDs should be encrypted at all, the judges said.
Is the publics' role simply to debate things that they can't do anything about ? DeCSS added plenty to the public debate, because it enabled people to do something that they couldn't previously do. It IS the debate.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
that it is utterly rediculous to make a number illegal, and yet it is.
If they rank a non-secret of trade above the first ammendment, then consider it an act of civil disobedience. If not, enjoy the code.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Let me state, right off the bat: this is not a troll.
While I agree with just about everybody here that reverse-engineering shouldn't be illegal, and you should be able to publish DeCSS, I just want to watch the DVD I bought legally for crying out loud, etc --
Let's keep the first amendment out of this, okay? DeCSS is code. It's not free expression, it's not an Art form. It's simply a useful tool that let's you watch DVDs on your linux box. It should be legal to distribute it, not because of free speech, but because you simply should be allowed to write code that let's you watch movies.
Rather than trying to shove the square peg of technology into the round hole of the 1st amendment, we should be addressing current technology laws. In a way, not calling shenanigans on the DMCA every chance you get implies your acceptance of it. If you fix the DeCSS problem with 1st amendment logic, you've fixed the DeCSS problem. But if you fix it by repealing the DMCA, you've fixed a whole lot of other problems as well.
c-hack.com |
Not sure if you're aware but typing a word and saying a word are not the same. Just a quick tip for our backward European friends.
So publishing information about a defective product is illegal, but trade secrets trump "free speech". It's obvious what this means.
...
What the court wants is that, if you have knowledge of a defect in a product like the CSS encoding, you shouldn't publish it openly for the benefit of customers. You should declare it your own trade secret, and sell it only to people willing to pay your price. Then the courts will protect you rather than punishing you.
Who would want to pay you good money for the information? Why, commercial pirates, of course. Just contact them, and contract with them to do the decoding that they need for their business.
This is then a B2B sale, and the US courts will support you against anyone who tries to publicise what you're doing.
What, me cynical? Nah
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Bullshit.
Decrypt - yes. You need to decrypt a DVD before playing it.
Copy - no. You can copy a DVD with the encryption in-tact.
This is about licencing fees. Each player must be licensed.
Each time someone tells you it's about copy protection, punch them in the face for me.
OK, a little OT here, but...
The MPAA is trying to get things like DeCSS, DVD X Copy, etc. banned as illegal circumvention devices. All right, well then, how do the studios make their DVDs? They use pressing plants to do it. Well, if DVD X Copy is a circumvention device, then these plants sure as hell are, too. In fact, they can churn out many more discs than a PC can.
So, wouldn't it be interesting if a copyright holder sued the studios for a DMCA violation for using a circumvention device? To be a copyright holder, you'd just need to have a copyrighted work on DVD. Not a big deal there. Just produce something and copyright it.
Another angle would be for the copyright owner to sue for restraint of trade. I mean, it looks to me like the studios are trying to prevent anyone who doesn't have the cash to use a pressing plant from duplicating their work, thereby squeezing them out of the marketplace.
321 Studios, are you listening?
California Recall Election
Anybody who lives there should immediately phone every candidates office, and make sure that this law is rewritten with the consumer in mind. Don't think you don't count, this election can be won or lost on a very small number of votes, giving the large number of candidates running. If enough of you vote as a block, you can have a surprisingly large clout.
My rights don't need management.
What is it with justices today that they are completely ignorant regarding the US constitution and its bill of rights? Here we have a judge that believes that first amendment speech right should take a backseat to corporate trade practices. In Alabama there is a chief justice that cannot separate his private religious beliefs from a constitutional requirement of non-endorsement of religion by the government. Then there is John Ashcroft, US attorney general, who believes that he can (and worse, should) remove sacred sections from our constitution.
See note at bottom of page: Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
when you load a DVD somehow the software has to authenticate itself to the drive. For example on a mac, you cant just put in a DVD and run DVD backup (deCSS) instead you have to run the DVD player first, then something magical happens (??? what ???) and the drive can be used by DVD Backup.
Moroever, if you look at the drive in your directory and try to copy the files you see there, they all copy just fine to the harddrive. but you cant play them using the DVD player. Why? if its a copy of the disk why cant the DVD player play the files succesfully? it will try to play them. they just come out scrambled and useless.
finally is it the drive or the DVD player that is decoding the CSS? if its the player, why cant it play the files you copied to the disk. if its the drive, then why cant I use DeCSS (DVD backup) directly on the files without first running the player to authenticate the drive?
can anyone explain? also I see a lot of DeCSS code which always fails to mention what files it needs to be run on. (.eg. do you decode each .vob file by itself or as a group. are there other files that need decoding?
Unfortunatly this isn't funny, it is true.
...interesting if true.
The next obvious stop is the Federal Circuit, which is where Constitutional matters such as Free Speech get decided.
Trade "secrets", once released into the retail marketplace, essentially cease to be so, since reverse-engineering is a legitimate practice, and always has been. License "agreements", which are a legal fiction anyway, do not change this fact. The idea that such compromised "secrets" can still trump Free Speech is ludicrous on its face.
Don't think for one nanosecond that this is over.
Oh, and to head off the foolish remarks ahead of time:
Copying a thing is not the same as taking a thing. They are morally, economically, and legally distinct acts. Conflation of the two will merely confuse you and lead you to the wrong conclusions.
See this editorial for a primer as to why you should view any such "agreement" as highly suspect.
Merely because you can't think of a reason why anyone should examine the unencrypted data on DVDs doesn't mean good reasons don't exist (wacky screen blankers and realtime integration with video games are but two examples). Therefore, cutting off all access to that data shows a remarkably foolish lack of foresight; you have no idea what you'll be depriving yourself of later.
Merely chanting, "It's illegal!" will win you no new followers. There are plenty of foolish, self-serving laws on the books, and many others are violated on a daily basis without threat to the Republic. You must describe why you believe such illegality is a social benefit, not just for you, but for your audience as well.
Copyright extremists like to bleat that creators' rights should be protected, and that creators should have absolute control over their creations. Apart from the fact that this point of view is completely unrealistic, it also fails to take into account that, by virtue of having sold (not licensed) their goods in the retail marketplace, their "properties" are now subject to the whims of a new owner -- namely, the person who purchased it, and who may have very different ideas about what should and shouldn't be done with it. S/he is every bit the legitimate owner as the creator. So who calls the shots, and how do you justify that?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
The First Amendment is very important, but what does the fact that it's first have anything to do with its "rank"? If it was so important, it should have been in the original text of the Constitution. You say an amendment is more important because it alters the previous text? Well then by the same token, shouldn't the last amendment be the most important? Clearly, the order the amendments were placed isn't the deciding factor as your post would suggest.
How long have the thirteen year old kids been locked up at guantanamo without any legal protection, now again?
Well shit. We can play the game of the year of 2001. We can preach nearly any beliefs we want, barring slanderous remarks. But damn. We can't discuss how to override copyright protection schemes. Shit.
IANAL, but I have legal advice anyway that sounds close enough to what everyone watches on TV. modded +5 informative
Several faux SCO press releases where Darl McBride is claimed to have said "Our IP is also in DeCSS", announcing that SCO is preparing to sue the owners of DVD players for copyright infringmenet
One off the wall profit list
No.
Not to be nitpicking or anything, but the kid in Norway DID NOT write DeCSS. From what I remember, he "borrowed" the DeCSS code without giving proper credit to authors and put a GUI on top of that borrowed code.
I do agree with your post though.
My licensees then start to sell boxes that contain my idea inside of them. The boxes are difficult, but not impossible, to open. They sell these boxes far and wide, to anyone who wants them, without any contractual terms. You can walk into a store and anonymously buy one of these boxes with cash.
Someone eventually opens one of the boxes and peeks inside to see how it works. He happens to have picked one of the easier-to-open boxes, but really, all of the boxes were openable. It was just a question of how hard someone was willing to work.
Did I exercise due dilligence in keeping my idea a secret?
That's about how solid DVDCCA's trade secret is: not at all. The widespread publication of the already-reverse-engineered DeCSS isn't what screwed them. The sale of DVD players themselves is what doomed them. As soon as the first DVD player was sold to an end-user without any contractual obligation to keep the inner workings a secret, the DVDCCA had lost control of their secret. Anyone could have opened their box, even here in USA. Some guy in Norway just happened to be the first to get the glory.
That this loss of control was known about in advance (the whole point was that consumer electronics would implement the algorithm) rather than one of their licensees surprising them by producing a DVD player, is devestating.
If they wanted to keep CSS as a trade secret, they should have made it so DVDs could only be played in theaters, with the descrambling happening on equipment that was under control of people with whom they had secrecy agreements.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
That because someone doesn't use the correct operatign system they are not allowed to watch dvd's? I mean was there any software out there before this that allowed people who used linux to watch a dvd?
Actually the 13-14-15 year olds are on the verge of being released, as in, in the next month.
Now this is really fuzzy. You're saying it's OK that the Europeans do it, because he's old?
It's still the EXACT SAME VIOLATION. They're holding that guy, and probably more, without trial, USA is doing the same thing.
With one hand, Russia holds back the United States from using military force. With the other hand, they wipe out scores of Chechens.
Europe is so screwed up, it's almost sad to talk about it.
where does the input .vob file get inserted here?
http://www.indrasweb.com/blog/archives/000063.php# 000063
Permission granted to spread this link around.
The problem is, everybody thinks their own point of view is the reasonable one. Thats why a fixed definition is necessary.
I've developed something, and no one knows what it is. You, through some nefarious means, maybe breaking into my office, manage to learn my trade secret. Free speech does not give you the right to publish it. What's wrong with that?
The problem isn't that trade secrets were ruled protected, the problem is that DeCSS was ever considered a trade secret in the first place.
paintball
I was under the impression that the only way that publishing a "trade secret" was wrong was if the owner had entrusted you with it and you disclosed it.
I cannot see how Brunner can be found liable for publishing the DVDCCA's "trade secrets" when Johanssen's code was independently developed in a reverse engineering environment even more stringent than the classic "clean room." I may be incorrect on the facts, but as I understand the Norwegian case, Johanssen did not dismantle his DVD player, download the ROMs and then disassemble the code. Most of what he did involved examining the data on the disk and trying to find the decryption key by means of quasi-brute-force cracking.
I see no violation of "trade secrets" here primarily because neither Johanssen nor Brunner were ever entrusted with the "secret" by the DVDCCA in the first place. Johanssen discovered it by independent reverse engineering, which the US Supreme Court has already determined to be protected as "fair use."
But, then again, I MIGHT be wrong on that.
utter rubbish
Welcome gents and ladies! This is August and is once again time for our yearly survey of the Debian testing packages to see if KDE3 has been included yet.
Wait....wait....wait... NOPE! STILL NO KDE3 debs in Debian testing.
When are you dinosaurs gonna learn? You wonder why even the Macintosh feebs laugh at you?
... mostly anyways. It's obvious that American justice is for sale to the highest bidder. If this is such a free society, why is justice only available for a fee? Let's face it, the affluent have sold this country down the river.
...
Sadly anonymous by necessity
Words to men, as air to birds.
the guy was carrying over 1,000 kilos of drugs and your worried about him being held without bail?
I think its safe to say that this guy is a flight risk.
Its also safe to say that this guy's fate in the US wouldnt have been any better except for the chance of prison rape which is highest in the US.
Hey, whenever we cross the border to get some cheap cigs in the US, we have the inside of our windows scraped. Getting your car taken away because the asinine War on Drugs' zero tolerance is only one of the stupid things that can happen to you.
The WOD sucks everywhere but no matter how bad the french and the swedes are, NO ONE is remotely close to the gulag down south....says the man whose 'democratic' country next door already knows who the next leader will be even though the leadership races arent even finished.
zack
Where is corporate "intellectual property" more important than freedom of expression? In the United States of Avarice.
How ya like dat?
like i said, bet you my karma points they're not released by the 25th of september.
Despite popular opinion, some things aren't funny to joke about.
Doug Alcorn
KDE 3 doesn't compile on kernel 0.86. You've got to satisfy dependencies first. Get it straight.
Our favorite dmca-flaunting professor Dr. David Touretzky has most of the decss implementations hosted at his site.
He also has the scientology documents that slashdot censors, which you can read here
Dr Touretsky also received a cease and desist letter from COS in an attempt to remove the material, but I guess he wasn't more worried about spending his dot com millions than setting a horrible precedent by caving.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
The rights of the corporations shall never be circumvented by the rights of the peons.
How this decision could have possibly been made without rampant corruption of our judges is completely beyond me.
Kiss the constitution goodbye. The 1st Amendment no longer exists unless you want to complain about God. Write about anything else and you'll either be branded a terrorist (for political speech) or a DMCA violator (for commercial/political speech) and thrown in jail.
This country is no longer "free". It hasn't been for a long time.... unless you are corporation.
The only possible good news would be if someone could appeal this to SCOTUS and get a different answer.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
Don't know how you're gonna get them to me though.
i tion=us&q=cluster:www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/ 25/1061663742056.html
Here are links for your parousal:
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&ed
Enjoy!
166 articles SHOULD be enough...
Also, it tells how the conditions are being substantially increased - from the animal cage style quarters, to places with a bed, sink, a toilet.
But of course, it's bad, because it's America.
One could also assert that if a company expects to sell some physical object, but not to provide the customer with the FULL actual contents of the object, but instead to intentionally limit access to the object, that they had best use adequate and appropriate protections on the physical object.
IIRC, I never agreed to any license when I purchased a DVD or CD. If they fail to protect that physical object themselves but expect the content protected, then they're depending upon honest behavior and possibly license agreements for their "rights". Illegitimate distribution of copyrighted material invokes civil liabilities, some day it might be a crime. Simply reading copyrighted material at a level that's present in a purchased product but inadequately protected should NOT be a crime IMO. This whole business makes the concept of property ownership a joke, which is where I can see a constitutional objection.
Two words: Civil Disobedience
Help fight continental drift.
It's ok to take rights away of SOME people, as long as it makes the majority happy?
Yeah, you Europeans REALLY got the smarts going on.
Couldn't this hurt IBM's side in the suit of SCO vs IBM? Doesn't this invalidate the GNU Public License? SCO's position is that it's their work, and the California State Supreme Court ruled that trade works are to be protected over first amendment rights... Soo.... SCO simply claims that it's their work, and the whole world has been using it illegally.
Phil
MPAA Inquisitor: Recant!
Publisher: Never!
Inquisitor: You'll be sorry.
Publisher: Do your worst!
Inquisitor: Very well! You leave me no choice! As punishment for distributing this code, you'll be forced to watch these ten DivX movies made from rips that used code you posted!
Publisher: I heard Dirty Pretty Things was pretty good.
Inquisitor: Nice try. You'll be watching this past Summer's big budget movies! Should I start you off with "The Hulk" or "Gigli"?
Publisher: No! I recant! I recant! You can spy on me! You can nuke my hard drive from space! Anything! Please! Aieeeeee!
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Trade secret controls are a privilegde.
Free speech is a right.
The privilidge of controlling trade secrets is granted to businesses by acts of government legislatures.
The right of freedom of speech is innate, universal, and to inaliable to every member of the human race. It also happens to be among the rights that the architects of the government of the united states decided needed to be explicitly enumerated in the government's charter as something that government legislatures are explicitly reminded they are not allowed to impinge in their actions.
Innate human rights take precedence over government-granted privilidges. Always. And among the functions of the courts in the United States is the task of ensuring that, when a government legislature attempts to put into law a limit on a universal human right despite.having no right or authority to do so, the law which creates the limitation is declared invalid and removed from the body of law of the land. For the moment, the California Supreme Court has failed in their duty.
This rant brought to you by Captain Obvious(TM)
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Right.
Disagree with the majority, get modded down. Of course. Slashdot rules.
...the continued reporting of how our rights as consumers are being eroded makes me...
Silly Rip Van Winkle... wake up. You have to have rights first before they can get eroded. Ours were all stomped on and taken away decades ago, probably before you were even born. Stop fantasizing.
What is this, a nut-case country or something? The richest man in the U.S. can just make up the rules? No. I want my Linux and I want to watch my DVDs on it. I do not want to pay SCO/MSFT and I paid for my DVD. I can use whatever tool I want to watch 'em on my Linux box.
First off, the IANAL blurb.
From my searching on the web for trade secret law, I have found several nuggets of information:
- Trade secret law is generally State enforced, there is a Federal component, but the States by and large enforce trade secrets.
- Reverse engineering is considered a complete defense, that is, if the trade secret was discovered through the author's own efforts then the disclosure of said trade secret disolves the trade secret protection and cannot be considered actionable.
I did not read the court decision, but I am pretty sure from the history of the DeCSS controversy that whatever trade secret protection for DeCSS that existed was extinguished by the discovery and publishing of the DeCSS keys from the unencrypted Xing implementation. Thus, the reverse engineered discovery was entirely legal and entirely disolved whatever trade secret protection existed. I don't see how this could be considered trade secret any longer, given the method of discovery and widespread nature of the information.
My 2 cents.
You are a bit incorrect there...there are times when property outranks free speech. One example is hypothetical, but is drawn from real life examples.
You're a doctor who specializes in abortion. In many states (Possibly the nation, but I'm not sure that the Supreme Court has ever ruled on something like this) it would be illegal for protesters to protest on the property of your abortion clinic. Lets take this one step further, in a situation that the Supreme Court would highly rule in favor of property. You're the doctor still, but this time the protesters are out on your front lawn picketing. You think the Supreme Court would rule for the people protesting? Highly unlikely.
That being said, the Supreme Court would probably not review it and let the state's supreme court decide. And in the case that we're talking about, DeCSS, the outcome would probably not be the same as my scenario. BUT what you say is not correct.
Blake
The cold logic behind the curtain: Without 'rule of law,' liberties cannot be ensured. Therefor, rule of law becomes paramount to the definition of liberties.
Make rule of law itself the perceived target ('Allowing people to circumvent encryption devices is an affront to established (bought, in our current US system) law'), and it's amazing how fast liberties can be ignored.
Although some times 'liberties' are allowed to influence how the 'rule of law' is executed, the under-lying (and admittedly very hard to 'positively define') 'rule of law' is the foundation. 'Rule of law' (order out of chaos) can be found in dictatorships, solialist communes, theocracies, monarchies, even simple tribes. It's the execution of 'rule of law,' as defined by 'liberties,' that make these governing systems different...
There's no wrong way, to eat a Rhesus...
Don't buy their damned movies or music. Don't go to movies or concerts. Don't buy the products they advertise.
Read a book!
Go buy a copy of Mein Kampf
you'll just be annoying unless someone things you'd really scream in hex.
(Use case and punctuation)
0x4669726421
0b0100011001101001011100100110010100100001
{'F','i','r','e','!'}
(Come to think of it, by leaving off the null terminator, we're inviting a nasty memory access exception...)
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
now- admittedly, for the copied data to be useful, you need the ability to write that data on a
compatible (read, dual layered) medium that is not available at the consumer level.
but (ianal) the copyright law exception that allow you to make a
backup don't require that backup to be useful. You have the data, it is backed up.
think I'm being silly? Consider a professional grade 4 track for audio production, something with DRM that allows a digital backup to be created once from the original master.. lets say you lose the originals/they get damaged.. can the backups help? no-- you can't back them up.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Aside, I know. But I'm always amused when I see a programming keyword in someone's English text. Your fingers have be trained to type "goto" instead of "go to" at some point. That says to me that you are:
1) either an old geek (like me).
2) a young geek that got a *VERY* early start.
3) responsible for maintaining fucked up code
4) responsible for writing fucked up code.
Which is it?
I've read the DMCA and I've seen the provisions for reverse engineering which especially applies for the purpose of creating a compatible technology.
This seems like a clear case of reverse engineering to create a compatible DVD player.
How is it this case and the 2600 case got so far?
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
By reading this on the EFF website, you would think that there was a different outcome. It's interesting to read what the EFF thinks about the decision.
I see the same right being violated. Doesn't matter the circumstances.
Who is to say that alleged drug smuggling is less of a crime than alleged terrorism?
I'm not sure how a third party is bound a trade secret agreement. Here's what I've been told is true: if "A" has some information which he wishes to have kept secret, he has to explicitly inform "B" of such when sharing the information with him. "B" is then bound by contract law to honor the secret.
If "C" should somehow independently discover the secret, "C" is in no way bound to keep it. This is partly because "C" isn't obligated to "A" and mainly because there is no way for "C" to recognize the information as being secret without having been so informed by "A".
And trade secrets are limited in scope. A company can't say that everything you learn while within their walls or from contact with their employees or agents is a trade secret. If it isn't clearly identified as a secret when someone tells it to you, it's not your responsibility to keep it from others.
DeCSS is a fine example of a non-secret. While "A" and "B" mutually agreed to keep the secret, "C" found it out independently and has no obligation to "A". Even if "C" discovered the secret because "B" forgot to protect it, the breach is by "B" who can be sued by "A". "C" is in the clear.
There is a credible theory that modern democracy began because the nobles in England would not even consider following the king. So, rather than have a complete lock-up, they wrote the Magna Carta, which limited the power of the king.
I'm glad to see the same tradition being continued in the United States. The "Gallery of CSS Descramblers" says "Oh, you want to take away our freedom? Then our response is that we will exercise it more."
In the U.S. at the moment, the less intelligent, more conflicted people are in charge.
Rubbish. It's an amusing stereotoype but bares no resemblance to reality. People do preach Christianity in Mecca and survive just fine. The original joke may have been funny or not, but trying to pass it off as truth is unconscionable.
Mimiluv duckspeak crimethinkers' crimethink is doubleplusungood, terrorism. All goodthinkers bellyfeel copyright. Minitru rectifies: ``Bill of Rights'' misprinted, unmisprinted ``Bill of Duties''.
``L'imagination au povoir.''
Basically, the CA Supreme Court said that the Court of Appeals should have considered whether the basis for granting the original injunction was sound. The Court of Appeals said, even assuming it's sound, it's a prior restraint under the First Amendment.
This is still bad news for the DVDCCA becuase their trade secret is no more. In the dissent, one CA Justice was ready to declare it then and there. The majority of justices thought it better to let the Court of Appeals make that determination. It is appealable again after that.
The opinion says that this is a narrow decision. All it says is that there are some circumstances when the courts can order non-disclosure against some individuals.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
it's just code right?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I can see it now - Bush, Ashcroft and co. copyright being anti-bush, etc. and then try you on copyright infringement when you march to Washington to get Bush impeached.
does this mean that i'm in trouble of life when i live home with that decss t-shirt?!?!?!
:-(
PS
jokes apart, indeed this's a bad new....
ptt.
ThinkGeek sold out of DeCSS t-shirts today.
Eat This:
$ c=142;$ t=255;@t=map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=(1 1,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])$t^=(72, @z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%162 :0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271);if ((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h@ b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$ h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$| (ord$b[4])>8^($f=$t&($d>>12^ $d>>4^^ $q>=8)+= $f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/p ack+/g;eval
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# 531-byte qrpff-fast, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz
# MPEG 2 PS VOB file on stdin -> descrambled output on stdout
# arguments: title key bytes in least to most-significant order
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;
$m=(11,10,116,100,
-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?1
=5;$_=unxb24,join"",
d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256
$d^$d/8))>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*8
Maybe I'm missing the point, and don't think I'm taking the MPAA's side, but what do we care about the quality of the cryptography being used in DVD's?
The cryptography (if any) is for their (imagined) benefit, not ours. They could use ROT-13 as their cryptography, and as long as it plays, I don't care.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Keep in mind, california 1) is insane; and 2) is home to Hollywood, where billions of dollars is made each year by selling bad movies to the unwitting public. Which means california, out of all the 50 states, is the only one that truly has a vested interest in getting rid of (yeh right) DeCSS. The law is created by self-interest. Only we peons can say freedom of speech is in our best interest.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
You can copy DVDs just fine without DeCSS. DeCSS is there for decoding DVDs so that they can be displayed.
The point is that the MPAA (and now RIAA, Microsoft, etc.) make it a point in assuming that their customer base is a part of their problem. Fine. Then I won't be a part of their customer base. End of story.
Excellent point. If you weren't already at 5 points, I'd mod you up instead of replying.
I have known many friends who felt very torn whether to buy an album by an artist they liked-- if they buy it, they are lining the pockets of an insdustry they felt betrayed by, but they still wanted to support their artists.
Understandable. However, it is a misconception that the creators of the content make money from CD sales. Except for a few very well know and very well off individuals, artists make most of their money from concert sales. They generate interest in those concerts when people listen to their music, regardless of how their fans come across that music.
If you want to support your artists, buy concert tickets, not CDs.
Only on
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# 531-byte qrpff-fast, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz
# MPEG 2 PS VOB file on stdin -> descrambled output on stdout
# arguments: title key bytes in least to most-significant order
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;
$m=(11,10,116,100,
-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?1
=5;$_=unxb24,join"",
d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256
$d^$d/8))>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*8
I did a report on this for my Computer Ethics course. The simple fact is this: the DeCSS code was published in an unsealed legal filing by John Hoy, president of the DVD-CCA (those fighting against DeCSS). By doing this, he made it part of the public record, thus nullifying any trade secret status it might have had.
I had a better link to the filing but I don't have time to track it down. Use google.
t'nera semordnilap
DeCSS is one implementation of a process to decrypt a DVD.
The person that wrote it used a language to describe and express for himself a process. It just so happens that process decrypts DVDs. What if it added two numbers together?
Is code art? Depends on who you ask. Some coders definitely view coding as an art form. How a program is written, the manner and/or order in which it executes, the minimum or maximum number of lines it takes to do something, the elegance of the design or implementation of a design. All of that is an art. The medium just happens to be in a language that a computer can interpret.
Is code speech? I believe Borland took this issue to some court in response to Lotus 1-2-3's suit against Quattro Pro because Quattro Pro supported 1-2-3's macro language. I don't remember all the details, but one issue that was raised was the issue of language. If you created a language, and people learned that language as a means of expression, can copyright law prevent others from using that language? A quick google did not reveal any real answers, except that Borland won at an appeal court and the supreme court deadlocked (one justice recused himself due to IBM owning Lotus).
I agree, getting rid of the DMCA would fix a lot of problems. The DMCA flies in the face of so many entrenched precedents, not the least of which is reverse engineering and fair use. In this case, you could even argue that DMCA is impairing freedom of speech.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
DeCSS is not about priracy, it is a ludicrous tool for any commercial pirate to use; it is much easier for these people to do a bit copy of the DVD and mass produce it - which they do.
This is not about controlling piracy - Hollywood doesn't care about that - what they do care about is controlling your use of DVD's once you have bought them.
DeCSS is about having a free and open source DVD player for Linux.
DeCSS is as much about piracy as owning a screw driver is about being a burgular.
Sadly I think that we are putting up just good enough a fight here with the EFF to insure that we lose in court and set a precedent. This is a prime example of the general crappiness of the law overiding common sense.
I mean, everyone thinks that wife-beating is terrible, yet even though forced installation of cameras in people's homes would prevent it, people would never accept that.
This is only the state Supreme Court. If the appeal makes its way to the US Supreme court, they might disagree with: "the state Supreme Court ruled that property and trade secrets rights outranked free speech rights in this case."
Last time I looked, the US Constitution specifically protects free speech, but only indirectly protects property rights (and specifically limits so-called intellectual property), and says nothing at all about trade secrets.
OTOH, courts -- even Supreme Courts -- have been known to come up with screwy decisions.
-- Alastair
Which is better - having secure airports, or making it illegal to talk about the flaws in airport security?
Aren't we lucky to live in the world's richest country, where money counts as free speech but programming code doesn't?
"Dear CA Supreme Court: Without any respect what so ever, fuck you. I have a handful of DVDs (I will never buy another) and I will watch them on any operating system I want. You are a disgrace to freedom and our Constitution."
It's quite obvious now (as it has been for some time) that our "courts" are nothing more than a big-business circle jerk. If you try to fight them on their turf, they'll win and the only result will be more propaganda for them to spin.
Unfotunately, I don't think civil disobedience will work either... Ghandi succedded because A) the great majority of people actually cared about something other than bread and circuses B) Britian couldn't control the news coming out. Unfortunately, the average fuckwit in America today doesn't know anything about the constitution, doesn't know anything about any amendment other than the first, and only wants bread and circuses, so forget A. And guess who controls the media? Take the fight to *your* turf, however, and you'll find that these idiots don't stand a chance (Already RIAA.com seems to be slow). Some initial suggestions:
* Never buy another DVD. Never let any of your friends buy another DVD either. Get the tape or p2p it
* I'm sure everyone here can think of a way to DOS or DDOS their site
* Snail-mail DOS
* Post their E-Mail addresses for the spambots
Yes, a lot of this is indeed malicious. But when passive resistance isn't working, you have no choice but to step up to actively fighting them. I'll change my sig for the spambots as soon as I find it (Besides, that honeypot now gets plenty spam...)
Code is a language. It has grammar. It has syntax. It has nuance. It has multitudes of dialects. Most importantly, it has meaning. It is most emphatically Speech in every sense of the word.
The fact that a machine can process and execute it is entirely orthogonal.
Not convinced? The Supreme Court ruled that the symbolic notation for music was Speech. Just because the language does not translate efficiently into audible words does not disqualify it from First Amendment protection.
Would you like to explain how a musician playing sheet music differs from a computer executing code? A phonograph playing a record?
Sheet music is copyrightable, so is code. How exactly does one copyright something if it's not Speech?
-Hope
Or you can mount the image and use a legally authorized DVD player.
When I bought my G4 it was advertised as being able to play DVDs w/out an mpeg decoder card. They were right, but the DVD software they had written wasn't up to the task. They have since lost a class action suit on this point.
Before the update to the DVD player was released, I found that I could get DVDs to play back properly (no more sound-going-out-of-sync) if I first made a disk image of the DVD then mounted it. Opening the Apple DVD Player software allowed me to play the "fake" dvd flawlessly.
I think this was fair use, but it does show how someone could pirate DVDs w/out using DeCSS. A simple copy works. This would not make much sense for piracy since used DVDs are cheaper than the HD space they take up.
t'nera semordnilap
SMB was never meant to be made public... The same logic could be used by MS to squish SAMBA then.
This is BULL!
...through the corporate property law backdoor, and everyone in the US (and soon the world, assuredly) is an implied signatory.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Never been to Mecca, have you?
That we can now legally view our legally purchased DVDs on a linux GPL pure box now?
If not then where is consumer choice?
They also say that 'the state Supreme Court ruled that property and trade secrets rights outranked free speech rights in this case.'"
Jesus, we might as well staple our mouths shut now. Just what can one say or do that CAN'T be construed as some kind of IP violation these days?
-R
You can read the PDF version of the California Supreme Court decision at: DVD Copy Control Association, Inc. v. Andrew Bunner.
The opinion is neatly summarized in its first paragraph:
Prof. Eugene Volokh of UCLA Law Schooland the Volokh Conspiracy has some comments.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Even though you post the decryption code, would I be in violation of the DCMA for decyphering something that's been deliberately encoded?
I know Coca Cola and DVDs are entirely different things. But the process of reverse engineering seems to be quite similar to the process of chemical analysis, on a superficial level. Sometimes we can get more insight from every-day life comparisons...
As that kid himself said, he didn't write the code. Friends of his did (perhaps from a hacking group) and he volunteered to release it, because he was under 18 and living outside of the USA.
Simply post DECSS info / program on Freenet. If the courts will not uphold the first amendment then p2p anonymous technology will.
Freenet P2P is GPL open source and you can download it at:
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
I am THOROUGLY apalled at this ruling. The judge actually said that industry "trade secrets" overrule free speech. This is a direct circumvention of the First Amendment, and the legel panel responsible should face legal consequences for violating their oath to uphold the United States Constitution.
Judges do not have the ability to determine that something is more important than a Constitutional Amendment, but it seems to me that this is exactly what they've done.
What's next? Are they going to take all firearms away from civilians because they *might* be used to commit a crime?
I for one downloaded DeCSS to my hard drive just because of this ruling.
~Knautilus
If the Coke recipt is not a patent, but a trade secret, what would happen if I reverse engineered a can of coke, and got the ingredients, then published them?
Is that legal?
Why? / Why not?
You make a reasonable point in that the key itself is simply a number. That brings us to the second point. Does the MPAA have the right to prevent its secret number from being publicly distributed? That above all else, I believe, is the real question. Is this any different than posting someone's bank account number with instructions for anonymously raiding the account? I think there are ample reasons why this is not the case.
1. The number is available in all DVD hardware and software. It is not secret, merely difficult to obtain.
2. Without the number, DVD owners cannot view their lawfully purchased DVD. Access to this number is implicit with the purchase of the DVD. Otherwise, they have not purchased a copy of the movie, they have purchased a piece of plastic.
3. When technology moves on and the last DVD player dies, all these pieces of plastic will be worthless, useless, and their contents lost, without this key. It stands to reason that the public good requires that custody of the key belongs with the DVD owners, not the MPAA.
4. At its root, copyright is a social contract between the public and the content creator. This right is limited solely to replication of content, not its use. As CSS has no capacity to limit replication, and substantially impedes use, it is my opinion that the MPAA has violated the social contract. To remedy these damages, the MPAA must relinquish all rights to the CSS key.
-Hope
Unless you count asset forfeiture. Which has developed into a very nice way for the local "law enforcement folks" to deprived someone of any of their property with essentially no due process , no right of appeal and generally no rights for much of anything. But then its only applied to those who are evidently (though not legally) icky and horrid in one way or another, so the notion of rights (which clearly should only belong to the nice and law abiding) doesn't apply.
But what the hell, Scalia thinks all the lumpen proles have too many rights already. Maybe its time to change the constitution as so many would like it changed : "Nobody but me and my friends have any rights except as I want to bestow them."
3. When technology moves on and the last DVD player dies, all these pieces of plastic will be worthless, useless, and their contents lost, without this key. It stands to reason that the public good requires that custody of the key belongs with the DVD owners, not the MPAA.
You just created a brainspark for me... This is one of the reasons the *AA's want these kinds of laws. When CD's and DVD's move on, they want to be able to reissue all there copyright material into the new format, rather than have up "copy" it yourself.
If its purely digitial data, you will have no drop in quaility and you wont need to repurchase the goods again and reprive them of the funds to keep the lie going.
`find / -name "*your_base*" -exec chown us:us {} \;`
I understand the emotions that are behind this ..
But what is the difference between someone posting the DECCSS and posting the recipe for CocaCola ??
I dont understand how anyone can think this to be free speech ?
The rights of the individual should be upheld above the rights of any business or corporation.
The US only pays attention to national borders when it is ours. Otherwise even if what you do is legal where you are, if it violates our laws we will try and enforce it....Makes me sad to be an American sometimes. I just love how we can prosecute foriegn nationals for violating US laws outside the US, but deny them the inherent protection of the US system...
Welcome to the United States of Hypocrisy, a subsidiary of King George Inc.
"Looking out for their own interests at our expense since the day they were "elected" - Bush and company."
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
How many times do we see stories where the author appears to have just stumbled out of bed and scralled a few un-researched paragraphs based on a headline appearing on the AP wires? This time around the author seems to have actually done a fair and ballanced TM job of reporting both sides of the issue. Nice going Business Week/CNET.
And how do you own "secrets" when said secrets aren't secret anymore?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
The First Amendment isn't the right basis for defending against trade-secret cases, anyway. The right basis is straight contract law: that you haven't made any agreement with them to keep that information secret, nor received any consideration for doing so which would imply an agreement. At that point they have to prove that they protected their trade secrets from disclosure or produce an NDA with your signature on it, which is a harder job for them.
Oh, except for that stupid anti-reverse-engineering-clause in the DMCA.
IANAL, YMMV (in your country - check local laws), HAND, yada yada.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, however, there is.
on topic: next they'll try to ban product reviews because they interfere with trade.
response to a sig (afterall this is slashdot)
You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.
"while" and "whilst:"
"while" can be used as a conjunction or a noun or a verb.
"whilst" only works as a conjunction.
Eg:
I will do that in a little while
(ok)
I will do that in a little whilst
(using conjuction where a noun should be)
but using both as a conjunction:
I'll submit an article while you write a reply
or
I'll submit an article whilst you write a reply
both work because the "while" and "whilst" are both being used as conjunction.
In a little while, while you get pedantic, I'll while away some time reading the dictionary.
"whilst" and "whiles" are older forms of the language than "while" and "while". How much I use "whilst" usually depends on what novels I've been reading recently. I fret that I wouldst utter curious phrases like "we must away ere the break of day".
And I'll stop calling you a pretentious kookaburra. (or is that donkey?)
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
How long would you sit by and let me post your CC and SS number on line?
/far/ from it.
I can hear the screaming starting already. Free speech for everyone except when it annoys me...
The 1st amendment (in case you haven't read it recently) does not even come close to allowing anyone to say anything at any time any where. Far
Go peddle crazy elsewhere.
I hear what you are saying, but it does not completely add up.
;)
I don't do divx. I do however watch DVD movies with Ogle and DeCSS. (Or some derivitive of it.) It is wrong to catagorize decss as evil just because it can be used to do evil things. (Evil in the context of the MPAA BTW --I could care less about divx
The current situation sucks.
I purchase DVD media, player, computer and obtain player software, but I must break the law to actually just view the media on my machine because I choose to run an open OS.
This is just silly.
You know, I setup that machine to be a smartass. Downloaded Ogle, did the decss thing and, in general, setup a very nice bedroom movie player. Thought I would see what all the buzz was about. Well, Guess what?
That machine happens to be better than all the other players I own combined! I can skip the FBI crap, previews, and other long segments on just about every movie with zero problems. Seek times, menu-navigation and other things work well and in a simple way. On Linux of all things!
I find it disgusting that, here in the land of the free, a paying DVD customer must deal with all the restrictions. It's an insult at the very least! Ask my family after using Ogle for a while. They ask why they cannot fast forward to the good parts! I get to tell them they are not trusted and be reminded how they could be criminals each and everytime they choose to watch a movie.
DeCss has actually increased the use value of my DVD collection because it does not force me to bother with all the crap that makes it a waste of time.
It is not about people making copies. This very clearly is about control and how they manage our lack of it!
Enough of a rant. Just don't see your point of view. Not everybody wants to just rip/encode/share everything they get their hands on. Plenty of people just want to be treated like an adult when they spend their money.
Having to watch that damn FBI segment every last time I watch a DVD makes me want to setup the pirate equipment just so I can encode my collection minus that particular stream. Having gone through the work of such an encode share it? Damn right! because nobody should be treated the way DVD viewers are today.
Decss actually prevents piracy in my situation (heh, heh)
Blogging because I can...
IANAL and my english isn't that great sometimes, but EFF's release concerning this doesn't match BuisnessWeek's, from what I can tell.
Check out EFF's release: California Supreme Court Upholds Free Speech in DVD Case.
I am misunderstanding it?
(...) I have known many friends who felt very torn whether to buy an album by an artist they liked-- if they buy it, they are lining the pockets of an industry they felt betrayed by, but they still wanted to support their artists.
That's a very natural reaction from a fan, that has an interest in the band and probably would have bought the album anyway, and where Napster served like a "preview" service. The problem are those that would set their internet connection on download, and stop buying albums because now they get them for free.
It's as if they outlawed the crowbar, because 95% of the time it was used to break into houses, while you used it only for legal purposes. Of course you're frustrated that they take away a useful tool from you.
Killing Napster is very much like the CD copy protection. It pisses off your customers, and the warez version with no CD check comes out almost instantly. Hell, I use those myself on legal copies so I don't have to look for the damn CD.
On the other hand, it's not enough for me to boycot them. I buy the games I like, the music I like and the movies I like. If they got SecuRom, CSS or whatever, as long as I manage to do what I want with them. Sure it sounds very resigned, but a slashdot crowd boycot of DVDs doesn't mean that CSS would disappear - only the DVD movies we'd like to watch, because they don't sell. And I've never had a survey ask me why I don't buy more DVD movies, so I doubt they'd even know about it.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It is interesting to observe what is currently happening in the US. I'm sure this period will be thoroughly covered in future history books. Witness the Americans passively giving up all they have been fighting for and all they praise as dear to their country. Witness the vanishing of freedom and privacy, the death of independent media, and -- most worrying of all -- death of public opinion, which just blindly listens to the media and the current administration.
The net effect of all this is that the average citizen will not oppose his rights being trampled, will not mind his privacy being gone, and will support going to war against anyone, given sufficient amount of convincing by administration officials.
Wake up, Americans!
This only affects people in california. It was the california state supreme court. Doesn't affect ISP's here in IL that actually matter.
Rubbish. It's an amusing stereotoype but bares no resemblance to reality. People do preach Christianity in Mecca and survive just fine. The original joke may have been funny or not, but trying to pass it off as truth is unconscionable.
Not according to the Saudi Embassy:
"Forbidden items include alcohol, narcotics, weapons, ammunition, pork and pornography. Prescription drugs must be documented. Makkah and Madinah hold special religious significance and only persons of the Islamic faith are allowed entry."
downtown newark and new york city people with bullhorns say allah is great, whites are devils with no souls, on and on , religion, mystisism, and nonsense. And selling books with the same nonsense and more (that the Earth's center is hollow says one black muslim book)
I live here, I talk to these nuts, they're harmless.
So, the fact that the IceCream Makers, make their quart of ice cream for less then a dollar, and ship it to you and you pay 4$.. Or the coffee places that make 100X on the cost ? I dont see anyone getting upset over that ?
That is the question that springs to my mind regarding licence agreements.
What if your toaster contained a EULA that modified the warranty terms from state law, or you had no warranty, or that any liability on the part of the manufacturer was null and void, or that you could not disclose any critisisms of the toaster's operation to others?
Does contract law supercede state or federal law? If so, what are the circumstances? What constitutes an enforcable contract? Can you ignore the terms of a license agreement? Courts need to address these issues before the entanglement of technology and society can move forward.
I have heard in Canada you cannot sign away your statutory rights, they are after all, the law. I recall one particular case involving a local ski hill that claimed the liability waiver you sign before skiing absolved them of whatever liability they may incur. The judge disagreed noting that courts are the arbiters of the law, not the ski hill, and that liability was laid out by statute and could not be removed by signing a waiver.
What do I know, IANAL, I just play one on TV.
...if the party who reverse engineers it comes to find the "trade secret" on their own?
:|
Otherwise there should be a database of trade secrets so people dont infringe on them unknowningly
Some of us can't aford to give. And others of us just don't want to buy into the big-money game. And if you do or do not, a corresponding grass roots campaign down at the level of the people is essential.
Tell your co-workers, family, friends, and people you run into what these monied interests are doing to our nation, to our world, and to our future.
They will listen. These are not difficult concepts to get across. There exist laws which prevent common citizens from doing what intuitively they believe they ought to be able to do. These laws exist for the benefit of corporate profits, laws bought with this very money.
Unless your father is Dick Cheney himself, even he will understand the simple notion of a law which just seems wrong to ordinary folk.
Do you know what we need? What we need are little printable cards, maybe business-card size or slightly larger, that we can keep in our back pocket and hand out to people, listing the injustices or present "intellectual property" law.
We need a list of some bold facts of simple, incredibly simple, things that just seem wrong, and are wrong.
It also needs to contain a website to go to for further information.
Ideally this website will contain links to specific cases, templates for the cards to print out, congress-people links, quotes from sold-out congress-people, and a philosophy section.
And no, I do not trust the EFF on this, not after the interview of one of the board members here. He does not represent my interests.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
I doubt there would be quite so many divx movies on kazaa etc. if it weren't for DeCSS.
:-)
I love it, myself, and use it regularly to watch DVDs on my Linux and OSX computers. (Apple's DVD player won't play outside of my region, VLC will).
But yes, it has had bad side effects. I just happen to think it's more important that it's free
This case is about the source code to decss.exe in specific, not about open-source CSS decoders in general. DeCSS is *not* what lets you watch DVDs in Linux. That's done by libdvdread and libdvdcss, which (so far) have not been sued, harassed, or even mentioned by the big bad MPAA! DeCSS is a *Windows-only* utility that decrypts DVD images copied to a hard drive. That might be fair use, but it's certainly not a DVD player for Linux.
So go on, expend all your political energy whining about DeCSS and your God-given right to watch DVDs on your Linux box, and ignore Ashcroft, the TIA, the PATRIOT act, and a hundred DMCA cases you've never heard of that are the real threats to your freedom.
Flame away, I'll be watching The Two Towers DVD with xine on my Gentoo box...
0 1 - just my two bits
I always put a fake "RIAA/MPAA Sucks" DECSS text file on all the webservers. Help waste their time.
It has always perplexed me how software came to fall under the protection of copyright. It starts with the idea that software is "expression" (not "invention") and should be protected as such.
I mean, I can understand why companies would want such a thing: if software were protected by patent only -- and, provided software patents weren't granted so irresponsibly (i.e. a patent souldn't cover abstract or nonnovel concepts, mathematical formula, etc. but only actual, specific implementations of novel concepts) -- well,
So, I can understand why it's a "better deal" for software companies that code falls under the rules of copyright rather than those of patents. Still, software has much more in common with patentable inventions than it has with, I don't know, Hamlet or Starry Night or Finnegans Wake.
Yes, sometimes some code is exclusively the expression of an idea--Hello World examples in text books, for instance, Touretzky's DeCSS Gallery, etc. And, yes, I buy the concept that software is to varying extents both functional and expressive. Most of the time, however, software is no different than a recipe. Recipes are also dual use -- arguably more expressive than code is functional -- but a recipe still doesn't necessarily get the protection of copyright law.
Copyright, after all, was devised to encourage the spread of intangible ideas, art, research, press. Patents, likewise, were devised to encourage invention, technology, science.
Now, I admit, I'm a socialist bastard and I reject property outright. But it seems to me, even on "social democratic" grounds, that software copyrights are contrary to the intent of copyright and that software ought to be protected, if at all, under a different system of law.
I know Slashdot hates software patents, but, in all honesty, software patents are a deal more sane than software copyright, if software went through the same scrutiny as other inventions. Patents are limited in both time and scope. Patents apply to specific implementations, only. Patents are "public domain" (i.e. on the public record for the benefit fo the public). Patent rights don't prevent tinkering and they don't prevent people from dreaming up new ideas based on what they've seen.
If software were protected by a sane system of patents, I very much doubt the GPL would have come to pass at all because most of the things it seeks to protect would be the case for all software.
Of course, when we speak of "protection" we're talking about two different things: the right to control one's creation and the right to create it in the first place. Slashdot likes "software is expression" because it protects the latter, but, I think we're ultimately shooting ourselves in the foot due to the overzealousness of protections for the former. Protecting the right to reverse engineer, tinker, experiment, and so on, needn't come at the burden of unreasonable rights of control.
bacchusrx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
I have a great idea how to fix all of this, why dont we all just shoot ourselves? becuase we're evil badguys and not needed for any of these companies' profits, their money comes from magical wells from lollypop lane! in seriousness, these people have forgotten who they're serving. we're not serving them, now they're pissed because we dare find alternatives or serve ourselves, so they bitch to the government to make it legal to enslave us. Oh well, I guess I'll go find some little island somewhere. I'm just plain tired of this constant crap that we kep getting fed, like I've said so many times.. just wait for the systems to trip over each other and keep a ammunition on hand when hell breaks loose. The people who serve us now feel that they are the people in power and feel that they can fuck us around, well, when people get pissed and not support them by not buying anything. they're quickly remember who they really are and will kiss ass again. this DeCSS stuff is an example of how greed controls the fate of the human race, we need to abolish greed, but before that happens, greed must take its course and do its damage, though its damage could mean the end of us all. however, people will survive and find new ways not to centralize the world around the almighty dollar and do things for others out of the reason for keeping the human race alive, because in the end, money has no real power, except social status.
Until we have nothing left but locked down hardware which self-destructs in response to attempts to study it, distributors can not stop prevent the willing from liberating the information.
Until neighbors are paid off to report neighbors, brothers to report brothers, distributors can not prevent the willing from liberating the information.
Sharing this information over p2p networks I believe is too dangerous. It is far too easy for you to be found, and sentenced to have your future destroyed, without you having accomplished anything. It is too impersonal. To many people, you are just an IP address.
What is far more dangerous to the existing "intellectual property" regime is the in person swapping of the physical media. When you go over to your neighbor's house or apartment for an evening to watch a movie, what if you were to bring copies of the latest DVDs you have bought? Maybe you'll watch one or two of them. What if when you are heading home you say, "Oh, just go ahead and keep them." Who is going to turn your offer down? It's just like being offered money or a gift. They will take it if for no other reason than that they don't want to offend you or seem unfriendly.
It is the widespread practicing of this very personal form of infringement which will spell the end of the corporate "intellectual property" regime.
Because unlike electronic copying, when you look your friend or your neighbor in the face, who has just given you a gift as a fellow person and as a friend and a neighbor, they can not then look at you and say, "Communist!", or "Theif!".
It is against their every intuition to do so, because you aren't just an IP address in a newspaper or court brief. You are their friend and their neighbor in the flesh.
I think that this would have significantly more intuitive appeal to people than the current issues which often seem to focus on electronic sharing.
Or maybe it's just a matter of waiting 20 years until we have middle aged people who have known p2p swapping all of their lives.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
Thank you. You put it much better than I did.
c-hack.com |
I've been boycotting the music industry for a 6 months now (although I haven't bought an album in years). Besides, every time I buy a blank CD, I'm subsidizing the RIAA (welcome to Canada -- we'll see your crazy laws and raise you a ridiculous levy :P ). I've essentially payed for music I download anyway. So screw them.
I can't believe that governments don't care that the MPAA is cementing the Microsoft monopoly. It just proves that western politicians have lost their balls. Thank goodness for DeCSS.
There has been a rash of illegal organ thefts. Numerous American lawmakers were discovered to be missing their testicles.
There was also a disturbing incident in which the American constitution was passed around as toilet paper by MPAA members.
I find it deeply, deeply disturbing that corporate greed can find more sympathy with judges than "national security".
Not that I ever thought that PGP should be restricted, either in source or in binary, but, fuck, national security should be a much bigger hammer with which to thump software than unadulterated money-grubbing.
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
Hmm. I always thought that the purpose of an amendment was to modify/override what was there before. To give an unrelated example: Article I dictates that the state legislatures choose senators, however we actually follow the text of Amendment 17, which requires popular election of Senators. Given this order of precedence, why shouldn't the First Amendment be considered to take priority over the text of Article I?
Admittedly, the fact that the Bill of Rights was ratified at the same time as the rest of the Constitution makes this rather tricky. Still, saying that Article I "is in the original text" seems to imply that it's actually less important.
To extrapolate your argument, you're suggesting that the mathematical formula E=MC^2 can be protected, but the actual value of the speed of light (C) can't, thus rendering the entire formula meaningless. For no better reason than that you don't like numbers.
Despite pussy opinion, everything is funny to joke about. Rape, murder, paraplegia, George W Bush - all of these horrible things can make for some excellent jokes, in the right contexts.
So grow a fucking spine, suck it up, and accept that other people will find things funny even if you don't.
that's just mean..
What? Me? Worry?
How on earth did that get past the lameness filter?
Except that DeCess wasn't exactly intended to be used for illegally copying DVD's.
--
Adobe's anti-counterfeiting softw
can be used to pirate pictures from internet sites.
Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech
Now, this is clearly very difficult for our Congresscritters and judges to comprehend, so I'm going to break it down to make it easier for them to understand.
Congress. Shall. Make. No. Law. Abridging. The. Freedom. Of. Speech.
I'm not sure where the confusion is coming from.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Your IP has been logged. Please wait for the SWAT team to arrest you.
Is it just me, or does this sound very similar to what happened to 2600 Magazine??
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
Has anyone managed to publish this code as a book with an ISBN number printed in an OCR friendly font yet?
Also last I checked, the code will always be available without needing to reverse engineer it since it has been submitted as evidence in the Jon Johansen case.
You don't need decss to copy dvd's if you have a dvd writer (or some patience, or use a dvd imaging tool, or ...).
In fact I know someone who's bought a dvd writer for this purpose.
This brings the reason for DeCSS's existance back to a single one, to view dvds on linux. You no longer need it for copying.
The united corporations of America will hopefully soom make the new law official. You can't do anything without checking with the 500 richest people first.
Actually, nutsack, there are plenty of Christians and even Jews openly living and worshipping in Mecca, just as in Iraq where Christians held top government positions.
Fact is, Bush's U.S. is well on it's way to being less free than these places you only know about through vague propaganda.
Host it on a FTP site!
Does a boycott matter? I haven't bought a DVD player because it is DRM by definition (it will play movies only through use of a decrypter) and it lacks the functionality - recording - of my good old VCR.
... DVD players have been said to be one of if not THE fastest growing consumer products ever.
And I know scores of people who still do the VCR thing, for whatever reason. The local video stores are stocked about 50-50 between DVDs and VHS tapes.
And yet
At what level of adoption, or more accurately, non-adoption, is there an economic incentive for the DVD cartel to change its DRM practices? What if DVD players are adopted very quickly shooting up to 50% of the audience -- and then just stops there, because of inertia by the buying public, or active resistance to the consumer-unfriendly DVD DRM concept, or whatever.
In other words, does a boycott matter? Even if 50% of us say, "screw DVDs, we're not going to use them until they remove the DRM and make them more easily recordable and consumer-friendly", will the 50% that have already adopted, and their occasional re-purchases of newer models, be enough to satisfy the DVD cartel?
On the one hand, the immediate answer would seem to be, of course-not. Look at how greedy the MPAA and RIAA etc. are and how they want to squeeze blood from a stone. They won't be satisfied until there is 100% adoption of DVDs, and as such if they run into the immovable mass of people who won't downgrade from VCRs to DVDs then they will make DVDs better (i.e. more recordable).
But is that true? Because such businesses have increasingly seemed willing to write off huge sectors of their audiences. Even the creation of DRM'd DVDs (again, all manufactured DVDs are DRM'd by default) was decidedly an anti-consumer move. The RIAA sues its consumers and doesn't care. The DVD cartel introduces a product with fewer features than VCRs and doesn't care.
So, can they make "enough" money off of catering to the clueless 50% who buy DVD, ahem, ugh, "players", and say "screw you" to the other 50% who say "we're not gonna buy a drm'd product like DVD players".
Do the economics work so they can just write off people like you and me who "refuse" to buy such anti-consumer products, and just ignore us?
That seems to be what they're doing ALREADY, right?
Nevertheless, keep resisting... I certainly am, too.
the state Supreme Court ruled that property and trade secrets rights outranked free speech rights
i can't help but think of the "bill of rights", and a minor law stating that state courts cannot make rulings that are against federal law.
i can't help but wonder why this case has gone as far as it has. i'm thinking of the implications here, the rights of business over the rights of free-speech? something is not being mentioned here.?.?.?
I'm sure they're referring to the actual religious sites/mosques, not the whole cities.
If a Pentecostal Christian started speaking in tongues and handling snakes in the nave of Notra Dame cathedral, they'd be told to leave too.
Hypocrites, these movie monguls are.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
The movie industry is in California. This decision is by the Calafornia Supreme court.
There's no connection at all, right?
Big Brother Bush is doubleplus ungood.
I hope this makes it up to the supreme court becasue it's just pain bogus. If I figure out how to watch DVD's by my own research, I have every right to tell my neighbors about it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Lemme help you out in your future legal drama. IANAL, BTW.
Based on the court documents, be it hereby known by one and all, that
[I'm just extracting this from Ed Felten's commentary.]
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Your post is somewhat confusing in this area, point well taken.
I too want the arguments to be sound. Understanding this point is only half the battle though. Winning the PR war is the other half...
Blogging because I can...
and as far as that kind of world, a capitalistic 1984 would be much worse, when you could not contribute anymore you would be discarded as valueless, at least a communistic system deals with the people as a whole and not the potential $$$ value a person represents. I guess you'd always have some value...Soylent green is PEOPLE....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The DVD CCA is trying to have it both ways - not patenting the information up front, but then relying on the government for IP protection after the cat's out of the bag. Their doctrine of some trade secrets being "unlawfully exposed" is contrary to the intent of the Constitution, even if it appears to have been somewhat supported by recent legal decisions.
Trade secrets should have no standing for protection in court IMHO; if you want your ideas protected, you should have to patent or copyright them so that the public eventually receives some benefit from them. The perversion of trade secrets is requiring the government to defend trade secrets, with no eventual release into the public domain to pay for the costs of that defense. It's a corporate handout, pure and simple.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and