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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."
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
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...
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*
OK: decss.c
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
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.
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
1320725973 7979936188 6063169144 7358830024 5336972781
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
1269007351 8309241530 1063028932 9566584366 2000800476
7789679843 8209079761 9859493646 3093805863 3672146969
5975027968 7712057249 9666698056 1453382074 1203159337
7030994915 2746918356 5937621022 2006812679 8273445760
9380203044 7912277498 0917955938 3871210005 8876668925
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) = $html =~ m{
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
SF Gate also has a story on this here more or less the same information ..
Now that there is another trump suit over the right to free speech (I guess that "national security", "libel", "slander" and no "Fire! in a crowded theatre are additional reasons), I have to wonder whether there will be cases where free speech is suppressed for less than reasonable cause.
For example, the Co$ 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."
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.
Even if you host it on a website outside the US, you are still legally responsible and well within reach of the US authorities. Sure it might make it harder to link the site to you, but once the link is made, the fact that it's hosted offshore won't provide any legal defense.
Jason
ProfQuotes
But they might decide to drop the whole case because the possibility for failure.
The case will anyway only (in Norway) be off historical interest since Norway anyway probably will addopt the new Infosoc directive from EU planned to take affect from January 2004.
But the way it is today, Johansen is not sentenced for anything and per se not guilty according to Norwegian laws.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Unfortunately that is not completely accurate.
Our legal system has already tested it's power
abroad. Anyone offering our citizens something
that is illegal in this country can be tried in the US.
As well, if you are a US citizen, and are
currently living in the US, you can not host a
website on a, say Australian server, that hosts
content that is illegal in the US, since you
yourself are uploading the data from the
US as an origin.
Unfortunatly this isn't funny, it is true.
...interesting if true.
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.
http://www.indrasweb.com/blog/archives/000063.php# 000063
Permission granted to spread this link around.
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
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...
Furthermore, various forms of CD/DVD copy protection entail putting necessary data on the media that violates checksums or table of contents information, so your CDROM drive will "correct" those errors, leaving you with a bad "copy". It is the player, since this whole DeCSS controversy arose because the Norweigian kid wanted a DVD player for Linux when there were none commercially available, so wrote one himself.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
No, trade secrets are quite simple.
Revealing a trade secret is only illegal if you either obtained knowledge of the secret by illegal means or if you are breaking a contract (NDA or similar) by revealing it.
The big question in this case is whether reverse engineering is obtaining a trade secret by illegal means. It is fairly obvious that it shouldn't be (and earlier cases have confirmed this), but there is a risk that courts may decide that under current legislation (DMCA etc.) it is.
You are correct, they are not guaranteed by an amednment, but in the original text.
United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8:
Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
1st amendment kinda does apply, though.
The issue is about protecting snake-oil. Look at the patterns of these laws - from Felton to Sklyarov - refuting claims of "being secure" is becoming illegal; any business model, no matter how far-fetched, is protected. The people creating the flaws are held harmless; the people who point them out are crucified.
Case and point - find an open WAP in the parking lot of a large retail store. Walk inside, and see the "PC Cash Registers" are using it, broadcasting credit card info etc. free and clear. You don't know this, but the jerk who set it up believes a MAC filter is adequate to prevent harvesting.
You gonna tell the people in the store? You sure as hell cannot tell the customers.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Then you should try reading it sometime:
Article I, Section 8:
Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Source code is protected speech under US law I believe. From Dave Touretzky's gallery of DeCSS scramblers:
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
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
Close, but incorrect in an important way.
You not only own the disk, but you own the data as well. What you don't own is the right to duplicate that data for most reasons. The reason this is important is that you don't need a license to use something that you own.
It's like a book. They don't put after-sale restrictions on books because the courts ruled that they could not.
As copyright law has special provisions for copying that is required in use (copy a game to the HD, or a movie into RAM and into video RAM, etc) there's no unlawful access involved in decrypting a DVD and copying it to the HD for viewing.
Doing anything with it after this, re-encoding it for instance, might be problematic, but the actual use of DeCSS to decrypt it and make it watchable is perfectly legal.
btw, because you're perfectly entitled to use copyrighted works that you bought, including copying them as necessary, you don't need to agree to EULAs. They're after-sale contracts which have never been valid.
Absolutely nothing. But what does this have to do with this case?
Your analogy is not apropos. The author of DeCSS did not break into anything, nor steal anything, nor copy anything. He did a bit of clever reverse-engineering, nothing more.
Now, could this still constitute revealing a trade secret? Maybe. The real trade secret is in the encoding algorithm itself, which a decoding algorithm cannot help but reveal. So I will agree that there is a trade secret issue here, but the tone of your example makes it sound like it was done for malicious intent and thus should be the sole grounds to stop it.
From an ethical point of view, we have to consider the fact that the programmer did not do this for personal gain, other than to be able to play legally purchased DVDs on a system not normally supported for such playback. Might be a stretch, but one could argue that this is legal under the DMCA as it involves interoperability.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
I dont quite get how DVDs are protected. Its more complex than just saying use DeCSS as I understand it. or maybe I dont understand it.
There are two layers of "protection".
First, the player and drive perform a mutual authentication process (although one has to wonder why a player would ever care to verify that the drive is an "authentic" DVD drive). A "proper" drive should refuse to operate until after this authentication process has been performed. Also, after the authentication sequence, the drive will provide the disk key, if asked.
Second, after the drive is unlocked, the actual data streams must be decrypted. Normally (i.e. with an authorized player) the way this works is that the player retrieves a set of encrypted copies of the disk key, one of which is encrypted with it's player key. After retrieving the disk key, it can then decrypt the title keys, which are then used to decrypt the data stream.
However, that's not how most unauthorized players work. They still do the authentication step, but when it comes to decryption they don't bother with using a player key to get the disk key to get the title keys... instead they just attack the data streams and compute the title keys. This is possible because CSS really, really sucks. It's vulnerable to a known-plaintext attack with a trivial amount of known plaintext and there's plenty of known plaintext in the DVD sector headers.
The "just attack it" approach is why open source DVD players are a little slow to play a DVD the first time they see it. Most (all?) of them use libdvdcss which caches the keys so that the next time it sees the disk it won't have to do it again (on my box, the caches are in ~/.dvdcss). However, on modern machines, the crack time is almost negligible, so users may not notice the difference, given that it takes a few seconds for the DVD to spin up anyway.
For example, on my 800MHz PIII laptop, libdvdread (with libdvdcss) reports that it took seven seconds to decrypt all 8 title keys for a DVD I had handy. My laptop actually starts playing a movie much *sooner* than either of my "real" DVD players.
Seven seconds to crack all of the keys on a three year-old laptop. Sheesh. I guess as a user I should be glad the cryptography is so bad, but the security geek in me really wants to slap the creator(s) of CSS around some.
I really, really want to meet the guys who designed WEP.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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."
The actual facts are that the Constitution was ratified on June 21, 1788 and the Bill of Rights were ratified on December 15, 1791. Amendments may modify the text of the Constitution and / or be additions to it.
The Bill of Rights enumerates specific rights not defined in the original 1787 Constitution and are additions. They modify neither articles, sections nor clauses of the Constitution.
The 17th Amendment modifies (actually, supercedes) the text of Article I, section 3 of the Constitution. As an Amendment, it has precedence over the text of the original document.
Amendments may also modify other Amendments. The 18th Amendment allowed for laws to prohibit the manufacture, sale, transportation, importation and exportation of intoxicating liquors. That one was so big a failure it was specifically repealed by the 21st Amendment.
Norway is part of the European Economic Area. See article at Wikipedia.