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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."
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.
... 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...
This link leads to a story about a related case. I know, it's no laughing matter....
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.
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
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8248893338 0474758711 2833959896 8522325446 0840897111
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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.)
Your sig seems oddly a propos...
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
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
- Are property and trade secrets rights a constitutional right?
NO.
- Can anything outweigh a constitutional right?
MONEY.
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
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 ..
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."
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.
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!
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 |
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.
Dude, you're mixing up your IP. Trade secrets and patents are pretty well diametrically opposed. A patent on an item gives you the right to a limited monopoly on the production/use/whatever of that item. However, in exchange for those rights, you must publically disclose, in detail, the workings of your item. A trade secret, OTOH, is just that. A secret. It absolutely must not be publically disclosed (hence the use of contracts, NDAs, etc, to prevent exposure of the secret).
Of course, that doesn't change your point that trade secrets are valuable (your Coca-Cola formula example is, actually, a good one... it's a trade secret, not a patent), however, one must not allow corporations to trump the rights of the public in order to protect their bottom line (a disturbing trend these days).
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
Patents could be, and perhaps once were, beneficial to society. They do not currently have a net posititve impact on society. On the bottom lines of certain companies, perhaps, but that's a separate matter. And one might question which of those companies have a net positive impact on society.
Patents are essentially nothing more or less than one particular method for creating monopolies. Monopolies have, except when relatively weak, a net negative impact on society. Thus when an individual owns a patent, there can be an argument that the net impact on society is positive. It distributes the power base, and thus strengthens democracy. But when some centralized agency, say an employer, owns or controls the patent then net benefit on society becomes negative because it acts of further strengthen already unusually strong elements. And thus weakens democracy.
Note that while a republic does not depend on being egalitarian, and often isn't, a democracy does so depend. Thus as centralizations of power accumulate the country becomes less and less democratic (small d). Not, however, necessarily more republican. If the power is quite centralized oligarcies are more likely. Or even some sort of virtual feudal system (with, e.g., people being forbidden by contract from changing masters [perhaps employers?])
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
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
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.
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
WHAT DIFFERENCE?!
The rights were still taken away. What difference does it matter whose rights were taken away!? SHouldn't the problem be the rights were taken away in the first place, not justifying it becasue America's doing it in the first place?
Of course not. That would make too much sense.
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.
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
I believe the chance of independent discovery is the key question in whether to seek patent protection. If your product, like the Coca-Cola formula, is difficult to discover, trade secret law provides an indefinite but uncertain monopoly, as you said. If otoh your product is easy to reverse engineer, patent law provides at least a short term of certain monopoly.
You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.
From what I remember, the checksum and table of contents methods are in the hardware of the CD/DVD ROM drives, which makes low-level reads equally ineffective. Safedisc is a popular copy protection method for CDs, though it has been awhile since I googled it.
I'm not sure how DVD rippers get around the protection. It's been posted in the comments for this story that the various ripping programs out there don't use DeCSS, and are much more efficient than if they did use DeCSS.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
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
I believe that the reverse engineering provision only applies to making a compatible product with the player. In other words, creating CSS discs to work with a DVD player, not a DVD player to work with CSS discs.
A solution to the problem with music 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
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
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
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
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)
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 ?
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.
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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?
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!
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."
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
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
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.
For example, surely by now someone has reverse engineers one of the player keys.
Oh, that was done first. Johanssen extracted the Xing player key from Xing's software player when he reverse engineered CSS. Early open source DVD players used this key.
so why dont the so called illegal players just do it the "authorized" way instead of doing it doggy style?
I'm guessing here, but I can offer two reasons, one legal, one practical. The legal reason is that the DVD-CCA can probably argue that the player keys are copyrighted. The practical reason is that if a key became widely used in unauthorized players, the DVD-CCA might just look into revoking that key. They couldn't make it stop working with existing disks, but they could make sure that it didn't work with any new disks. Rather than fighting that arms race, the unauthorized players just crack.
Besides, cracking is cooler.
I have noted that occasionally deCSS programs do screw up their attacks... but I do know that authorized players are more robust than unauthorized ones in the case of file corruption.
I haven't seen this, and it doesn't make any logical sense. I have seen disks that Linux players won't play, but it's not because they can't decrypt the data -- DVDs are complex and reverse engineering them is hard. The reason it doesn't make any sense is because authorized players should be *more* sensitive to problems with corruption. They depend absolutely on being able to retrieve that block of disk keys, and if that portion of the disk isn't readable, bit-perfect (module error correction), they're hosed. As far as there not being enough known plaintext for crackers, well, as I understand it, there's a few bytes at the front of every 2048-byte packet, so unless the title is *very* short, there's always plenty of data available. If some of it is corrupt, there's plenty more.
That said, I'm not saying you're wrong, just that the statement doesn't make sense to me. There is a whole lot I don't know about DVDs.
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