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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 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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
extract it with:
:o)
#!/usr/bin/perl
Anyone else see the irony in using Perl to make something less obfuscated?
- 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.
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 |
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.
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
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?
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