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DeCSS Trade Secret Case Comes to an End - Again
Andrew Bunner writes "We asked the courts to rule on our appeal of the DeCSS preliminary injunction (even though the DVD CCA dropped the case) and... we won! No more preliminary injunction. Here's the official ruling (pdf)." This is the last gasp of this case, which we've been following for some years now. This ruling goes into some depth analyzing the trade secret claim, gets the ruling "right", and should be helpful in future cases on similar topics.
/* efdtt.c Author: Charles M. Hannum <root@ihack.net> */
,y,s[2048];main( ,n=2048 ,s,n) )if(s /16%4 ==1 ){int /2^j&1
;}}
/* Thanks to Phil Carmody <fatphil@asdf.org> for additional tweaks. */
/* DVD-logo shaped version by Alex Bowley <alex@hyperspeed.org> */
/* Usage is: cat title-key scrambled.vob | efdtt >clear.vob */
#define m(i)(x[i]^s[i+84])<<
unsigned char x[5]
n){for( read(0,x,5 );read(0,s
); write(1
[y=s [13]%8+20]
i=m( 1)17 ^256 +m(0) 8,k =m(2)
0,j= m(4) 17^ m(3) 9^k* 2-k%8
^8,a =0,c =26;for (s[y] -=16;
--c;j *=2)a= a*2^i& 1,i=i
<<24;for(j= 127; ++j<n;c=c>
y)
c
+=y=i^i/8^i>>4^i>>12,
i=i>>8^y<<17,a^=a>>14,y=a^a*8^a<<6,a=a
&nbs p; >>8^y<<9,k=s[j],k ="7Wo~'G_\216"[k
&7]+2^"cr3sfw6v;*k+>/n."[k>>4]*2^k*257/
  ; 8,s[j]=k^(k&k*2&34)*6^c+~y
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Who would have thought a simple CSS remover would create such news ;)
DeCSS ok, but not DVD X-Copy. Why is that? Because DeCSS doesn't do anything by itself, but having X Copy demonstrates criminal intent?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
its the Shift dummy =)
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
I recall a while back about 2600 losing their case on which they were linking to DeCSS, wonder if they can get it overturned by a judge. Probably won't though, knowing the government (after all, they are evil hackers!).
Bored? Why not join a decent mess
It's foolish, of course. Trying to protect silly "trade secrets" behind a poorly conceived law is the worst thing to happen to digital media (and the internet). It's like being a restauranteur and crying "No fair" and refusing to sell desserts to customers who taste a dessert and ask, "Is that cinnamon?"
If people are going to buy your product, and be exposed to it, they will naturally have to gain some familiarity with it. It's silly to want a food critic taste your food so he could publish a glowing review and then get upset when he writes what he (correctly) believes to be your ingredients.
The DVD-CAA wants the DVD format to be adopted and for it to be widespread and popular, but they complain about anything that comes from people using it and that would help distribution.
It's been said, but if they want their DVD encryption to be impenetrable (and hence popular with the MPAA) they should actually try to make it tough to crack instead of hiding behind a flimsy law that has apparently been dismissed in this particular case.
It's just like any software (i.e. IE) being lackadaisical about security and then complaining about people breaking the law by writing viruses. Yeah, it's a law, and people shouldn't do it, but then some people also don't care.
The preliminary injuction fell out of force when the original case that caused the injunction to be issued got dismissed. Afterall, a preliminary injution is a request for the court to implement some of the relief that is going to be the result of winning the trial because its needed right away and can't wait that long. In order to get one, the court has to be convinced that it's pretty likely that the plantiff is going to win. If the case is dismissed, there's no chance left the plantiff can win that case, so the injunction goes away.
But, this issue over whether the injunction should have been granted in the first place got appealed and hadn't been decided yet. Well, actually, it had been already decided that this violated the free speach protections in the US Constitution by the appeals court, but the CA Supreme Court overturned that ruling. However, the CA Supreme Court returned the case to the appeals court to let them rule on the argument that the injunction was an improper use of the CA trade secret laws.
That's where the appeals case was when the DVD CCA abaondoned the original case that generated the injunction and the appeal. Now, normally, such an appeal automatically dies as a moot point when that kind of thing happens, but the appeals court rejected the DVD CCA's request to dismiss because this was such a novel argument, it really needs an appeals ruling to guide future cases.
And here comes that ruling... that the injunction shouldn't have been granted in the first place. That's now on the record as an appeals ruling and can be cited in other future cases.
The DVD CCA balled out of the original lawsuit fearing that they were going to lose, and furthermore lose in a way that'd get them in trouble in future cases. Well, guess what, their worst nightmare came true. A declarative ruling that the preemptive injunction that they got was one they shouldn't have, so that set of legal paper goes in the "Don't try that again" pile. The key arguement to their case has basically been shot down... CSS doesn't appear to be a trade secret anymore in CA.
Can I use Cascading Style Sheets on my websites now?
"It is important to stress that our conclusion is based upon the appellate record filed in this court. It is not a final adjudication on the merits. The ultimate determination of trade secret status and misappropriation would be subject to proof to be presented at trial." So how does this mean the case is over? It just means the injunction before trial is over, doesn't it?
I have never appreciated this until I met a friend at work. Let's meet "Nikki". She's 21, works in the seafood department of a crappy grocery store (and #%$! makes more money than I do as a cashier) and makes a lot of money on the side selling all of us at work pirated DVD's. This is a Good Thing. She said, when she doesn't make rent, she burns DVD's for kids. What she used to do in the past was buy alcohol for kids under 21.
Simply put, by supporting CSS, you support underage drinking.
Mod "Overrated" instead of replying "I disagree with you," you coward.
that debian distros will now be able to include working DVD players?
(Donning my asbestos underwear)
No. First, Debian distros need to work.
You just wanted to write (i.e. IE), didn't you?
It's been said, but if they want their DVD encryption to be impenetrable (and hence popular with the MPAA) they should actually try to make it tough to crack instead of hiding behind a flimsy law that has apparently been dismissed in this particular case.
Except, that is theoretically impossible, which is the whole point of the DCMA. Since bullet proof DRM impossible, just make it illegal to create device that doesn't honor DRM, then the average user will never be able to break it, and the minority of people that do, will be small enough to ignore or sue. Well that was the theory until p2p showed that it was possible for the minority to anonymously distribute their cracked works to the majority.
Of course, all this DRM is completely unnecissary, just look at the software industry's experiance with it.
Of course, and that's not what this decision was about. This was about *De*CSS, which means that you can now *remove* the style sheets from your website.
I bet there are a lot of web sites where people tried style sheets once but then realized it was illegal to remove them.
In NYS vs. 2600 the judge's decision made use of an analogy I posted to Slashdot. This isn't to say he got it from me, it was a fairly obvious analogy, but it was known at the time that both parties were reading arguments on Slashdot and I believe incorporated some of them into their arguments.
Sometimes we are watched.
Oh yeah. The analogy?
Buying a DVD is like buying a book locked in a safe, where the seller won't give you the combination unless you pay him additional money.
This is as far as the judge took it in ruling against 2600. My analogy went on to point out that DeCSS was like getting the combination from some other source to open the safe you own to read the book you own. And there's certainly no law against cracking your own safe, or providing instruction to someone on how to do it.
KFG
Maybe a statement along the lines of "This information is believed to have been legally obtained by means of reverse engineering." could take away much of the uncertainty in future cases.
Combined with rapid internet wide distribution, this seems a solid way to publish information obtained through reverse engineering in the public domain.
My personal favorite:
Second, the evidence in this case is very sparse with respect to whether the offending program was actually created by improper means. Reverse engineering alone is not improper means. (See footnote 7 ante.) Here the creator is believed to be a Norwegian resident who probably had to breach a Xing license in order to access the information he needed. We have only very thin circumstantial evidence of when, where, or how this actually happened or whether an enforceable contract prohibiting reverse engineering was ever formed.
There were dozens of slashdot comments to this effect when the whole shebang was going down the first time.
I wonder if I should be happy that our voice is heard worldwide and effecting the very body of law, or scared shitless that AC's like me (an International AC, I should add) could be making ripples in court decisions that effect merely the state of California.
The Internet really bends/breaks the legal system, and this brief is a great example of it.
I'm also developing an enormous amount of respect for those judges whose opinions manage to be very readable, even when discussing arcane technicalities of law (and, in this case, technology) -- many of us engineers could learn a thing or three from these folks about clear writing.
-Brian
Hopkins & Carley, Arthur V. Plank,
Allonn E. Levy, San Jose;
First Amendment Project, Oakland,
James R. Wheaton, David A. Greene;
Tomlinson Zisko Morosoli & Maser,
Thomas E. Moore III, Palo Alto;
Electronic Frontier Foundation, San
Francisco, Cindy A. Cohn
You are now on the protected list.
I have come to know on a first-hand basis what effects that ordinary people here on /. can have.
/. community would go with this, but on the whole I'm fairly pleased with what has happened. It has helped to define the attitudes of a whole generation of programmers and set legal precedence that I hope is going to, in the long run make it easier to freely express myself in software. Yeah, my part was real tiny but it doesn't take much to get everything moving. I also deliberately tried to lay low during this entire controversy because I already saw the legal mess that everybody who came in contact with this whole affair went through. I made it through without one single problem.
I posted the original story about deCSS back in November of 1999. It probabally would have been brought up eventually here on Slashdot, but it was amazing to me to see just how quickly this legal action (originally against Jon Johansen) spawned a whole battle cry from readers here on this site. I was an active participant on the LiVID discussion group back then and this was one situation where I knew that this really needed to be seen by a much larger audience. I had absolutely no idea just how far the
My only regret is that similar actions haven't happened against the DVD Consortium (formerly DVD Forum and prior to that... well, does it really matter?) in regards to the DVD-Video specification. Although some of it is patented (mainly the MPEG-2 portions), for the most part that DVD-Video spec is protected by the same trade secret laws that the CSS algorithms were also protected by. The only problem is that the DVD-Video spec is much more complicated and won't simply fit on the back of a T-shirt.
I had the good fortune of actually being able to read the formal DVD-Video specs (as an employee), and implemented a multiplexor/authoring system following those specs. It is from this experience that I am absolutely committed to open specifications. There was so much I wanted to disclose to the other LiVID members information I knew about those specs, but I deliberately stayed on the sidelines and simply said "Yeah you are going in the right direction" or "No, I think you got that model wrong. Try something else."
The full potential of utilizing the DVD-Video still has yet to be realized, and unfortunately I don't think it ever will be. I'm talking a genuine "hacking" of the capabilities of a standard DVD-Video player like you have in your home entertainment system, not just the Linux box that you also want to play some DVD movies on (although knowledge of the spec can also help that effort). The DVD/optical disc format is a totally different medium of delivery from video tape, but unfortunately most movie studios simply treat it as only a glorified version of a VHS cassette (DVD extras on a typical release not withstanding). Worse yet, people who consider DVDs to be just another version of VCDs.
I also wouldn't mind trying to put something together right now, as I'm currently unemployed, but that is another story altogether. I can't afford the current specs even if I was fully employed right now.
This DeCSS case is a trade secret case. The court said that no trade secrets were illegally obtained.
Go back and read it again. He said no such thing. He said that once it was out, and all over the internet, it may have ceased to be a trade secret. Since this is the standard, a trade secret that becomes common knowledge is no longer a trade secret, the ruling restored the status quo before Kaplin turned activist.
The entire ruling is about how once a trade secret is no longer a trade secret, it is basically in the public domain. You can hold the individual/company/etc liable for the release, but not the people who distribute something that is no longer a trade secret. The appeal was about the injunction, and the harm that could be done if an injunction was not granted. IE: since it was no longer a trade secret, the judge (Kaplin) overstepped his boundries by issuing an injunction because the case didn't meet both standards required to do so. 1. Harm if the injunction was not issued, 2. Likelyhood that they would win the case. They had to succeed on both counts, and they succeeded in none.
Keep in mind, you can't patent a trade secret, and you can't claim a patent IS a trade secret. You can only choose one method: Patent it, sharing how you did it with everyone but they can't profit from it without your permission, or: Make it a trade secret, and protect that secret. The differences are that patents expire after a fixed term of years and trade secrets expire once they are no longer a secret. Their only recourse is to sue the original party that caused the secret to get out, maybe Xing.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
That requires eyes. A few days ago a friend sent me this mp3 (dunno where he found it) You can *listen* to someone sing the decss code, and its not richard stallman style either! Check it out at http://macwhore.net/the_computer_code_hoedown_.mp3
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.