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Jon Johansen Interviewed
wuzfuzzy writes "Depending on your point of view, Jon Lech Johansen is either your hero or adversary. To the copyright industry, Jon Lech Johansen has been a detriment to their policy of control since the advent of DeCSS (Decrypt Content Scrambling System.) To those who cherish freedom, he has been a pillar of hope in an age when DRM (Digital Rights Management) threatens to overtake mainstream media. After two trials, the courts finally ruled in Jon's favor. However, there is much more to Jon Lech Johansen than DeCSS. In this interview, Slyck hopes to bring to light the many facets of Mr. Johansen, and the numerous projects he is involved with."
pow(256,5) != 32768
5 bytes covers 1,099,511,627,776 possibilities, which is a little harder.
It rather depends on how difficult it is to test each possibility.
I guess today is a passable day to die.
Slyck.com Interviews Jon Lech Johansen
April 4, 2005
Thomas Mennecke
Depending on your point of view, Jon Lech Johansen is either your hero or adversary. To the copyright industry, Jon Lech Johansen has been a detriment to their policy of control since the advent of DeCSS (Decrypt Content Scrambling System.) To those who cherish freedom, he has been a pillar of hope in an age when DRM (Digital Rights Management) threatens to overtake mainstream media.
Jon Lech Johansen became well known for his role in the development of DeCSS. Jon spent 3 long years in the Norwegian courts proving his innocence. The American movie industry pressured the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit to press charges against Jon Lech Johansen in 2000 for allegedly bypassing the CSS copy protection on DVDs.
After two trials, the courts finally ruled in Jon's favor. However, there is much more to Jon Lech Johansen than DeCSS. In this interview, Slyck hopes to bring to light the many facets of Mr. Johansen, and the numerous projects he is involved with.
Describe your role in the development of DeCSS. Was is a group effort or were you the mastermind behind it?
DeCSS was written by 3 people: a German developer, a Dutch developer and myself. The reverse engineering was done by the German.
From time to time I see people repeat the claim that DeCSS was only made possible because a DVD player manufacturer forgot to "protect" their DVD player. This is a myth that is perpetuated by people who don't understand how computers work. Code obfuscation only slows down reverse engineering, it doesn't block it.
What was the motivation behind creating DeCSS?
The motivation was being able to play DVDs the way we want to. I don't like being forced to use a specific operating system or a specific player to watch movies (or listen to music.) Nor do I like being forced to watch commercials. When your DVD player tells you "This operation is not allowed" when you try to skip commercials, it becomes pretty clear that DRM really stands for Digital Restrictions Management.
Did you ever expect the level of legal entanglements; and for it to become as popular as it is today?
No and no.
How difficult was it do break the CSS encryption? What did it take to break the encryption?
Technically DeCSS didn't break CSS. Breaking a crypto algorithm requires revealing and/or exploiting a method that's faster than brute force. DeCSS simply implemented CSS the same way as a normal DVD player.
CSS was however broken by Frank Andrew Stevenson: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/FrankStevenson/ index.html. Many DVD decryption tools today exploit the weaknesses in CSS that he revealed.
Another myth is that DeCSS is illegal because it uses a "stolen" key. A CSS key is 5 bytes. How anyone can think that it's possible to "steal" 5 bytes is beyond me. 5 bytes do not have any protection under copyright law because it's not an original work. It's probably possible for 5 bytes to be protected under trade secret law, but CSS hasn't been a trade secret since DeCSS was released and mirrored all over the net. Is someone who names their child "Frank" (5 bytes) stealing Frank's name? It's absurd.
Was there at any point during the DeCSS trials when you felt you were in serious trouble, or were you confident throughout that you would emerge victorious?
I was confident throughout.
What was the expression(s) on the face of the movie industry when you were finally acquitted?
The MPAA's (or rather, the MPA, which is the international arm of the MPAA) Norwegian lawyer was present for most of the first trial. I don't remember if he was present when the judgment was handed down, but if he was, he was probably wearing his standard grumpy look.
For the acquitt
With a symmetric key algorithm, a 40 bits key is considered extremely weak. Remember that DES (56 useful bits) is dead and 3DES has been officialy replaced by AES (128 bits).
The best example of this is the DVD of "Master and Commander". It forces you sit through 10 minutes of advertising of other films before you get to the main menu!
I found this requirement to be shockingly obnoxious.
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I can skip over it on my DVD player (a Daewoo). So I doubt that that is actually a law.
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
Not true - to manufacture DVD players you need a license from the DVD Copy Control Association. If your player includes features that they don't like, such as skipping commercials, they won't give you a license for CSS.
Many times it is a RPM limiter on the engine. Speed = rpm x gearing (plus stuff about tire diameter, etc). For example, in one of my cars 3000 rpms in first gear is good for 12mph, in second it is good for 30mph, 45mph in 3rd, and 60mph in 4th (standard gearing for a '65 Porsche 356C). So assuming there was a limiter to keep it from going above 70mph, then you wouldn't be able to go above 15 in 1st because you'd have to limit the rpms.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
See this article for an explanation of the speed governor. Reasons: 1) tires not rated past 155 mph; 2) to prevent a speed war among car manufacturers.
That's because speed governors kick in at 155 mph.
Mercedes and BMW speed govern their cars at 155. Other car manufacturers may be different or may not have a speed governor at all.
The development and distribution of DeCSS was ruled legal in Norway, which means that CSS was revealed legally.
Which means this is the logic: trade secrets lose their protection when they are legally revealed.
I didn't see that jj said "school is useless" in this interview.
It plainly states in the interview --> "Actually...I haven't attended university. I quit high school to work in the computer industry. "
I can see how you read into that, but you're possibly incorrect.
Karnal
It's not the notes that are copyrighted...it's her performance of those notes contained on whatever medium, which is going to be a hell of a lot more than 5 bytes.
Besides, it's not the CSS source code that's copyrighted, Jon was talking about the actual numerical code used by the CSS algorithm to decrypt a DVD. The algorithm might be patentable, and the code for the algorithm may be copyrightable, but the code used to unlock a DVD is not.
It is this last code that I think he was referring to, and no one could deem that copyrightable. I've probably got a sequence of bytes in this post that has been used to decrypt a DVD...no one in their right mind would try to call me out on copyright infringement.