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Proposed Amendment Would Ban All DVD Copying
Ynefel writes in with a PC Magazine article reporting that the DVD Copy Control Association is considering an amendment to the agreement equipment vendors must abide by, which would completely ban all DVD backups, whether fair use or not, and prevent DVDs from playing without the DVD disk being present in the drive. The amendment is being voted on imminently and if approved would go into effect within 18 months. Quoting: "The proposed amendment was made public in a letter sent by Michael Malcolm, the chief executive of Kaleidescape, a DVD jukebox company which successfully defeated a suit by the DVD CCA this past March."
In my entire life, I've only met one person that copied movies - and he was doing it using two VCRs. It was simple, anyone could do it. You buy two VCR's and you record the movie from one onto the other. A grade-schooler could probably figure it out. My point is the same as yours, however, he's the *only* person I've ever known that's done this.
These execs need to be focusing on places like SE asia where burned movies are sold on the street like penny candy. When will they learn to stop biting the hand that feeds them? Do I want to copy my DVD's and CD's? Yes! Why? Because when the original media is scratched it RUINS your enjoyment of that movie / music. I copy as many of mine as I can so that I don't have to worry about it. I also keep burned copies of my CDs in my car to protect me from theft. If some jackalope breaks into my car and steals my CDs... I don't care, I'll just buy a spindle and re-burn them - because the probability of the cops getting them from the thief or of insurance fully reimbursing me for their worth is pretty slim. Ever lent a CD to a friend and gotten it back trashed? Of course you have... that's why copies are great.
As a consumer - if there's no simple, legitimate way to protect the media I've invested my money in then I'll just find another means of acquiring it.
Did he win in court because he pointed out the license agreement didn't prohibit this usage, or did he win on other grounds? If they're changing the license agreement to close up some holes (think GPL 3), he may have a case of unfair and tortorus interference in his business. If he won on other grounds, this might not affect him -- or us, under the same decision -- at all.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm ready to support removing ALL rights from the movie industries. They'd still find a way to survive, and even prosper, but not in the insane taking of public rights they now enjoy.
Remember, everyone who initially came to Hollywood to found the western movie industry did it because they were stealing the use of Edison's patents, and were trying to avoid his enforcers. They were all a bunch of thieves to start with, and that hasn't changed all that much since!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You can't do that without special equipment or breaking the encryption. The CSS system (redundancy ahoy!) uses a special track which does not exist on rewritable DVDs. In fact, DVD drives have special commands for reading the track. The information on that track is encrypted with a set of "player keys". The Player Keys are contained within licensed software, and are used to decrypt the disc key track. The disc keys are used to decrypt the title keys, which are the actual keys used to watch the movie.
In addition, the DVD drive has to authenticate a CSS disc with its own encryption checks before it will allow the disc to be read.
DeCSS works by brute-force cracking the encryption. (CSS uses a 40-bit key.) So it's not really possible to create a *legal* backup of a DVD disc without a license and equipment from the DVD CCA.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade