Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Clean-Room RTMPE Spec Created From rtmpdump

Posted by kdawson on from the streisand-in-action dept.

lkcl writes "A clean-room RTMPE specification has been created using the source code of rtmpdump-v1.6 for guidance. Adobe recently issued a DMCA take-down notice against SourceForge, resulting in copies of rtmpdump hitting quite a few bittorrent sites worldwide."

12 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The OP doesn't know what "clean room" means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    Of course it can. "Clean room" implies a barrier between two implementations where no code is shared.

    Someone doesn't know what "clean room" means

    Quite.

  2. Re:Someone doesn't know what "clean room" means by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, one thing is clean-room IMPLEMENTATION. A very different thing is clean room SPECIFICATION (whatever that's supposed to mean).

    The article clearly states that this one's a spec.

  3. Why? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IANAL, etc. but my distinct impression was that cleanrooming wouldn't(outside of curious edge cases) save you from the DMCA. For copyright claims, the more layers of cleanroom, the better; but the DMCA only cares if the code constitutes a circumvention device or not. It could be based on a cracked copy of some proprietary adobe tool, OSS based on network sniffing of the proprietary tool, written according to a spec based on the OSS implementation, or, for that matter, produced by the Oracle of Delphi based on instructions from Olympus.

  4. WTF is RTMPE? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you're going to post an article about some obscure bullshit nobody's ever heard of, you could at least give people some hint at WTF you're talking about. "RTMPE" doesn't even show up on Wikipedia. God forbid you elaborate your terse, two sentence summary.

    1. Re:WTF is RTMPE? by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Clean room reverse engineering is where you reverse engineer things using no code from the project you are attempting to emulate. This is used to make sure your project is 100% legal.

      --
      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    2. Re:WTF is RTMPE? by hazem · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's a common problem with the summaries on slashdot that less-common acronyms are not explained. The world of nerds is pretty vast and it's impossible for all of us to keep up with every possible acronym, system, software, etc.

      It would have been trivial to add ", a proprietary protocol developed by Adobe Systems for streaming audio, video and data over the Internet," right after the first instance of RTMPE and it would have made the summary much more useful and informative.

  5. Define acronyms in the article! by bertok · · Score: 4, Informative

    Clearly, Slashdot editors are strategically shaved monkeys trained to click "accept" or "reject" in exchange for bananas.

    Define obscure acronyms in the articles!

    RTMP is the Real Time Messaging Protocol used by Adobe Flash

  6. Re:The OP doesn't know what "clean room" means by Jurily · · Score: 5, Informative

    The developer of the clean implementation does not see one byte of the original code, onnly the reversed specs. This is how the original IBM BIOS was cleaned, allowing the PC explosion.

  7. Re:RTMPE? WTF! by Qubit · · Score: 5, Informative

    OK WTF is that all about...

    RTMP is the Real Time Messaging Protocol that Adobe has developed for streaming stuff over the Internet.

    Red5 is a Free Software (LGPL) implementation of the RTMP.

    Cygnal is the Gnash project's RTMP server (also Free Software).

    Also see more docs on RTMP on the Gnash wiki, and RTMPE on this other wiki.

    ... and should I care?

    Would you like to have control over the software that you run and use? Are you concerned about your software and/or hardware implementing things like the Broadcast Flag? Do you believe in Free Software because it gives you control over your computer?

    If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, then you probably should care, as what's going on right now is making it difficult or impossible for you to run Free Software (or even to pick software) to interact with the RTMP protocol -- a protocol that a given website might require you to use to interact with their media content.

    --

    coding is life /* the rest is */
  8. Re:The OP doesn't know what "clean room" means by KlomDark · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's not what my mom told me a "clean room" meant.

  9. Re:What!? by JadeNB · · Score: 4, Funny

    What in the hell is this!? Ten links to d

    Wow, apoplexy induced by the poor summary killed the anonymous coward!

    (OK, so it's not quite as punchy as “Video killed the radio star” .)

  10. Re:The OP doesn't know what "clean room" means by CaptSolo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's the DMCA takedown notice issued to the rtmpdump project:

    http://www.chillingeffects.org/anticircumvention/notice.cgi?NoticeID=25159

    Note that they are just claiming the ability to download copyrighted content as the reason for takedown (will we see a DMCA notice for IE and Firefox soon?). They might as easily use the same "reason" to issue notices to projects implementing this clean room specification.