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Legal Actions Against Linux-DVD authors
Teancum writes "Legal actions have already started to happen against the programmers who wrote the DVD-CSS decription routines. This page contains the official response by the programmer, who has had his web site shut down by his ISP. I guess that the DVD Forum doesn't want to see an open source project that can read DVD-Video. More info about the Livid project can be found here. " Update: 11/05 04:33 by H :Check out the latest announcement from his site - eMedia has done a great report on the whole thing - read this.
Notice where it says (In section 2A)"advertises for sale or hire or possesses in the course of a business" are the conditions for breaking the law. As he has neither offered for sale or substantially benifitted from the CSS decryption code, I figure he is probably safe.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Of course it would have. Someone would have said, "That won't work. You see, once someone gets a single key, which they will be able to do if they disassemble or just pay attention to what a software decoder does, the whole thing goes ka-blooey."
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Hey, I could be wrong, but I though that was academy ratio. Academy ratio motion pictures (pre-widescreen) were in an aspect ratio similar if not identical 4:3 and this called the academy ratio. Perhaps academy ratio is slightly different. The only reason I was willing to call it that was that I have never seen vertical or horizontal letterboxing when they show academy ratio movies on TV. So, if the academy ratio is NOT 4:3, then it is close enough that there is no signifcant cropping. They certainly dont pan-and-scan them!
There is little to fear -- the fact that the industry went after the authors already suggests that they're archeologically ignorant of how an information network functions. Before they made their stupid attack, there were perhaps a hundred copies of the source. Now there are thousands, spreading all over with an O(n^2) growth surface area, and they'll never be able to catch them all (my copies are in two secured machines far enough apart that a strategic nuclear warhead couldn't get them both, and no paper trail -- some friendly overseas mirrors would help, though).
If it does come to a court case against the linux-dvd authors, though, it would be great to see organized OSS community resistance -- legal defense funds, PR/letter efforts, source-code T-shirts and such stuff. As the OSS community grows in scope, it will naturally tend to come in contact with more legal pigheadedness, and it would be useful to have some sort of organized defenses (conventional and guerilla types) to cope with an attack.
Oh, and the 24-inch referred to my screen diagonal measurement. It wasn't meant to be part of the aspect ratio comment...
Also I read about someone else complaining that the protection was very weak, and it was easy to break. Fine - if your front door is unlocked it does not make legal to steal your home. This is not a legal defense.
You're missing something - nobody "broke into anybody's house".
If your front door locked is broken by design, then yes, it's illegal for someone to break in. - but it's NOT illegal for that someone to tell you about it, or to inform the lock manufacturer that they make a shoddy product, or to broadcast to the general public that the locks are faulty.
Nobody broke any laws here - they cracked the encryption for legitimate reasons. Your analogy implies that they broke the encryption and started selling pirate DVD's, which is untrue.
I accidentally deleted by copy of the decyption code this morning. Arse! Does anyone have a pointer as to where it's available?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Where do we send legal defense contributions? Do not let these coders suffer for their efforts!
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
If there's going to be a major court battle, it's going to get expensive. I hear a lot of talk about what is/isn't prosecutable around here, but when it actually comes to a case, does the open source movement have a legal defence fund?
I know the FSF has a legal team, but I've never heard that they'd do anything but enforce the GPL. Would they get involved in this kind of thing?
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
The emperor has no clothes. Sound familiar? Like the story, nobody wanted to acknowledge that the DVD encryption sucked - it was trivial to crack! I'm sure the people that initially released this knew it was weak. I mean... 4 bytes for encryption?
Now somebody comes out and says "Sir, you have no clothes"... and boy is the emperor pissed! MS did the same thing with hotmail (bad hackers, bad!) - blame somebody else. Security is not about ignoring issues.. it's about confronting them. Make it public.. let people try to crack it. If it stands the test of time... THEN it's secure, and not before then. The movie industry just spent several billions on security training.
--
Once the jinni gets out of the bottle, it's damned hard to get it back in. Lawsuits might harass individuals, but it won't stop the momentum.
The only way I can see this thing being stopped is for a "DVD2" to come out and for "the industry" to obsolete all DVD currently on the market, and if that happened, I'd bet the consumers would raise bloody hell over it. ESPECIALLY considering how long everyone waited to get the freaking DVD standard in the first place.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Devices designed to circumvent copy-protection
296
(1) This section applies where copies of a copyright work are issued to the public, by or with the licence of the copyright owner, in an electronic form which is copy-protected.
(2) The person issuing the copies to the public has the same rights against a person who, knowing or having reason to believe that it will be used to make infringing copies
(a) makes, imports, sells or lets for hire, offers or exposes for sale or hire, or advertises for sale or hire, any device or means specifically designed or adapted to circumvent the form of copy-protection employed, or
(b) publishes information intended to enable or assist persons to circumvent that form of copy-protection, as a copyright owner has in respect of an infringement of copyright.
Thanks to Pekka Pietikainen, who found this little goodie.
296 Devices designed to circumvent copy-protection
(1) This section applies where copies of a copyright work are issued to the public, by or with the licence of the copyright owner, in an electronic form which is copy-protected.
(2) The person issuing the copies to the public has the same rights against a person who, knowing or having reason to believe that it will be used to make infringing copies-
(a) makes, imports, sells or lets for hire, offers or exposes for sale or hire, or advertises for sale or hire, any device or means specifically designed or adapted to circumvent the form of copy-protection employed, or
(b) publishes information intended to enable or assist persons to circumvent that form of copy-protection, as a copyright owner has in respect of an infringement of copyright.
[(2A) Where the copies being issued to the public as mentioned in subsection (1) are copies of a computer program, subsection (2) applies as if for the words "or advertises for sale or hire" there were substituted "advertises for sale or hire or possesses in the course of a business.]
(3) Further, he has the same rights under section 99 or 100 (delivery up or seizure of certain articles) in relation to any such device or means which a person has in his possession, custody or control with the intention that it should be used to make infringing copies of copyright works, as a copyright owner has in relation to an infringing copy.
(4) References in this section to copy-protection include any device or means intended to prevent or restrict copying of a work or to impair the quality of copies made.
(5) Expressions used in this section which are defined for the purposes of Part I of this Act (copyright) have the same meaning as in that Part.
(6) The following provisions apply in relation to proceedings under this section as in relation to proceedings under Part I (copyright)-(a) sections 104 to 106 of this Act (presumptions as to certain matters relating to copyright), and (b) section 72 of the Supreme Court Act 1981, section 15of the Law Reform
(Miscellaneous Provisions)
(Scotland) Act 1985 and section 94A of the Judicature
(Northern Ireland) Act 1978 (withdrawal of privilege against self-incrimination in certain proceedings relating to intellectual property);
and section 114 of this Act applies, with the necessary modifications, in relation to the disposal of anything delivered up or seized by virtue of subsection (3) above.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Ok, this may all seem obvoius, and if it is, please tell me I'm just being insane. But what in the hell is going on here? Let me get this straight:
I could go on for a while, but I see that it's pointless. The fact that they're trying to sue someone for their own neglegence is fairly amusing. But the fact is, they lose absolutely nothing by having the keys cracked. They didn't get anything out of it in the first place - so they can't lose anything.
Is it just me, or does it seem like the DVD industry was trying to pull a fast one on movie and publishing studios... you know, "Hey, DVD is encrypted... so you'll no longer have to worry about bootlegged copies of your product." Now they have to save face, and it looks like they don't like it one single iota. If this is the case, I wonder how they explained the DVD->VCR and similar copying techniques once the stream is decoded... Oh well, back to the drawing board.
Shaun ThomasKildosphere.com
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
When the first article on this came out I posted a comment on how they were probably violating some law. Obviously it was moderated down as a troll but it was true anyways. If there's any law against cracking DVD encryption you can bet the RIAA and MPAA goons are going to hit them with it and with the amount of money these guys can throw at lawyers they'll either put these kids in jail or settle on a $multi-million lawsuit if they ever distribute Livid.
Now ask yourself if you want the ability in the coming millenium to make your own desktop movies, your own music CDs, and be able to go on the net and sell 'em to people on your own without going to CBS or Universal Studios? It doesn't matter that much if you're not good, do you want the _ability_ to express yourself in this way?
The alternative is exactly what Bruce says, allowing commercial interests acting as trusts to make it difficult for you to be in the business unless you go through one of the established studios- and there's a LOT of evidence that this is sheer exploitation. I'm not sure how bad it is in film, but in the music industry the exploitation is very very bad, insanely so, outright fraudulent. It's brutal.
The counterbalance to this is ability to produce your own artworks, at several important levels.
- First, it needs to be legal and possible to do the actual artwork. This would compare to being allowed to own recording equipment at all, if you're a musician. This is tough to lose- it would be tyrannical and indefensible to eliminate it, though you'll see just this happening indirectly- you're taxed on blank media by the industries, supposedly to defend against 'pirates'.
- Second, it needs to be legal and possible to distribute your artwork. There are some ways to challenge this, though it is tough. This is the level of ability to record your own work on media that is played on industry standard consumer level players, such as CD players. Soon it will be a question of making your own DVD desktop films and being able to give friends your work to play on their consumer DVD players. I _think_ DVD already punishes independents in that you can't do that yet, you have to be a licensee for huge sums or you don't have ability to record that format and play it on a consumer deck. That's bad, very bad, and it must be changed.
- Third, you need to have the ability to go somewhere and get 1000 CDs/DVDs pressed. Here, CDs have traditionally been strong- there are many small outfits that will burn a case of CDs for you. I think there is a concerted effort going on to make it so no such availability will be there for DVDs. If you have a hit underground rock album and enough grassroots/net distribution to justify pressing them in the thousands, you can do that today. I'm not aware of any way to legally and practically have a hit underground _film_ and press DVDs of it in the thousands, and this is a very serious problem and concern for freedom. We are not talking about pirates here, we are talking about the voice of the artist or independent filmmaker.
- Finally, you get up to extremely heavy distribution. There may be a problem in getting along with the big entertainment trusts, but if you're playing on those levels you already have your own distribution networks and can cut deals from a position of strength, by shipping X many products and saying 'There. I could move 6X as many with your distribution. You can have a cut of that, or you can sit by and I'll get someone else for it or grow until I'm doing it myself'. At this level the artist does not need that much protection as he or she has _arrived_ and is doing business effectively, with extensive distribution already.
That's basically 4 levels. Currently, with regard to CD-Roms, the levels to watch out for are second and third- if new consumer CD hardware refuses to play the existing format, it would be suicidal but would also be a way of 'taking back' control of CD authoring from the independents. More significantly, the people who can press 1000 CDs for less than a grand have to be protected- if they are harassed out of business, the independent would have to try releasing their work on blue dye-CDs pressed one at a time, and that doesn't scale. Access to the industrial duplicators _must_ remain.With regard to DVDs, it looks like the entire first three levels are at serious risk. I'm not certain you can burn the DVD format at home with your own material: THAT has got to change (rejoicing if I'm wrong here, but I kind of doubt it.). By the same token, if you can't burn it you can't give it to a friend, the datasizes are not comparable to the industry offerings, and if it's made illegal to 'pirate' defined as burn movie content onto a DVD (backing up HDs OK but video content, you're not allowed to?) then level two is shot- if you distribute your own work burned in DVD format you could get done for piracy even though it's your own work. Finally, the third level is the volume producers- if they are stamped out in the name of antipiracy it is an incredible imposition on the independent artist, because without that ability to work hard enough to earn the money to ship the commercial grade content on standard media in volume, nobody is ever going to get to stage 4, the stage of jockeying for position and making room for yourself at the table. To do that you _have_ to be able to move the units yourself and present the big distributors with a fait accompli- giving them an unsolicited tape will not cut it, you have to show them your network and the amount of units you're currently doing.
Are we going to let the industry BAN us from producing artworks as independents? (insert 'poetic license' joke here!
The _first_ order of business should be getting control of the ability to master consumer DVDs, just as we are able to master audio CDs legally and unharassed. If that means losing the encryption so be it- there are important issues at stake for the millenium. The technology _will_ come, and people _will_ be able to do desktop filmmaking. It's a question of whether the consumer media becomes a wholly controlled property of vast conglomerates, or whether individual artists will be allowed to pursue their artwork using common consumer media for output. You can burn a CD and play it for people (especially if they have a CD-Rom, but maybe even on their CD players.) What if you were only allowed to record on DATs and had to go to Atlantic Records to be allowed to have it made into a CD?
I don't recall any mention of Linux in the article on wired that was posted yesterday.
Quite frankly, I wouldn't be suprised if the "group" broke DVD for whatever reason and then just brought up Linux to deflect the argument somewhat. I hope that doesn't make me a troll.
The way you describe it, I don't see a point. They can press all the DVD's at once and then ship them to different areas at different times to correspond to your release codes, and that's once pressing.
If they have to press one set for the US and then one other set for everywhere but the US regardless of release codes, that's now 2 smaller runs (40 bit & 128 bit) vs. one larger run. The cost of warehousing the DVD's as they're waiting for the release date is negligible.
>Every monolithic organization uses the legal system of the country that they're in to bully people when their profits are threatened.
It's called *capitalism*. This system can't exist without an overwhelming apparatus of lawyers, courts, prisons, police, and so on, all of which function to protect the rich crooks from getting challenged by the little guys/gals.
How many rich people do you know who are in prison?
Yup, awfully small list isn't it?
Chuck0
Mid-Atlantic Infoshop
www.infoshop.org
What I care about is access to tools.
Give me either access to the ENCRYPTION if there must be encryption, or make the format so you can burn DVDs with unencrypted data, AND THE CONSUMER DECKS WILL PLAY THEM. I'm serious. This isn't about piracy at all. It's 'content protection', in the sense of "You can't be an artist/filmmaker unless you're big enough to be one of the X many corps which can afford one of the encryption slots. Not many of those! If you're just some schmuck making films, you are NOT ALLOWED to produce standard media. If you try we'll sue."
Does anybody see what is wrong with this picture? Who is working on making this state of affairs STOP and giving artists the right to create and distribute their artworks? This goes waaaay beyond the pale, and it really has little to do with piracy at all. It's just the same as taxes on blank media for consumers to tax independent content creators- only this time it appears that it might be possible to TOTALLY cut off every indie artist/filmmaker from the ability to reach an audience. Is this unconstitutional?
OK - they may have a patent, but since the site has been shut down due to "copyright infringement", such a patent would have nothing
to do with this
Actually, Derek wrote the following on the Livid-dev mailing list:
Still haven't got full details, but it "potentially violates the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988; Sectiond 296(1) and (2)".
They seem to be using a statute that covers both copyrights and patents so they could be claiming either, or both. This is why I used the terms in the way that I did.
Oh, please. Any computer that comes with a DVD drive is fast enough to play DVD-movies in realtime; consumers wouldn't stand for it otherwise. Most do this through hardware, which is why we need to get drivers for that hardware up and running.
Many computers anymore could actually do this in software, though it'd eat most of the CPU time. Then again, if you're watching movies it's pretty unlikely you're doing any other work.
What are you trying to do, add a DVD drive to a Pentium-200? While I suppose you could try it, the money would be better spent on a real DVD player and an upgrade for the computer.
Oh yeah; before I forget, do you have any idea how long it would take to convert a 4-gigabyte movie file to something like, say, an AVI or MPEG, which woulf come out larger still?
That's the problem with the industry. So the encryption was cracked. Big deal. DVD piracy is still impractical. One DVD-RAM disk costs more than a DVD movie. The storage space to hold just one DVD movie on a hard drive will set you back by as much as ten movies or more. A DVD drive costs more than a DVD player. And not enough people have DVD drives that you could recoup costs by selling pirated copies, which you'd never be able to sell anyway because you'd have to put them on DVD-RAM media (4-odd gigabytes is still a huge pain to download even on the most high-bandwidth connections), which are already more expensive than the movies, so to make any profit you'd have to price them higher still, and no one's stupid enough to buy that when the movie can be had legitimately for less.
In other words, you've got four cost-related factors which kill DVD piracy's practicality, at least for the moment. And by the time these are nullified, computers will be powerful enough that the encryption would have been cracked anyway, if it's really as weak as the crackers said.
You may think it's a trap, but through sheer coincindence, I genuinely did have the source, and genuinely did accidentally delete it this morning. Sigh.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Every monolithic organization uses the legal system of the country that they're in to bully people when their profits are threatened.
Look at the RIAA they made Diamond spend tons of money to fight their claim in court when the RIAA knew all along that they'd lose.
They wanted to scare other companies into not making MP3 players. Had Diamond not been as successful in the past they wouldn't have been able ot beat the RIAA in court.
Because these programmers are most likely not multi-millionaires and can't afford 60k(US) in lawyer fees the hope is for them to just disappear.
Like the guys who wrote HLE, like the guys who cracked NT SP4's "security", the DeCSS guys are going to be pounded until they are forced to disappear or by some miracle are cleared.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I don't know the laws of Norway, so what are the legal grounds for action against the authors/distributors of the DeCSS package? Perhaps someone more familiar with those laws should comment before we get in a tizzy about this..
Your Working Boy,
The above linked page is pretty sparse on info, bascially saying the ISP seems to have shut down the website "for copyright violation". This isn't exactly legal action (yet). Where's the rest of the story?
-- Alastair
In the mean time, let's start some lawsuits.
1) Sue Microsoft, Hollywood and all of the DVD manufacturers for conspiracy to restrain trade. DVD's a big app, and there are no commercial DVD players for Linux, which is the only viable competitor against Microsoft. Coincidence, or conspiracy?
2) Sue whoever got that page shut down for harassment. If the author was within his rights to reverse engineer the code and post it on the internet, threatening him legally should be considered harassment. Corporations like to harass people this way. It's time to start suing them for it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
This screams in my ears that big business is, yet again, hurting us more then helping us. Progress is the enemy of profits. It may be worth it to start a Slashdot Defense Fund, as this is one of the larger (largest?) forums of free-software users and writers.
OFTC: By the community, for the community
A brief update. Derek posted moments ago to the mailing list. Seems the ISP shut down the site because it "potentially violates the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988; Sectiond 296(1) and (2)".
.sig: Now legally binding!
Since the author himself doesn't know who had is site shutdown, I'd say it's unlikely anyone here does.
I also think that filling a corporate inbox with flames is unlikely to affect their legal department. Maybe their sysadmins would quit in frustration and they'd go under from a lack of digital infrastructure... but I doubt it.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Well, the replies on livid-dev are just starting. As of right now, not much is known. According to Derek's most recent message, it "potentially violates the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988; Sectiond 296(1) and (2)". You can keep up with the discussion if you want at http://livid.on .openprojects.net/pipermail/livid-dev/1999-Novembe r/, which is the archive for the livid-dev mailing list.
Also, to get your own copy of the code, do the following for bash (*csh people, export your variables properly with setenv instead :)
--
Jeremy Katz
The pointer to the response it hardly official. I WOULD like to see more information regarding who is claiming trademark infringement. Sounds like a slashdot email effect should be launched. Linux needs DVD, unfortionatly, it appears that the DVD guys don't think they need Linux.. :-(
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
From the posted items, it appears the infringement claims may be based on either copyright or patents or both, and that the jurisdiction may be European. As I'm also not a lawyer, the following information may be highly irrelevant, though I hope it's illuminating.
First, it's not clear that there are legal grounds to pull the plug an an entire website based on alleged but not (at least publicly) specified infringemnt. If nothing else, ISPs may face significant backlash risks for violating common carrier covenants to provide equal service to all without prejudice. My reading of the US DMCA (Millenium Copyright Act) is that protection against copyright infringment on the part of customers is offered in return for a clarification of common-carrier status, and liability limitations. This is US law and doesn't apply in the UK, but a similar legal tradition exists there.
Second, there is precedent under US law of a similar type of reverse engineering in the case of either Sega v. Accolade or Atari v. Nintendo (I don't recall which, and it may have been another, but these are the two major cases in the area, and the subject was gaming). The basic premise was that the defendant's hardware require both reverse engineering of software to allow cartridges to run on it, and a literal copying of some small portion (14 bytes?) of code was required by the security or authentication mechanism of the console, including, IIRC, an encoded trademark. These were held to have functional, not expressive, attributes, and the defendents won in both cases.
I suspect a bit of bluster here, and while I wouldn't run for shelter in the information I've provided, I might look to it for some ideas for defense.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Saw the mention about them going after Slashdot and I immediately thought, "For what reason?" but then I thought, "Hey, let's give them a reason!" We all know that Rob doesn't censor Slashdot, hopefully removing him from liability. What if someone, say an Anonymous Coward (or in this case, Hero) were to post the source code for the entire project to Slashdot? Would Rob be liable?
If it worked, you'd have a great source that potentially couldn't be attacked anymore than an anonymous post to a newsgroup.
I'm not sure I understand why they (the entertainment industry) has their shorts all in a bundle over this. Surely they new that at least some people would be knock off DVDs via a redigitalization of the analog signal? Sure, it isn't as high quality and the seconday channels are lost, but aren't they already subject to piracy galore with VCRs? And yet they make money hand over fist on VCR rentals and sales. I am fully capable of copying videos at home, and yet most of my videotapes are purchased, pre-recorded videos.
Frankly, I think piracy should be regarded as competition. If you lower your price enough, people are simply not that tempted to pirate. I think most people would buy rather than pirate depending on price.
In shrink wrap software (which I hardly ever have to buy anymore, thank you FSF and Linus et.al.!), I would buy just about any title at $20 or less. I'll even go up to about $60 for something like Quicken (where's the Linux version, Intuit? -- BTW, I've sent them letters swearing that I'll not upgrade again until they make Linux version. What could any future version do that my current one can't?)
In movies, at an average price of $20, I seem to be content enough to buy them.
I can't help but be outraged, however, at the fact that DVDs, which cost them FAR less to make than videocassettes, are consistently more expensive! I have stuck with VCRs for now because of that (well, and because I expect HDTV to be the "must" for upgrade to DVD -- why get a DVD and feed it to my 24-inch academy ratio 3-inch mono speaker TV?).
I guess I'm saying it should be a linear programming problem to compute the price at which they get the most money rating rate of sale against rate of piracy. I don't care how much technology they throw at it. If it can be viewed, it can be copied somehow, even if it's sampling the voltages at the CRT! Give it up. Keep it open and make it cheap. People will pay then.
I agree. I'd be willing to donate US$20 (approx the price of a DVD ;) to help out.
While I don't presently use linux, it can't hurt to have more than one DVD program floating around - the one that came with my computer isn't particularly impressive IMHO.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
This report puts it in a different light:
... MoRE also publicly released the trade secret CSS algorithm, which allowed the Linux programmers to discover the weaknesses that made the keys unnecessary. ... Once the MoRE programmers released the decryption keys and source code for the CSS decoder, the Linux programmers felt it was safe to speak up about their own work.
> The DVD-on-Linux movement appears to have caught the attention of a Norwegian group calling itself Masters of Reverse Engineering (MoRE), who then reverse-engineered a software DVD player from Xing Technologies and discovered an unencrypted key that could be used to unlock DVD movies.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I'm confused by something in regards to DVD decryption. How does ANY software do DVD decryption? Do they ALL need to request to have a key? How are 'new' keys added? As they are all burnt on the disk itself, it doesn;t seem like it would be 'easy' to simply add more keys to the stack. Isn;t this a long term problem, as more companies want to USE DVD?
Are they basically locking in a limited number of companies from producing decoder boards, based on the FINITE number of keys available, even if ther already is 'space' keys for such a purpose such as future expantion?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
> Like the guys who wrote HLE, like the guys who cracked NT SP4's "security", the DeCSS guys are going to be pounded until they are forced to disappear or by some miracle are cleared.
And the irony is, the movie industry will end up suppressing access by the honest people who would have ended up buying DVDs to play under alternative OSes. But the crooks who want to make massive bootleg issues undoubtedly already have the code, and won't have it posted on a web site where it's easily spotted and stamped on. The pirates will thrive, but sales won't be increased.
They would have been better off not using encryption in the first place.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's your own damned fault. Treat customers like cattle, and they're going to respond like this. Treat us with a little respect, release some linux sources (or a binary) for a DVD player, and we'd all be much, much happier. Oh, well. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
We need make our displeasure known using peaceful and legal means. I can't over-emphasize that. Beyond that we need to work out a strategy, and get the Linux businesses involved in supporting legal defense. Sit down now, think about what you can do, and do it today. Tell reporters. Call your congressman. Picket a video store if you can't think of anything else!
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I'm pretty sure that's a UK law (I don't know where Derek is located) so if you're searching for more information, check the .uk sites first.
:)
I'm sorry to let you down, AC, but Tet is a real /. user with a history.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, programmer, or even a smart guy.
... I have to imagine it's not a free standard. Most likely, the DVD Forum (previously the DVD consortium) has a patent or copyright on the way that DVD's utilize this system.
Now, it's my understanding that to read DVD's, you must utilize their encryption/decryption key system. Now, not knowing which system they use
It could be that the only way a Linux DVD player could exist would be to write code that works with this patented system. You can either license it, or steal it. This may lead the Forum to believe that there is only one way to write code to work with their system, so it MUST be a copyright violation.
God forbid another programmer can do the same thing you paid millions for without using your code. *shrug*
Anyway, I'm sure they have enough to completely ruin the lives of anyone that doesn't follow their rules or license their technology.
I've been a long time DVD supporter and my continued support will be directly effected by how the DVD Forum handles this situation.
The first one is about the legality of reverse engineering. I was surprised to not seeing any comment about it in /. Lets not be mistaken, this is completely different of getting reference code (such as in the MP3 case). In some countries reverse engineering is explicitly prohibited. Many manufacturers put clauses of usage in their licenses stating that the owner of the device is not allowed to reverse engineer it. I dont know the situation in Sweden, or any specific country for that matter.
There is one thing that is not as discussed as it should, and is the legal defense funds for the OSS developers. Legal advice can be quite expensive. I remember all the fuss over MIDI sequencers months ago. Their work is legal - everyone is entitled to write their own interpretation of someone else's music - but it takes a lot of lawyers to prove it. The industry has enough money to pay the best lawyers, and they to their job very well. Its very easy to take out a web page - just a call from the lawyer frightens the ISP. OSS advocates should take steps to have the same weapons on their side.
Also I read about someone else complaining that the protection was very weak, and it was easy to break. Fine - if your front door is unlocked it does not make legal to steal your home. This is not a legal defense. However, what could we do to stop it? Maybe the OSS community can come up with a strong mechanism to replace the current one. I'm sure it can be done. There is no point in keeping the algorithm secret - it can be always reverse engineered. The design of a really strong protection mechanism could be done by an OSS team, and it could be offered to the standards body. It could be the best 'proof of goodwill'.
This leads us to another point - the reason to do it. It's a tool to watch DVD movies in a Linux box, or it's a tool to generate copies of DVDs? The Internet community (and some /. readers) must bear in mind that this protection is fundamental for the entertainment industry. We would have no Star Wars Trilogy without it :-) As someone else said, in this case it's better to have protected content than to have NO content.
There is also a lot of smaller issues that aren't clear at all. Patents, rights of distribution, and so on. All of this must be cleared. It will be much better for the Internet community to solve this in the legal arena, so we can keep doing what we do best.
I don't like the fact that ISP's are so trigger-happy at shutting a site down at the command of the first person that sends a threatening mail, be it on behalf of a company or not, without checking if the alleged accusations are true. When they are in doubt, they just shut a site down.
Why do i find this irritating? It removes the possibility for the site-owner to say: "okay, you think i'm violating the law? sue me."
The way ISP's behave now bully's will always achieve their goal because the people who are willing to stand up for their rights are taken away the opportunity to do so. Even if the content of a certain site was violating a law, the offended party should take it up with the owner of the site, and not the ISP who is merely responsable for the network connection.
Actually, two I suppose.
1) Everyone, get a copy of the source. If you can legally serve it up (meaning no patent issues on the encryption) do it. Basically, spread the information so far and wide that it's useless to go after anyone, because it would take more money than even the entertainment inductry has.
2) Figure out how to start a good legal defense fund. DVD on Linux would be a Good Thing.
This said, I do have a few issues with the people who cracked the decryption. Making it possible to save the unencrypted movie on a hard disk was unnecessary and uncalled for. It's possible to rite a player without that capability, and that's what they should have done, at least at first. Were they trying to get into trouble by writing that capability into their software right off the bat?
And yes, I know it's Open-Source, so someone else could easily have written software to copy the DVD movie. But the people who cracked the decryption shouldn't have been the ones to do that, if only as a gesture of goodwill towards the industry. The capability would always be there for someone who wants to do it, and the original hackers come out of it looking at least tolerable to the indistry.
Both sides are in the wrong this time, albeit in different ways. But I'm sticking by the hackers, who are wrong only by virtue of a rather shortsighted design mistake, rather than the industry which, which is wrong due to undue technophobia, a healthy dose of greed, and the inability to see that copying DVD's to another DVD is pointless since a single DVD-RAM disk costs more than most DVD movies. It's cheaper just to buy it legitimately, so piracy is pretty much pointless.
Except, I suppose, for potentially wrecking the idiotic "tiered-release" schedule the entertainment industry uses. But that's no big loss.
But i don't remember how Linux is getting dragged into this argument. I don't recall hearing the the hackers were breaking the DVD's codes simply to be able to watch DVD's in Linux. They were doing it in order to show the futility of DVD's copy-protection scheme.
All of you that are dragging Linux into this are really doing something bad for Linux. You need to be careful, lest if become regarded as the "renegade" OS... "Linux users don't respect intellectual property, look what they did to DVD." I'm not saying that, but it could be said in a boardroom somewhere.
I really don't think that the movie industry singled out Linux when thinking of copy-protection schemes... They were just more concerned with Windows users, because, face it, that's where the primary market is. Most industry publications have Linux relegated to the server closet, and just recently has it's head started to pop out. It would have happened had more and more people started using Linux on the client side.
But that's a separate argument. The fact remains (in me view) that Linux was not involved, it was simply people demonstrating that after all their hard work, the copyprotection scheme used by the movie people was flawed.
We need make our displeasure known using peaceful and legal means
To make our displeasure known is not enough. We need to know and remember who did what. We need, basically, a database that knows that on such-and-such date such-and-such firm threatened/sued/shut down a programmer/group/site because of this-and-that. In this way people in position to pressure the offending organization will know if it needs pressuring (and, for example, has a history of hostility towards, say, MP3s).
Of course, there will have to be a significant threshold to cross before some action gets into such database. We don't want script kiddie complaints that their ISP shut them off for trying random 'spoits to end up in there.
And yes, I understand that it is likely to end up being known as "The Slashdot Black List".
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
In terms of what the ISP can do with the site,
the terms and conditions of use say that they
are allowed to disable it if they feel like it.
But see below.
I've just had been supplied with information on
the relavent bit of the Act, and it's seems to
be about circumventing copy protection mechamisms.
I'm supprised we have such lunacy in our Law.
Thus that page may well fall foul of English Law.
So don't bother the ISP, they are taking a
reasonable course of action.
I guess I basically need to visit a Solicitor
on Monday.
Derek Fawcus
Address the issue - not pass laws to try to make it disappear. I just had a lengthy discussion with somebody this afternoon about what "legal" means. Legal doesn't mean anything. You need to address the issue - ie: why did I kill you? instead of passing a law saying it's wrong. The latter will not stop me. Education will. Which one is the cheap solution, and which one is the best solution? I'll let you be the judge
Besides... the movie industry knew how important it was to make this format secure, and they blew it. If I entrusted billions of dollars into something on the premise that somebody wouldn't do it because it's illegal... that ought to be a shooting offense.
--
I can probably count to 999 quadrillion (I'm not sure if the next set is quintillions?, if so, i can get that far too) but I think people have a right to patent algorythms. It's intellectual property. It lets a company reap the benefits of spending all that money on R&D.
Is the issue at hand the fact that the industry created their own 40-bit crypto algorthym and someone reverse engineered it, or is it that they're upset that someone released a program that essentially allows the duplication of their CD.
Reverse engineering in order to create a playback mechanism in Linux is one thing, and they probably wouldn't even mind that. Piracy/copyright violations are not.
It's THEIR movie. They own it. They paid the actors to make it. They risked millions of dollars in marketing. They deserve the rewards it brings.
It would have cost us, the consumer, more money if they had decided to release 128 bit encrypted titles in the US and 40-bit encrypted titles to the rest of the world. That's two smaller runs rather htan one larger run. Sure you can yell about the export laws but they're a different subject.
If you don't agree with the law, don't be and ass and break it just because you can. Write your congressman. How many outraged slashdotters do that? Or do you just preach to the quire here? I stand in favor of patents, I just think that the system needs to be revised in the computer age. Just shortening their lives would be a good thing.
moviebone has a good take on this whole thing. Read the article here:
http://www.moviebone.com/arti cles/1999/11/crypto.html
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.