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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.
Where do we send legal defense contributions? Do not let these coders suffer for their efforts!
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
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.
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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!
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
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 :)
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Jeremy Katz
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.
The record and video industry has been crying about this for years, but I think it's still a red-herring. Their real purpose is to make it difficult for you to be in the business unless you go through one of the established studios. They don't want artists to be able to do their own distribution, electronicaly, and keep all of the profits.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.