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DVD Situation Takes New Turn
Several readers wrote in to let us know that the maintainer of css-auth has announced the
end of his involvement with CSS, while the DeCSS
person has removed the source from his website. The source has been removed at the behest of lawyers representing "the film industry".
Yes, have him remove the source from his webpage, this will fix everything. After all, it's well known that source code can't simply be downloaded like other files, and can't be copied endlessly throughout the net, or else we'd be in REAL trouble...oh wait, it can.
Anyways, I don't see the trouble, DVD will come to linux/freebsd/beos/whatever else in time as it becomes increasingly popular...though it still kinda pisses me off that those trying to help get crucified by the lawyers (so to speak) over it.
Derek was told that he was in violation of the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988, Sections 296(1) and (2). These sections read:
(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.]
Clearly, the DVD consortium would try to demonstrate breach of copyright under clause 2(b) as Derek has published information intended to enable or assist persons to circumvent that form of copy-protection. The fact that we are NOT using this information to actually copy DVDs is IRRELEVENT, simply publishing the information is, under this statute, equivalent to infringement of copyright.
In my opinion Derek would be found liable by the court as this statute stands. Derek is a scapegoat - the DVD consortium have not gone after others who have worked on cracking CSS because they reside in coutries that do not have such a law on the books. Unfortunately, the UK parliament passed this law (no doubt after considerable lobbying by industry groups) and Derek is a UK resident so they went after him.
EVEN if the DVD Consortium was on shaky legal grounds, the cost in time and money of fighting a copyright infringement case is astronomical and I think most people in Derek's position would have done the same thing.
There is no point in arguing over whether reverse engineering is legal, whether this is a breach of free speech; as the statute stands, publishing details on how to circumvent copyright prevention is itself an infringement of copyright, pure and simple.
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
http://www.rhythm.cx/dvd
There is a list of other mirrors there as well. Well there will be as soon as people start mirroring it :).
Thanks.You have chosen to make that difficult, if not impossible. As a result, you will find me purchasing no further DVDs, at all, forever, until such a time as I am able to view them using the platform of my choice in an open and free manner. If you were to check my financial records over the last several years, you would find I have spent thousands of dollars on Laser Disks. Future thousands for DVD releases could also have been yours.
Not anymore.
Not only will I not be purchasing any further DVDs until I can view them under Linux, I won't be purchasing any further movies of any kind, on any medium, from you folks. I am going to rediscover the library as a form of entertainment, and do my best to insure that no further dollars pass from my wallet to yours, either at the video store, video rental store, cable box, or even at the theater.
It is my hope that others will feel, and do, likewise.
In the meantime, perhaps you should reflect upon your own strategies, and consider the following carefully.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
It appears many people on /. are advocating the wrong approach to dealing with this, namely spreading the code far and wide. This is doomed to fail, because we're being driven underground, and prevented from engaging in perfectly legal activity...the reverse engineering of CSS for the purposes of compatibility. Spreading the code around in the absence of someone willing to take responsibility for maintaining it is not going to help in producing a Linux/OpenSource DVD player. Running underground is acting like the pirates they want to paint us as.
I can understand Jon and Derek's position. When the laywer hounds of hell are after you and you're in the hotseat, it's perfectly natural to turn and run. Is there a larger organization (with deeper pockets and/or staff lawyers) that'd be willing to take a stand with Jon and/or Derek to fight for their rights? Perhaps we could get the FSF or the EFF interested. Probably the EFF more so than the FSF, but still do we wish to give up our rights simply because we're unwilling to fight for them?
EVEN if the DVD Consortium was on shaky legal grounds, the cost in time and money of fighting a copyright infringement case is astronomical and I think most people in Derek's position would have done the same thing.
I agree - and I think that this also points to how we get around this .... bend, don't break .... there are lot more of us than them (the lawyers) what should happen now is that someone else should pick up the torch, move the sources under CVS elsewhere and continue work on linux DVD .... don't make a big deal about it .... but also realise that eventually the lawyers will come after you, when they do you raise a stick, then bow out gracefully and pass the torch ...
1) Why are both of these groupd getting picked on, it seems to me only one was trying to pirate content.
:-)
2) What does DeCSS have to do with users who just want to play their disks in their computers? Does making a player cause CSS to be defeated?
You can't play an encrypted disk without decrypting it. It's just that simple.
A DVD player (software) works a bit like this:
Pass decryption code to DVD drive
DVD Drive accepts it, starts streaming out decrypted MPEG data.
Player decodes said data, displays it.
A DVD Pirate works a bit like this:
Pass decryption code to DVD Drive
DVD Drive accepts it, starts streaming out decrypted MPEG data.
Pirate takes data, writes it to hard drive.
So you see that the process is really the same, it just depends on where you want to put the final data. (This is a bit simplified from reality..)
3) I'm all for free information here, but there seems to be a lot of people whining about some guys who knew damn well their work would be used to rip off content.
The downside is that you couldn't do this much any other way. The DVD consortium isn't giving out any more decryption codes, therefore nobody else gets to write a DVD player without paying through the nose for it. Naturally, those free spirits out there think this is BS, so they just worked around it.
The gist of the whole thing: They wanted to protect DVD security through secrecy. That's always a bad move. The DVD encryption was broken, plain and simple.
Not expecting anyone to steal the horse when the lock on the barn was all rusted is just stupid.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
source binary Mind moderating this up one or two so it shows in thread lists for people with higher thresholds :)
This is in reply to the first 5 people who've posted...
:)
The movie industry isn't forcing you to buy or use windows. You can purchase a DVD player for your TV and bypass the whole computer thing. It is a convienence that player-back software exists. It's made it to the Mac and Wintel so far, and will probably not come to Linux anytime soon.
For one, there's a huge installed base of both machines and OS's.
For two, there's no way of gauging the Linux installed base. Yeah, there have been so many downloads and so many purchases, but how many people use it on a daily basis, compared to the other two groups?
For three, all the mainstream press talks about Linux's use in the server arena. Servers don't need to play DVD movies. So, why would the movie industry want to create a player for a server?
Also for three, there players available for Solaris, *BSD, Openserver, Unixware, Netware, BeOS, Irix, AIX, or HP-UX? I'm guessing not. And for them to create a *nix port solely to serve this market would be a huge waste of resources given the potential returns.
(Still stuck on 3...) Rather than just running ahead and writing that program, was this brought up in a more political sense, such as letter-writing, email, phone calls, etc? I doubt it was, to any extent, maybe one or two here or there. Maybe some programmers could have done the movie-watching community a favor by signing a NDA, and created binaries for the said platforms, with the industries okay. Was that tried?
Four, you can do whatever you want with the disc itself. Burn it. Use it as a frisbee. microwave it. It's the IP on the disk (the movie) that you need to show some restraint about...
Now for five. DVD playback probably will take longer to make it to Linux than it would have before. Why? Because of this. More and more, I notice around here (not singling anyone out, so don't get down on me too hard) a mentality of "I don't want to pay for something if I can get the same thign for free" or "Who cares about intellectual property".
Those attitudes are not condusive to getting the industries okay on releasing spec's (and liablility for implementing a playback mechanism) for DVD. They can easily view those two statements as saying, "I'd rather watch a free pirated movie than acually buying the DVD, especially if they're the same exact movie... I'll even copy it for all my friends, too."
You really have to watch yourself when stepping around the giants of any industry... you may not realize that you've stepped on their toes until it's much too late.
All done for now.
Bear with me a second:
CSS does nothing to prevent the outright copy of a disc. The keys survive copying procedures just fine.
CSS does, however, prevent interoperability with non-approved hardware.
Since reverse engineering for purposes of interoperability is a common and legal practice, and since interoperability could not be achieved outside of a procedure that rendered the colluding cartel's enforcement mechanisms ineffective, the breaking of the CSS encryption scheme is not necessarily a violation of copy protection law.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I believe that the prohibition on circumventing copy protection will eventually be found unconstitutional.
However, there appears to be a lot of confusion as to what legal ground we are standing on, and I'd like to start a discussion to shake that out. What legal principles make the creation, distribution, and use of DVD decryption programs legal, and under what circumstances.
Some ideas from a non-lawyer (meself):
First off, programs such as DeCSS and livid cannot be created or distributed for the purpose of unauthorized duplication of copyrighted works. Regardless of what you think about copyright law, and freedom, no court is ever going to sign off on the use of DVD decryption programs for this purpose; it's a counterproductive and losing argument.
However, there are certain legal uses of copyrighted material which become impossible without the utilization of DVD decryption programs.
Let's try this:
DVD decryption and viewing programs are created and distributed to facilitate legal, fair use of copyrighted material, and for the private, legal display of copyrighted material.
FAIR USE:
Section 107 of the United States Copyright Code specifically recognizes the right to extract sections of copyrighted materials for such purposes as criticism, comment, and news reporting.
DVD decryption programs are, by definition, the only method available to the public of accessing a true, accurate, undegraded copy of copyrighted material distributed in the DVD format, for the purposes of legal manipulation of this material for protected free speech activity, including fair use.
In addition, Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright code permits libraries and archives to reproduce copyrighted works in their entirety, for certain purposes. DVD decryption programs are the only method of making a true and accurate copy of such material for this legal purpose.
These rights are recognized in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which contains the following language, with regards to the unauthorized circumvention of copy protection:
OTHER RIGHTS, ETC., NOT AFFECTED: Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
Nothing in this section shall enlarge or diminish any rights of free speech or the press for activities using consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing products.
Therefore, the creation, distribution, and use of DVD decryption software for these legal purposes should, in theory, still be legal.
PRIVATE DISPLAY:
The legal owner of a physical copy of a copyrighted work has the right to view their copy.
DVD decryption programs are distributed for the purpose of legal, private viewing of DVD programming.
COMPUTER SOFTWARE:
Section 117 of copyright law:
... it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine, and that it used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that such archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
The contents of a DVD disk consist entirely of computer instructions and data, and therefore should be considered as a computer program for this purpose.
In short, the acquisition and use of a DVD decryption tool is the sole existing method for persons to exercise their rights under copyright law to make a legal backup copy of their DVD software, and to exercise their right to use it in certain computer environments.
Comments?