deCSS Listed On Download.com

Abscissa writes "I just discovered that Download.com has listed the hottest illegal utility for "bypassing" DVD copy protection. It won't be long before they get contacted by the motion picture association!" And deCSS is also mirrored on many other, lower-profile Web sites. There's simply no way it can be stopped.

Comments

Ha! Stick it to the man.

[Daffy Duck]

I'm sure lots of people who don't even have DVD-ROM drives are downloading this thing just to keep it in the Net's collective memory.

Shades of Fahrenheit 451 :)

Remember CD music?

[SEWilco]

Remember when CDs and DAT came out? The Music Industry tried to restrict copying by legislation. Now we're using $200 CD writers for portable data, and Panasonic is running commercials for their CD copiers. And the Music Industry still sells a lot of CDs.

Not really hosting it

[vectro]

It seems that download.com is not really hosting it themselves, but in fact linking to a site in Denmark. It also seems that said site has taken down this software.

Oh no...

[Nichen]

no more movies are going to be made, since everyone is going to download this app and become a hardcore pirate, thereby breaking the motion picture industry. Woe is us. I myself have already put out of business a couple of studios by making illegal copies of my massive DVD collection. The MPAA needs to hurry up and sue download.com, cnet and affiliate sites, and everyone that visits them to protect the fragile movie industry.

Sheesh. I can only imagine the witchhunts that will follow once this lil' app gets around now.

Off topic, but I wonder if napster can be configured to transfer *.vob's now? ;)

perhaps not _illegal_

[adraken]

this utility is probably not illegal in many countries, but cnet.com is definetely posed with civil legal action by the MPAA or some other lawyers. (even more so, now that it's been posted on hackernews and slashdot) it's obvious that DeCSS, the Livid stuff, and articles explaining how it was done will live forever. the question is: will the MPAA give up and just forget about it? or will the MPAA go on a 30 year hunt to try to discourage all DVD pirating and ultimately destroy itself and the format well before a more viable solution comes along? or will they come up with a different format and screw everyone over?

Don't call it Illegal.

[maroberts]

I do wish people would be more careful with the posting on Slashdot. Calling DeCSS an 'illegal' utility immediately gets motion picture lawyers backs up and will possibly have a negative impact on when/if you can happily view DVDs in Linux. This slashdot article is almost as bad as the initial Wired article that seemed to started the problems with Linux DVD development in the first place.

AFAIK, DeCSS is *not* an illegal tool - the development of DeCSS was perfectly legal in the country in which it was developed and it would have been legal to develop it in the US and most other countries [possibly till the Digital Millenium Copyright act comes into force]

DeCSS, at least in its Linux form, is not intended as an aid to making illegal copies, hopefully it is just a means of assisting you in viewing DVDs under Linux.

Even the use of DeCSS in the UK, where there are specific provisions that appear to block it, is in doubt - there are a number of hurdles that someone taking the case to court would need to overcome.

P.S. IANAL, if you are please feel free to correct any mishtakes....

Copy protection.

[Rob the Roadie]

Since copy protection was invented, there have been ways around it.

With DAT there was some sort of digital signature (i forget the TLA) that was written to the tape that ment that the tape had to copied by the machine that produced the master. A box of tricks costing £100 (ish) got rid of that and you could freely copy DATs.

The duplication of CD's used to be protected by the high cost of CD writters but we just copied them to tape and all was fine. CD writters now cost around £180 and everyone is freely coping CD's (either audio or MP3) and distributing copywritted material.

The MP3 audio format was one of the final nails in the coffin. Fast, high quality and small audio files distributed freely are rapidly killing off sales of CD's. Well, so we are lead to believe by the music industry.

All this little application does is break the current encryption/protection method used. I'm sure that within a few months a new format will come out and all the DVD hardware/software/content vendors will adopt it and proclaim it to be secure. A few months later someone will break it and announce who easy it was and how stupid the industry is for using such a weak encryption/protection method. Repeat the cycle. Do until end.

Re:Copy protection.

[Baz Quux]

"With DAT there was some sort of digital signature (i forget the TLA) that was written to the tape that ment that the tape had to copied by the machine that produced the master. A box of tricks costing £100 (ish) got rid of
that and you could freely copy DATs."

Ahh, that would be SCMS -- Serial Copying Management System. *ptooey* This depended on the hardware to check for a couple of flags on the recording - the L bit (0 for original recordings, and 1 for a first-generation copy) and the copyright bit - to determine whether to allow or disallow copying. Not really encryption, just a control check, and only consumer-level DAT machines bothered obeying. Pro DAT players typically ignore it, or can easily be set to ignore it, and nowadays, pro DAT decks are about the only ones in use. Any wonder why? (Well, there were plenty of other reasons consumer DAT sucked, but that's getting off topic.)

The MP3 audio format was one of the final nails in the coffin. Fast, high quality and small audio files distributed freely are rapidly killing off sales of CD's. Well, so we are lead to believe by the music industry.

Yep. They're damned fools for not seeing the forest through the trees. Capitalism isn't about saying "No, you can't have that (i.e. no decrypting DVD's, no distributing mp3's)". It's about saying "Yes, you can have that, and only for the low low price of $X." Those who oppose secondhand and thirdhand distribution of digital media are missing out, and wasting a lot of time, effort, and money in trying to stifle technology.

Before long, we're going to have unencrypted, high-fidelity digital compression formats for any video or audio you want, and more importantly, the bandwidth to handle it. There is no stopping this. There is only the choice to embrace it and look for ways to make a buck from it, or continue dragging one's knuckes trying to stop it.

--

Re:DeCSS source (Linux version)

[maroberts]

...can be downloaded from the CVS server [instructions on the web site] at: http://livid.on.openprojects.net

Re:Looks like a job for ... REDHAT

[DragoonAK]

I'm going to have to disagree on both counts. First off, RedHat doesn't have that much money. They may have a sky-high market valuation, but it's not like they have that much cash, or can even turn it into anywhere near that much cash. Furthermore, why should they? If RedHat really wanted to make DVDs work under Linux at any cost, they'd go to the DVD companies, *co-operate* and give incentives, not start a fight they'd probably lose no matter how many lawyers they had. Going into bankruptcy is not a good use of money. RedHat's small compared to the media conglomerates - same deal with the fight against the DMA. If RedHat can spend X million dollars against, just imagine how many millions they can use.

Don't expect companies to perform civil disobedience or be the revolution - that's what individuals are for.

Mirrors ... I'm sure there are many more...

[Avoiderman]

http://home.worldonline.dk/~andersa/download/DeCSS .zip
http://douglas.min.net/~drw/css-auth/
http://www.devzero.org/freecss.html
http://home.t-online.de/home/skinner01/decss.zip
http://www.chello.nl/~f.vanwaveren/css-auth/css- auth.tar.gz
http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Campus /8877/index.html
http://www.angelfire.com/mt/popefelix/
http://www.vexed.net/CSS
http://members.brabant.chello.nl/~j.vreeken/
http://gullii.stu.rpi.edu/dvd/files/DeCSS.zip and http://gullii.stu.rpi.edu/dvd/files/css-auth.tar.g z
http://www.dvd.eavy.de/css-auth.tar.gz
http://www.eavy.net/stuff/dvd/css-auth.tar.gz and http://www.eavy.net/stuff/dvd/DeCSS.zip
http://www.dynamsol.com/satanix/DeCSS.zip and http://www.dynamsol.com/satanix/css-auth.tar.gz
http://www.dvd.eavy.de/DeCSS.zip
http://frozenlinux.com/civ/decss/
http://www.humpin.org/decss/
http://www.unitycode.org/
http://dirtass.beyatch.net/decss.zip
http://members.tripod.lycos.nl/jvz/
http://www.free-dvd.org.lu/
http://www.angelfire.com/in2/mirror/
http://mclaughlin.orange.ca.us/~andrew/
http://batman.jytol.fi/~vuori/dvd/
http://www.zpok.demon.co.uk/deCSS/CSS.html
http://plato.nebulanet.net:88/css/
ftp://alma.dhs.org/pub/DVD/
http://www.d.umn.edu/~dchan/css/
http://www.logorrhea.com/main.html
http://people.delphi.com/salfter/LiVid.tar.gz
http://www.theresistance.net/files.html
ftp://193.219.56.32/pub/dvd/LiVid.CVS-11.06.tar. gz and ftp://193.219.56.32/pub/dvd/LiVid.CVS-11.06.css-st uff-only.tar.gz
http://merlin.keble.ox.ac.uk/~adrian/css/index.h tml
http://www.dvd-copy.com/
http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/dvd/css/css-auth.tar.g z and http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/dvd/css/DeCSS.zip
http://www.sent.freeserve.co.uk/css-auth.tar.gz and http://www.sent.freeserve.co.uk/DeCSS.zip
ftp://ftp.firehead.org/pub/ (very slow - 33.6 line)
http://members.tripod.co.uk/bap/css/css.html
http://www.tasam.com/~fenkt/dvd/
ftp://eris.giga.or.at/pub/hacker/crypt/DVD/
http://therapy.endorphin.org/DVD/
http://www.discordia.de/decss/DeCSS.zip and http://www.discordia.de/decss/css-auth_tar.gz and http://www.discordia.de/decss/LiVid.tgz

Actually...

[Wakko Warner]

...not all DAT decks have SCMS. My Sony M1 ignores it; I can (in theory) copy DATs to my heart's content without it complaining, or I could, if I had another DAT deck. Most "professional-grade" DAT players ignore SCMS outright or have a means of defeating it, whereas most "consumer" DAT decks willfully obey SCMS. (The lesson to be learned here should be obvious.) - A.P.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

Missing the real lesson here...

[MobyDisk]

With all the sites coming under fire, and the MPAA on a witch hunt, we seem to have forgotten the real cause of this problem.

• The US Government's arrogance in limiting the keys to 40 bits. MPAA and DVD manufacturers should be in an outcry over this stupidity.
• Xing for letting go of an unencrypted key, and violating the security standards of the CSS protocol. Where are they owning up to this?

Route around the problem: Usenet

[Morgaine]

The artificial barrier erected by studio-led organizations against access to DVD by the free operating systems is not dissimilar to a fault in the (information) network.

Well, the Internet is good at dealing with network faults, ie. with the classic response of routing around the problem. In this case the problem is that lawyers and other luddites can prosecute website owners. No big deal: just post the sources repeatedly and automatically to appropriate Usenet newsgroups, and automatic news archiving worldwide will ensure that anyone that needs the code will be able to find it without presenting a target for slobbering lawyers.

[And no, I do not accept that lawyers can get away with "just doing their job" without accepting responsibility for their luddism, just like I do not accept that it is moral for scientists to place tools of destruction in the hands of brainless politicians. If the legal profession wants to be well regarded, it needs to stop washing the blood of its actions off its hands.]

Seems to me the DVD consortium should be illegal

[slim]

It seems to me the whole idea of DVD was to create a monopoly. As I understand it, the idea of the DVD protection was not to prevent copying, but to restrict playback on players who have not paid money to the DVD consortium.

I don't know whether there are any laws forbidding this kind of practice; I'm just saying it's wrong.

Look at it this way -- *some* form of digital medium for the sneakernet distribution of video will become the single de facto standard, and it's likely that DVD will be the one.

With the DVD consortium in control of the keys necessary to create disks and read them, a small number of companies effectively become in control of that significant chunk of media. Free speech? Dead. Indie movies? Dead.

Bah.
--

Electronic Age - Products Tend Towards Free

[Sorklin]

I read an excellent article in Wired Magazine that partially explains what is happening here. As we enter the electronic age (sheesh what a hokey statement) leaving the industrial age behind, we have a new set of rules that naturally start to govern this new economy. My favorite new 'rule' is Follow the Free which assigns the most value to those things that are given away. Such is one of the principals in which the Open Source community operates (consciously or unconsciously).

But we still have many businesses (including the motion picture industry) which are still operating under the old industrial age rules. Those rules favor protecting property to preserve scarcity to help assign higher product value. That we can copy movies with no real overhead, threatens the scarcity, which in turns lowers the assigned value of the product. They see the need to try to protect their property, so that they can continue to retain value assigned to it. A great example of the extreme of this mindset was Disney (until recently) which not only protected their IP, but actually would take products off the market for extended periods of time to drive up the 'value' (by making the product more scarce).

The Electronic world compensates. Its just the beginning of the new economy, and what we are seeing is that the wired folks are starting to act in a new way. Notice the increase of attention regarding issues of intellectual property and privacy. Both of these issues have to transition to a new set of rules in this new economy and we have a conflict of the old-economy businesses and the new-economy public. Expect to see more of this for the next few years.

The popularity of DeCSS (in our community) and the proliferations of MP3s are just two examples of the new rules in action. DeCSS is a correction to the old rules, and MP3 is the principals of the new economy in action. Not that most people have any idea that this is going on. Like rules of any economy, they 'just make sense.' We like MP3s cause it just makes sense to distribute and collect music this way.

Of course, I could be just blowing smoke.

Re:Seems to me the DVD consortium should be illega

[FreeUser]

No, you are wrong.

The idea was to prevent the wholesale copying of DVDs like the CD problem they have in Asia.

No, you are wrong.

Wholesale pirates have access to commercial grade DVD copying and pressing equipment, which as another poster noted is not affected by CSS at all.

Furthermore, wholesale DVD pirates have the option of recording from the analog output, redigitizing the result with only a small loss in quality, and pressing as many unencrypted DVDs as they wish. Minimal effort, minimal cost. Given the kinds of pirated movies that have been sold in the past (taken with a video camera in front of a screen for crying out loud!), quality is not a very important issue to pirates.

CSS is designed to restrict playback and limit fair use as provided for under the law, including but not limited to making backup copies or moving the data to a more convenient medium.

The MPAA has plenty of legal recourse, and muscle, to go after wholesale pirates. CSS is an effort to make an end-run around laws permitting individuals fair use, something the MPAA and movie studios can't stand, but have absolutely no LEGAL method of stopping (except by encryption and excersizing the draconian new rights they have been granted in the US through the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which was snuck through on a voice vote during the height of the Clinton/Monica sex scandal.)

As I noted in another post, I will not be giving any money, directly or indirectly, to Hollywood until such a time as DVD is supported under Linux and their witch hunts stop. Yes, this means I'm making allot of use of the public library, local book stores, and local theaters and comedy clubs. Now that I'm hooked on the latter, I will probably be much less inclined to watch movies again even after the MPAA cleans up their act (should that optomistic expectation actually ever happen), as plays and comedy acts have actually turned out to be much more entertaining than any movie I've seen in the last several years. But that's another story altogether ...