The NW Airlines incident had nothing to do with who owned the computers. Some of those searched were personally owned by the employees and were searched after the company obtained a court order to do so. They didn't just send "thugs" as you so colorfully put it.
Still, you raise an important question. Who owns the data on the hard drives of the computers Ford is giving to its employees? Is Ford reserving the right to examine that data at any time just as they would any computer located on company premises? Do they claim copyright on all original material stored on those machines?
I don't think it's fair to bust this particular gift horse in the mouth until we know those answers.
UCITA may very well be a "bad thing", but please do us all a favor and don't argue that it's bad because it might prevent someone from cheating on shareware. If all it did was enforce payment for shareware, there wouldn't be a problem. That's what freeware is for.
I'm aware of that, but I honestly don't think physical copying of the discs themselves is what the MPAA is worried about. It's the content. DeCSS can decrypt and copy the content of the disc to your hard drive. Arguments about the current costs of storage and bandwidth (for "sharing" the movies over the net) aren't very convincing either. What about years from now? Sure, we'll be watching hi-def DVDs or something, but all of the movies currently on DVD will be available for copying. The quality is good and every copy, no matter how many are made, is perfect. When the storage and bandwidth are available to "share" these movies over the internet, they will be.
There's no need to ignore this aspect of DeCSS. The fact that it has a legitimate, non-infringing use should be good enough. If everything that had a criminal use were illegal, just about everything would be off-limits.
[preventing illegal copying] is not what CSS does...
I'm reading that a lot here on Slashdot, but are you sure? Read this section from the DVD FAQ at dvddemystified.com. It says that the DVD-ROM drive's firmware reads the key block on the disc and exchanges authentication codes with the CSS module of the DVD player software. If this is the case, then why would the firmware allow the key block to be copied? If it can't be copied, how do you create a bit-for-bit copy of a disc short of hacking the firmware on the drive -or- *gasp* cracking CSS?
I'm not saying DeCSS is for piracy. I do believe it's for viewing DVDs on Linux, but that's what it is intended to do. Let's not ignore what it can do. The MPAA's legal team sure won't.
While I agree with all of these points, it's only fair to also mention that the MPAA has a legitimate reason to be afraid of DeCSS being used to "rip" DVDs to disk, especially since many of the places it was mirrored were advertising just that capability. While this may not represent a great threat right now due to bandwidth and storage limitations, how far down the road do we have to look before the average netizen does have that capacity?
That said, I'm really just mentioning this as devil's advocate. It's the sort of reasoning the MPAA will use to argue that DeCSS was made to copy DVDs. I don't think the best way to combat that is to say that there are other ways to pirate DVDs or to claim that CSS is not a copy-protection scheme. We don't need a list of arguments. We need only one: "The primary purpose of DeCSS is to enable playback of DVDs on open-source DVD player software."
That gets right to the core of their argument. I'm no lawyer, but if the "primary purpose" of DeCSS is NOT the copying of DVDs, then the DMCA shouldn't apply, right?
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Still, you raise an important question. Who owns the data on the hard drives of the computers Ford is giving to its employees? Is Ford reserving the right to examine that data at any time just as they would any computer located on company premises? Do they claim copyright on all original material stored on those machines?
I don't think it's fair to bust this particular gift horse in the mouth until we know those answers.
UCITA may very well be a "bad thing", but please do us all a favor and don't argue that it's bad because it might prevent someone from cheating on shareware. If all it did was enforce payment for shareware, there wouldn't be a problem. That's what freeware is for.
There's no need to ignore this aspect of DeCSS. The fact that it has a legitimate, non-infringing use should be good enough. If everything that had a criminal use were illegal, just about everything would be off-limits.
I'm reading that a lot here on Slashdot, but are you sure? Read this section from the DVD FAQ at dvddemystified.com. It says that the DVD-ROM drive's firmware reads the key block on the disc and exchanges authentication codes with the CSS module of the DVD player software. If this is the case, then why would the firmware allow the key block to be copied? If it can't be copied, how do you create a bit-for-bit copy of a disc short of hacking the firmware on the drive -or- *gasp* cracking CSS?
I'm not saying DeCSS is for piracy. I do believe it's for viewing DVDs on Linux, but that's what it is intended to do. Let's not ignore what it can do. The MPAA's legal team sure won't.
That said, I'm really just mentioning this as devil's advocate. It's the sort of reasoning the MPAA will use to argue that DeCSS was made to copy DVDs. I don't think the best way to combat that is to say that there are other ways to pirate DVDs or to claim that CSS is not a copy-protection scheme. We don't need a list of arguments. We need only one: "The primary purpose of DeCSS is to enable playback of DVDs on open-source DVD player software."
That gets right to the core of their argument. I'm no lawyer, but if the "primary purpose" of DeCSS is NOT the copying of DVDs, then the DMCA shouldn't apply, right?