That said there was only one way this injunction could go. All the raving, ranting and spewing of rhetoric in the world cannot change the fact that it costs nothing to link/unlink to DeCSS but the potentially costs MPAA a considerable amount in piracy costs.
This statement is untrue. As a matter of fact, Macrovision (the company that provides the videoscrambling part of the DVD copy protection system on the analog side of things) has sent out a letter explicitly stating that the 'CSS crack' does not impair the Macrovision copyright protection in any way.
Which is true. People who want to copy their DVDs can do so anyway. Just copy the DVD bit for bit. It's digital, after all. It's just the files that are encrypted. Admittedly, you need a pirate which a big budget.
IMHO, the DVD association is now losing money because of this whole CSS business. Whining about how my secret was stolen, does not help them in any way. The software is not going to disappear.
Let's put it another way: if I were to write my own DVD software player, regardless of platform, I should have the right to do so. How much money would I have to pay to legally obtain one of those decryption keys and the algorithm to decrypt DVDs?
I work for a company that, among other things, produces DVDs. One of my colleagues made the interesting point that CSS is not protecting DVDs from being copied. You can still make a perfectly good (digital) copy of a DVD, because the bits are not protected by CSS.
The real copyprotection is in the Macrovision part of the DVD specification. Macrovision is a scrambling technique that makes analog copying of DVDs impossible. (Unless you happen to have a 'signal enhancer' or other Macrovision defeater, of course.) This is the reason that some other guy could not use his VCR to generate a RF signal.
Macrovision also states in a letter that was sent to various DVD production companies that the whole CSS thing will not increase piracy overmuch, as it is not feasible to copy entire images to harddisk or DVD-RAM (which has 'only' 2.5 Gb) or DVD-R (because the cost would be too high, DVD-Rs are quite expensive).
The real reason that there is CSS is to prevent DVD production houses from using eachother's techniques in their own productions, giving competitors in this field an unfair advantage.
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That said there was only one way this injunction could go. All the raving, ranting and spewing of rhetoric in the world cannot change the fact that it costs nothing to link/unlink to DeCSS but the potentially costs MPAA a considerable amount in piracy costs.
This statement is untrue. As a matter of fact, Macrovision (the company that provides the videoscrambling part of the DVD copy protection system on the analog side of things) has sent out a letter explicitly stating that the 'CSS crack' does not impair the Macrovision copyright protection in any way.
Which is true. People who want to copy their DVDs can do so anyway. Just copy the DVD bit for bit. It's digital, after all. It's just the files that are encrypted. Admittedly, you need a pirate which a big budget.
IMHO, the DVD association is now losing money because of this whole CSS business. Whining about how my secret was stolen, does not help them in any way. The software is not going to disappear.
Let's put it another way: if I were to write my own DVD software player, regardless of platform, I should have the right to do so. How much money would I have to pay to legally obtain one of those decryption keys and the algorithm to decrypt DVDs?
I work for a company that, among other things, produces DVDs. One of my colleagues made the interesting point that CSS is not protecting DVDs from being copied. You can still make a perfectly good (digital) copy of a DVD, because the bits are not protected by CSS.
The real copyprotection is in the Macrovision part of the DVD specification. Macrovision is a scrambling technique that makes analog copying of DVDs impossible. (Unless you happen to have a 'signal enhancer' or other Macrovision defeater, of course.) This is the reason that some other guy could not use his VCR to generate a RF signal.
Macrovision also states in a letter that was sent to various DVD production companies that the whole CSS thing will not increase piracy overmuch, as it is not feasible to copy entire images to harddisk or DVD-RAM (which has 'only' 2.5 Gb) or DVD-R (because the cost would be too high, DVD-Rs are quite expensive).
The real reason that there is CSS is to prevent DVD production houses from using eachother's techniques in their own productions, giving competitors in this field an unfair advantage.
Just to put things a bit in perspective.
Ronald