You can still find DVDs for cheap--in fact, taking advantage of coupons, gift certificates, limited-time offers, preorders and the occasional spot of free shipping, most DVDs can be hard for $5-$15 (depending on how much bargain hunting you're willing to do). Mail me if you'd like to know more. I would just post it, but I don't want to spam everybody with a detailed tutorial on DVD hunting.
Unfortunately, you don't own the copyrighted material on the DVD. You only own the DVD media and the player. The entity licensing the material (in this case, the studio) may grant you the right to back it up--most software companies include a clause to this effect in their license agreements--but the studios have chosen not to do this.
Although I'm sure 99% of Slashdot readers understand this point intuitively, I'm going out of my way to make it extra clear to those who don't know much about the subject or who haven't put much though into it:
The breaking of CSS encryption has absolutely nothing to do with piracy. Think about it for a second: how feasible is it to move around 5- and 6- gigabyte DVDs? How do you store them? Not on your hard drive, that's for sure! How many people do you think can afford a DVD burner capable creating true dual-layer DVDs (and not DVD-RAM discs, which are something completetly different?) And when DVDs can be bought online by a judicious shopper for as little as $5 per title, do you really think anyone's going to go out of his way to pirate them? It's far easier to hook a VCR to the video output of your DVD decoder card and videotape the damned things! The loss of quality is far less than if one were to recompress an MPEG2 stream using a lossier but higher-compression encoding.
No, the issue at hand here is that of free access to information--an issue that has traditionally been very important to the open-source community and very unimportant to the corporations that write your software and, to an increasing degree, control your life.
You see, when the DVD manufacturers came up with CSS, their goal was not to protect the intellectual property contained on DVDs; rather, they were establishing an ironclad grip on the entire DVD market. They control who gets to view DVDs, how, and with what hardware and software. They have accomplished this end through the use of a proprietary encryption scheme (CSS) about which they have released no information. Of course, if they'd bothered to consult with any security professional, they would have been told that security through obscurity simply doesn't work, as has been proven endlessly, usually at the expensive of the implementor of said obscure security.
Now, someone has broken their cute little encryption scheme, which they never patented and never published. In what is basically a panic response, they are wasting millions of dollars and contemplating turning the entire DVD market on its side just so they can maintain total control of the market.
As if this wasn't bad enough, they are threatening legal action against the people who cracked CSS, an activity that never was and still isn't illegal, and they are trying to block them from publishing anything else they find out about the non-patented CSS encryption algorithm. This is a violation of the CSS crackers' right to free speech which, if you'll recall, if a constitutional right.
This is an old story, of course. Those of you who have been around long enough can remember countless other occasions where some company's naive encryption scheme was broken and the corporate response was to attempt a legal assassination of the cracker in order to maintain security.
So, instead of whining irrelevantly about piracy, why don't you boycott DVDs yourself in order to protest the violation of someone's first amendement rights? Somebody might someday do the same thing for you when you find yourself against the wall.
Slashdot Mirror
You can still find DVDs for cheap--in fact, taking advantage of coupons, gift certificates, limited-time offers, preorders and the occasional spot of free shipping, most DVDs can be hard for $5-$15 (depending on how much bargain hunting you're willing to do). Mail me if you'd like to know more. I would just post it, but I don't want to spam everybody with a detailed tutorial on DVD hunting.
Unfortunately, you don't own the copyrighted material on the DVD. You only own the DVD media and the player. The entity licensing the material (in this case, the studio) may grant you the right to back it up--most software companies include a clause to this effect in their license agreements--but the studios have chosen not to do this.
The breaking of CSS encryption has absolutely nothing to do with piracy. Think about it for a second: how feasible is it to move around 5- and 6- gigabyte DVDs? How do you store them? Not on your hard drive, that's for sure! How many people do you think can afford a DVD burner capable creating true dual-layer DVDs (and not DVD-RAM discs, which are something completetly different?) And when DVDs can be bought online by a judicious shopper for as little as $5 per title, do you really think anyone's going to go out of his way to pirate them? It's far easier to hook a VCR to the video output of your DVD decoder card and videotape the damned things! The loss of quality is far less than if one were to recompress an MPEG2 stream using a lossier but higher-compression encoding.
No, the issue at hand here is that of free access to information--an issue that has traditionally been very important to the open-source community and very unimportant to the corporations that write your software and, to an increasing degree, control your life.
You see, when the DVD manufacturers came up with CSS, their goal was not to protect the intellectual property contained on DVDs; rather, they were establishing an ironclad grip on the entire DVD market. They control who gets to view DVDs, how, and with what hardware and software. They have accomplished this end through the use of a proprietary encryption scheme (CSS) about which they have released no information. Of course, if they'd bothered to consult with any security professional, they would have been told that security through obscurity simply doesn't work, as has been proven endlessly, usually at the expensive of the implementor of said obscure security.
Now, someone has broken their cute little encryption scheme, which they never patented and never published. In what is basically a panic response, they are wasting millions of dollars and contemplating turning the entire DVD market on its side just so they can maintain total control of the market.
As if this wasn't bad enough, they are threatening legal action against the people who cracked CSS, an activity that never was and still isn't illegal, and they are trying to block them from publishing anything else they find out about the non-patented CSS encryption algorithm. This is a violation of the CSS crackers' right to free speech which, if you'll recall, if a constitutional right.
This is an old story, of course. Those of you who have been around long enough can remember countless other occasions where some company's naive encryption scheme was broken and the corporate response was to attempt a legal assassination of the cracker in order to maintain security.
So, instead of whining irrelevantly about piracy, why don't you boycott DVDs yourself in order to protest the violation of someone's first amendement rights? Somebody might someday do the same thing for you when you find yourself against the wall.