"simplistic obfuscation" can be _very_ powerful if exercised properly.
Please take a look at any Netrek client source code. "Blessed" binaries use a 128bit RSAREF public key system to verify the client as authentic (as opposed to a hacked up "borg" client that tends to play itself.) The key and relevant code is broken up into a minimum of 15 files (I think the max is 40) and then the binary is linked in random order so the key processing is scattered all over the rather huge binary.
Despite the "small" key size and the relative ease of recovering the secret key by factoring, I've never heard of anyone recovering one of the keys for a blessed binary. And if they did, I'm sure it was not by disassembling the binary.
Most quality TVs on the market have macrovision stablizers. My 13 year old Sony TV (it's actually a monitor with a TV decoder in it) has a macrovision stablizer in it -- and I have the full schematics for that TV:-) [FWIW, that TV also has a video signal stablizer in it that effectively puts the sync signals -- in fact, the entire VBI -- back in... who needs a cable descrambler:-) And no, it's not designed to be a descrambler, Sony just put some damned good hardware in there.]
Macrovision does not mess with the active video portions of the signal. It sticks a "super white" high-frequency spike in the vertical blanking interval (VBI) to mess up the automatic gain control (AGC) circuitry intended to correct the white level -- exactly what voltage is "white" and "black" -- for broadcast signals that can (and usually do) have slight changes in the peak-to-peak waveform. Basically, the AGC is there to prevent the picture from fading in and out when you're watching it.
TV's have very slow "averaging AGC's" simply because it doesn't have to react rapidly to what is usually very slight voltage changes. And since the TV is only displaying the image and the designers know the retenative properties of the phosphor and the average human eye, it doesn't make sense to have rapid changes in the AGC. A dip in signal would be smoothed by the glow of the phosphor and the image retention of your eyes. Like wise, boosting the signal for a transient spike would not be good -- it would take a noticable fraction of a second for the image to return to normal.
VCRs are a totally different problem. They have rapidly adjusting AGCs because they have to. They're job is to record the video signal to a magnetic tape. The tape heads can only handle a specific range of voltage for the video signal. Too much could bleed into the other tracks and end up erasing the tape instead of recording or actually generate too much voltage and damage the VCR during playback. Too little would end up not recording any signal at all. The VCR needs every frame that it's recording to tape to have the exact same peak-to-peak white level or it would run the risk of recording too little video signal to be able to play back a fully synchronized video signal.
Alot of VCRs will have no trouble at all playing back a macrovision signal recorded onto the tape, but even ignoring the AGC, most VCRs cannot record a signal with that voltage level -- the circuitry cannot recover fast enough from such a high voltage, high frequency spike. I used to have such a VCR... the rotary transformers would get slightly messed up and and not record a clean signal for the rest of the VBI and sometimes on into the active (displayed) video portion. (I may not have recorded anything I could playback, but it did a better job deguesing the heads than the tool designed to do that:-))
Disclaimer: Macrovision is not new and I'm not a child:-) I used to work on TVs and VCRs back before they became single-chip, disposable toys.
CDs are bad enough -- esp. from bad mass-production houses. My win95 CD, in absolute pristine condition, has been difficult to read from day one due to the low quality, high speed method of production (I think they were a little low on silver that day:-))
Given this and the density of information on a DVD, I wish they would be securely encased. 3.5" floppies are better protected than DVDs. (I've always been a strong backer of CD caddies. It's unfortunate that high speed drives _have_ to be tray loaded due to balance concerns -- would you trust a caddy loaded CD spinning at 9000 RPM?)
I'd love it if DVDs were encased like MO disks. They are basically a CD in a secured housing that has a caddy-like door on both sides so they fit alot like a tray loaded CD. There is a recessed latch to keep the "door" from opening by accident. This may be how the DVD-RAM carts are done, but I've never seen one nor does the movie industry use such things (they'd much rather you buy a new 30$ DVD.)
That's the good (and bad) thing about the Supreme Court... Congres can pass whatever laws they want to, but it's up to the courts to enforce them. Once it reaches the Supreme Court -- they look at each other, shake their heads, say "I don't think so" -- and they declare the law unconstitutional, then the game is over. What's Congres going to do, pass the same law again?
First off, that stupid, moronic, idiotic law only applies to encryption and has nothing at all to do with software or hardware for decryption. Otherwise, the d.net clients would be illegal to download outside the US.
Second, that stupid, moronic, idiotic law doesn't apply to non-US citizens outside the US. If it wasn't developed by a US citizen and/or on US soil, then it doesn't apply.
Personally, I think they choose 40bit crypto for two reasons: they wanted it to be broken, and they didn't want a computationally intensive system. The more complex they make the crypto, the more complex the hardware/software will be to deal with it. Hardware based decoding wouldn't be much of an issue, however, software based systems could be a severe hinderance.
I don't know... the old Atari "hole in the floppy" method, while relying on the software to verify the hole, was a very effective system. The C64 also had a very good system... the floppy drive was a computer all it's own; load code in the drive to read back the protected data in a way that was not normally readable.
Any time software is used to enforce copy protection, the protection is worthless. Only a hardware solution beyond the alteration of an end-user is a solution. This worked perfectly for the Playstation until the advent of the mod-chip.
The scratch problem is too true (with digital data, audio is a different story.) The tighter the data is packed onto the disk, the easier it will be to destroy it with a speck of dust. Hard drives are (and always have been) this sensitive. When your "CD"s get anywhere near that data density, merely breathing on it could render it a coaster.
Video tapes, on the other hand, can take some _serious_ abuse. You can wrinkle the tape, scratch some of the oxide off, stretch it, and even cut sections of the tape out (i.e. "splice") and it'll still play back with little distortion and certainly without "skipping" or crashing. Basically, if it's not been rendered a pile of smoldering plastic, it's probablly still playable:-)
However, video tapes have a finite lifetime. They are magnetic media and as such slowly bleed their magnetic charge away (this is why you shouldn't punch your low density floppies to be high density floppies, btw -- not that floppies have a shelf life anyway.) Additionally, the action of playing the tape is slightly distructive. The tape has to be under precise tention during playback to work right. This tention stretches the tape -- esp. if the VCR needs service. (This is what causes the distortion at the top of the frame during playback.)
Disclaimer: I used to service VCRs back before they became disposable. I've seen/heard audio CDs playback without distortion despite them having been half disolved. (be careful where you spill your liquor.)
I'm sure the DVD Forum was well aware this weak as all hell pseudo-crypto was going to be broken in record time. Anyone who knows anything about cryptography knows the CSS system is a joke -- the only way it can be close to secure is by hiding it's simplicty behind an NDA.
There's nothing to suggest the forum cannot (will not) change the keys. After all, it's simply one sector of the disk. No PC DVD-ROM will care what's in that sector any more than any set-top box will. This will break every software player and every DVD decoder card that handles CSS directly. The set-top boxes are questionable...
As I understand it, CSS merely prevents access to the sectors of the DVD; it's not actually munging the data in that sector. If that's the case, then the DVD forum can fill that sector full of random garbage and break every PC DVD-ROM in the world while not bothering the set-top boxes that don't give a rats ass about CSS -- the decoder hardware is closely coupled to the read head. It wouldn't take long before manufacturers would be offering new firmware to remove CSS once and for all. That'd be _GREAT_, therefore, I must be wrong:-(
Of course, for all I know, the DVD-ROM drive itself could be the one doing the scambling. All I know is that the drive is not supposed to give you access to the protected sector(s) without proper CSS handshaking and key exchange.
If Sigma would stop hording the specs for the chips, the linux community would churn out a driver in no time. But they seem to be following the same bad habits of other specialty chip makers in keeping the hardware specs locked up -- if they let people at the specs, maybe more people would use the chips?
In all fairness, I've not asked them for the specs either. I've got a H+ setting here looking for a PCI slot:-)
sectors??? Even if you are refering to the 1024 CYLINDER limit, you're still wrong. I have NT 4.0 installed on an 18G SCSI drive with the entire NT partition beyond the 16G point. The machine works just fine.
So far, I've had no problems with any OS and those archaic cylinder limits -- that limit is only valid for the 3D mapping in the PC partition table; everything uses the linear address now.
Actually, you can do this from the GUI as well. But, yes, a lot of NT can be done from a command line if you know what's being run behind all the buttons.
This would be nothing new... there already are several different "forks" of the linux kernel (RT-Linux, uCLinux, ELKS, etc.)
There are some things that make sense to be included in the mainline kernel, but there are also specialty things that have no place there. Linus is a fair person when it comes to these things. I've never known him to reject things that are of general benefit.
Every one on the planet doesn't need HA or clustering, but there could be cases made to support adding it to the base kernel much like SMP (albeit of growing use) and RAID support. Things that make drastic alterations to the kernel would generally be split off as a specialty.
"without special software or drivers..." Right, just a JAVA VM, a Jini "driver", RMI... No wonder we need 200MHz PPC's in our tie tacks.
How Jini Technology Makes This Work Jini Technology provides mechanisms that group devices together into a service network, secured through the Java[tm] language.
Umm, NO.
Sun Community Source Licensing ...
HAH! I don't think so.
Close Jini technology is the architecture to streamline the future of computing.
Didn't they say similar things about JAVA years ago? It still doesn't have the platform independance.
Also keep in mind the market Mot lives in... they've always been designing and supplying devices (not just processors) for embedded applications. (eg. the DragonBall in palm devices, MCU's found in some modems and ISDN TAs, various Cisco routers, etc.)
I started out my life of crime, err, computers with the venerable 6809E. I've always like the motorola world of processors. I've never liked that Hewbrew-ish Intel syntax... I learned to read and write American (I ain't gonna say "English") so I like things to read left to right. Besides, that ugly real mode vs. protected mode and segmenting just makes me violently ill.
(BTW: a 1MHZ 6809e could do most things faster than a 4.77MHz 8086/8088.)
The MacroVision "scrambling" is quite easy to remove. Depending on the age of your VCR, you may be able to simply bypass the AGC controls all together -- if you are feeding a quality signal into the VCR, the AGC is not needed.
Plus, there are TV's and VCR's specifically designed to remove it. I have a VCR that will record MacroVision intact with zero effect to the video quality. (Let the cable company MacroVision every channel; it won't bother me.)
People tolerate it because it's non-obtrusive and they tend to like the ads having some relation to their interests. (I've not seen any Victoria's Secret banners in a long time. *grin*) Personally, I'd see it as an improvement if companies paid attention to their marketing information -- AT&T has called me twice in the past two years to "become an AT&T long distance customer"... I already am; how many times do I have to turn down the same MBNA CC before they get a clue?
People don't seem to mind having their browsing habits recorded by web proxies either. So go figure. (And in some cases, they may not even know it's being proxied.)
#1 is a dead company (and they should already know it.) #2 is a dying company or a startup.
While your point is taken, the simple fact remains: A business cannot sustain itself by spending more money than it generates. In Amazon's case, they have "equity"... i.e. non-cash things that have value (patents, programmers, software, investments, etc.)
The modern world of economics is far (very far) from simple. Companies spend money that doesn't exist, publish corp. valuations that exceed the amount of cash ever printed by the treasury... It's all accounting smoke and mirrors.
A classified classification?! If I didn't know better, I'd say it was guberment work.
There are some things that should be classified. Trust me on this one... there are a few things you truely do not want to know about. (Do you really wanna know what that green stuff is?)
Discussions like this always bring to mind the scene from "Deap Impact" where Morgan Freeman is before some gov committee... "It was my impression that you didn't want to know."
Movies are released in different areas at different times. For example, a movie may be released to DVD in the US just as it hits the screens in Oz. But the industry doesn't like people being able to mail-order a US DVD from Oz and see a movie before they've cashed in on the box office sales.
The error(s) in their logic... how much is a movie ticket? How much is the DVD? Would you never go to a theater to see the movie just because you own the DVD?
Personally, I spend way more on videos (tapes/DVDs) than I do on movie tickets. And I often will see a movie in a theater even after I own the video -- not many people have a "home theater".
For the record, region coding is NOT "copy protection" as such it's not illegal in that sense. If anything, defeating the region coding would be a breach of the EULA for the software and/or hardware.
As was mentioned on the LiVid mailing list, it's not the home user pimping gigs of MPEG files that MPAA should be worried about. It's the Asian copy houses capable of de-compositing a pressed CD to make a master and then spit out thousands of copies. [* ] Correct me if anyone's tried this, but the home user has no way of making a DVD-ROM playable in a stand-alone DVD player. I don't know of any that will read a DVD-RAM. (Disclaimer: I've not wasted my money on a DVD-RAM, yet.)
Slashdot Mirror
"simplistic obfuscation" can be _very_ powerful if exercised properly.
Please take a look at any Netrek client source code. "Blessed" binaries use a 128bit RSAREF public key system to verify the client as authentic (as opposed to a hacked up "borg" client that tends to play itself.) The key and relevant code is broken up into a minimum of 15 files (I think the max is 40) and then the binary is linked in random order so the key processing is scattered all over the rather huge binary.
Despite the "small" key size and the relative ease of recovering the secret key by factoring, I've never heard of anyone recovering one of the keys for a blessed binary. And if they did, I'm sure it was not by disassembling the binary.
That's B A W L S...
It's an interesting drink. I have one setting here on my desk.
Most quality TVs on the market have macrovision stablizers. My 13 year old Sony TV (it's actually a monitor with a TV decoder in it) has a macrovision stablizer in it -- and I have the full schematics for that TV :-) [FWIW, that TV also has a video signal stablizer in it that effectively puts the sync signals -- in fact, the entire VBI -- back in... who needs a cable descrambler :-) And no, it's not designed to be a descrambler, Sony just put some damned good hardware in there.]
:-))
:-) I used to work on TVs and VCRs back before they became single-chip, disposable toys.
Macrovision does not mess with the active video portions of the signal. It sticks a "super white" high-frequency spike in the vertical blanking interval (VBI) to mess up the automatic gain control (AGC) circuitry intended to correct the white level -- exactly what voltage is "white" and "black" -- for broadcast signals that can (and usually do) have slight changes in the peak-to-peak waveform. Basically, the AGC is there to prevent the picture from fading in and out when you're watching it.
TV's have very slow "averaging AGC's" simply because it doesn't have to react rapidly to what is usually very slight voltage changes. And since the TV is only displaying the image and the designers know the retenative properties of the phosphor and the average human eye, it doesn't make sense to have rapid changes in the AGC. A dip in signal would be smoothed by the glow of the phosphor and the image retention of your eyes. Like wise, boosting the signal for a transient spike would not be good -- it would take a noticable fraction of a second for the image to return to normal.
VCRs are a totally different problem. They have rapidly adjusting AGCs because they have to. They're job is to record the video signal to a magnetic tape. The tape heads can only handle a specific range of voltage for the video signal. Too much could bleed into the other tracks and end up erasing the tape instead of recording or actually generate too much voltage and damage the VCR during playback. Too little would end up not recording any signal at all. The VCR needs every frame that it's recording to tape to have the exact same peak-to-peak white level or it would run the risk of recording too little video signal to be able to play back a fully synchronized video signal.
Alot of VCRs will have no trouble at all playing back a macrovision signal recorded onto the tape, but even ignoring the AGC, most VCRs cannot record a signal with that voltage level -- the circuitry cannot recover fast enough from such a high voltage, high frequency spike. I used to have such a VCR... the rotary transformers would get slightly messed up and and not record a clean signal for the rest of the VBI and sometimes on into the active (displayed) video portion. (I may not have recorded anything I could playback, but it did a better job deguesing the heads than the tool designed to do that
Disclaimer: Macrovision is not new and I'm not a child
CDs are bad enough -- esp. from bad mass-production houses. My win95 CD, in absolute pristine condition, has been difficult to read from day one due to the low quality, high speed method of production (I think they were a little low on silver that day :-))
Given this and the density of information on a DVD, I wish they would be securely encased. 3.5" floppies are better protected than DVDs. (I've always been a strong backer of CD caddies. It's unfortunate that high speed drives _have_ to be tray loaded due to balance concerns -- would you trust a caddy loaded CD spinning at 9000 RPM?)
I'd love it if DVDs were encased like MO disks. They are basically a CD in a secured housing that has a caddy-like door on both sides so they fit alot like a tray loaded CD. There is a recessed latch to keep the "door" from opening by accident. This may be how the DVD-RAM carts are done, but I've never seen one nor does the movie industry use such things (they'd much rather you buy a new 30$ DVD.)
That's the good (and bad) thing about the Supreme Court... Congres can pass whatever laws they want to, but it's up to the courts to enforce them. Once it reaches the Supreme Court -- they look at each other, shake their heads, say "I don't think so" -- and they declare the law unconstitutional, then the game is over. What's Congres going to do, pass the same law again?
First off, that stupid, moronic, idiotic law only applies to encryption and has nothing at all to do with software or hardware for decryption. Otherwise, the d.net clients would be illegal to download outside the US.
Second, that stupid, moronic, idiotic law doesn't apply to non-US citizens outside the US. If it wasn't developed by a US citizen and/or on US soil, then it doesn't apply.
Personally, I think they choose 40bit crypto for two reasons: they wanted it to be broken, and they didn't want a computationally intensive system. The more complex they make the crypto, the more complex the hardware/software will be to deal with it. Hardware based decoding wouldn't be much of an issue, however, software based systems could be a severe hinderance.
I don't know... the old Atari "hole in the floppy" method, while relying on the software to verify the hole, was a very effective system. The C64 also had a very good system... the floppy drive was a computer all it's own; load code in the drive to read back the protected data in a way that was not normally readable.
Any time software is used to enforce copy protection, the protection is worthless. Only a hardware solution beyond the alteration of an end-user is a solution. This worked perfectly for the Playstation until the advent of the mod-chip.
The scratch problem is too true (with digital data, audio is a different story.) The tighter the data is packed onto the disk, the easier it will be to destroy it with a speck of dust. Hard drives are (and always have been) this sensitive. When your "CD"s get anywhere near that data density, merely breathing on it could render it a coaster.
:-)
Video tapes, on the other hand, can take some _serious_ abuse. You can wrinkle the tape, scratch some of the oxide off, stretch it, and even cut sections of the tape out (i.e. "splice") and it'll still play back with little distortion and certainly without "skipping" or crashing. Basically, if it's not been rendered a pile of smoldering plastic, it's probablly still playable
However, video tapes have a finite lifetime. They are magnetic media and as such slowly bleed their magnetic charge away (this is why you shouldn't punch your low density floppies to be high density floppies, btw -- not that floppies have a shelf life anyway.) Additionally, the action of playing the tape is slightly distructive. The tape has to be under precise tention during playback to work right. This tention stretches the tape -- esp. if the VCR needs service. (This is what causes the distortion at the top of the frame during playback.)
Disclaimer: I used to service VCRs back before they became disposable. I've seen/heard audio CDs playback without distortion despite them having been half disolved. (be careful where you spill your liquor.)
I'm sure the DVD Forum was well aware this weak as all hell pseudo-crypto was going to be broken in record time. Anyone who knows anything about cryptography knows the CSS system is a joke -- the only way it can be close to secure is by hiding it's simplicty behind an NDA.
:-(
There's nothing to suggest the forum cannot (will not) change the keys. After all, it's simply one sector of the disk. No PC DVD-ROM will care what's in that sector any more than any set-top box will. This will break every software player and every DVD decoder card that handles CSS directly. The set-top boxes are questionable...
As I understand it, CSS merely prevents access to the sectors of the DVD; it's not actually munging the data in that sector. If that's the case, then the DVD forum can fill that sector full of random garbage and break every PC DVD-ROM in the world while not bothering the set-top boxes that don't give a rats ass about CSS -- the decoder hardware is closely coupled to the read head. It wouldn't take long before manufacturers would be offering new firmware to remove CSS once and for all. That'd be _GREAT_, therefore, I must be wrong
Of course, for all I know, the DVD-ROM drive itself could be the one doing the scambling. All I know is that the drive is not supposed to give you access to the protected sector(s) without proper CSS handshaking and key exchange.
If Sigma would stop hording the specs for the chips, the linux community would churn out a driver in no time. But they seem to be following the same bad habits of other specialty chip makers in keeping the hardware specs locked up -- if they let people at the specs, maybe more people would use the chips?
:-)
In all fairness, I've not asked them for the specs either. I've got a H+ setting here looking for a PCI slot
You can cut-n-paste urls into any netscape window just like any other app. -- as long as you don't middle-click a hyperlink :-)
sectors??? Even if you are refering to the 1024 CYLINDER limit, you're still wrong. I have NT 4.0 installed on an 18G SCSI drive with the entire NT partition beyond the 16G point. The machine works just fine.
So far, I've had no problems with any OS and those archaic cylinder limits -- that limit is only valid for the 3D mapping in the PC partition table; everything uses the linear address now.
Actually, you can do this from the GUI as well. But, yes, a lot of NT can be done from a command line if you know what's being run behind all the buttons.
This would be nothing new... there already are several different "forks" of the linux kernel (RT-Linux, uCLinux, ELKS, etc.)
There are some things that make sense to be included in the mainline kernel, but there are also specialty things that have no place there. Linus is a fair person when it comes to these things. I've never known him to reject things that are of general benefit.
Every one on the planet doesn't need HA or clustering, but there could be cases made to support adding it to the base kernel much like SMP (albeit of growing use) and RAID support. Things that make drastic alterations to the kernel would generally be split off as a specialty.
hmmm, that gives me one hell of an idea...
:-)
1 - 900MHz FSK broadband modem
1 - Mot. 5206eLITE prototype
1 - Philips SAA7111
1 - Ind. std. NTSC CCD
1 - Radio Shack RC car
1 - Garmen GPS
...
I'll get back to yah. (And people thought the Lego Mindstorms' "Magic 8 Ball" was hot shit.)
"without special software or drivers..." Right, just a JAVA VM, a Jini "driver", RMI... No wonder we need 200MHz PPC's in our tie tacks.
How Jini Technology Makes This Work
Jini Technology provides mechanisms that group devices together into a service network, secured through the Java[tm] language.
Umm, NO.
Sun Community Source Licensing
...
HAH! I don't think so.
Close
Jini technology is the architecture to streamline the future of computing.
Didn't they say similar things about JAVA years ago? It still doesn't have the platform independance.
I guess I've written a few "complete" programs then.
:-))
(It's so much fun to "email" yourself an xterm
Also keep in mind the market Mot lives in... they've always been designing and supplying devices (not just processors) for embedded applications. (eg. the DragonBall in palm devices, MCU's found in some modems and ISDN TAs, various Cisco routers, etc.)
I started out my life of crime, err, computers with the venerable 6809E. I've always like the motorola world of processors. I've never liked that Hewbrew-ish Intel syntax... I learned to read and write American (I ain't gonna say "English") so I like things to read left to right. Besides, that ugly real mode vs. protected mode and segmenting just makes me violently ill.
(BTW: a 1MHZ 6809e could do most things faster than a 4.77MHz 8086/8088.)
*ahem* /me raises his hand.
As if it matters, but, my apartment should be zoned commercial as it's mostly a warehouse now.
The MacroVision "scrambling" is quite easy to remove. Depending on the age of your VCR, you may be able to simply bypass the AGC controls all together -- if you are feeding a quality signal into the VCR, the AGC is not needed.
Plus, there are TV's and VCR's specifically designed to remove it. I have a VCR that will record MacroVision intact with zero effect to the video quality. (Let the cable company MacroVision every channel; it won't bother me.)
Bar codes? Nah, that's what credit cards are for.
People tolerate it because it's non-obtrusive and they tend to like the ads having some relation to their interests. (I've not seen any Victoria's Secret banners in a long time. *grin*) Personally, I'd see it as an improvement if companies paid attention to their marketing information -- AT&T has called me twice in the past two years to "become an AT&T long distance customer"... I already am; how many times do I have to turn down the same MBNA CC before they get a clue?
People don't seem to mind having their browsing habits recorded by web proxies either. So go figure. (And in some cases, they may not even know it's being proxied.)
#1 is a dead company (and they should already know it.) #2 is a dying company or a startup.
While your point is taken, the simple fact remains: A business cannot sustain itself by spending more money than it generates. In Amazon's case, they have "equity"... i.e. non-cash things that have value (patents, programmers, software, investments, etc.)
The modern world of economics is far (very far) from simple. Companies spend money that doesn't exist, publish corp. valuations that exceed the amount of cash ever printed by the treasury... It's all accounting smoke and mirrors.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
A classified classification?! If I didn't know better, I'd say it was guberment work.
There are some things that should be classified. Trust me on this one... there are a few things you truely do not want to know about. (Do you really wanna know what that green stuff is?)
Discussions like this always bring to mind the scene from "Deap Impact" where Morgan Freeman is before some gov committee... "It was my impression that you didn't want to know."
Sure. It's a simple (stupid) reason...
Movies are released in different areas at different times. For example, a movie may be released to DVD in the US just as it hits the screens in Oz. But the industry doesn't like people being able to mail-order a US DVD from Oz and see a movie before they've cashed in on the box office sales.
The error(s) in their logic... how much is a movie ticket? How much is the DVD? Would you never go to a theater to see the movie just because you own the DVD?
Personally, I spend way more on videos (tapes/DVDs) than I do on movie tickets. And I often will see a movie in a theater even after I own the video -- not many people have a "home theater".
For the record, region coding is NOT "copy protection" as such it's not illegal in that sense. If anything, defeating the region coding would be a breach of the EULA for the software and/or hardware.
As was mentioned on the LiVid mailing list, it's not the home user pimping gigs of MPEG files that MPAA should be worried about. It's the Asian copy houses capable of de-compositing a pressed CD to make a master and then spit out thousands of copies. [* ] Correct me if anyone's tried this, but the home user has no way of making a DVD-ROM playable in a stand-alone DVD player. I don't know of any that will read a DVD-RAM. (Disclaimer: I've not wasted my money on a DVD-RAM, yet.)