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Man, I love watching this shit unfold. Is anyone following the DVD-DeCSS
controversy? No??? Well, here it is in a nutshell. DVDs use an
encryption called CSS, which the MPAA (i.e. Hollywood) hopes will keep
people from pirating them. However, it also means you can't make backups
of legally purchased DVDs, which you should be able to do under Fair Use
and the Berne convention (The Berne convention is what stopped them from
putting similar encryption on Betamax tapes). It also means you can't
watch your DVDs on Linux boxes, because no "legitimate" (i.e. MPAA whore)
company has released a Linux DVD player. Well, a few months ago, some
Norwegian kid reverse-engineered the CSS algorhythm and wrote
DeCSS, a DVD player for Linux. Then, after everyone on Earth who wanted a
copy already had one, a US judge signed an injunction against several
websites with copies of deCSS available (including 2600 and OpenDVD) stating that
they must take it down or face jailtime (and stating that he too was an
MPAA whore). Then the Norwegian government arrested the Norwegian kid,
who is (of course) going to get tons of defense fund money, job offers, and no chance of
actual jail time. The reasons I think this shit is just
hilarious: 1. This is not the first program that decrypts DVDs. I've had one called DVD-rip for six months that does the same thing. And incidentally, no one (probably) would have hacked CSS if Xing hadn't done such a shitty job of writing their DVD player. 2. It has nothing to do with piracy, since pirating a DVD does not require you to decrypt it. You just copy the encrypted DVD code to a blank DVD and presto, new DVD. The only reason the Norwegian kid decrypted it was to port it to Linux. 3. CSS encryption only penalizes home users, not pirates. For someone in the private sector to buy a blank DVD-R costs almost $50. A DVD movie from a store costs $20. Ergo, there are no DVD pirates. But there are plenty of people who'd like to watch their legally purchased DVDs without being forced to buy a standalone DVD player. 4. The MPAA is doing all this shit under the auspices of the pretentiously titled "Digital Millennium Copyright Act", which specifically allows "reverse engineering for purposes of interoperability." Which is exactly what the Norwegian kid did. 5. (the best one) When the MPAA brought the injunction against those websites, it had to include the source code to DeCSS in the suit. Which means that the source code is now a part of the Public Record, and is legally available to any US citizen via FOIA requests. *snicker* By trying to wipe it out, they ensured it would be available to anyone, forever.
The moral of the story? To the MPAA, the RIAA, and the other consortiums
who exist for no other reason than to desperately try to protect the
intellectual property of the multinationals, I offer the following screed:
Unsurprisingly, since the MPAA filed their bullshit complaint, the number of mirror sites with DeCSS has increased a thousand-fold- so what's one more? Update: The link to DeCSS has been removed as a result of the cease-and-desist letter Josh got from the MPAA. It makes me proud to know we've pissed them off, because it means we must be doing something right, but this should also serve to demonstrate how stupid the sweat-sack-licking lawyer-whores at the MPAA are: DeCSS is mirrored on thousands of websites, and they think they can shut off access to it with bullshit legal threats. Best of luck, fuckheads. In the meantime, we've taken DeCSS offline (look around, it's not hard to find), and we'll keep you updated on future developments.
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