WARNING: barely on-topic, long, and opinionated.
You have been warned :)
Matthew Chapmap wrote:
<snip>
> > Do the new Amendments to the Broadcasting Services Act have any weight
> > in this matter?
>
> I doubt it. Their case won't hold water in any reasonable country,
> and Australia is fairly lenient towards reverse-engineering as is.
> And it's a lot easier to duplicate DVD's *without* decrypting them :-)
>
Sorry, had to step in on this one:
(dons nomex suit) /RANT
It is NOT easy to duplicate encrypted DVDs. You CAN'T do it with
consumer grade equipment. Many people say "you just copy the encrypted
bitstream from the DVD to a new DVD, and tada! bitwise perfect copy."
This WILL NOT work, for the same reason (more or less) that Playstation
CDs can't be pirated with consumer grade equipment without modifying
the Playstation, or couldn't just copy the King's Quest III 5 1/4" floppy
back in the 80's. An encrypted DVD stores the encryption keys in a
special track, and that track can't be duplicated on consumer DVD readers
or writers. I don't recall if it's because the DVD player will refuse to
hand
you a bitwise copy of the special track, or because the DVD recorder is
unable to record the track, but the end result it that copying an encrypted
DVD using a normal PC is a perfect bitwise copy of the encrypted DVD,
with no decryption keys on the copy. In the playstation's case the CD has
some deliberate errors on it, which are "fixed" during the copy process,
and the "fixed" CDs are detectable to the Playstation. Anyone old enough
will recognise these techniques as being the same as the ones used
on early (pre-cd) games for PCs, C-64, Amiga, etc. Long sectors,
damaged tracks, etc and will also remember all the _C_rackers breaking
them. DeCSS was originally no different.
DeCSS was originally written by some German Crackers (note the C) who
posted their l337 code to haxor / warez sites with instructions on how to
use it to copy DVDs onto VCDs. It was originally written for pirating, and
only ran on Windows.
Since then it has been ported to Linux, though I'm yet to hear of
anyone successfully playing a movie using it. The MPAA do have a
case under the "Millennium Copyright" laws, their "Trade secrets"
case appeared to be totally bogus, especially since the Xing keys
may not have actually been used. Of course since the code was
actually written by anonymous _C_rackers, the details of how it
was done are sketchy at best.
I'm really hoping that the MPAA lose, and that DeCSS eventually
turns into a useable DVD movie player, but neither have happened yet.
As to comments like "out of my dead hands shall ye prise the DeCSS
source code", if you don't like the laws, lobby to have them changed,
don't just break them. I really dislike the idea of laws that aren't
enforced, or enforceable, as I think it dilutes the laws that should be
enforced. Protest DOES work, look what happened to the Sodomy
laws in Tasmania.
IANAL, but as I understand it, before the millennium copyright stuff
became law, if a product had any legal purpose, it couldn't be banned.
DeCSS did have at least 2 uses: it could be used for piracy (which
is why it was written) and it could be used (real soon now) to watch
DVD movies on Linux (which is where JJ comes into the picture, and
when most people came into contact with it). Under the old laws,
since it had one legit use, the product is legit. This is the same
ruling which allowed video tape, audio tape, recordable CDs, etc.
(All of which were originally opposed by the MPAA or equiv, and
these groups are what more or less killed DAT <pet peeve>)
Thus the original MPAA suit was based on (probably bogus) trade
secret laws (the case, not the laws, trade secret laws seem ok).
My (potentially flawed) understanding of the Mill. (c) stuff is that
this is no longer the case. It's more like the opposite, if something
make pirating easier, or it can be shown that piracy is a major
use of the product, it can be banned. This obviously sucks, it means
that things like video tape, etc, would not be allowed if they were new
today, which is obviously pretty appalling.
Of course at this point, the copyright holding associations have
so much power that any protest will be ignored, or labelled as
"fringe weirdies" because these power blocks control the media.
Go do some reading on what has happened to copyright in the US,
and why Mickey Mouse isn't, and probably never will, be in the
public domain, despite what copyright was originally meant to be.
Please note that it is actually a "privilege" not a right. How would
you like it if you still had to pay royalties on Shakespear? Thanks to
Disney et al, it is likely that copyright will be extended more or less
indefinitely, and that once legitimate technologies will be crushed
or banned if they dilute the value of these massively extended (c)s.
Welcome to the future, where the corporations rule the world.
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