DVD Copiers Barred From Web Sites

Jan 23 05:49 UTC 2000

JANUARY 22, 22:29 EST 


SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) - A judge has ordered Web site operators to
stop disseminating a
program that makes it easy to copy DVD movies and audio discs, a victory
for the digital video and
film industries. 

The software, called DeCSS, allows users to unlock the security code on
DVDs and copy movies
to personal computers. 

A DVD trade group sued the Web site operators, alleging theft of trade
secrets. 

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge William Elfving issued a
preliminary injunction Friday
barring the sites from offering DeCSS to users. He had refused last
month to grant a temporary
restraining order pending hearings on the trade group's lawsuit. 

His ruling follows a similar decision Thursday by a federal judge in New
York, who ruled that
three Web sites posting DeCSS had violated the 1998 Digital Millennium
Copyright Act. 

Internet activists said Elfving's decision abridged the Web site
operators' free speech rights, but
he disagreed. 

``If the court does not immediately enjoin the posting of this
proprietary information, the
(industry's) right to protect this information as a secret will surely
be lost,'' Elfving wrote. 

Jeffrey Kessler, lead attorney for the DVD Copy Control Association
trade group, said the
decision ``establishes that the rules of intellectual property apply on
the Internet, just like in all
areas of commerce.'' 

Kessler was not worried the program would continue to circulate in
defiance of the court order.
``Most people are law-abiding,'' he said. 

The lawsuit was filed last month against 27 named and 72 unnamed ``John
Doe'' defendants. 

Lawyers for the site operators said the ruling was an affront to their
belief in open sharing of
technology. 

``This isn't about hacking or privacy. It's about sharing legitimate
information and code developed
in the open-source community,'' said Tom McGuire, a spokesman for the
San Francisco-based
Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

McGuire said his group would contest both rulings. 

response 2 of 39:

Jan 23 05:56 UTC 2000

A gunziped tarball of the aformentioned is in /tmp/dvd-munitions.tgz.
If it is removed, you can always send me mail.

response 4 of 39:

Jan 23 08:36 UTC 2000

I'm sorry to have to do this.  I do think that open source DVD players are
a good thing, and I wish the court rulings had gone the other way.  However,
the court rulings pretty clearly set down what the current interpretation of
the law is, and we've always had a policy here that Grex is not to be used
for illegal purposes.  Given that anybody who reads Agora was pretty
explicitly told that that file was there, it would be awfully hard for those
of us on the Grex staff to say we didn't know about it.  Accordingly, I've
deleted the file. :(

response 6 of 39:

Jan 23 16:46 UTC 2000

  Pass by value:      Bad
  Pass by reference:  OK

 --

  re #0:  It's not too surprising that we've reached this situation
  since the content-owning companies got to write the applicable laws
  themselves (especially the recent Digital Millenium Copyright Act,
  with its elevation of minor infractions to felonies and its really
  questionable ban on "reverse engineering")

  An important point that has been menioned in most discussions of this
  issue but deserves to be mentioned again for the benefit of those
  grexers who haven't been following it: Although the movie companies
  are portraying this move as a fight against piracy, the matter under
  contention has very little (if anything) to do with piracy.  Figuring
  out the encoding on the discs is not necessary for a pirate who wants
  to copy DVDs to play on any DVD player, that pirate can just make a
  bit-for-bit copy of the information on the original disc and wind up
  with a duplicate that the player cannot distinguish from an original.
  This case has *nothing* to do with that.

response 8 of 39:

Jan 23 18:55 UTC 2000

  I disagree that that is the primary issue interesting the litigants.

response 10 of 39:

Jan 23 19:24 UTC 2000

        Time to copyright reading "left to right; top to bottom"..

        And, remember: anyone employing anything to distribute the written
        word in "my format" owes me a royalty.

        But Wait! There's More! (I always died laughing at those ads ;-)

        You gotta' use OUR CHIPS and OUR ALGORITHMS and OUR MEDIA..

        I still like cassette-tape and VHS, thanks anyway ;->

response 12 of 39:

Jan 24 00:16 UTC 2000

It's a collision between classic property rights and the new "infinite copies"
technologies that are available.

response 14 of 39:

Jan 24 02:49 UTC 2000

Presumably DVD isn't considered a monopoly because anyone can come out with
a competing format.  This happened while VHS was still under patent
restrictions, you'll recall.

response 16 of 39:

Jan 24 18:35 UTC 2000

Re #7:  Even under the DMCA, reverse-engineering for compatibility
purposes is always allowed.  The X-ing DVD player was reverse-engineered
(in Norway?) because there were no DVD players for Linux.  DeCSS or the
equivalent is an essential part of any PC DVD player.  While the DVD
consortium may desire to prevent anyone from producing a software DVD
player without buying their specifications and signing their agreements,
they cannot stop people from deriving the details from reference to
other products.
 
Re #11:  That's incorrect.  You can read the raw data off a DVD, including
the sectors which hold the encryption keys.  What that raw data won't give
you is the MPEG data stream you need to watch the video (though you could
copy it and write it to another DVD).  With the decryption hardware enabled,
you can get the MPEG data in a form suitable for an MPEG decoder.  This lets
you watch the video.
 
Re #12:  It's not even that.  This is a non-issue in the property rights
area; today's movie DVD's hold either 4.7 or 9.4 GB of data, and the
biggest DVD-ROM you can buy today holds less than 3 GB *and* the raw
discs cost more than a DVD movie.  DeCSS only lets you read and decrypt a
DVD to your hard drive.  Sooner or later you run out of hard drive space,
so you over-write it with another movie.  Making temporary copies is essential
to all DVD players, even the licensed ones.  It's not economical to copy
to another DVD, and copying to another format entails losses in resolution
or faithfulness.  Even if these clowns purged DeCSS from the world, you
could still put a DVD movie on VHS tape.  So freaking what?
 
Once on your hard drive you could edit stills from the movie and the
like.  That's fair use.  You could down-convert to a video-CD format,
which I guess is kind of like converting audio to 64Kbps MP3.  As long
as you don't distribute copies, that's fair use too.  What the DVD
consortium appears to be trying to do is get an injunction against
the technology required to *get* fair use out of a DVD.  That's wrong.
 
The DVDCCA may win this one in court, but the technology community has
been rubbed the wrong way by their heavy-handed tactics.  The backlash
is brewing; the spurt of web and ftp sites posting DeCSS is only the
smallest ripples of the wave of opposition they're going to get.

response 18 of 39:

Jan 25 19:25 UTC 2000

Linked to cyberpunk.  A conference which discusses among other things, the
ethics of software distribution, copyright, open source/gnu software
liscenses, the ethics reverse engineering, etc. 

response 20 of 39:

Jan 25 22:04 UTC 2000

...proving that the DVD companies, like the RIAA, are now able to manipulate
foreign governments.  The militia groups have it wrong -- the "One World
Government" won't be run by the UN, it'll be run by a group of corporations. 
The WTO, perhaps?

response 22 of 39:

Jan 25 22:38 UTC 2000

  I sure hope so..

response 24 of 39:

Jan 27 03:27 UTC 2000

this is absolutely laughable.  all bluster, not a legal leg to stand on. 
case in point is the 1984 suit filed by a similar consortium against sony
to prevent the coming to market of the consumer video cassette recorder
(betamax). in 1986, the supreme court ruled that the existence of a
potential for the violation of copyright laws inherent in the technology
does not invalidate the technology or illegitimatize its use for other
innocent applications.