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. 

39 responses total.

Good thing I already got my copy.

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

Pirates

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. :(

Ok, then how about a pointer to this instead:

<http://copyleft.net/cgi-bin/copyleft/t039.pl>

  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.

It's about their ability to collect royalties on an algorithm they
developed, as I understand it.  While that makes it really inconvenient for
those of us who don't use "normal" operating systems, I guess it's
understandable.

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

Then what *is* the primary issue?

        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 ;->

I've been told that it's impossible to just read the raw bits off the dvd
with normal dvd drives, and so cracking css does in fact make the duplication
of dvds possibly easier.

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

        It hasn't been "new" for decades, if not centuries.. Anyone know
        what a "scriptorium" was? Or a "scribe"?

        Remember the advent of "Xeroxing-articles"? GPL? LGPL?
        "public-domain"? "limited-public-domain"? "restricted(etc..)"?


        Is this DVD format (hardware, whatever) a Public Utility, thereby
        exempt from Monopoly-Laws? Is it in the interests of
        "national-security" to "classify" the process, etc?

        Too little, too late, boys - you lose..

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.

re#11:  It is impossible to prevent you from reading every bit on a DVD.
What the DVD vendors are trying to do is make distributors of blank
media 'scribble' or 'pre-record' the part of the DVD blank which is
where the decryption key is in a DVD movie.  This will of course create
a market for 'real' blank DVDs.  

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.

I agree with you that reverse-engineering *should* be legal in the U.S.  I
think companies can still make it illegal in their license agreements,
though.  It's the old "golden rule."  Reminds me a bit of an EFF short story
about a future in which debuggers were illegal to posess.

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. 

  Recent development in this story:  Norwegian police arrested,
  interrogated, and seized the computer equipment of Jon Johansen,
  16-year-old author of DeCSS.

...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?

The Corporation of Dallas?  Maybe the movie "Rollerball" got it right!

  I sure hope so..

http://segfault.org/story.phtml?mode=2&id=388eed70-0506c980

MPAA, RIAA Legal Teams Join in Suprise Lawsuit

In a legal move that has even the experts baffled, the Recording Industry
Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have
teamed up to sue yet another group that has allegedly contributed to the
growing problem of copyright infrigement. 

"These companies have wontonly and knowingly enabled the creation and
distribution of criminal programs such as DeCSS and Napster," said Stephen
Suemall, spokesman for the joint legal parties. "The time has come for
each and every power company in the United States to stand up and take
responsability for wontonly fueling the entire criminal activity of the
Internet. These bad corporate citizens have not only supplied the
electricity that allowed criminal programs to be created but have enabled
communist organizations like the so-called 'Open Source Community' to
undermine capitalism by making unlimited copies of program source codes,
but we intend to prove in a court of law that the power companies in this
country have knowingly powered computers and electronic devices that have
been used to illegally duplicate and distribute copyrighted music and
video." 

The power companies contacted for comment had not returned calls as of
press time. 

After experts recovered from initial shock of the accusations leveled by
the MPAA and RIAA, they universally agreed that this was a brilliant move.
"This is this sort of thinking that has made America the nation that it is
today," one legal expert proudly said. 

Court dates have not yet been set, but the undeniable logic of the lawsuit
has most industry and legal analysts expecting a preliminary injuncion
against the nation's power companies to cease and desist generating
electricity unless they can prove that none of the power is being used for
any of the practices named in the suit.

Posted on Wed 26 Jan 04:50:48 2000 PST Written by Trebor
<rmaefs@aholdusa.com>

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.

(re#24 re#23: pssst.  It was a joke, man.  A joke.)

i quite agree!  :)

  I presumed #24 was responding to the motion picture industry tactics
  in general, not to #23..  

  The 1986 ruling mentioned in #24 doesn't seem to have kept the record
  companies from stymieing DAT for years and essentially killing it as a
  viable home format for consumers.  So often in these cases it's not a
  matter of who will eventually prevail in court, but of what else will
  happen if one party is suitably motivated to keep things tied up for
  years and years.

This is silly.  DVD was a trade secret.  It was not patented.  Going after
the kid because he figured out the encryption is wrong.  He was able to
figure it out because either he was lucky or the encryption scheme was
not that difficult to figure out.  That's the risk you run with trade
secrets.  Just because you built something and someone else figured out
how you did it does not make the other person a criminal!

One of the Windows players had left the important code in plaintext, when all
of the licensees had been warned to encrypt it to prevent reverse engineering.

  re #28:  actually, according to last year's DCMA, that probably *does*
  make the other person a criminal..

The sticky legal point is going to be if the DeCSS et al programs are a
'devices' (like a 'lock pick') which the plaintiffs' attorneys seem to
be keen on using to refer these programs.  Its gonna be an interesting
legal arguement as for the first time 'software' is gonna be regarded as
'hardware'. It was interesting to read the transcripts of the 'in
chambers' hearing of the NY case where among other things I think it is
clear the judge hasn't a clue nor do either the defense or plaintifs
attorneys - truely the blind leading the deaf.
Transript of hearing:

http://www.2600.com/news/2000/0121-trans.txt

Personally, all I'd wanna do is be able to view the DVDs that I might
buy on the hardware that I own running the OS that I prefer. I can't
so I haven't bought any DVD hardware or 'software' - no DVD movies here.

It is amusing that the industry lawyers forgot to request that the source
code for DVD encryption be kept under seal.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,33922,00.html

This is starting to sound like one of the Scientology trials, with all 
the emphasis on secret documents.

  Yeah, plus all those movie stars..  ;-)

Re #17: I thought that was something RMS wrote, not something the EFF wrote.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Probably true.  I was going by memory, and all I could remember was that it
was on EFF's web site.

A listing of assorted articles on this subject can be found at
http://www.msen.com/~mwg/css-broken.html

I will be updating this with a number of more recent articles over the
weekend, as the page is about a month old.

http://www.opendvd.org/

I have a link to them as well, I am updating my articles links while
waiting out net-lags to Grex, a lot of new links should be available about
an hour from the time stamp on this response.

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