For those of you who saw Silicon Spin on tech tv last night (or those of you
who know what Tech tv even is (www.techtv.com)) they had a very intereting
discussion on the decss. Even though I didn't wath all of it, i'm beginning
to see how important this case is. For those who dont know (and my definition
may not be entirley correct; please correct it as needed) decss is a program
that is used to DEcrpit the Content Scrambling System (and to make copies?)
I know that many websites including 2600 (www.2600.com) are taking heat from
the MPAA. Is decss protected under free speech? Who is wrong here? I wanna
hear peoples input on this, as this could become a very important case on the
issue of free speech.

3 responses total.

Well it seems to me that DECSS does have substanstial non infringing uses
as long as the movie industry won't release it's the scrambling code to
some group of Linux coders so a non DECSS DVD player can be made available
under Linux.  If the industry were to do this then it seems the LEGALITY
of DECSS is debatable.  The moral question is a whole other ball of wax
and I hope DECSS remains available in the same way I hope Napster remains
available, legal or not I want my free media, damnit.  In the mean time
I think the best we can hope for is to ecourage content makers to release
their content GPL'd.

p.s. One a movie is decoded with DECSS it can be copied onto your hard
drive compressed and sent over the internet in CD-R sized bites.

Not that I have either a DVD player or enough bandwidth to make that possible,
but it can be done, and is being done as we speak using peer to peer file
sharing srvices like gnutella.

Guess what, DECSS cannot be made not legal.  The DVD manufactures
bought out the DECSS from its creator, but nothing released under
GNU's GPL can ever be unreleased.

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