Posted on 05/24/2002 4:56:01 AM PDT by Quila
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:50:32 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the First Amendment Project today asked the California Supreme Court to uphold a lower court's decision to permit publication of the source code for DeCSS technology, which circumvents digital copy protection systems. DeCSS is a computer program designed to defeat an encryption-based copy protection system known as the Content Scramble System, or CSS, which is employed to encrypt and protect the copyrighted motion pictures contained on DVDs.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsbytes.com ...
Publish a little source code even as a news item, and get sued because people could use it to pirate DVDs (or to exercise their fair use rights, which DVDs prohibit).
Doesn't this apply to our legal problems here at FR?
You mean republishing news stories? I wouldn't think so since most of that (the actual copy&paste text) is copyrighted. DeCSS was free. They are claiming trade secrets, but that's lame because if you use a super-special algorithm to protect your works, and it turns out to be ROT-13, you could bust these guys for offering a decoding service and this guy for offering links to the source code for 56 code cracking variants.
For FR's problems of people posting copyrighted works (which I admittedly did here), I'd suggest a look at Chilling Effects' DMCA Section 512 FAQ page to see how they are covered under the "safe harbor" provision.
Maybe they could have their programmers write a "Fair Use" chopper, which when the admins point to a full story posted, it would auto-chop it little enough to be considered fair use. (that should be a one line awk or sed in Unix). This would immediately free them from liability under the safe harbor provisions in the DMCA.
main(a){while(a=~getchar())putchar(~a-1/(~(a|32)/13*2-11)*13);}
Now if someone protects their copyrighted work with ROT-13, I've just legally exposed myself!
Okay, take me to court and we'll set a cool precedent if you lose. Of course if the court found out, we'd both be busted. :)
BTW, you're handle is pretty cool in ROT-13: "trareny_er"
I read that Adobe's super-secure hardware dongle option for their ebooks uses Rot13, so you'd better watch out--you're really in trouble now!
Unfortunately, if I actually want to be honest and buy a high-quality digital movie, that's the only way to get it. Years of law and Supreme Court precedent says I have a right to time-shift and space-shift copyrighted material, as well as back up software, and I'm going to do it. The industry, unfortunately, doesn't want me to have those rights anymore because it eats into profits. They forget that copyright law in America is a balance of rights.
An interesting point in the DMCA, under which they are pursuing this case, is that the DMCA specifically allows backing up of software, which a DVD in part most definitely is. The same law forbids those tools necessary to exercise the aforementioned right.
One of the thirt-party encryption options for the PDF format did have ROT13 in it. Nost of the other security packages were almost equally as pathetic.
It may be possible, since I've seen copy-once disks. The point is Hollywood didn't even consider our rights at all. They tried to lock things down to increase their profits, just look at the failed DIVX (the disks, not the compression format) for the ultimate expression of their greed. Luckily the public rejected that. They even added region coding to increase profits at our expense. Don't buy the BS about theater release timings, or why would Wizard of Oz and Casablanca be region-coded? The whole format is designed to make us good little consumer eunuchs. Luckily we have the technology to reattach what was cut off.
They assert a need for "balance" when, in fact, they want the scale tipped entirely toward themselves.
No, we just don't want our current rights stripped. Even look at the origins of DeCSS, it was designed so the author could watch legally purchased DVDs on a Linux machine. And a program to provide such simple functionality is illegal.
BTW, have you thought of another problem of the DMCA? Constitutionally, copyrights are for a limited term (although Congress keeps extending them retroactively, creating essentially an unlimited term). If all unsanctioned format reading tools are illegal, how will we access works if they ever do come into the public domain? We will keep getting charged to view something that's free. The defense that the software is designed to gain access to public domain works won't hold, because that same software can access copyrighted works too if they are protected by the same schemes as the public domain works.
And I still love how Hollywood portrays its customers as the #1 threat, while factories in Asia are turning out pirated DVDs by the millions. It's all about profit margins in a partially outdated business model.
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