DeCSS Arguments in CA Supreme Court Case

scubacuda writes "According to News.com, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer called DVD-cracking software DeCSS a tool for "breaking, entering and stealing" during a hearing before the California Supreme Court on Thursday. "The program DeCSS is a burglary tool," Lockyer told the judges, adding that the movie studios lose millions of dollars because of piracy over the Internet. (CopyLeft offers this "burglary tool" on a t-shirt)" If you've forgotten what this case is about, see EFF's page about it.

Again, you dont need DeCSS to copy a DVD

[Sigurd_Fafnersbane]

Again, you dont need DeCSS to copy a DVD, you need it to be able to decode its content.

Making a bit by bit copy of a DVD will play flawlessly in any DVD player, no problem. The problem comes when you want to build your own DVD player, then you need DeCSS.

CSS doesn't control Piracy

[More Trouble]

If you want to "pirate", aka make unauthorized copies, of a DVD, just image it. CSS doesn't hinder you one iota. That's not what it's for. It's for forcing users to use licensed players. And, more over, it's to force users to obey region encoding. Neither of these have anything to do with movie's intellectual property.

:w

Re:Again, you dont need DeCSS to copy a DVD

[Sigurd_Fafnersbane]

One could add that having DeCSS would enable you to rip a DVD and make a un-encrypted copy. In this respect it could be used for circumventing the copy protection. Nevertheless I will risk the claim that 99.9% of the people using DeCSS is doing so to watch DVDs they have purchased for their hard earned cash.

If you wanted a pirated version it is easier to download one than to make one yourself;-)

Not purchase: license

[John Jorsett]

Who's burglarizing who? I buy a car, I get the keys. Ford doesn't have the right to tell me where I can drive; I bought the car, and I bought its keys. If they come in and take the keys away from me, am I not the victim of burlary?


The industry's point of view (and backed up by law) is not that they've sold you something, but that you've bought a license. Which means that they get to tell you the terms by which you can use it.

Re:Not a PIRACY tool at all

[praedor]

To VIEW your DVDs on your computer generally requires decryption software to view it. THIS was the main reason DeCSS was written, remember? So that people could watch the legally purchased and owned DVDs on their totally legal and legit linux systems.

Copying is also legal and legit for backup purposes. Period. This you CAN do with the correct burner in bit-by-bit manner but such are not in general custody of most users. Copying is peripheral to DeCSS in the first place, just FUD-talk by MPAA criminals and their mob lawyers.

Re:Right...

[Shenkerian]

I believe many, if not all, states restrict the sales of lockpicks and key-cutting machines. So there is precedent. I don't think it's being appropriately applied here, though.

Re:Right...

[ichimunki]

Where does the MPAA come up with this crap?

Well, the best part is that copyright infringement is not burglary. It's copyright infringement. That's why there are separate laws to cover each kind of offense. :)

Re:Again, you dont need DeCSS to copy a DVD

[stratjakt]

You can copy the vob file to your HDD and play it back with powerdvd or other licensed DVD playback softwares.

So you could go ahead and trade around the encrypted movie and watch it, no problem.

Even with a super duper mega unbreakable encryption, you could still framegrab the video and encode it into divx or whatever. You're downsampling and losing quality either way, it's really six of one, half dozen of the other.

This doesnt stop movie trading, it just prevents the MPAA from collecting CSS licensing for DVD playback devices, and takes away their power to impose region locks on the movies.

It's a strawman argument to protect their artificial regional targetted marketting.

Re:Again, you dont need DeCSS to copy a DVD

[Poeir]

The problem here is that consumer DVD burners can't burn to track 0, where the keys to the encryption are kept; so when you burn a bit-by-bit copy, it's encrypted with no key, and therefore useless.

I don't have any idea what a professional DVD burner would cost.

Re:Doesn't it seem odd...

[scubacuda]

While funny (and applicable), that story is bogus [snopes.com].

Claim: Questioned about the wisdom of teaching Boy Scouts to use firearms, a US General points out the difference between being equipped to do something and doing it.

Status: False.

Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1999]

This is an extract of an National Public Radio (NPR) interview between a female broadcaster and US Army Lieutenant General Reinwald about sponsoring a Boy Scout Troop on his military installation.

Interviewer: "So, LTG Reinwald, what are you going to do with these young boys on their adventure holiday?"

LTG Reinwald: "We're going to teach them climbing, canoeing, archery, and shooting."

Interviewer: "Shooting! That's a bit irresponsible, isn't it?"

LTG Reinwald: "I don't see why, they'll be properly supervised on the range."

Interviewer: "Don't you admit that this is a terribly dangerous activity to be teaching children?"

LTG Reinwald: "I don't see how, we will be teaching them proper range discipline before they even touch a firearm."

Interviewer: "But you're equipping them to become violent killers."

LTG Reinwald: "Well, you're equipped to be a prostitute, but you're not one, are you?"

End of the interview

Origins: As great a tale as this is, it's pure fabrication. It began life in 1999, purportedly about an "LTG Reinwald" of the US Army. In 2001 it reappeared, this time attributed to "Marine Corps General Reinwald."

The U.S. Army denies that there is a Lieutenant General Reinwald and chalks the whole thing up as a hoax. (Which is as logic dictated all along; if an armed forces spokesperson ever gave voice to a sexist remark likening a female interviewer to a prostitute, that officer would soon be called upon to make a very public apology as well as face charges within ranks for conduct unbecoming.)

National Public Radio had this to say about the matter:

We are aware of an erroneous story posted on the Free Republic Website, and possibly elsewhere, which mentions a supposed interview between an unnamed NPR reporter and a U.S Army Lieutenant General Reinwald. The story is false -- the dialogue mentioned was not an NPR interview, and it never aired on any NPR program.

Those who like their guns and who believe responsible gun ownership begins with teaching young people the right way to handle firearms at an early age have a great fondness for this story. As well they should, because this anecdote illustrates in a humorous way the difference between having the ability to do something and that ability dictating life choices.

The "Reinwald" story existed as a joke as far back as October 1997 when it appeared on a number of web pages in the following form:

Excerpt from a recent live radio interview on one of the regional Welsh stations:

A female newscaster is interviewing the leader of a Youth club:

Interviewer: So, Mr. Jones, what are you going to do with these children on this adventure holiday?

Mr Jones: We're going to teach them climbing, abseiling, canoeing, archery, shooting...

Interviewer: Shooting! That's a bit irresponsible isn't it?

Jones: I don't see why, they'll be properly supervised on the range.

Interviewer: Don't you admit that this is a terribly dangerous activity to be teaching children?

Jones: I don't see how, we will be teaching them proper range discipline before they even touch a firearm.

Interviewer: But you're equipping them to become violent killers.

Jones: Well, you're equipped to be a prostitute but you're not one are you?

Needless to say, the interview was terminated almost immediately.

Notice the differences that have taken place between the two tellings:

* "Abseiling" has been taken out of the Americanized version (probably because whoever altered the text didn't know it was a r

Re:Good point.

[Dante333]

And the DMCA. It passed 99-0 in the Senate back in 1998.

Re:This again???

[red_gnom]

"Lockyer told the judges, adding that the movie studios lose millions of dollars because of piracy over the Internet."

Well, the statistics do not seem to back this statement up. It looks that the movie industry is doing better then ever:

YEARLY BOX OFFICE [boxofficemojo.com]

In year 2002 they grossed $9,135 millions.
In year 2000 $7,661 millions.
In year 1996 $5,911 millions.
So the number of downloads mast be increasing their profits, and if it is so, I think they should repay some money to the downloading community for advertising and marketing activities.

Re:Hrmm

[corbettw]

Actually, all a contract needs is an agreement by two parties. For a good overview of contract law, see the Cornell Law Library's overview [cornell.edu].

Briefly, a contract is a legally enforcable promise between two people. The terms of the contract can be pretty much anything, all it takes is both parties' agreement to the terms. If a DVD publisher sells you a DVD with the promise you can play it for your own personal use, with the provisions that you not gain financially by it and that you only play it on previously approved devices, that's fine. Your agreement to those terms is sealed when you promise to pay $20 for that DVD, and then do so.

Re:Again, you dont need DeCSS to copy a DVD

[Alsee]

I don't have any idea what a professional DVD burner would cost.

With all of the competing formats it's a real pain to search out the proper drives. You need a drive that can write DVD-R(A). The A stands for authoring. I don't have a price quote on them, but I'm pretty sure these drives can be had for under $1000 now. There are cheap drives around $100 to $200 that claim "authoring", but it's hard to verify whether or not they actually support DVD-R(A).

Any time you see DVD-R it generally actually means DVD-R(G). the G stands for general. The (G) discs are crippled in that one of the sectors is destroyed. I really hate industry conspiracies that cripple products. There is no reason to ever buy a disk with a destroyed sector over an un damaged disk. Yet no manufacturers sell undamaged DVD-R(G) disks. Everyone buys damaged disks because that's all that's on the shelves.

You need to get DVD-R(A) disks. These use a different dye that can't be recorded on by "ordinary" DVD burner lasers. They are usually a several dollars a piece because very few are made/sold. I did once come across a dozzen or so on e-bay for under a dollar each.

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Trade secret law

[Hamster Lover]

After reading the article (!), I stepped over to Google and looked up the law regarding trade secrets.

WHAT FACTORS DETERMINE WHETHER SOMETHING IS A "TRADE SECRET"?

the extent to which the information is known outside the business;

the extent to which it is known to those inside the business, i.e., by the employees;

the precautions taken by the holder of the trade secret to guard the secrecy of the information;
the savings effected and the value to the holder in having the information as against competitors;
the amount of effort or money expended in obtaining and developing the information;

the amount of time and expense it would take for others to acquire and duplicate the information.

Ok, so how does any of this relate to the dissemination of a trade secret? As near as I can tell from my scouring on the web, reverse engineering a trade secret is a complete defense, meaning if the information was obtained by independant means then there is not much you can do about it. With DeCSS, the information was reverse engineered and became common knowledge so there is no basis for trade secret protection anymore. I don't see how the MPAA has any case here for an apparent trade secret that was legally reverse engineered and the information placed in the public domain.

What do I know, I am not a lawyer.