Feds Continue To Consider Linux Users Criminals For Watching DVDs 423
An anonymous reader sent in a link to an article in Wired about the latest DMCA loophole hearing. Bad news: the federal government rejected requests that would make console modding and breaking DRM on DVDs to watch them legal. So, you dirty GNU/Linux hippies using libdvdcss better watch out: "Librarian of Congress James Billington and Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante rejected the two most-sought-after items on the docket, game-console modding and DVD cracking for personal use and 'space shifting.' Congress plays no role in the outcome. The regulators said that the controls were necessary to prevent software piracy and differentiated gaming consoles from smart phones, which legally can be jailbroken. ... On the plus side, the regulators re-authorized jailbreaking of mobile phones. On the downside, they denied it for tablets, saying an 'ebook reading device might be considered a tablet, as might a handheld video game device.'"
So you can jailbreak a phone, but if it's 1" larger and considered a "tablet" you are breaking the law.
Re:duh (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't see any properly licensed dvd software being offered for sale for linux systems. Seems like it is a market that needs to be filled.
Re:duh (Score:5, Interesting)
Not so fast (Score:5, Interesting)
I've bought a dozen retail DVD players (standalone and PC) over the years, each of which came with a license either in the form of internal firmware or standalone software. I have two DVD drives still in use, both in Linux PCs. I should have plenty of licenses - if that's what they in fact are. The idea that I can hold a dozen licenses and yet not be authorized to play legally obtained content on two surviving drives because someone in the MPAA doesn't like my completely legal operating system is an abomination of logic, reason, and ethics.
Re:duh (Score:3, Interesting)
There was plenty of demand. They would not sell it retail, but only to OEMs.
What this is really about. (Score:5, Interesting)
This has nothing to do with copyright. That is a strawman.
This is really about destroying open computing systems, which is an obstacle to building a police state.
The idea is to lock down, data, and technology and only allow it to be in the hands of anyone who has an approved license.
This means ebooks, technology instruction, mathematics or anything with critical independent thinking which is critical to a free society.
Right now they are testing the waters.
They will never stop until they get either everyone dead, what they want or they themselves are destroyed.
Many of these people are at the point of media control and propaganda, including Ted Turner which is one of the most diabolical globalists I can think of in the areas of information control and dissemination/disinformation and programming.
These people are incredibly arrogant and brag that they think you should be dead, and that watching anything else except Globalist News Channels on T.V. makes you a radical and a terrorist.
They continually enforce the ideas of nullification of anying except communism and fascism with constant messages driving home the fact that you cannot own _anything_ you buy, you are not permitted to use _any_ information unless it is authorized by they themselves.
These people have access to military hardware and advanced weaponry to enforce their brutal tyranny with anything from SWAT teams entering homes to execute any who resist if they are found simply copying or downloading DVD's.
They are incredibly dangerous people and they become more dangerous by the hour.
-Hack
Re:duh (Score:5, Interesting)
It's my property. I bought it. It is a thing. There is no license.
THAT was adjudicated for books over 100 years ago.
Me using my own personal property should not be considered illegal or immoral.
SO what. Bypassing DRM to view a DVD is LEGAL Now (Score:5, Interesting)
Thanks to a little known case against GE, it is now legal to break DRM to watch a move or play a game.
http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/07/23/29099.htm [courthousenews.com]
>Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the (Digital Millennium Copyright Act's) anti-circumvention provision," Judge Garza wrote for the New Orleans-based court.
"The DMCA prohibits only forms of access that would violate or impinge on the protections that the Copyright Act otherwise affords copyright owners."
This referred to GE cracking a hardware dongle to use software. If that's not a violation of the DMCA, then nothing that simply enables use is a violation.
Interoperability clause (Score:5, Interesting)
Exclusion directly from the DMCA, emphasis (boldface and italics) added:
The purpose of DeCSS is not to infringe copyright. It is in order to be able to use the content one OWNS (yes, you OWN that copy, just as you OWN a book). That some use it to infringe copyright by redistributing works they do not have the right to distribute is beside the point. The primary purpose of DeCSS is interoperability. Period.
What part of running software (the DVD) on Linux-based systems is not interoperability?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They told me... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, "toe the line" is the standard expression for conformance to ideologies or rule-sets, however "Towing the Line" could be seen as a clever modernized variant whereby you not only conform, but then drag those lines of rhetoric into your Slashdot posts.