DeCSS, crypto, law, and economics

Perry E. Metzger perry at piermont.com
Tue Jan 7 20:25:44 EST 2003


Nomen Nescio <nobody at dizum.com> writes:
> I don't see much evidence for this.  As you go on to admit, multi-region
> players are easily available overseas.

Sure, but they're generally "illegal". I can buy grey market
non-regioned players in the U.S. but the manufacturers are violating
within the intellectual property agreements that prevent such
behavior.

> You seem to be claiming that the
> industry's main goal was to protect zone locking when that is already
> being widely defeated.
> 
> Isn't it about a million times more probable that the industry's main
> concern was PEOPLE RIPPING DVDS AND TRADING THE FILES?

Without DeCSS, the piracy problem would have in no way been
improved. Even if you didn't want to use physical DVDs, it wouldn't
have been an issue. Ripping the raw bits encrypted bits from a DVD
drive is easy. From there, you just would have had to have built a
driver that pretended to be a DVD drive but actually read a chunk of
disk, and presto -- Windows DVD player software would be perfectly
happy aiding and abetting your piracy. For those that want physical
DVDs, the encryption of course prevented nothing at all -- bits are
bits.

No, what region coding did largely was allow the industry to try to
prevent grey market sales.

I don't know anyone who trades video files -- they're pretty big and
bulky. A song takes moments to download, but a movie takes many many
hours even on a high speed link. I have yet to meet someone who
pirates films -- but I know lots of hardened criminals who watch DVDs
on Linux and BSD. I'm one of these "criminals".

Many nights, I close the blinds and illegally use the computer I
lawfully paid for to view the DVDs I lawfully paid for. To do that, I
make use of DeCSS. My nice Unix based DVD player, ogle, needs it to
read the drive. A little later this evening I'll be watching an
episode of "I, Claudius" I bought and paid for, using this "criminal"
software combination. Hopefully no one will learn of my shamefully
immoral act. Please don't tell anyone.


-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com

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