I can sort of understand rather less-than-accurate reporting from "reliable" news sources such as Slashdot but when Reuters and the BBCcontinue propagating RIAA and MPAA myths I get rather upset.
Why do journalists find CSS so difficult to understand? It is nothing other than an obfuscation mechanism (I find it hard to describe a 40-bit key as encryption these days) to ensure that only licensed DVD players can reproduce a "protected" DVD. These are the players which comply, amongst other things, with the mandatory "zoning" which, in theory, allows film studios to time the releases in the USA, Europe and Asia according to schedules of their liking.
What did this terrible DeCSS do? It allowed its author to view DVDs which he had bought on his Linux box by effectively cracking the codes of the Windows DVD player software he had and using those to decode the CSS information in an equivalent piece of Linux software. Without entering into the legalities of the matter the whole point of DeCSS was to be able to read DVDs in a "non MPAA sanctioned" DVD player.
What has the above got to do with "illegal copies"? Nothing whatsoever. A relative of mine has been working in the VHS (and now DVD) duplication industry for years and they know full well how pirate copies are made: a master is taken to a friendly duplication studio which then churns out thousands in the space of a day.
Do they "crack" CSS? Of course not! They make a bit-by-bit copy of the DVD, inclusive of all the CSS data so much that if they duplicate a zone 1 DVD it will only be usable on zoned DVD players which support zone 1.
Both the BBC and Reuters claim that DeCSS is instead used for copying DVDs illegally. It might well be the case but it is really a rather inefficient way of doing it: why read the DVD in the first place, decode it and then burn it again when you could just make a higher quality bit-for-bit copy of it?
Let us use an analogy: claiming that CSS protects the DVD from illegal copies is the same as claiming that an Arabic language newspaper is protected from copying by a european on a photocopier by the fact that it is written in Arabic as if not being able to read something precludes you from copying it. Alternatively the more literature-oriented might consider the idea that Joyce's Ulysses can only be copied if stream of consciousness literature is understood by the reader.
So the bottom line is that what the DeCSS author did is the equivalent of learning Arabic or completing a modern english literature course which I am pretty confident is not necessary to opearate a photocopy machine.
Posted by arrigo at January 6, 2004 09:44 AM