Random Access - Monday, March 19, 2001Copy Right?
Let's protect freedom of speech by suing everybody who disagrees...By Chris Gulker
So, I have this $750 problem.
I've got a shelf full of DVDs. I love, and collect, movies about the future. There's Fritz Lang's 1926 silent masterpiece, Metropolis, and Kubrick's 2001, Ridley Scott's classic Blade Runner, William Gibson and Robert Longo's Johnny Mnemonic, The Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix and 25 more.
At an average of $25 a pop, that's $750. DVDs are great: the picture is excellent, the sound is thunderous, and they don't degrade with lots of playback, the way my VHS tapes have. Quality is not the problem.
Watching the movies at all is the problem. My wife, a movie buff, is not fond of seeing movies - my movies anyway - repeatedly (I am). So I usually watch them on my computer and wear headphones, rather than on the DVD player connected to our TV.
The problem has emerged as my wife spends more time in the evening surfing the Net - she inevitably uses our Macintosh, which means I'm using the other computer in our family room, a computer running a variant of BSD, a free UNIX-like operating system. There is a fine software DVD player on the Mac, but almost no way to play back DVDs on the BSD machine.
The BSD machine has a DVD drive, but it doesn't have player software. There is software that could play back the video on the disks, but the disks are encrypted. The disks are encrypted because the Motion Picture Association of America wants to protect copyright.
MPAA's constituents have an entity that licenses the decryption key and code - called CSS for Content Scramble System. The price is some $15,000 a year, a hefty fee, but affordable to large commercial enterprises who can spread the costs over thousands or millions of users.
Most of the software in the BSD world, however, is Open Source - free software built and maintained by volunteers. Volunteers already make a huge, unpaid effort, so it's unreasonable to expect them to personally pony up $15,000 in licensing fees as well.
So, many evenings I can't watch my DVDs. The same is true for everyone who has a computer that runs BSD or Linux - Linux alone is thought to have 3.5 million users.
This is a software problem, and given the 'just do it' nature of Open Source, it was not at all surprising that programmers reverse-engineered CSS.
CSS was, in fact, not very hard to reverse-engineer. A couple of programmers - one of whom was 16 at the time - figured it out in less than a day, creating a de-encryption program called DeCSS. They, and other Open Source collaborators, have since honed this code down to just a few lines (by comparison, most commercial software contains hundreds of thousands or millions of lines).
Which should have been good news for me. But, enter the Motion Picture Association of America, the trade group for the largest movie studios. MPAA arranged for one of the programmers - 16-year-old Norwegian Jon Johansen - to be arrested and his computer seized. MPAA later persuaded a New York judge to ban Web sites from so much as linking to the DeCSS code, on the grounds that it was a device for infringing copyright and promoting piracy.
Never mind that DVD movies are huge - bigger than most hard drives - and highly unlikely candidates for Napster. On my DSL line, it would take the better part of 3 days to download a single movie. DVD burners exist, but they're very expensive, and the blank DVD media costs $50 a disc - it's far cheaper to just buy the DVD.
There's also the fact that DeCSS doesn't abet the actual copying of the files. I typed a few characters into my BSD machine and it quite happily filled the hard drive with a copy of the film 'Johnny Mnemonic' all by itself, using the normal copy command. All DeCSS means is that I can actually watch my movie.
In a bizarre twist, an MPAA attorney recently sent a heavy-handed (and rather clueless) letter to a distinguished professor of computer science, Dr. David Touretzky, at Carnegie Mellon University, a premier U.S. engineering institution. MPAA threatened Dr. Touretzky's ISP with a lawsuit if they didn't immediately cut him off (Dr. Touretzky's ISP is the University).
Dr. Touretzky's crime was to assert that computer programming, including DeCSS, and particularly the source code for programs, is speech and thus subject to U.S. First Amendment protection. His site(1) - the DeCSS gallery - is a scholarly dissertation advancing the notion of programming as protected expression, with links to pictures of T-shirts with DeCSS code, audio files in which people dramatically read and sing the code, and other forms.
Which is bizarre because, for decades, MPAA has routinely championed free speech(2), particularly when Congress has looked askance at sex and violence in Hollywood films. And now, the same MPAA has filed some 70 lawsuits against teenagers, University professors and others for so much as even hyperlinking to discussions of DeCSS.
MPAA's strategy has been spectacularly successful - for its opponents: DeCSS turns up more than 77,000 mentions on the Google search engine, and Jon Johansen is an Open Source hero.
As they say in Hollywood, the only thing worse than bad publicity, is no publicity.
--
1. Touretzky, D. S. (2000) Gallery of CSS Descramblers. Available: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery, March 8, 2001.
2. Valenti, Jack (1995) speech before The Economic Club of Washington, September 28, 1995. Available: http://mpaa.org/jack/95/95_9_28.htm, March 8, 2001
Random Access | www.gulker.com | Help/Info
editor@gulker.com This page was last built with Frontier on a Macintosh on Mon, Mar 19, 2001 at 08:42:03.