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Encryption Security

CSS Decryption Library Released by Videolan.org 82

Posted by CmdrTaco from the let-it-all-hang-out dept.
javilon writes "libdvdcss is the cross-platform library used by vlc, the VideoLAN Client, to access DVDs with transparent CSS decryption. It is the first library based on the vlc codebase, but others are planned. VideoLAN is a project of students from the École Centrale, Paris. Coming from a research background they could have some legal coverage to fight the RIAA in France. " VLC is currently the best DVD player for Linux. apt-get install vlc-gtk for you deb heads. Check it out. It's not 100%, but its pretty damn good.
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CSS Decription Library Released by Videolan.org More

CSS Decription Library Released by Videolan.org

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  • Re:VLC is really great (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    On my machine, xine currently beats vlc by a little bit in terms of CPU usage. With the new video-output code soon to be commited to vlc, videolan is in fact lower than xine. Also, xine seems to become corrupted in between chapters changes at an alarming rate - a problem I haven't experienced with vlc.

  • Re:Is that a fact? (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19, 2001 @08:35AM (#140953)
    You should take a look at a newer version of vlc - I submitted a patch to allow full-screen xvideo playback a few versions ago. libdvdcss has many advantages over libcss, including not requiring the region to be set on a DVD drive as well as being supported on more platforms (windows, BeOS, linux, *BSD)
  • Can anyone explain in simple terms how this works? I don't see how you can decrypt the movie with er.. decrypting the movie.
  • I quote from the libdvdcss page (BTW, the Link has magically disappeared from the slashdot article.. is /. afraid of being the next in line behind 2600 for linking to DeCSS?)

    "libdvdcss is a simple library designed for accessing DVDs like a block device without having to bother about the decryption."

    That makes it sound like it does it without decrypting.
  • Really? Videolan is the best? I tried it a few weeks ago, and it just crashed. I didn't really pursue it because I already had a <A HREF="http://xine.sourceforge.net/">the best DVD player</A> hat worked on the first try ;)
  • Not that I know how to spell, or use HTML, or anything...
  • Doesn't VideoLAN support Xv? That'd be a whole lot faster if it does.
    _____

    Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
  • Impressive. Yet another mistake that the MPAA and friends will be kicking themselves for, I'd guess?
    _____

    Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
  • How can it allow the reading of DVDs from any region on a region-locked (RPC-II) DVD-ROM drive? I was under the impression that the hardware just wouldn't allow it, but as long as you had a (slightly) older (i.e., pre-RPC-II) DVD-ROM drive, you could read a disc from any region, as well as RPC-II drives with patched firmware.
    _____

    Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
  • Artists get dicked by the labels and distributors, making mere pennies per album sold in the store. Bands go on tour not just to promote the album (which predominantly helps the labels), but also to actually make some real coin, as a much larger chunk from the concert proceeds end up in the artists pockets. Why do you think so many bands create thier own labels as SOON as they can? It isn't a hobby. They're cutting out useless deadweight in order to make more coin for themselves. It's after they reach that point and start playing the "big money game" is when they start getting uppity about napster. (PS - Lars, I hope you get eye cancer you lame pussified pantywaist excuse of an ex-metal icon)

    As for digital distribution, sure, I've napstered stuff. Much of it sucked and was subsequently turf. The ones that didn't suck I went to the store and purchased when I could (One album, Jethro Tull's "Songs from the Wood" took me two years to find). If I didn't have napster for those occasions, I'da ended up buying albums that suck based on one or two good singles. Maybe that's what is really pissing them off... they can't make 'sucker sales' to people based on a good single any more.

    If there were an online store that'd whip up CD images for me from original media (ie: not sampled to mp3 and back again) at a reasonable price, I'd probably buy my music from them and love 'em for it.

    --
    rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)

  • This is legal in Europe, but not for long. The EU recently passed a multinational-sponsored Directive on Copyright, which is even more draconian than the DMCA. This requires EU member states to criminalise circumvention devices, giving them no leeway; member states are expected to ratify this (and it's extremely unlikely that the usual protests from local academics and napatistas will persuade any nation to buck the EU). Once it's passed, this will disappear, or move to one of the rapidly dwindling number of nations without a DMCA-analogue law.

  • Subtitles without hardware? (Score:3)

    by acb ( 2797 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2001 @05:25PM (#140963) Homepage
    Would VideoLAN be able to do subtitles on a machine without hardware overlaying? I've been unable to get subtitles working with Xine on my Riva TNT2 card; apparently Xine's subtitle feature requires hardware overlaying, which is only supported by drivers for a few high-end cards.
  • Most RPC2 drives only do the region check once, during a key exchange process that libdvdcss manages to skip. Any subsequent access doesn't get blocked.

    --

  • HuH? (Score:2)

    by djweis ( 4792 )
    How similar is a Description library to a Decryption library?
  • Movie acting is becoming obselete anyway. In a few years people will be able to make their own movies a la Shrek.
  • You get your IFO spec and code it. Oh right, there isn't one. Atleast not a complete one. It's not quite that easy.
  • Because the information for the menus is stored in the IFO files on the disc. These files have no official documentation available, and very little has been reverse engineered. It's a very difficult task to reverse engineer a file format about which you know very little.
  • I'm sure this is redundant, but I found vlc to be the easiest way to play DVD's on Linux. All I did was make a symbolic link from /dev/dvd to my dvd player, ./configure, make, make install. That's it. Plays everything I've thrown at it (encrypted as well). Xine didn't work for me, neither did oms. Not to mention the pages of install instructions for those packages, and the software required.

    Great job with vlc!

  • Silly. (Score:1)

    by mcc ( 14761 )
    There are some missing steps in your logic..

    Your post contains the following implicit assumption:

    In a state of things where industries based on the sale of intellectual property are fundamentally unable to prevent person-to-person piracy of their works, it automatically follows that no consumers will buy any intellectual property legitimately (or, at least, so few consumers will buy intellectual property legitimately that given the current cost of production it will be impossible for any such industries to turn a profit).
    This does not follow. Please provide some form of justification for this assumption, or i will be forced to completely ignore the last paragraph of your post.

    I *could* make some comment on the way your post seems to assume that the recording industry and the RIAA are all the same thing and that is good for one is good for the others, but it isn't worth the bother.


  • This code, along with patches for OMS an Xine, allow RPC II drives to play dvds without ever setting the region code. Check http://www.prout.be/dvd/

  • This is a pretty novel approach to DVD-decryption. I'm not sure as to the legality of this, but I do know that the server where this code resides is in France, maybe they have a saner intellectual property policy?

    I really think that with this release the folks at videolan.org [videolan.org] have surpassed the OMS [linuxvideo.org] project, which also had an aim of bringing DVD video to the desktop.

  • Well, it's an open-source method of transparently extracting DVD data probably based on DeCSS. Last time I checked, 2600 lost their DeCSS case to the MPAA and unfortunately were forced to remove their links to the DeCSS code.

    Of course the question here is, "Is it legal?" I didn't even infer it was illegal, I just wanted to know how close to illegal it is, or if there was some kind of legislation in France that permitted this sort of thing. If "people" are stupid enough to associate "libdvdcss" with "illegal" just because of something they read on Slashdot, they'll also believe that Natalie Portman has been petrified, everyone should have grits in their pants, and that all your base are belong to CATS.

    WARNING: Slashdot is for entertainment purposes only. Any information found on these message boards is probably partially incorrect, mostly incorrect, or completely fabricated. As a matter of fact, you've probably just imagined the whole Slashdot thing. Go home now.
  • Exactly, and that is where the DeCSS fiasco may die, if we only let it.

    If the DeCSS fiasco was simply a matter of "letting it die", the issue would have been dead for months now.

    People are stupid enough to associate with libdvdcss with "illegal" when they hear people asking "Is that illegal?"

    Well, I never said "Is that illegal?"

    IanCarlson: I'm not sure as to the legality of this.

    All this means is that the legality should be looked into futher. I sure do hope that the code doesn't infringe on the intellectual property rights of a company in the MPAA, but if it does, it should be noted for the record.

    It is silly to think that if you don't question the software's legality, the MPAA lawyers won't either.

  • bleh (Score:3)

    by complex ( 18458 ) <complex@s p l it.org> on Tuesday June 19, 2001 @08:27AM (#140975) Homepage
    remind me to not vote for this article for roblimo's 'best online article' sponsorship contest. it took approx. three rereads to understand it at all, and the end result was equivalent to an ice cream headache.

    complex
  • Well, I just grabbed all the source, and while I realize it's early alpha and all that it still seems extremely linux-centric. It bugs me when something is plugged for many different operating systems when I (admittedly not a coder, but I'm not totally clueless) can't compile it for the life of me on a recent stable FreeBSD release. This might not be such a problem if there was any kind of documentation, of any sort, anywhere, regarding other operating systems.

    So while this product looks really slick, not all of us can bear the thought of slapping RH 7.1 on our boxes, which is unfortunate. oh well :)

  • 5:09pm - Saving from http://www.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/0.2.80/vl c-0.2.80.tar.bz2 at 8,5 k/s

    5:11pm - Saving from http://www.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/0.2.80/vl c-0.2.80.tar.bz2 at 0,1 k/s

  • "RIAA in France." Recording Industry Association of America... In France... That alone is incredibly silly

    Like, uh, French fries?

  • Comment removed (Score:5)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2001 @08:49AM (#140979)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • "RIAA in France." Recording Industry Association of America... In France... That alone is incredibly silly

    Like "AOL Canada" and "AT&T Canada".
  • The problem with this sort of thinking, is that it does no real good. Sure, it may get you somewhere you're happier, but it does nothing to fix the underlying problem. You can't run and hide from everything. We have what's called the "fight or flight" response when we're threated. Our bodies prepare to do either, should they need to. It's not just the "flight" response, there are two options.

    If I'm a wolf looking for a place to sleep, and every time I lay down some other wolf comes and scares me away, I'll never get a place to stay. Sometimes you have to stand your ground.
    "So, go somewhere where there's no wolves to bother you."
    Sounds good in theory, but it's gonna be awfully lonely come mating season... ;-)

    The bottom line is, if you simply move to another country when some corporation does something you don't like, then they've won. You're giving them the power to push you out. If all the people who didn't like the MPAA moved to different countries, they'd have no opposition from within the country and no problem doing whatever they want.

    -------------------------------------------
    I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
  • There task list is numbered in hex ;-)

    Here is an example...

    Task: 0x5e
    Difficulty: Hard
    Urgency: Wishlist
    Description: All-in-one interface window
    Find a way for the interface plugin to provide video output capabilities
    and have it display the stream in the same window.
    Status: Todo
  • "RIAA in France." Recording Industry Association of America... In France... That alone is incredibly silly

    Like, uh, French fries?

    You mean pommes frites? "French fries" isn't that much of a stretch.

  • And it took me a few parses to figure out what CmdrTaco meant by "CSS Description Library" in the title. I can't wait to get this software so I can *describe* all my DVDs. Yay!
  • It is a 10Mb ethernet switched network with an ATM backbone made of 3Com stuff.

    The format DVD uses is mpeg2 so making a decoder for DVD is not really more complicated.
  • I can't agree more. Videolan is the best DVD player now available for Unix and BeOS. I tried other alternatives like Xine, but Videolan looks more stable and needs less CPU time than other players.
    Great work !

  • Re:Live by the sword... (Score:3)

    by MustardMan ( 52102 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2001 @10:09AM (#140987)
    I think your statements on music are good, but the movie one is kinda only half right. The majority of the big movie dollars is in the theater sales, not the home movies. Actors in a straight-to-video movie hardly make tens of millions of dollars for their performances.

  • Whether we like it or not, many decisions are made by people's emotions. People are stupid enough to associate with libdvdcss with "illegal" when they hear people asking "Is that illegal?" The judges who make the crucial decisions on cases like this are not techinically-minded, and often are not as impartial as they pretend to be. It's a fact of life.

    Last time I checked, 2600 lost their DeCSS case to the MPAA and unfortunately were forced to remove their links to the DeCSS code.

    Exactly, and that is where the DeCSS fiasco may die, if we only let it.
    ------

  • STOP IT! (Score:3)

    by Dwonis ( 52652 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2001 @04:48PM (#140989)
    I'm not sure as to the legality of this

    I want all of Slashdot to STOP SAYING THAT! The last thing we need is people associating "libdvdcss" with "illegal". The more this gets engrained in people's heads, the more likely it will be to actually be outlawed.
    ------

  • I agree, i have Xine working great on my machine, fullscreen and windowed xv output with perfect audio sync.

    I also have it playing back through my Hollywood+ after using the dxr3 patches. Audio sync is not working perfectly yet, so i wouldn't use it as a replacement for my hardware DVD deck, but practically no CPU usage and a perfect picture on my external TV is awesome.

    Xine also plays DivX and other AVI formats if you supply it with win32 codecs, which earns it top marks in my books.

    While I will try VideoLAN at some point, i can't imagine how it could be particularly 'better' than Xine, since xine works so damn well with almost all my video clips.
  • Actually, I beg to differ. Xine [sourceforge.net] is currently the BEST DVD player for Linux, and supports Xvideo playback in both windowed and fullscreen mode, which videolan does not. Further, LiViD release libcss long ago and works with a libcss plugin for Xine, so this isn't the first time this has been out for the public to grab, though I suppose it might not be based on the same thing. Regardless, that was quite a declaration, sir.
  • It was a lot easier than Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech from "Romeo and Juliet," which I had to memorize back in High School -- that was 96 lines of Middle English

    Okay, before the self-pity express takes off here, let's clarify a couple things about old-fashioned european languages.

    First off, the English language as we know it has only existed for a few hundred years. Before it came "Olde Englishe," which was basically German with some French vocab thrown in (hence, the term "Anglo-saxon" to describe englishmen). It was really only English insofar as it was the language spoken in the place called England. But basically nothing like the language we know.

    Middle English arose in the 13th and 14th centuries, when some particularly English idioms found their way into the vernacular. While you might recognize a passage written in middle english, you'd almost certainly need footnotes (at the rate of about 2 per line) to really get the gist of what was being said. For comparison, pick up a copy of the "original," non-modernized "Canterbury Tales" by Chaucer.

    By the time Shakespeare was even born, Gutenberg was dead and the printing press was revolutionizing the way people thought of literature. Because identical copies of a text could be distributed ad infinitum, the language more or less became standardized, and eventually canonized into the Oxford English Dictionary. This is, more or less, the language we know today as "English." There were still some spelling issues to work out, and of course contemporary idioms always change, but the essential grammar and indeed much of the vocabulary has remained the same ever since.

    So no, you didn't have to memorize any "middle english" to play Mercutio. If you got a printed copy of the play, you didn't even have trouble reading the glyphs, which might be a legitimate complaint of a modern Shakespeare scholar poring over the frist Folio. Sorry if you don't know what an "alderman" or "philome" are, but you could probably find out with a good dictionary. So, I'm sure you're a great actor, but PLEASE don't go around bragging about memorizing a hundred lines in an ancient language just because you had to read the freakin' queen mab speech.

    ---

  • Hmmm... I tried this just the other day on my Athlon 900 / Geforce2 / 256MB ram / Kernel 2.4.5 / GCC 2.95.3 / GLibC 2.2.3 / SLD 1.2, and it was extremely slow.

    Anyone know what would cause this?

    I was using SDL for the output.

  • Sure there is one.. just that you're not getting it!

    How else would all the proprietary players exist and work as well as they actually do?


    --

  • How similar is a Description library to a Decryption library?

    It's natural you would miss this subtle technological point, but it's importance cannot be overstated.

    The exciting fundamental breakthrough from France, even more earth-shattering than croissants, is that you can view Britney Spears latest pirated home videos (seen advertised the world over via email) using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

    I hope this helps to clarify matters.

  • Well, I meant MPAA, my mistake...
    But if the guy who wrote DeCSS could get arrested because of pressure from the EEUU you could get the same happening here...

  • Re:Saw libdvdcss on Freshmeat.net... (Score:5)

    by OmegaDan ( 101255 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2001 @08:28AM (#140997) Homepage
    Imagine the prospect of france being on the right end of an argument!
  • Funny... apt-get isn't working. Oh wait, I'm on a windows machine. Let me try my Mac. Nope. Nothing. How about this OpenBSD machine? 'Fraid not. I think my friend has a Red Hat system around here somewhere... argh... still not working. I guess it's a Solaris thing, then...

    Yes, I know... I really do use Debian myself... don't mod this as redundant (overrated, maybe, but not troll or flamebait ;) )

  • But the CSS crack is old news by now.

    You're missing the point. This isn't "wow, the VideoLAN team managed to crack CSS with a cryptic ninety-line Perl script that you pipe from /dev/dvd into /tmp/obscenelylargefile." This is "wow, the VideoLAN team managed to create a portable, simple, well-documented CSS decryption library that lets you access the DVD as a block device without even caring if it's encrypted."

    Yes, the fact that CSS can be cracked is old news. The fact that there's a very high-quality library to do so is not.

  • It bugs me when something is plugged for many different operating systems when I (admittedly not a coder, but I'm not totally clueless) can't compile it for the life of me on a recent stable FreeBSD release. This might not be such a problem if there was any kind of documentation, of any sort, anywhere, regarding other operating systems.

    They aren't plugging it for many different operating systems. For each of their ports, they have a brief description of what is working and what isn't. In some cases, some pretty vital features are missing, and they aren't hiding that. VLC ports: BeOS [videolan.org], BSD [videolan.org], Linux [videolan.org], MacOS X [videolan.org], QNX RTOS [videolan.org], Solaris [videolan.org], and Windows [videolan.org]. Click on any of those to get the current status of the port. In the case of BSD, it says encrypted DVD input is untested. So you've got a pretty limited selection of DVDs you can get to work, unless someone has managed to get that code working (it is possible they just haven't updated that page).

  • whowhatwhere?! (Score:5)

    by Lord Omlette ( 124579 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2001 @08:17AM (#141001) Homepage
    "RIAA in France." Recording Industry Association of America... In France... That alone is incredibly silly, but what does the RIAA have to do with CSS? I thought that was MPAA?

    Peace,
    Amit
    ICQ 77863057
  • It does decrypt. It just does it for you so you don't have to worry about it (i.e. it is "transparent").
  • This is precisely the movie I've been trying to make work in my DVD player for quite some time now. I always get these scrambled green things and a SIGSEGV. So far, no cow. Here's to another attempt.
  • As Anonymous Coward already pointed out, the subtitles work better with the libcss-plugin. I got it working with with the older css-patch as well, but the text was in green.
    I look forward to try vlc again now; hope it's still progressing under BeOS too - what we really need is cross platform DVD playback. Not that it isn't nice with good DVD playback in Linux and *BSD, but I really like what VideoLAN is doing for other OSs. Now port it to AtheOS too. :-)
  • Like "AOL Canada" and "AT&T Canada".

    At least they're on the same continent. It's AOL UK that has me boggled.

  • Movie acting is becoming obselete anyway. In a few years people will be able to make their own movies a la Shrek. You mean I get to meet Cameron Dias? Sweet!

  • Umm... shouldn't it be... "If he will give us food and water and shelter and bend forward and grab his ankles in the nude, he may have software that plays DVD discs!"

    VALENTI: Go and tell your master that we have been charged by God with a sacred quest. If he will give us food and shelter for the night he may have software that plays DVD discs!

  • You have penis mightiers?

  • Excellent work (Score:3)

    by uriyan ( 176677 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2001 @08:48AM (#141009)

    I think that this is an excellent project in general, not just in the input library. It already has much functionality, it is developed an coordinated thoroughly, and they even gave thought to porting their player to other platforms.

    Notate bene also the fact that they have not tried to make themselves known, in spite of the fact that they have a superior product, contrary to the massive media coverage some other, significantly less successfull developments are drawing.

    Also mark the fact that the students in questions are as far as I can tell college students. Writing a DVD player is an exceedingly difficult task; I just hope that my school would spawn projects more significant than a pocker game simulator.

    To sum up, bene factum.

  • Better yet, AOL Germany. I might actually end up going with them since T-Online (the phone company's ISP) stopped offering flat rate.

    Firethorn
  • Hwat we gardena linux leodhan, in gardagum.

  • Clarification (Score:4)

    by Erasmus Darwin ( 183180 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2001 @08:17AM (#141012)
    It took me a few parses to figure out what they meant by "transparent CSS decryption". I kept wondering what the hell "transparent CSS" was and whether it was related to regular CSS.

    After browsing through the pages, it seems that they mean that it's something to let you transparently decrypt CSS. The library lets you access a DVD as a block device, as if it didn't have any encryption at all. The page for the library itself is here [videolan.org].

  • Sure, they can win small, isolated victories. But even if 2600 lost, do you think that would even begin to stop the spread of DeCSS-related software, or the people who made it possible? No way! It would probably do quite the opposite (mirroring campaigns, etc).

    2600 may be a casualty of war, but there are a hell of a lot more angry hackers on the battlefield, and they can't target 'em all.

    -John
  • First off, VLC is pretty cool. I tried it a while back, and it worked almost perfectly. Just like a DVD player should, under any OS. Hats off to its creators.

    But the CSS crack is old news by now. While the MPA (not the RIAA) is entangled in futile litigation, we're watching movies. We have been for a long time. Dave Touretsky's gallery of CSS descramblers (http://cs.cmu.edu/~dst) has grown to an enormous size, there are several Copyleft anti-DVD CCA shirts at every LUG meeting, and the algorithm is very well understood by now. I propose that we consider this a victory of information and move on to other fronts... There's plenty else to fight.

    -John

  • Actors in a straight-to-video movie hardly make tens of millions of dollars for their performances.

    Perhaps that's because straight-to-video movies generally aren't very good, and that's why they were s-t-v movies in the first place? Theatrical releases function as much for advertising for the video release as they do for making money in the first place.

  • VLC is currently the best DVD player for MacOS X, considering Apple still hasn't released one yet...

    grrrr...

    *sigh*

    *This message has been brought to you by the makers of skin...Hey, we've got you covered.*
  • I just tried Videolan .. to all those reading - performance may vary depending on your setup! I don't get good Videolan performance but Xine works near perfectly for me. Videolan may work well for you, or even OMS.
    There aren't that many players to try, so you may as well try all of them and see how your mileage varies. I attribute part of my problems to my Aureal Vortex 2 PCI sound card.

  • Live by the sword... (Score:4)

    by rohar ( 253766 ) <bob.rohatensky@sasktel.net> on Tuesday June 19, 2001 @08:31AM (#141018) Homepage Journal
    ya'know,
    Regardless of the moral stance you may take on the whole RIAA copyright infringement circus, there is a bit of irony here.

    The business side of the the recording arts, has made it's fortune from technology, with unrelentless greed. The multi-billion dollar industry exists only because someone invented everything from the motion picture through the eight track to the digital media.

    The recording arts business embraced every chunk of technology to come along, and has sucked it for all it's worth.

    Overwhelming greed pushed the industry into releasing material in digital form, not a huge desire to increase the quality of the product they sell.

    Now it has backfired. There probably hasn't been a CD produced that is any good, that hasn't been converted to an MP3 and spread out on the net. The same will happen for movie DVD's.

    I personally think this is wrong, but that is irrellevant, it will happen.

    The irony is that the golden goose that made the business side of the recording arts what it is (technology) is what is going to sink it. They never will be able to encode digital format in a way that some geek can't crack, an still have something that will play in a cheap player. They won't quit releasing digital media, because it is way cheaper to produce than the analogue version (lp, cassette, vhs), and they won't be able to stop pirates.

    If bands wanna make money, get a tour bus and hit the road. Put your albums out for free on the net, they are going to get there anyway. I guess actors can do the same with live performances. The business side is a huge leach that it was created by technology, and is now taking it's lumps from it.


    It's easy to write songs, you just sit down and write them?

  • Don't fuck with a postgrad rhetorician minoring in lingustics...

    Good advice, postgrad rhetoricians minoring in linguistics are well known to be no good at all at any kind of sex and even Madonna stated after the attempt that she would rather have spent the two minutes and five seconds in question doing something more fun like filing her taxes instead.

  • An interesting advantage of this approach is that a player does not need to have DeCSS in it or even hooks that might be considered "suspicious". A player for unencryted disks is completely legal.

    Unfortunately it would then make the kernel module illegal, possibly even the entire kernel if compiled-in. However, on my reading of the DMCA, I think the RIAA would have severe difficulty claiming that a DVD player with compiled-in decryption was a circumvention device - because that would make all players illegal, licensed or not. There's no mention of licensing in the DMCA as far as I can see.

    Also a comment on the original story ...
    Coming from a research background they could have some legal coverage to fight the RIAA in France.

    They don't have to - it isn't illegal in France - yet. And I suspect (usual "NAL" disclaimer) that CSS could never be claimed to be an "effective technological measure" under laws implementing the EU directive, because under the directive the word "effective" retains its usual English meaning, and any alleged "effectiveness" was blown away long before the law was enacted. Same goes for SDMI.



    --

  • One album, Jethro Tull's "Songs from the Wood" took me two years to find

    Great album (had it on vinyl since it came out). I've seen the CD in stores here in Germany, but my vinyl copy is still in good form. I'd recommend most of their other earlier stuff too: "Thick as a BricK", "Aqualung" - there's a long list.

    --

  • Yeah, I know...but occasionally when you're making a "Joke" you need to "generalize" and not "recant the Oxford fucking English Dictionary's apocryphal history of dialectic English." Actually, the reason I said "Middle English" rather than "Olde English" was because I wanted to specifically avoid the common misconception of Shakespeare(or Chaucer)-as-old-English that most of my students have had, and yet still make the point funny. I wholly realise the difference between them, and personally have no trouble differentiating between archaic, middle or old Englishes (having completed survey courses in The Faerie Queene, Beowulf in the original text [ you haven't lived until you've heard a Germanic Languages professor read the name "Hrothgar" in a stylized Danish English accent] and James Joyce, whose language is about as archaic as they get).

    Don't fuck with a postgrad rhetorician minoring in lingustics...we may generalize a few facts to avoid belabored explanations in adjustment to common paradigms, but we are never wrong.
  • Ooh, a Madonna joke combined with a tax joke...I see somebody's giving the Onion a run for their money on that whole "topical, non-cliche humour" thing.
  • Actually, I memorized the DeCSS Perl Script. It was a lot easier than Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech from "Romeo and Juliet," which I had to memorize back in High School -- that was 96 lines of Middle English, this was less than 2000 characters, and in a language I understood.

    I'm waiting for the MPAA to declare my head, and everything in it, in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and force me to core dump and reformat it. After all, I'm taking away their profits...people can send me data files of their movies, I can decrypt them in my head and tell them the gist of the plot. I mean, what other reason is there to see a modern film? Cinematography? Acting? Meh. Our nation's greatest actresses are just thin blondes with giant hooters and sexy smiles and the artistic range of your average prom queen, and I can write up the appeal of every modern Hollywood film and post it to www.asstr.org [asstr.org].

    My brain is a danger to the profitability of the motion picture industry, and must be stopped at all costs.
  • .. it ended up as a DVD-player ?

    videolan project started in the old days beeing aimed at broadcasting mpeg2 video on the students' campus' LAN in Chatenay.
    I remember they got huge funding to buy a complete 100MB switched ethernet network, mostly sponsored by companies such as Cisco (or maybe else..). I saw the very first demos in 1999 or so... they were using a mpeg2 decoder card, and focused on developing the streaming over the LAN, which i remember as beeing quite complex.

    I didn't even know they GPL'ed the whole thing and started developing the decoders themselves. nice thing ! :-))

    Still, i don't really understand how DVD format fit in the initial picture. ability to brodcast DVDs over the LAN ? Isn't that a big copyright and broadcast issue ?

  • The toothless DMCA (Score:3)

    by karmawarrior ( 311177 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2001 @10:04AM (#141026) Journal
    In many ways, this gives an answer to the many critics of the DMCA who've been protesting about the clamp down on DeCSS and how it makes it difficult to choose Linux (and other free OS's) as an operating system for certain applications - not for what Linux is capable of, but because of unjust laws discriminating against it. The answer being: If you don't like it, shop around for governments that have the laws you want.

    The US is a country dominated by the interests (or at any rate wants) of big business. This is known, and is why the latest round of draconian copyright laws are being put into place. It's why the US is the home of some of the most powerful corporations in the world, including MS - which controls the very way we can use computers, and AOL-Time-Warner, which controls a large proportion of what we see, read and hear. This isn't new, it isn't news to anyone reading this.

    The truth is that anyone protesting about these conditions can see look across the world and find examples of places where it is legal to do the things you want to do. This varies from countries with more liberal drugs policies, to countries where working conditions are guaranteed. And, in the case of the DMCA, most, if not all, of Europe is untouched by this kind of legislation.

    And generally, if you're the sort of person who finds this important, you probably can move to the country that has the laws you want. If implementing DVD viewers is your speciality, it's highly unlikely that you don't have the skills to get a European employer to sponsor a visa for you - and that's assuming you don't want to take the student route, or some other similar perfectly legal way of getting into Europe.

    Ultimately you have to make a choice. Moaning about how the government has been taken over by corporate interests can only go so far: if you want to deal with it, you have to take matters into your own hands. There are countries out there that are not in the pockets of big business, that have laws protecting the rights of employees, of people to write code they want to write, that have written the right to privacy into their constitutions or as their highest priority laws. It may sound faceous, but perhaps it's Europe that yerns for America's "huddled masses" now, as a collection of nation states committed to democracy in a way that a US controlled by private corporate interests never can be.

    Either way, there's little excuse to continue complaining. Continuing to live in the US is a choice, more so indeed than choosing a career or to have a family - the favourate examples of areas where people shouldn't complain if they choose to do these things and then find they have less freedom than before. If you don't like the DMCA, get the skills to leave, and then do it.
    --

  • The action against 2600 Magazine is on-going. Until the legal system realizes that they cannot (and more imporantly, must not) block the flow of knowledge implicit in the concept of "fair use", you are still at risk. Maybe not for DeCSS, but for the hack for the next "secure" (fair-use-free) technology and the one after that, and the one after that...
    --
  • The irony is that the golden goose that made the business side of the recording arts what it is (technology) is what is going to sink it.

    Yeah, just like being able to copy any game, utility, or productivity tool has destroyed the software industry.

    Amongst all these debates about copyright infringement, I don't understand why nobody mentions software. Software piracy has existed almost as long as computers, yet the industry has thrived! The MPAA's and RIAA's paranoid propaganda are just greedy, self-serving lies.

  • Hey (Score:2)

    by sllort ( 442574 )
    While you're busy fighting the RIAA in France, could you also fight the Evil Empire in my pants?

    Or maybe you meant the DMCA and the MPAA in America as applied by the Hague Treaty, but then, that would require a clue.
  • If bands wanna make money, get a tour bus and hit the road. What? And make them work? Nonsense. Copyright protection exists solely to make artists and labels rich, and keep them that way with outrageously long terms. I have had lengthy discussions on the Napster forums with an owner of a small record label. You'd think I was taking the food out of his mouth when I spoke of my defense of file-sharing. The distribution model in place is an outmoded dinosaur with too many hands and the till. Until the industry and public realize that the product isn't worth $20 a pop, the record companies will still produce it. And the public wil buy it.
  • Hey it seems a guy has written something similar but using the LiViD's libcss, I have tried and they all works, the patches can be found on http://www.prout.be/dvd [prout.be], it's a french page thought, but hey it works!!! :)
  • Well, vlc now works pretty well under windows, with nearly all the features of the linux client ... the only problem is the SDL lib that doesn't seem to be very stable under Win32 last time I tried to read a mpeg movie under windows, vlc was eating 15 % CPU while Windows Media Player was eating 30 % ... Not so bad, isn'it ?

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