And in the case of people who want to play their movies on an OS that isn’t Mac or Windows, the MPAA isn’t giving us jack shit. So we need the key in order to legally use what we legally bought in a legally legal fashion. You know, legally. Trying to explain that to the MPAA is akin to explaining the principles of non-violence to a Dalek: In either case, the only response is “EX-TER-MI-NATE” and heavy blunt instruments.
Anyway, the specific key is useless on new disks but the same team that brought us the key has found a way to play HD-DVDs without needing any keys at all. The lesson here is simple to the point of tautology: You can’t give someone something and not give it to them at the same time, you can’t pour the milk and not pour it at the same time, and you can’t decrypt a disk and not decrypt it at the same time. Zen koans are meant to break logical thought, not prop up a business model.
Except the MPAA is no longer offering a salable product and yet it hasn’t disclaimed any statutory warrantees that I’m aware of. Once upon a time, that meant something in this country. In fact, it still means something if you happen to be selling tractors or TV sets.
Hey, no one expects the MPAA to develop the playback software for non-mainstream OSes themselves. In that sense, it’s certainly not their problem. We just wish they wouldn’t pitch a fit when we go and do it on our own, using information obtained on our own simply by inspection of materials at our disposal.
In general, when it comes to these discussions, my viewpoint is this: I bought a disc, it had some ones and zeros on it, and I never signed any contract limiting my ability to do with the disc as I please. So what’s so evil about reading those ones and zeros and manipulating them in whatever way I want? I’m not even talking about making copies for anyone, I just mean dicking around with the raw data in whatever way I please for my own use.
And just to make the obvious even more clear, and to counter the ceaselessly-repeated lie, copying has nothing to do with decryption. Encrypted bits can be copied exactly as well as decrypted bits and copied disks play just as well on approved players. Stopping people from playing their own disks has nothing to do with stopping people from sharing movies online.
Yeah, although, I suppose the one thing that’s true is that, if you want to get at the raw video/audio data and lossfully compress it to share more easily, you’re going to need to do some decryption. So in that sense there’s a link.
But, of course, if you’re willing to take the quality hit of lossful compression, you can always rig up a system to capture the actual video and audio coming out of your monitor and speakers.
So it’s basically like Derleth says; all these encryption schemes do is make it harder to make playback devices, while doing absolutely nothing to make perfect copying harder, and failing to prevent imperfect copying through the analog hole (as all reasonable systems must).
Yeah, of course, perfect copy is totally possible without decryption. I’m just saying, if you want to do lossy compression to share it more easily on the Net, you might have a use for decryption, and so there is a tenuous link.
But I’m in agreement with you; encryption has absolutely no impact on one’s ability to make a perfect copy, and, like I said, thanks to the analog hole, it has only a marginal impact on one’s ability to make an imperfect but small and usable copy.
