Servo: Whilst DeCSS may have ostensibly been about viewing, once you’ve broken the encryption, you can do other things with the content, like remove copyright notices, transmit it over the internet, etc.
Whatever the intended purpose, breaking the encryption contravenes the DMCA, i.e., it’s illegal.
Whatever the intended purpose, breaking the encryption contravenes the DMCA, i.e., it’s illegal.
Only here in america (the land of the free). In Sweden (or wherever it was) where the guy wrote DeCSS, it was not illegal for him to do so. Must be nice living in a free country. I wouldn’t know.
** Desmostylus**,
I understand that. I realize I wasn’t very clear.
What I should have said:
Breaking the encryption is about getting at the content [and doing things to it that you wouldn’t be able to do with a licensed player]. It’s not about just making copies of the media.
I was really answering this question in the OP: “why do you need to crack the encryption to do the copying?”
If the encryption we’re talking about is CSS, the answer is, “you don’t.” The encryption isn’t there to prevent making copies of the media, it’s to prevent free access to the content. But, if you break CSS then you can make a copy of the content, and you don’t need to make a bit-level copy of the media. You can write [or download] software that reads the data from the DVD, decrypts it, and writes it to an mpeg file on a hard disk. Which is much scarier from a copyright holder’s point of view, because now you don’t need special equipment, and you can make changes to the content [like you pointed out].
The reason you cannot make a bit-for-bit copy is that you cannot burn the decryption keys onto writable media. The decryption keys must be written to a special section of a special disk using a special drive that consumers do NOT have access to. A standard DVD-R drive you buy at Best Buy cannot write to this special area, and even if it could, the discs you buy along with the drive cannot be written to in that special area. Thus, you end up burning encrypted content with no decryption key, which is quite useless.
Firmware is not an issue. The only access control mechanism having to do with firmware is the Region Coding, which insures that you can only play a DVD from your geographical region in your DVD-ROM drive or DVD player. And also, Macrovision and CSS are different. Macrovision doesn’t affect the data on the DVD, its supposed to be activated and applied by the DVD player. CSS is actual encryption of the DVD data.
Wrong on both accounts.
Jon Johansen was actually prosecuted in Norway.
It was heavily publiced by EFF last spring, but I haven’t heard the results.
FDISK: No one is claiming that pirates use off-the-shelf equipment to do the bit-copy. To tell the truth, I hadn’t even considered using DVD-R discs as the output medium, I was thinking of print runs in the thousands that get sold in markets (in same countries).
Nevertheless, you point is well taken, the writing question is implicit in the OP.
Macrovision is an irrelevant side-issue that seems to have confused some of the posters. Your interpretation of the Macrovision/CSS issue is the correct one, however.
I don’t accept your “firmware is not an issue” claim. Firmware in a DVD drive implements more than the region coding. Region coding is just one of the “amongst other things” I referred to in my first post.
If a pirate has access to professional DVD authoring equipment and DVD authoring discs, he can do a bit-for-bit copy of DVDs until the cows come home. There’s nothing standing in his way besides the law. I’ll wager that thats how any major bootlegging outfit does it, except I’d think they’d use pressed discs and much more expensive pressing machines instead of DVD-Rs.
As for the firmware, I’ve never encountered nor heard of the firmware on a DVD-ROM drive preventing bit-for-bit data extraction. In fact, I don’t know how this would be possible. I believe what you are thinking of is the requirement that hardware or software that implements CSS decryption LEGALLY is required to insure that the decrypted data stream isn’t sent anywhere unprotected. In a computer, this restriction would apply to the DVD playing software or DVD decoder card, not the DVD-ROM drive. On a DVD player, this requirement will be satisfied by the employment of Macrovision protection.
FDISK: Your first paragraph is spot on.
In your second paragraph, I’m not sure what you are saying.