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Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 00:42:16 -0500
From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>
To: wire-service@snark.thyrsus.com
Subject: DVDCA and the Big Lie

The DVD Control Association (DVDCA) is up in arms.  A few weeks ago,
some Linux hackers in Norway cracked the encryption scheme used for
DVD media, producing a DVD decoder called DeCSS.  On 27 December 1999,
the DVDCA brought suit before a Superior Court judge in California
accusing dozens of defendants and unnamed John Does of piracy.  They 
sought a restraining order against websites carrying DeCSS.  

The gravamen of their argument was that if DeCSS is allowed to
proliferate, illegal copying of DVDs will become routine.  Content
producers (the film and television industry) will be irreparably
injured because the market returns for their products will be stolen
wholesale by pirates.

Much has already been made of the free speech issues this lawsuit
raises.  The DVDCA has imperiled its own case by seeking an injunction
not merely against sites that carry DeCSS, but any site that carries
links to the DeCSS carriers.  An attorney for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation argued that such a ruling would have severe chilling
effects on free speech on the Web, and that may well have been the
argument that persuaded the court not to grant an immediate
injunction.

The real story here, though, is that the DVDCA's central complaint is
fraudulent.  DVD encryption does nothing to prevent content piracy.  A
pirate doesn't have to know how to decode DVDs to make bit-for-bit
copies of them by the thousands.  And no DVD player can distinguish
between a legally distributed original and a pirated bit-for-bit copy.
The amount of protection content producers get from DVD is exactly
zero.

Why is the DVDCA lying?  That's easy -- because the lie sounds a lot
better than admitting that DVD is a fraud designed to line the pockets
of a few selected players in the consumer-electronics industry.  The
DVDCA's real issue isn't protection of the market for DVD films, it's
control of the market for DVD *players*.

The Linux hackers who broke DVD's encryption didn't do it because they
wanted to copy DVDs -- nobody needs DeCSS to do copying!  They did it
because they wanted to play the DVDs they legally owned through their
Linux machines.  And that is what the DVDCA really wants to prevent;
they're protecting their members' monopoly on DVD players.  The high
prices and license fees the DVD monopoly can charge would collapse if
anybody with a PC and speakers no longer needed a dedicated DVD player
or licensed software.

Content producers, far from being injured, will actually benefit from
DeCSS because it expands their market by making players less
expensive.  The content producers owe the DeCSS hackers a favor --
they really ought to be suing DVDCA for cutting into their profits by
rigging the player market!

There's another reason the DVDCA is lying.  A long string of court
cases defends both the right to reverse-engineer around trade secrets
and individuals' rights to copy media they legally own into other
formats for their personal use.  The DVDCA must know that if they
fight on that territory they will lose -- so, instead, they're hoping
that if they blow enough smoke about piracy they can spook the courts
into ignoring both equity and all the legal precedents in favor of the
consumers and the content providers.

John Gilmore once observed that "The Internet interprets censorship as
damage and routes around it."  Equally, the Internet interprets
attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat
them.  Hackers all over the world are responding to the DVDCA attack
by propagating thousands of copies of DeCSS to websites all over the
world, places where no California Superior Court will ever have
jurisdiction.  The genie is out of the bottle and won't be stuffed 
back in.

In one particularly telling bit of ironic spin, the OpenDVD website
at http://www.opendvd.org/ is sponsoring "The Great International DVD
Source Code Distribution Contest".  Four winners demonstrating the
most interesting and novel methods of distributing source code will
each receive "a copy of the DVD movie of their choice about an evil
totalitarian society, such as `1984' or `Brazil', so that they can
watch the movie and thank God for their freedom."

One can almost pity DVDCA.  Like the feeble minds behind the misnamed
"Communications Decency Act" in 1996 and the NSA's key-escrow power
grab back in 1994-95, they're about to find out what happens when you
try to step on the Internet community's liberty.  The biter-gets-bit
consequences would have been amusing enough even if they weren't
transparently frauds and liars; as it is, it should be very
entertaining to watch the Internet make them look like idiots even
before the courts chop them into chutney.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a>

According to the National Crime Survey administered by the Bureau of
the Census and the National Institute of Justice, it was found that
only 12 percent of those who use a gun to resist assault are injured,
as are 17 percent of those who use a gun to resist robbery. These
percentages are 27 and 25 percent, respectively, if they passively
comply with the felon's demands. Three times as many were injured if
they used other means of resistance.
        -- G. Kleck, "Policy Lessons from Recent Gun Control Research,"