Court Hits Hollywood's "Pause" Button
by Paul McGoldrick
We all want to root for the little guy, we want to help him get through the collective embarrassment both he and us are going to feel when his nose is pushed into the mud. "And if the challenger should ever win over the Iron Chef…" we will idolize him for at least a moderate period of fame. So it is for Jon Lech Johansen, the Norwegian teen who was handcuffed and arrested in his parents' house at the behest of the Motion Picture Industry of America. The crime alleged was that this brigand had developed software to allow him to play his legally-acquired DVDs on his Linux-equipped PC.
Hollywood probably wouldn't have even noticed excepted that Johansen (DVD-Jon to his hacker fans) had the additional audacity of posting his DeCSS software on line. And, really, at 15 years of age - as he was when he was dragged to a squad car - he should instead have been given a large scholarship for college with a guaranteed career after.
The Oslo City Court - a three judge panel dressed like something out of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale - came out with some of the most commonsense remarks you are ever likely to hear in a court of law when they acquitted Johansen this week after interminable delays brought by the prosecution.
The charge brought was not copyright related (everyone agreed that Johansen never copied a DVD) but was "digital burglary" - getting into the DVD without permission from, presumably, the owner of the copyright. But, as the court rightly commented, "Someone who buys a DVD film that has been legally produced has legal access to the film." In other words, when you legally own something it is not burglary to break into it. Wow, at least in Norway, now you won't need Hollywood's permission to throw it away either!
DeCSS (as in Descramble CSS - Content Scramble System) unravels the 400+ master keys and algorithms that allow for the mutual authentication between player, software and DVD. Reverse engineering it was apparently a simple matter for this 15 year-old and shows that it was pretty useless in the first place.
In the US the matter is hardly dead. Poor picked-on Andrew Bunner, plus 20 other named defendants and an unknown number of John Does, are still deeply embedded in legal processes with Hollywood. But, as their legal brief says, "DeCSS first appeared on the Internet no later than October 6, 1999. It was quickly republished at many sites; DVD CCA (DVD Copy Control Association) identified 118 websites in at least 11 states and 11 countries that had republished DeCSS or linked to sites republishing DeCSS, including the leading news site 'CNET.com.'" How do you spell genie? But the lawyers will continue to earn money on attempts to put this one back in the bottle for some while yet.
To prevent illegal copying there has to be a better way than scrambling
- which will never be secure until you can do it with a single photon -
and the DVD CCA has been looking into embedded watermarking. The last Interim
Board of Directors ended its term at the end of July 2002 without choosing
a technology and perhaps the next 12 members will realize that watermarking
isn't the way to go either. But then Hollywood still hasn't woken up to
the fact that it needs to be the solution, not the problem. As has been
reported being said by a studio chief after a demonstration of TiVo, "That
was a very nice presentation: Now go burn yourselves." A nice response,
but he might more appropriately have said, "Hit reverse," because
that is what the industry is doing.