"James A. Donald" wrote: > CSS is not to prevent copying. Anyone can copy the one disk to another disk. > > It is to control access, to prevent small companies and ordinary people > from making video disks, from making video disk players, and to prevent > users from being able to edit movies, perhaps by extracting scenes (the > dirty bits). > > In short, to keep the movies in the hands of the big boys. > > DeCSS was primarily created and used to produce unauthorized DVD players, > in particular to allow DVD disks to be played on linux computers. This was > its original use, and remains its primary use. > > Some of these unauthorized DVD players now do things like lossy > compression, to allow a DVD movie to fit on a CD, facilitating piracy. Not that I'm a lawyer or anything, but to my law-unsavvy mind, it would seem that the above things would prevent granting the CSS code from having ANY extra protection from that law since it isn't a mechanism used to prevent copyright violations. It's my understanding (and again, from what little knowledge I have of these laws, this could be wrong) that defeating a copy protection mechanism is illegal, but this therefore not being a copy protection mechanism, cannot be protected by copyright - so DeCSS would/should IMHO be perfectly legal. After all, I vaguely recall that Sony was bitch slapped by a judge who said that copyright isn't a mechanism that can be used to create monopolies - this was about the Sony Playstation and emulators thereof. There are also examples of other video games - ROM based ones that wouldn't play a cartridge unless the begining bytes contained a copyright to the name of the maker - (was it NES?) *BUT* that also in this older case, it was ruled that third parties could make games for without paying them money. (Again, all this is off the top of my head, and could be totally wrong.) So (unless I'm remebering these cases wrong) how come these examples weren't brought up in court as prior decisions of similar cases? -- ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :Surveillance cameras|Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :aren't security. A |share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:camera won't stop a |monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :masked killer, but |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :will violate privacy|site, and you must change them very often. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sunder.net ------------
