At 04:05 PM 1/5/00 -0700, Philippe Moutarlier wrote:
>
>May I ask : who has the write to read a DVD ? This is getting VERY
confusing !
There's been a lot of press. I don't know the answer to your question,
someone owns the rights to licence the DVD decryption technology and you
would have to speak to them. I believe it's the old story that they want a
lot of money and a NDA (i.e., you couldn't open your source).
So here's my take on what happened: The (mostly US) entertainment industry
is all bent out of shape about copyright violations (bootlegs) sold
(mostly) outside the US and MP3's distributed on-line. They figure that if
they were getting their usual cut of these products, they'd have millions
more (i.e., that demand for these things would be inelastic even if the
prices were much higher and thus that they are suffering tremendous
opportunity costs--thefts in their view). So they reluctantly agreed on
the DVD format because it was sold to them as having unbreakable encryption.
This alleged unbreakable encryption was subject to at least two problems:
First, it was possible (as is usually the case) for human error to leave a
gaping back door. Second, to satisfy US munitions regulations regarding
the export of decryption technology, fairly insecure 40-bit keys were
involved.
Ok, now the point is that you have to decrypt the DVD before you can view
it. So any open source Linux viewer would violate the NDA required by the
DVD folks to licence their decryption technology. Thus no one had made
licensed Linux software for viewing DVD's because the licensing prevented
you form opening your source.
So maybe reason #1 above is unfair (what system is really secure against
human failure?) but that's what happened. One of the legitimate licensees
of the decryption technology failed to encrypt something. A group of Linux
hackers discovered this and were able to infer not only that licensee's key
but also a large number of the others (like 280 of 500). They published
their open source software as DeCSS.
(This point I'm unclear on: stories quote people in the know as saying that
DVD rippers have been around for months... So I'm not sure what made DeCSS
special? Maybe the rippers just ripped but did not decrypt?)
Anyway, the people who thought that DVD was unbreakable apparently "reeled"
when they found out that the unbreakable decryption had been compromised
and that they could suffer lots more "theft". So they did a lot of things
that the Linux community thought were dumb. Like sending threatening
letters to websites that linked to websites that actually contained the
DeCSS software. And suing a lot of people. I believe the DeCSS authors
were all non-US citizens so it's not clear to me whether or how they are
involved in the suits; but I thought they were.
Meanwhile, I believe the US passed a law that makes it illegal to create
mechanisms to bypass protections against copyright abuse. There are some
exceptions and I think the law is not in force yet while some committee
works out the details of those exceptions. But this law may be used now or
later against any sort of Linux-based DVD viewer. We'll see what the
future brings but I wouldn't bet on Linux DVD anytime soon (at least not in
the US).
You can read the original stories on sites like www.linuxtoday.com.
---
Alan D. Mead / Research Scientist / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Institute for Personality and Ability Testing
1801 Woodfield Dr / Savoy IL 61874 USA
217-352-4739 (v) / 217-352-9674 (f)
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