It was thus said that the Great Wayne M. Smith once stated:
>
> > As seen on Slashdot; an decent read. I'll have to admit that I agree
> > with much of what O'Reilly has to say here:
> > <http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html?page=1>
> >
> I became dubious as soon as he trotted out the "sample-then-buy" myth. While
> this argument might not have been laughable 4-5 years ago before CD burners were
> cheap and widespread, it's preposterous today. The rest is largely "blame the
> victim" drivel in the form of
> "you-haven't-given-us-what-we-want-in-the-form-we-want-it-so-that-justifies-our-
> stealing-it-from-you-until-you-do" -- or as O'Reilly cutely puts it "Give the
> Wookie what he wants." If you buy that, then you probably subscribe to that
> mainstay of the hacker apocrypha that Jon Johansen created DeCSS because he
> wanted to view DVDs on a Linux machine. Right.
If Johansen wanted to create copies of DVDs he did *not* have to break
CSS---all he needed to do (or anyone needs to do) is make a bit-for-bit copy
of the DVD in question and it will play in any DVD player as a normal DVD.
Now, to watch a DVD on a Linux system, then yes, he needed to break CSS.
In the past year, the RIAA came out with a new copy protection scheme and
went to far as to ask people to attempt to break it. A university professor
spent less than a week and broke the scheme. He was about to publish the
results with the RIAA attempted to DMCA his ass by saying he broke the DMCA,
*even though the RIAA asked people to break the system!*
The MPAA and RIAA are failing to see that we are slowly turning from
consumers to producers/consumers and this has actually been going on for
some time now. In 1989, a little known musician spent a week mixing his own
music on a Macintosh (doing two takes per song) and in 1990 released the
album to critical and commerical success (Nine Inch Nail's "Pretty Hate
Machine"). That was 12 years ago. Imagine what can happen now.
-spc (Or even with the success of the "Blair Witch Project" ... )
Received on Fri Dec 13 2002 - 22:02:00 GMT