DVD industry's fallback plan: Sue!
Published: 29 Dec 1999 12:55 GMT
On Tuesday, the DVD Copy Control Association Inc. filed suit against 21 individuals and 72 Web sites for posting information and utilities designed to break the copy protection on DVD movies.
"(The) defendants have disclosed ... proprietary information on their Internet Web sites as part of a scheme to defeat DVD encryption software which thus enables users to illegally pirate copies of DVD videos," stated the complaint.
Two months ago, in the culmination of an international open source project, several researchers broke the encryption that protects DVD movies. Known as the Content Scrambling System, the technology acted as a digital defense protecting what movie studios consider to be near-perfect copies of their films.
One of the groups that published the source code on a mailing list was striving to bring video to the open-source Linux operating system, claimed Frank A. Stephenson, a research programmer for games Web site Funcom B.V., in Oslo, Norway, in early November.
Stephenson was dismissive of the so-called copy protection. "One part of the (CSS) algorithm is really weak," said Stephenson, who analysed the source code and found additional holes that the original program has not exploited. "The slowest attack that I have to break the encryption takes less than 18 seconds on my PC ... a Pentium III."
The groups responsible for reverse-engineering the CSS have voluntarily taken down the information to avoid a costly lawsuit. "I know very well that they would not win in court, but they could make a big mess out of it," said Jon Johansen, the person that the lawsuit claims was the first to post the DeCSS utility, in a November note posted to his site. "I simply do not have the time, nor money, to go up against these people."
Among the defendants in the current lawsuit are Emmanuel Goldstein, editor and founder of 2600 -- a quarterly magazine serving telephone phreakers and cypherpunks, and Slashdot.org, a forum for tech types to comment on current topics.
The choice of defendants is no coincidence, said Jeff Bates, executive editor for Slashdot.org, who believes his site and others were singled out because they seem most hacker-like.
Legitimate researchers that link to the information -- such as noted cryptographer Bruce Schneier, who has created an algorithm that is a finalist for the U.S. Advanced Encryption Standard -- have not been cited.
"It's a case where the CCA is trying to fall back on methods that worked in a different (non-digital) medium," he said. "To try to sue over linking to someone else's content is ridiculous."
"The cat's out of the bag," said 2600's Goldstein, who thinks that the only viable alternative for the industry is not lawsuits, but better protections.
"The encryption was completely reverse-engineered. They are going to have to come up with a better encryption scheme and they will have to do it in the open." He added that he hasn't been served with the complaint as of Tuesday afternoon.
The case could be a hard one for the industry association if the defendants can prove that the secrets surrounding DVD copy protection were reverse engineered, which by all reports seems to be the case.
"If someone sat down and figured out the secrets by reverse engineering, then the DVD CCA has a big problem," said Ron Coolley, an intellectual property partner in Houston-based law firm Arnold White & Durkee. "U.S. law allows a company to, say, take a Coke to a lab and have it reversed engineered and then disclose the recipe."
Goldstein, for one, is not happy with what he sees as the ultimate strategy of the CCA. "What if you make it illegal to try to reverse engineer the information? That's what they are trying to do," he said. "You have the corporate mentality coming to head against the freedoms of the Net."
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