At the dawn of the new millennium civilization didn't disintegrate, but human rights did. Norwegian authorities forced their way into Jon Johansen's home, confiscated his personal belongings, and then incarcerated him. Sounds like a typical hacker bust, except that Jon isn't a hacker. Not according to the ridiculous definition brought by mainstream media.

According to the old definition (the true definition according to most of us) he is most definitely a hacker. Jon successfully reverse engineered the DVD's encryption system called CSS (Content Scrambling System). The DVD CCA (Digital Video Disc Copy Control Association) is pissed - real pissed. They are currently battling this 16 year old hacker savant in a California Court.

His opponents are claiming that he broke the new Digital Millennium Act, specifically USC 1200 (c), which declares that is unlawful to break any protection device designed to safe guard copyrighted works. The spirit of this new law seems to be aimed at crackers, however the newer the law the looser the interpretation. The DVD CCA asserts however that without CSS anyone could destroy their business model by mass producing DVDs illegally. As of this writing, this notion is completely and utterly absurd ($20 for DVD-R media and about 300 hours to transfer to someone else across the internet). This article is an attempt to analyze these claims and not only disprove this theory, but show the DVD CCA's true fears.

DVD's are encrypted MPEG movies that can only be played on an authorized player. Each authorized player contains keys that can decrypt the movies and allow for playback. To create an actual authorized player one must pay exorbitant licensing fees to the DVD CCA. According to the AMENDED AND RESTATED CSS INTERIM LICENSE AGREEMENT in Hoy Exhibit B (more on this complete debacle later) it can cost 1,000,000 Yen for each new authorized player that is introduced to the market.

"3.2 Administration Fee. Concurrent with Licensee's selection of the Membership Categories pursuant to Section 3.1, Licensee shall pay [Blank], a nonrefundable sum of 1,000,000 Japanese Yen for each Membership Category selected by Licensee (the "Administration Fee") which fee shall be used to offset the costs associated with [Blank] administration of CSS."

Now in the event that one of these authorized distributors happens to breach their contract, they are in for a fine of $1M. Remember, this case is about the DVD copyrighted material! It has nothing to do with the enormous fees that they reap for each new authorized player developed.

"9.3 Specific Remedies. Licensee acknowledges that due to the critical importance of maintaining the integrity of CSS and the inability to calculate the damage to CSS users in the event of any material breach of Section 5.2, , in addition to any other remedies in equity, but in lieu of any and all other claims for monetary damages, may recover liquidated damages for each material breach from Licensee in the amount of one million U.S. dollars ($1,000,000), provided that the parties agree that Licensee may request and the court may grant such request that this amount be reduced to take account of the fact that Licensee brought the breach to [Blank]'s attention in a timely and reasonable manner."

According to Jack Valenti (President and Chief Executive of the Motion Picture Assn. of America), every DVD is coded with encryption software. The protection of our creative product is even more critical in a digital world because the one-millionth copy of a digital film is as pristine and pure as the original. The program in question illegally breaks the encryption, leaving the valuable product unprotected.

Let's take a careful look at this statement. We have a message (the movie) that is encrypted and burned to a disk. Next, a special (authorized :) player is used to decrypt this message. Funny, I don't see the protection that CSS is providing. Let's look at it again:

[movie] -> (CSS encryption routine) -> [digitally encrypted movie] -> (dvd player) -> [movie]

To put it poignantly I will use a quote from the EFF site:

"Look, it's like this - a DVD Movie is basically just a message written in secret code on a piece of paper. To read the message you need a secret decoder ring. To be a pirate, you need a photocopier, but you don't need a decoder ring because you don't really care what the secret message is, as long as your photocopier makes nice, crisp copies that your client (who has a decoder ring) can read. All these guys did was make a decoder ring that works under linux, because all the commercial decoder rings only run on Windows [or standalone DVD players.]"

Now if I made a bit for bit copy of this movie and ran it through the DVD player just what do we think will happen? The movie would play just fine! Just how then is this about copyright law? Well, by examining the course of events we can see that the lawyers for the DVD industry are playing this game statue by statute.

The preliminary injunction they sought against web sites in a California court of law on grounds of trade secret violations was turned down. (since when can you charge trade secret violations against someone who has never first been privy to said secrets?) Beaten and unwavered, they strutted into a New York court and changed statutes. They even went as far as to try and distance themselves from their shameful loss against the raging hackers.

Then there was a lawsuit that was started in California. . . under a trade secret law. The motion picture companies are not parties and don't control in any way that litigation. (page 7-8 of the US District Courts in NY transcript)

Ok, back to the issue at hand, what are we really looking at here? The exact words of the statue ask:

Are defendants offering, providing, trafficking in this device, and is it designed to circumvent the technological measure that's controlling access to protected copyright work?

The answer of course is no! They are offering, providing, and trafficking a device that is designed to decrypt a file that *isn't* protected. They are of course circumventing a great money making scheme set up by the DVD consortium.

CHOICE OUT TAKES FROM THE TRANSCRIPT:

"you simply put your mouse on that, double click it, and you have DeCSS."
--LEON P. GOLD of PROSKAUER ROSE LLP

I'm sorry, is this a *website* we're talking about??? Once! you click once! These guys are debating the future of code and they don't even understand how to use a browser properly!

"One of the problems with doing that in the hacker community is that if you challenge them a little, you really turn them on."
--LEON P. GOLD of PROSKAUER ROSE LLP

Yeah baby! I got a stiffy just reading that.