24 August 2000. Thanks to DW.
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/08/circuits/articles/24pete.html
In addition to this report, the paper also has today has a long essay by Peter Wayner on the Open Source wars, which features the DVD battle:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/08/circuits/articles/24free.html
Peter Wayner frequently writes on cryptology and technology. It is a pro-open source piece which elegantly lays out what is wrong with the copyright industry and what is right about open source.
New York Times, April 24, 2000
Peter Lewis
[Excerpts]
For a product that is wildly expensive, technically confusing and apparently incompatible with a lot of machines with which it ought to be expected to work, the Panasonic DMR-E10 DVD Video Recorder is actually pretty cool.
It has the distinction of being the first consumer DVD video recorder to reach these shores from Japan, and therefore it -- or one of its competitors heading this way later in the year -- will be pounced upon eagerly by rich gadget freaks.
But let's get real. This champagne-colored DVD recorder costs $4,000, blank DVD-RAM cartridges capable of recording 120 minutes of digital video cost more than $25 apiece, the recorded discs may not work in older DVD players, and the likelihood is high for an ugly Betamax-versus-VHS death match with rival DVD recording formats.
The Panasonic recorder comes with a 140-page manual that is only slightly less scary than a Stephen King novella.
In short, this product is actually more expensive and more complicated to use than a personal computer, which is a remarkable achievement. ...
In terms of rapid adoption by consumers, DVD players are the most successful consumer electronics devices of all time, getting into millions of homes in a much shorter time than it took VCR's or audio CD players. But the arrival of DVD recorders has been delayed, for reasons both technical and political. The Hollywood film industry, which a generation ago waged a bitter fight to stop VCR's, has been urging the consumer electronics companies to hold off on introducing DVD recorders until there is reliable copyright protection to thwart video pirates.
The Panasonic DMR-E10 includes a copyright protection system called Content Protection for Recordable Media, which allows movie studios or music companies to embed signals in a digital file that determine whether it can be copied once, many times or not at all.
And that inspires us to take a lateral arabesque into public policy. Those of you who find such topics boring may be excused now.
Flashback: In junior high school, the lockers all had combination locks, but before long we figured out that by lifting the locker door handle and applying just the right amount of pressure to a specific point on the door -- BAM! -- the locker popped open. We also discovered, much to our delight, that the technique worked on any locker.
The vice principal was not pleased that we had found a way to circumvent the locker security system, and he forbid us to use it. Thus were sown the seeds of anarchy.
It was the school's fault, we reasoned, for having chosen cheap locks in the first place. And instead of trying to suppress what was already by then a widely known technique for hacking the lockers, the school simply needed to install better locks.
Fast forward to 1999. Jon Johansen, a Norwegian who was then 15 years old, wanted to watch DVD movies on his Linux-based computer. But he couldn't because of a copy-protection scheme called Content Scramble System. The system was developed by the motion picture industry and encoded into every DVD disc so the discs could be played only on DVD players and computers that contained the special key needed to unscramble the files.
Mr. Johansen and a couple of friends discovered that the security codes were almost as flimsy as my old school lockers. They wrote a Windows program called DeCSS, which allowed them to descramble and view the movies and copy them to hard disks. Mr. Johansen posted the program on his personal Web site, and it propagated quickly.
Instead of putting on their dunce caps and writing "We goofed on the encryption scheme" 100 times on the blackboard, and developing a new business model, the movie studios decided in effect to sue the Internet.
And in doing so, they compounded their mistakes into something that was not only wrong, but dangerous. A group of motion picture studios sued Eric Corley, whose 2600.com Web site had posted a copy of DeCSS. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, passed by Congress with generous input from Hollywood, it is a crime to possess any technology that is designed to violate a copyright. Mr. Corley removed DeCSS from the 2600.com site, but he left hyperlinks that pointed visitors to other Web sites where the program was still available for downloading.
Last week, a federal judge ordered Mr. Corley to take down the links. The judge said it was illegal not just to use the DeCSS program to circumvent DVD copy protection, and not just to make the program available on a Web site, but it was also illegal to provide a hyperlink to a site where the program was being offered.
"This is the court's decision after trial, and the decision may be summarized in a nutshell," District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote in his decision. With all due respect to Judge Kaplan, he chose a highly appropriate container.
If upheld on appeal, this ruling means that someone can be found liable merely for pointing to objectionable information or programs that someone else has posted on the Internet. It does not require a Hollywood-style imagination to envision where this ruling could take us.
Now, don't get me wrong. Hollywood has a right to restrict the viewing of its DVD movies to the personal use of people who have paid a royalty. They just chose the wrong way to accomplish that, and now the entire Internet could suffer.