🚀 go-pugleaf

telford@xenon.triode.net.au wrote:

> It seems to me that the judge is stating openly that any fair use
> problems that might occur are of no concern to the court and that the
> letter of the law will be upheld regardless of moral right and wrong.

Well, yes. It is not the function of the Court to second guess the 
legislature where the wording of the Act is clear. The only exception is 
where the Act contravenes the Constitution.

> 
> 
>>which paints a rather different picture. At the end of the day, this was 
>>a case about someone making software available whose sole practical 
>>function was to enable piracy. The software was not a Linux DVD player, 
>>and the average Linux user would not have been able to use it to play 
>>DVDs under Linux.
> 
> 
> The court document explains that quite clearly, the user needs a MS-Windows
> machine and DeCSS to decrypt the DVD into a file, which is then transfered
> to linux and played with one of several linux media players. This is
> effectively media-shifting much like copying your CD music onto tape
> so you can listen to it on your car tape player.
> 
> The bulk of the linux DVD player was distributed relatively openly, it
> lacked a single plug-in component which was the decryption engine.
> Without this engine it could play multimedia files but not DVDs.
> The DeCSS source code could be dropped into the media-player code to
> make a complete linux DVD player (but most users used the media-shifting
> method because it was easier).
> 
> If there had been no suppression under the DMCA, the whole thing would have
> been distributed as a single unit along with the major Linux distributions.
> That's what the authors wanted to do but were prevented from doing.

Instead of posting DeCSS, they could have modified the open-source 
medial player to play the DVD content. This would still have required 
media shifting, and the copyright owner might still have been unhappy, 
but it would then have been a straight forward copyright issue.

In particularly, it would not have enabled DivX compression and 
distribution over the Internet.

I'm inclined to the Judge's view, which is that the whole Linux DVD 
playing thing was a red-herring.

> The court clearly stated that it was unconcerned with the first fact
> and made its judgement based on the second fact.

The court had no choice. The Circumvention device laws do not provide a 
fair-use exemption.
> 
> 
>>I still believe it to be legal to distribute or provide an installation 
>>service for chips whose sole function is to enable the running of 
>>software not licensed by Microsoft, including the Linux OS. It's true 
>>that I'm not about to start such a business myself, because of the 
>>uncertainties. In practice, I also have to wonder whether there is 
>>really a market for such chips, even if they are legal.
> 
> 
> Consider that to make a non-approved game and sell it, you only have
> a market of people with chipped machines so there isn't much incentive
> to make such a game. On the other hand, a market for a chip that won't
> play pirated games but will play legitimate non-approved games is only
> going to be practical when there are some games out there.
> 
> The other problem is that from a technical point of view, a chip that
> can reliably tell the difference between a pirated game and a non-approved
> game from an independent publisher is nearly impossible to design.
> At least, I know a fair bit about how such chips work and I don't believe
> there is a way to get something like that working -- someone smarter
> than me might know a way.

I'm not that familiar with the X-Box architecture, but I was under the 
impression that it does not have an anti-copying system, and that 
bit-for-bit copying of the DVDs will work.

> 
> 
>>Whether Palladium is really the bogy man is hard to tell, given the lack 
>>of concrete detail (last time I looked, which was admittedly a while back).
> 
> 
> You are better off taking a close look at the Sony PS2 which is the nearest
> thing to Palladium that has been released into the market. Now the PS2 is
> not really a general purpose computing device (although in the UK it 
> pretends to be for tax reasons) but everything that has been done on the
> PS2 with regard to bootstrap encryption, could in theory be done to a
> regular PC. I think that the X-box was Microsoft's trial run of Palladium
> and the X-box is mostly a general purpose PC inside so the technology
> and the lessons learned in terms of vulnerability could be applied to a PC.

The very important difference is that the PS2 is tethered to PS2 games. 
You buy one with the expectation of buying the other. Any attempt by a 
manufacturer to cripple standard PCs this way would simply lose money 
for the manufacturer. There is nothing anywhere to suggest that such a 
mechanism could be imposed world wide. Certainly the current legislation 
has not such clauses, but to the contrary has an express clause (as dos 
the DMCA) making it clear that no such obligation could be imposed.
> 
>>>In addition, some
>>>people noted that an X-box connected to the network would automatically
>>>seek to update itself and even delete software that it detected as
>>>foreign (e.g. xbox-linux partitions). I have not seen this first hand
>>>but I've heard reports of it. Someone else might have more info...
> 
> 
>>I have to wonder about that. It would almost certainly be unlawful for 
>>Microsoft to do that intentionally.
> 
> 
> You seem to miss the basic premise of all legal systems -- it is only a
> crime if you get caught. Microsoft have got away with a lot already so
> we can fully expect them to try to get away with more.

Either they've done it, and the fact that it's known means they've been 
caught (even if not sued), or they haven't done it.

> I release my own work under GPL, except what I do under contract to
> someone else which I don't have too much choice about. I have tried to
> work my employment situation toward maximising the use and distribution
> of GPL software but the current market demands some compromises.

How would you eat if everything you did was released under GPL?

Sylvia.