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134 Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About DVD<br />
PC can generate the entire list of 409 keys, rendering the key secrecy process<br />
useless.<br />
In any case, there’s not much appeal to being able to copy a set of movie<br />
files (often without menus and other DVD special features) that would take<br />
over a week to download on a 56K modem and would fill up a 6G hard disk<br />
or a dozen CD-Rs. An alternative is to recompress the video with a different<br />
encoding format such as DivX (see “What Is Divx?” in <strong>Chapter</strong> 2) so that<br />
it will take less space, but this often results in significantly reduced picture<br />
quality. In spite of lower data rates of DivX et al, the time and effort it takes<br />
to find and download the files is not worth the bother for most movie viewers.<br />
The reality is that most people ripping and downloading DVDs are<br />
doing it for the challenge, not to avoid buying discs.<br />
The supporters of DeCSS point out that it was only developed to allow<br />
DVD movies to be played on the Linux operating system, which had been<br />
excluded from CSS licensing because of its open-source nature. This is<br />
specifically allowed by DMCA and WIPO laws. However, the DeCSS.exe<br />
program posted on the Internet is a Windows application that decrypts<br />
movie files. The lack of differentiation between the DeCSS process in Linux<br />
and the DeCSS.exe Windows application is hurting the cause of DeCSS<br />
backers, since DeCSS.exe can be used in the process of copying and illegally<br />
distributing movies from DVD. See OPENDVD.ORG and Tom Vogt’s<br />
DECSS CENTRAL for more information on DeCSS.<br />
Worthy of note is that DVD piracy was around long before DeCSS. Serious<br />
DVD pirates can copy the disc bit for bit, including the normally unreadable<br />
lead in (this can be done with a specially modified drive), or copy the<br />
video output from a standard DVD player, or get a copy of the video from<br />
another source such as laserdisc, VHS, or a camcorder smuggled into a<br />
theater. It’s certainly true that DVD piracy is a problem, but DeCSS has little<br />
to do with it.<br />
Shortly after the appearance of DeCSS, the DVD CCA filed a lawsuit and<br />
requested a temporary injunction in an attempt to prevent web sites from<br />
posting (or even linking to!) DeCSS information. The request was denied by<br />
a California court on December 29, 1999. On January 14, 2000, the seven<br />
top U.S. movie studios (Disney, MGM, Paramount, Sony [Columbia/TriStar],<br />
Time Warner, Twentieth Century Fox, and Universal), backed by the MPAA,<br />
filed lawsuits in Connecticut and New York in a further attempt to stop the<br />
distribution of DeCSS on web sites in those states. On January 21, the<br />
judge for the New York suit granted a preliminary injunction, and on January<br />
24, the judge for the CCA suit in California reversed his earlier decision<br />
and likewise granted a preliminary injunction. In both cases, the judges<br />
ruled that the injunction applied only to sites with DeCSS information, not<br />
to linking sites. The CCA suit is based on misappropriation of trade secrets<br />
(somewhat shaky ground), while the MPAA suits are based on copyright cir-
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