MPAA vs Copyright Law & You
Roadmap Introduction What is at stake? How will this effect you? Conclusions – The Bigger Picture
Introduction Who is: MPAA DVD CCA 2600.com What is: CSS & DeCSS Why the lawsuit?
The MPAA Motion Picture Association of America Represents the entire movie industry DVD Copy Control Association Content Scrambling System – CSS Licensed and required for all DVD playback equipment
2600.com The Hacker Quarterly Self-described as “focused on the vulnerability of computer security systems” Editor Eric Corley a.k.a. Emmanuel Goldstein
CSS & DeCSS DVDs have files (.vob) that are encrypted using CSS DVD CCA controls who has decryption keys DVDs are region encoded DeCSS Input:.vob file (encrypted) Output: mpeg file (unencrypted)
Why the lawsuit? MPAA sued 2600.com because it was linking and hosting to DeCSS MPAA cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as basis for lawsuit Circumvention of copyright protections illegal 2600.com was allegedly contributing to copyright infringement
Text of DMCA No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
What is at stake? Economic issues Legal issues Ethical issues Social issues
Economic Issues $8.4 billion at the box office in % increase over 2000 $3 billion world-wide lost in potential revenue Not including internet piracy
Legal Issues Code as object vs. Code as speech Fair use vs. copyrights Legality of reverse engineering Digital Millennium Copyright Act Trumping speech with copyright
Court Decisions 2600.com prohibited from linking and/or hosting DeCSS code. Code mixes speech & non-speech elements—i.e. expressive & functional 2 nd Circuit Court (NY) has upheld ruling 9 th Circuit Court has found code to be speech (Bernstein vs. U.S. DOJ)
Ethical Issues Linking to code Reverse engineering Providing information about exploits Anonymous release of code
Utilitarian Ethical Test ProCon SourceDisclosure of vulnerabilities Harmful impact on movie industry, economy ObjectBreaks hegemonic control over DVD movies Circumvents copyrights “Keys to castle”
Social Issues How does this case effect you? Stifle innovation in research Restricts speech Control over consumption of media Should it be absolute? Fair use in the 21 st century
Conclusion State of the case now EFF & 2600 have appealed to CA Supreme Court Batted back and forth between CA & NY Still has yet to be resolved entirely DeCSS continues to be widely available Google search for DeCSS returns ~97,000 resultsDeCSS DVDs are the fastest growing consumer product ever
The Big Picture Magic-markers and CDs Is this any different from DeCSS and DVDs? AP & Reuters have not been sued English vs. C-code – what is the difference?
Questions, Comments, Flaming Criticism?
References MPAA post-trial brief: brief2.html brief2.html "Source code is speech" Amicus Curiae Brief: speech.html speech.html EFF's case archive (provided by Ms Cohn): MPAA Economic Review mic/index.htm mic/index.htm