CSS — Page 5

That DeCSS was ruled

August 24, 2000 by Michael Boyle

illegal is not terribly surprising, even if it’s a potentially flawed decision. But as Declan McCullagh wrote in a Wired News article called Only News That’s Fit to Link, that the judge went as far as saying that links to the download sites are illegal is way over the line, for me. The DMCA suggests that ruling, for sure. But the only thing I’m left with is that the DMCA is trying to treat copyrights like drugs – with trafficking, and (more tenuously) seeming to support trafficking (whether true or not) considered to be equivalent to doing the infringement in the first place.

At least Emmanuel Goldstein (aka Eric Corley) has approached it with some cheek and confronted the craziness of the issue… he left the addresses, only in text format, not as links.

Some more links to

August 21, 2000 by Michael Boyle

stories about the deCSS ruling: DeCSS judge: Code isn’t free speech [Salon], Reactions to the DeCSS decision [IDG.net], Passionate reactions to the DeCSS decision online [Network World Fusion], Analysis: DeCSS Ruling Puts Free Speech At Stake [ZDNet], Judge in DVD-Hacker Trial Rules in Favor of Movie Studios [Inside].

Inside.com is running

August 2, 2000 by Michael Boyle

and excellent “this is where we are” story today about Napster and the labels. BTW, there’s no such thing as a secure file format. I’m no crypto genius or anything, but it’s pretty clear to me that someone could “deCSS-ify” any such format – because at some point, the file has to be decrypted to play. Open is open, and may be intercepted by another program that could copy it.

Since last week

August 2, 2000 by Michael Boyle

, there have been several interesting articles that note the power of David Touretzky‘s testimony. The EFF noted it in their DVD Update [via Ed and Scripting News], Another take on it was published in a Wired News article explaining that the deCSS T-Shirt guys have been named defendants in the trial.

Last week, Cam Barrett

August 2, 2000 by Michael Boyle

of CamWorld pointed to a transcript of the deCSS trial from July 25, 2000. I read it that day while I ate lunch at my desk. In the transcript, there’s a lot of stuff that seems to miss the point, or make a point so tangentially that I wonder if the judge et al. will really get it. But not everything was so oblique – one witness explained, clearly, how code could be construed as speech, and therefore protected in the US by the First Amendment – finally!

I say finally because this has been an issue ever since I first jumped online in 1993, when I got hooked on the whole crypto/PGP thing. Code = speech has a long history, and it might finally be getting its due. I’m not 100% sure how far down that road I go, mind, but I think it’s a compelling argument and definitely the case to some extent.