[CrackMonkey] Tell The World About Your Information Rights -- Friday, 2/4/2000

[Seth David Schoen]

ESP writes:

> >>>>> "SDS" == Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> writes:
> 
>     SDS> Note that DeCSS is a Windows program and can't be run on
>     SDS> Linux.
> 
>     SDS> The current popular opinion seems to be that the Linux CSS
>     SDS> code in (say) LiViD is derived from DeCSS and wouldn't have
>     SDS> been possible without the various things that were revealed
>     SDS> in DeCSS.
> 
>     SDS> All this bears more looking into.
> 
> I was laboring under the assumption that the DeCSS code was originally
> developed for the Linux DVD player and then released separately. Am I
> so very wrong?

We should distinguish between "DeCSS" (the program) and "the DeCSS code"
(functions or C code that are found in DeCSS).

For DeCSS: no, because DeCSS is a Windows program.  It doesn't run on Linux
and has never run on Linux.

For the DeCSS code: according to Jon Johansen, MoRE wrote DeCSS as a
demonstration with the intention of getting the code re-used in a Linux
DVD player once UDF was supported on Linux; according to other people,
maybe not.  (Interestingly, the people who are skeptical of that claim
include people with _very_ different positions on the whole affair.)

I'm still trying to determine _how_ all of this stuff is descended.

The code in LiViD at the moment is descended from some other CSS code that
they got sent to them anonymously.  That has a name, but I'll call it
"*livid".  So, was *livid descended from DeCSS, was DeCSS descended from
*livid, were they independent, or were they descended from a common
ancestor?

That may turn out to be a very big issue soon, as far as the trade secret
question goes.  (It's totally irrelevant to the DMCA case, as far as Judge
Kaplan's current reading of the DMCA goes.)

See why it's difficult to answer questions from the public at these protests?
"Well, this kid in Norway published this program which he said he got from
an adult in Germany, and the guy in Norway said that the guy in Germany
wrote it in order to demonstrate something which could be used by some
other programmers later in order to support DVD on Linux... but in this
process it appears that the guy in Germany traded technical information with
people who had other intentions."

At the moment I am listening to "Open Up" by Leftfield on the _Hackers_
soundtrack; the lyrics include a long section which says "Burn, Hollywood,
burn".  Did Leftfield know something we didn't?

-- 
Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>  | And do not say, I will study when I
Temp.  http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/  | have leisure; for perhaps you will
down:  http://www.loyalty.org/   (CAF)  | not have leisure.  -- Pirke Avot 2:5