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Lodestone.org » Users » Hoss » Political stuff » A Brief History of DeCSS and the DMCA

Hackers vs. Hollywood, round 1

(A very brief history of DeCSS and the DMCA)

Note: This page attempts to provide context for the DMCA protest that occurred at UR in October of 2000. Please see the protest page for more information.

Dismantling Copyright law and the First Amendment?

Rush Rhees Library gets a face lift.

In a nutshell, this is a story about how greedy media corporations are eroding U.S. constitutional freedoms in order to make a fast buck. Not surprisingly, the greedy corporate-media spokespeople see things a bit differently. If you want both sides of the issue, check out opposing views in the related links section.

No matter who tells it, however, no nutshell can do this story justice — far too many details are involved for that. Nevertheless, my attempt at a brief summary (as of October 2000) follows...

DMCA: The Digital Millenium Copyright Act

No trespassing (or else).

In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), a complex and controversial bill designed to bring copyright law up to date with digital media. Among other things, the DMCA outlaws the manufacture of, or "trafficking" in, technologies capable of circumventing so-called "technical protection measures" used to restrict access to copyrighted works.

Ostensibly this provision of the DMCA was designed to discourage the (already) illegal pirating of protected material, but the law also has some sweeping -- and rather nasty -- side effects. In particular, it effectively eviscerates the long-standing "fair use" exceptions to copyright. If a publisher can use technology to enforce where, when, and how a copyrighted work is accessed, and if the law bars consumers from circumventing such technologies -- even with products they have legally purchased -- then the provisions of "fair use" become hollow and irrelevant.

CSS: The "Content Scramble System"

Bilingual street signs in Toronto's Chinatown.

CSS is a technology created by the movie industry to control access to Digital Video Disc (DVD) media. CSS is not a copy protection system, but rather an access control system: it prevents the playback of discs on "unauthorized" devices -- i.e. devices lacking decryption keys that the movie industry provides (for a fee) to preferred manufacturers. Ironically, pirates can still make duplicates of CSS-scrambled DVDs, and these pirated copies will play normally in authorized DVD players. CSS does not prevent piracy.

So what is CSS good for, then? For one thing, it gives the movie industry perpetual control of digital content after they sell it to you. By contrast, older technologies like video cassettes preserved your implicit right to access the material you purchase: the cassettes weren't scrambled, so you didn't need to buy an "authorized" VCR with the right descrambling keys built-in. Once you bought a cassette, it was yours to watch on any player of your choice. You could even duplicate short sections for educational use or parody. These were (and still are) long-standing rights guaranteed to US citizens under the "fair use" provision of copyright law.

But no more. In the digital arena, you effectively have these rights only if the copyright holder deigns to grant them to you. In other words, CSS and the DMCA effectively revoke your right to access material you've already paid for. They are a technological end-run around copyright law, rendering your fair use rights obsolete.

The hero of our story, Jon Johansen

Hill Cumorah Pageant.

In late 1999, a program known as "DeCSS" appeared on an Internet mailing list. Among its authors was 16 year-old Jon Johansen of Norway, a Linux user who wanted to let consumers watch DVDs on computer operating systems for which authorized players did not yet exist -- like Linux, for instance. Naturally, DeCSS had to circumvent the CSS access controls on these discs in order to play their content. Which, according to the DMCA, is now illegal.

Several months after the DeCSS code first appeared on Jon's father's web site, the Norwegian police paid an unexpected visit to the Johansen household: Jon's computers were seized as evidence, and both he and his father were charged with intellectual property offenses. Both face the threat of two years in prison.

Litigation a'plenty

So far this year (2000), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) -- an umbrella organization representing the major movie studios -- has filed hundreds of lawsuits against "traffickers" of DeCSS. The defendants include independent web site operators, a magazine publisher, and a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Among the crimes they are accused of: (1) publishing the DeCSS code on the web; (2) publishing various non-executable versions of the DeCSS algorithm, including graphic renderings, plain-English descriptions, and a recording of the C-language code sung to music(!); and perhaps most baffling of all, (3) publishing mere hyperlinks to sites where DeCSS can be found.

In other words, if the MPAA has its way, not only will you be banned from distributing an algorithm, but you won't even be allowed to tell others where they can learn about it. (e.g., this very web page will be considered contraband, since it links to sites where you can learn about the DeCSS program.) Clearly this precedent will have chilling implications for First Amendment freedoms. The MPAA has already won the first round of at least one lawsuit as of this writing, but appeals are pending.