Linux Journal: Crackers and Crackdowns

[ Thanks to Edward
Marsden for this link. ]

“From Kevin Mitnick to Jon Johansen, the Empire strikes
back.“

“DeCSS author Jon Lech Johansen’s home was raided by special
police forces at the whim of the Motion Picture Association, an
organization which affectionately refers to itself as “a little
State Department”. Jon’s Linux box, his FreeBSD/Win2k box, as well
as his Nokia cellphone (which we are sure played a large part in
helping him to provide a DVD player for Linux, and is likely to
harbor dark and mysterious secrets) have been confiscated. Although
Jon was questioned for seven hours and then released, he and his
father are charged and could face fines and up to two years in
prison. The GILC, a coalition of civil rights groups throughout the
world (notably including the EFF), has condemned the action as a
violation both of the Human Rights Accords of the United Nations
and the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Almost ironically,
Jon’s reverse-engineering rights are specifically protected by the
notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which itself is
probably unconstitutional).”

“DeCSS has been the source of much contention between the Linux
community and government/industry (it’s hard to tell government and
industry apart these days). Linux hackers wanted to play DVDs on
their Linux boxes, while the movie industry wanted to prevent
people from being able to copy DVDs. Although currently the sheer
size of DVDs is a better copy restriction than the most elaborate
encryption, the techno-ignorant industrial lawyers probably expect
increased bandwidth and some new compression scheme to make DVD
distribution possible some day, as is currently the case with mp3s
(a fair expectation). Still, encrypting DVDs hasn’t any effect on
whether or not they are easy to copy, so it’s not clear what the
industry’s line of thinking was (most likely typical
techno-ignorance).”

Complete
Story