“Leave it to a teen-age boy to trigger the legal scramble that
may present the first real test of the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act.”
“In the eyes of some within the hacking and open-source
communities, by creating DeCSS, Johansen has ‘radically transformed
a multibillion-dollar electronics and content industry.’
Owners and distributors of copyrighted content have been fearing
this ‘radical transformation’ for some time. They fear the advent
of an age where perfect (and pirated) copies of digitized movies,
music, images and more, could be transmitted globally with
ease.”
“…you may be asking yourself: Why is it illegal to produce
and distribute a program whose ostensible purpose is to allow Linux
aficionados to play DVDs? For the answer, we need to take a quick
trip through the nuts and bolts of the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act’s anti-circumvention provisions.”