“Dave Touretzky might seem like an unlikely champion of free
expression….”
“Touretzky’s latest project is no less controversial: a Gallery
of CSS Descramblers that thumbs its nose at the Motion Picture
Association of America by exhaustively documenting how to decrypt
DVDs. It includes every known computer program that does
so….”
“But Touretzky says that so far, the MPAA has only fired off
threatening letters. In one nastygram last month, MPAA anti-piracy
official Hemanshu Nigam said: “We therefore demand that you take
appropriate steps to cause the immediate removal of DeCSS from the
above identified Internet site, along with such other actions as
may be necessary or appropriate to suspend this illegal
activity….”
“Even if we get this (DeCSS) code distributed everywhere, it’s
just going to strengthen the hand of the content companies to argue
that people can’t be trusted to have control of their own computers
and the government must enforce controls over computers,” Touretzky
said. “They’re going to do that by implementing stuff like
CPRM.”