Your web browser cache is now an illegal mirror of the source code to DeCSS.

This page may eventually become a takeoff on the EFF's "blue ribbon campaign" for free speech. (By the way, the EFF is paying the legal bills of the people supporting DeCSS.) The purpose would be to explain what the MPAA is doing and why it is wrong, and expand general awareness of DeCSS to people who don't understand it already. As of right now it does neither of those; all that is here right now is the GIFs with the DeCSS code in them, and a vague attempt to explain what they are and where they came from.

The GIF above contains as part of it's GIF comment field (open in a text editor to see it) instructions, in the form of a compilable C program called DeCSS, on how to perform the mathematical process of de-encrypting the CSS algorythm. CSS is used in most DVDs in order to prevent people from playing them without an authorized playback device. The DVD consortum has repeatedly ignored the pleas of users of Linux, BSD, Be, and other "non-mainstream" operating systems to liscence any software to decrypt the CSS and thus watch the movie, many users of these operating systems were forced to reboot into Microsoft Windows every time they wanted to watch a DVD on their computer DVD drives. This is assuming they owned a copy of windows. As another result, people began to try to create unauthorised DVD software for the non-mainstream operating systems. The major breakthrough in this came when some guys in norway reverse-engineered the process used to create CSS "keys" and wrote a program called DeCSS. This is legal under the laws of Norway. However, the MPAA claims the purpose of DeCSS is to help make illegal copies of DVDs. This is not true; the purpose is to decode DVDs into unencrypted MPEG-2 for the purpose of being watched. Besides this, if you wish to make a copy of a DVD you can do this without DeCSS; making a copy of a DVD is not worth it, since blank DVD-RAM disks actually cost more than a new copy of a DVD movie; and if you want to turn a DVD into a form you can illegally distribute over the internet, it is easy to simply write a piece of software that pretends to be a video card, so that instead of the DVD displaying to a screen it is saved in a file. From there you can re-encode it as some lower-quality form of MPEG or MPEG-2 (which you'd want to do even with decss, DVD movies are huge) and do whatever you want with it. However the MPAA has been using the Digital Millineum Copyright Act to attempt to force people to keep from distributing DeCSS or even _linking_ to it. They have been granted several injunctions to silence specific people, but this is a futile thing to do since for every mirror they take down, another three will appear.

This page sprang from a couple of discussions on slashdot.org, which has had a number of news articles on this subject and contained a great deal of very good arguments for why DeCSS should be legal. i have the three posts that led to this page mirrored below. Note all three are replies to other posts (the second one is a reply to the first) and may not make much sense out of context. I will attempt to update this page later to include a more detailed analysis of the situation; right now it really has no purpose except to explain the meaning of the two GIFs.
mcc@drowned.cx

organized civil disobedience (Score:2) by mcc (mcclure111@earthlink.net) on Wednesday December 29, @12:40PM EST (#355) (User Info) http://drowned.cx/

an internet petition is pointless. Who are you going to be petitioning? The DVD forum? the film association? why would they care? any petition would be operated and signedby consumers. The DVD forum and the film association have made it abundantly clear by everything they do that what consumers want does not matter one iota to them. And why should it? They have a monopoly. If the consumer wants a decent-quality copy of The matrix, there is no alternate source. Therefore whether the consumer likes or is directly hurt by any actions of the DVD forum is completely irrelivant. Following the blue ribbon campaign is a _much_ better idea, but should be done along slightly different lines: instead of placing a simple GIF image on all pages, place the GIF image _and_ a copy of the DeCSS source on all pages. Think about it. Set up the "ribbon" so that underneath it is a link "download DeCSS from this mirror location", and have it mirrored on that server along with the webpage. If this got any amount of support, it would make the efforts of the DVD forum to prevent people from having the right to the free speech (source code) of _describing_ how to go about performing the action of decoding CSS-- not doing it themselves, not distributing a tool to do so, but _describing_ the method-- pointless. If a sufficiently large number of people are mirroring the CSS code in an organized manner- and in the process linking back to some page explaining _why_ the DVD forum has no right to complain-- they will be powerless. The DVD forums only weapon is to put people in court knowing that the other side cannot afford the expense of hiring a lawyer and being placed in court, that simply being sued is more effective than losing a lawsuit. But if the number of defendants is sufficiently huge, then the DVD forum will be unable themselves to handle doing this to all of them. What this problem needs is visibility to the general public, not a large show of support. People-- people in general, not just slashdot readers-- need to know _what_ the DVD forum is doing and _why_ it is wrong. If we as a community do _anything_ about this, it must be something to get this issue into the light, to make it visible so that the legal system cannot any longer ignore the ability of corporations to win any battle simply by threat of lawsuit. start shit.

GIFs & deCSS and really huge distribution. (Score:1) by griffjon (griffjon@spamsucks.austin.rr.noitreallydoes.com) on Wednesday December 29, @01:13PM EST (#403) (User Info) http://www.GriffJon.com

First of all, I think a petition would be useful as a PR attack. But more importantly, IIRC, the deCSS source is pretty tiny. GIFs have those fantastic comment blocks available through any decent editing software. So why not start distributing gif files with the deCSS source code stuck in them? Half the people who possessed the GIF would be unaware, and every .gif in every cache of every browser that saw it would provide the DVD CCA with another defendant to worry about. --GriffJon "All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind." --Aristotle

ok, i did it.. here it is. (Score:4, Informative) by mcc (mcc@drowned.cx) on 10:40 PM January 21st, 2000 EST (#431) (User Info) http://drowned.cx/

http://drowned.cx/decss/ well.. i don't know if i like how these came out, but here they are. I went ahead and made them for some reason. I don't really like what they say. "This GIF is illegal" maybe isn't the best way to put it. I'm not quite sure. And it may or may not be true depending on your definition of "illegal". (And they maybe oughta have the LZW compression removed via ungif, just so we can all have rhetorical purity. :P) The idea behind these images (spread public awareness, a la the blue ribbon campaign) only works if it's somehow centralised-- i mean, if images like these wind up in widespread usage, any usage of them should link to some central page that explains what the MPAA is doing and why it's wrong. In which case the "this gif is illegal" should be added to with "click here to find out why". From there it could probably explain what source code is, why it should be considered speech, the purpose of DeCSS, the purpose of CSS, the reason DeCSS does not help piracy (seeing as you can pirate DVDs just as easily without DeCSS just by copying the dvd without decoding or writing a fake video driver before playing it in windows), the reason the MPAA/DVD forum brought this on themselves (by refusal to give any support the unices, the one group most likely to understand how to reverse-engineer), the constitutionality of the Digital Millineum Copyright act with regards to the first amendment and the copyright clause of the constitution, and how the DVD forum in general is basically trying to prevent the spread of information. Y'know, how they are absusing the legal system to try to prevent people from distributing information about how to defeat a copyright protection measure (which sounds to me like it should be covered by freedom of speech and freedom of the press, even if said speech is in the language of C++ and said press is printing on TCP/IP packets instead of paper), or even distributing the location [URLs, links] of that information (which i know is speech, and which there is no basis whatsoever to prevent talking about.) Oh, and maybe some stuff thrown in about monopolies, the sherman antitrust act, and the fact that crushing DeCSS is clearly not to prevent piracy and protect the MPAAs profits and help the artists involved, but simply to preserve the MPAA's power as a political entity/robber baron. And everything else i forgot; what the MPAA/DVD forum is doing is wrong on so many levels you could go on for pages about it. We know all this already, you could do it solely based on compiling slashdot posts, i could write it myself if i weren't so damned tired and i didn't have to go to bed so i can take the SATs tomorrow. As for the GIFs themselves, the kind of murky colored stuff in the background is actually the DeCSS code itself, with the ASCII interpreted as raw color values. Kinda nifty how the hex values at the end come out as just patterns of lines. On the big one i enlarged it and blurred it over a bit to fit more text, but i wouldn't use that one if i were you cuz the file size is unneccicarily large (like 40k.. i think it's better as small as possible). As promised, both contain the entire source code to DeCSS in their comment fields. If you feel like it (hell, do whatever you want-- they contain GPLed code, so they're GPLed images, so i have no control over what you do with them :) ) you can go ahead and put either on any web page you may have with a little note about how the person viewing the page has just broken the law by storing illegal information about defeating copy protection in their browser caches. But, i still think this needs to be more organized. Please excuse the poor writing in this post. As i said, i am tired.

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