People often ask me about the availability of particular pieces of software on Linux. They’ll say, “I have a .DOC file, how can I open that on Linux?” and I’ll say, “OpenOffice.org makes a great word processor for Linux, Windows and OS X!” Or they want to know how to edit photos, or use a web browser, or play music.
But when they say they want to watch DVDs, I have to tell them it’s illegal and they get confused. Maybe you didn’t hear the nerds screaming about it five years ago when the Digital Millenium Copyright Act passed, or when the Motion Picture Association of America arranged to have a 14-year-old Norwegian boy arrested (he was eventually freed after a three-year legal battle that destroyed his father’s business). Maybe you didn’t hear when the Russian cryptographer Dmitri Sklyarov was arrested in Las Vegas, or when the Harvard professors got a letter threatening them with legal action and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines if they published their most recent work.
Well, now you know why it mattered five years ago: you don’t own that DVD. You own a limited license to access the data on it from certain licensed players. You may not use still images. You may not skip to an arbitrary portion of it without watching certain advertisements and notices. You may not make backup copies. You may not transfer it to another medium. You may not edit out the dirty parts if you think your kids would be better off without them
It’s theoretically legal, under fair use rights, to do any of those things. It’s just that constructing an unlicensed player is a crime. You can build an unlicensed player, of course– the key bits are simple enough for any 14-year-old computer whiz with a good knowledge of software compilation and encryption technologies. Not brilliant? You’re SOL.
Write your senator. Give to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Or give up.
Secretly Ironic 