Just when you thought you had seen it all, there comes another almost incredulous court case pending, where a kid should be going to trial very soon for watching a DVD which he bought on his own computer. Makes you wonder whatever next...

It goes something like this: "THE MOTION PICTURE Association of America (MPAA) has persuaded authorities in the kingdom of Norway to try a teenager three years after he watched DVDs on a Linux computer using the Linux-based de-scrambling program DeCSS. Which he created."

I don't remember the full story, but I think it went something along the lines of the kid had to write the DeCSS program to remove the CSS encryption from his DVD and rip it to his HDD, so that he would watch it under Linux where there was no DVD playing software with CSS decryption built in. But then don't quote me on that.

Admittedly, I am not in full possession of the facts here, but it looks like witch-hunt after witch-hunt on the part of Hollywood, Record Companies, RIAA, Federation Against Copyright Theft, etc, etc, etc... these days.

More here and here and comment here.

Thats just plain retarted.

Now I also do not know all the legal technicalities here but one would think that 1 copy of that dvd sitting on his hard drive, if in fact he owned the dvd, would be just as legal as making that 1 copy of your music cds for backup purposes.

This is sick! HE BOUGHT THE DAMN CD!! (if i read correctly). He better be aquitted..

Wait...he bought the DVD? And he watched it? That doesn't sound right.

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Admittedly, I am not in full possession of the facts here, but it looks like witch-hunt after witch-hunt on the part of Hollywood, Record Companies, RIAA, Federation Against Copyright Theft, etc, etc, etc... these days.
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Fair comment if the kid bought the DVD and then watched it, he should be let off and the company sueing fined for wasting time. But Piracy IS theft no matter what, Its not a witch hunt at all.

But surely its only piracy if he distributes the DVD rip to someone else?

Looks like the MPAA is trying to kill off linux as well then Just because someone broke their lovely css encryption.

I don't think they will be going out after Linux (besides MS is doing a good enough job of that ) but I think that if anyone try to release source code to any application that could defeat DVD copy protection technologies, then that person if they could be caught would wind up looking at a jail term.

Yeah, but by stopping the use of such tools as DeCSS to play DVDs you own legally (as opposed to using DeCSS to rip DVDs), then that surely limits the ability to play DVDs on Linux, as all DVD Software for Linux AFAIK uses DeCSS or some other inevitably illegal algorithm. If you cannot play DVDs on Linux, what other alternatives do we have, Windows.

If DVD software could commercially be made closed source then I don't think anyone would have a problem with it, and I still think that it would sell if done well.