DVD decryption and perl

Steve Johnson steve at bbdltd.com
Wed Mar 14 22:00:43 CST 2001


Hi all,

I stumbled onto this site http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/ on the
way to somewhere else.  It has an interesting discussion of the issues
around DVD decryption triggered by a preliminary injunction in Universal
City Studios et al. v. Reimerdes et al., prohibiting the defendants from
distributing computer code for reading encrypted DVDs.

Since the pm group enjoys the bits, I thought perhaps this bit fit.

I especially liked the conflicting court rulings that code is not free
speech, but text is (now if I use NOTEPAD to create my c code, and NOTEPAD
is a text editor, that means my c is text and thus free speech protected?).

To that end, the site has included DeCSS et al on permanent display.  You
can see/hear the decrypt code in C, perl (about 500 bytes), dramatic
readings of source code, the ascii code encoded as a midi file, english (a
guy wrote a C to english/english to C translator), gif images, compilerless
programming language versions, T shirts, and my personal favorite, haiku.

Regards,
sj




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