At 11:15 AM 6/21/01 -0400, Riad S. Wahby wrote:
The EBay advert could have been selling "cp" because there was nothing about playback implied. Presumably you would copy your DVD files from CDs onto a hard drive and then play them back. As the ad said, perfectly legal.
You don't need to decrypt to copy.
That's true. However, in order to read data from a DVD, you must first "authenticate" to the DVD player. This is before any decryption takes place. This is a cryptographic handshake mechanism using a key. If you do not perform this handshake, it is not possible to read the data.
Yep. But that's not implied by the (probably totally exploitive, BTW) ad.
You are correct that this does not involve decryption. It does, however, involve circumventing a part of the DVD protection mechanism---the one that protects the raw bits from being read off the disk.
My argument, to any judges reading, is that its *not* circumvention if you've bought the damn thing, no matter how you decode it. If you paid for satellite TV but you build your own descrambler, its *not* illegal circumvention, even though your gizmo (legally) circumvents access controls. Get it? [Rhetorically; Riad is not the problem :-] Hint: its only illegal if its fraud. DeCSS has nothing to do with fraud. "cp" does. Actually, only humans do, "cp" is not a moral entity.