eBay: Burn DVD movies onto CD?

David Honig honig at sprynet.com
Thu Jun 21 15:43:44 PDT 2001


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.














 






  








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