The Microsoft Xbox Key/dvd issues

[Peter Fairbrother]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28749.html

The entertainment lobby has failed to persuade a Norwegian court to convict
a teenager for creating a utility for playing back DVDs on his own computer.

Jon Lech Johansen has been acquitted of all charges in a trial that tested
the legality of the DeCSS DVD decryption utility he produced, Norwegian
paper Aftenposten reports.

Norwegian prosecutors, acting largely on the behest of the Motion Picture
Association of America (MPAA), argued in court that Johansen acted illegally
in sharing his DeCSS tool with others and distributing it via the Internet.
They claimed the DeCSS utility made it easier to pirate DVDs.

The court rejected these arguments, ruling that Johansen did nothing wrong
in bypassing DVD scrambling codes that stopped him using his Linux PC to
play back DVDs he'd bought.

(They go on to say that it's not illegal to use DeCSS to play dvd's. So if
you haven't already got a copy, you can get one now, in Sweden at least.)
.............

There is a product called DVD region x for the xbox that allows you to play
dvd's from any region coming out soon. As it probably has to be signed by
Microsoft (as all xbox programs must be), can we assume that the
regionalisation of DVD's silliness is effectively over?

And apart from that, what was the point of CSS? You can do a "dd" on a DVD
and play the image from a hard drive. I don't have a DVD burner, but I'd
imagine you could burn a DVD from such an image, so direct copying is
probably easy enough. Maybe I'm wrong, I haven't tried it, but the pirates
don't seem to have any technical trouble.

The regionalisation issue was another monopoly grab. The DVD format is as
much a monopoly as Microsoft or Intel (probably more...)

-- 
Peter Fairbrother