Good news for all you pirates...

... if you're Norwegian!

http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=internetNews&storyID=4072927&section=news

 

It's the only reasonable and sensible outcome that case could have had. The poor kid wrote DeCSS (which de-crypts DVDs) so that he and others could use their Linux machines for watching DVDs (which they owned) as at the time there was no DVD player software for Linux licenced for "authorized" decryption.

The fact that people have used the DeCSS algorithm to write DVD copying software is incidental and shouldn't be blamed on him. People don't blame Oppenheimer for Hiroshima and Nagasaki just because he helped invent the nuclear bomb do they?

As with all copy-protection systems, especially ones used widely in the consumer market and therefore cannot be regularly updated, the DVD CSS system was bound to be cracked sooner rather than later.

The music and movie industry need to get their heads out of the sand and accept the realities of the digital and internet world we live in. The sooner they realise they need to adapt to the new realities the better. Even had they won that lawsuit it would have made not a jot of difference to the number of people using DeCSS and copying DVDs.

Michael.

 

Agreed, Michael. Trying to stop this sort of thing has approximately the same level of futility as Canute trying to stop the tide. No matter what the legal niceties say, you eventually have to recognise the real-life situation and deal with it, and the longer the industry puts it off, the worse it's going to be.

On a historical note, there are (or at least were) quite a few people who did indeed blame J. Robert Oppenheimer for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.