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vsp · 09-19-2001, 11:09 AM

Okay, I'll do this as simply as I can.

The region-coding issue is simple at heart: the media producers of the world have divided the world up into several sections for marketing purposes. (For example, game consoles like PlayStations and Dreamcasts have US, European and Japanese versions, among others.)

Roughly speaking, for DVDs, it's like this:

1 = US and nearby possessions
2 = Western Europe, Japan, South Africa, the Middle East
3 = Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Philippines, Indonesia
4 = Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, South America
5 = Russia, Eastern Europe, most of Africa, North Korea
6 = China
There is also a Zone 0, for region-free discs, but very few of those exist.

99% of the DVD players in the world have a single region built into their firmware -- for instance, every player you can buy off the rack at a major US store is Region 1. This is done to control what movies are available in certain parts of the world at any given time, strictly for economic/marketing reasons.

If you have a Region 2 disc and attempt to play it on a Region 1 player, the disc will not play. Certain manufacturers created Region 0 players (capable of playing 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6); the DVD manufacturers then adjusted their encoding so that many of their discs will not play on Region 0 players. Interested in something that's not available (or not available yet) in your region of the world? Tough -- you're not allowed to watch it, according to the powers that be.

This is what is known in technical terms as a "crock of shit."

Now, several DVD players have hidden menus that allow you to monkey with the region setting, enabling you to watch movies from anywhere in the world by temporarily setting the player to their encoded region. (Some, like Philips players, only allow this to be changed a finite number of times, after which it's locked; others, primarily brand-X manufacturers, let you modify it as needed.) Unfortunately, most of the major DVD player manufacturers are in the back pocket of the Motion Picture Association of America, and thus leave out this useful feature.

There are also hardware hacks, much like there are for game consoles (the PlayStation has a handful of methods for bypassing country checks, for instance).

NOW...

DeCSS is a software program written by a German hacking group, designed to get around DVD encryption. Y'see, in 1999, the only commercial software players available for home computers were for Windows and (later) Macintosh. Thus, a consumer could have a perfectly legal and original DVD, a store-bought DVD-ROM in his PC, and be unable to view it in any way because he was running Linux, FreeBSD or some other alternative to Windows.

In order to write the proper DVD-ROM device drivers and software for Linux, it was necessary to break the CSS encryption system. This proved to be a trivial task, particularly when one of the encryption keys was inadvertently leaked to the public in an unencrypted form (I'd have to go back and look up whose fault that was). The group whipped up DeCSS, which disabled the encryption and allowed Linux DVD software to take it from there, and a 16-year-old in Norway named Jon Johansen (a member of the group) posted a link to the source on his website. Now DVDs could be enjoyed by (and purchased by) consumers regardless of which OS they ran, and all was well. Right?

Wrong, actually. At the behest of the Motion Picture Association of America, Nordic cops swarmed Johansen's home and took his equipment, and other links to the software worldwide were swatted down by cease-and-desist orders and threats of lawsuits. According to the MPAA, DeCSS violated a rather nasty US law known as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which labels attempts to break encryption on consumer products for ANY purpose (legal or not, fair use or not) as criminal activity. Trade agreements extended this US law to just about every nation the US does business with, including Norway, in case you're wondering how Hollywood producers had enough influence to make Norway's police mobilize and bust a teenager.

Clearly, stated Jack Valenti and his MPAA drones, DeCSS was designed for rampant movie piracy. As it happens, DVD piracy was occurring worldwide long before DeCSS appeared (software existed to make bit-per-bit copies, actually copying the encryption as well as the content, and other programs grabbed the movie during playback (after it had been decrypted by the player) and dumped it to a hard drive for conversion to VCD). As it happens, this was the only method available for viewing legally-purchased DVDs on legally-purchased DVD-ROMs in non-Windows environments. This didn't slow down the MPAA's legal bulldozers, unfortunately; among others, 2600 Magazine (a US magazine devoted to hacking, cracking and assorted digital sleight-of-hand) was slapped down in court for maintaining links to the source code on their web page.

You read that correctly -- not only was it "illegal" to distribute this software, but courts ruled that it was illegal to merely LINK to where the software could be found. This has some serious privacy and legal implications -- imagine if your web page points to a dot.com somewhere, it folds, the new owner of the domain name quietly fills the site with child pornography and you fail to update your links (having not heard about the abrupt change in format). Can you be arrested for distributing illegal materials? According to these judges, YES, you can be. An assistant US attorney likened DeCSS to "software programs that shut down navigational programs in airplanes or smoke detectors in hotels," claiming that it "creates a very real possibility of harm."

This would generate a lot more snickering among the hackers of the world, if it wasn't for the fact that many US judges are far from technologically savvy and BUY these arguments, and rule accordingly.

Naturally, DeCSS, Johansen and the DMCA have become major buzzwords among the legal and online communities, and the legal wrangling continues to this day.

This is all off the top of my head, of course. Try:
http://www.eff.org/Intellectual_prop...PAA_DVD_cases/
or
http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/p...cgi?name=decss
for more detailed information on these cases.

09-19-2001, 11:09 AM	#5
vsp Syndrome of a Down Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: West Chester Posts: 1,367	Long-winded bastard alert Okay, I'll do this as simply as I can. The region-coding issue is simple at heart: the media producers of the world have divided the world up into several sections for marketing purposes. (For example, game consoles like PlayStations and Dreamcasts have US, European and Japanese versions, among others.) Roughly speaking, for DVDs, it's like this: 1 = US and nearby possessions 2 = Western Europe, Japan, South Africa, the Middle East 3 = Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Philippines, Indonesia 4 = Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, South America 5 = Russia, Eastern Europe, most of Africa, North Korea 6 = China There is also a Zone 0, for region-free discs, but very few of those exist. 99% of the DVD players in the world have a single region built into their firmware -- for instance, every player you can buy off the rack at a major US store is Region 1. This is done to control what movies are available in certain parts of the world at any given time, strictly for economic/marketing reasons. If you have a Region 2 disc and attempt to play it on a Region 1 player, the disc will not play. Certain manufacturers created Region 0 players (capable of playing 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6); the DVD manufacturers then adjusted their encoding so that many of their discs will not play on Region 0 players. Interested in something that's not available (or not available yet) in your region of the world? Tough -- you're not allowed to watch it, according to the powers that be. This is what is known in technical terms as a "crock of shit." Now, several DVD players have hidden menus that allow you to monkey with the region setting, enabling you to watch movies from anywhere in the world by temporarily setting the player to their encoded region. (Some, like Philips players, only allow this to be changed a finite number of times, after which it's locked; others, primarily brand-X manufacturers, let you modify it as needed.) Unfortunately, most of the major DVD player manufacturers are in the back pocket of the Motion Picture Association of America, and thus leave out this useful feature. There are also hardware hacks, much like there are for game consoles (the PlayStation has a handful of methods for bypassing country checks, for instance). NOW... DeCSS is a software program written by a German hacking group, designed to get around DVD encryption. Y'see, in 1999, the only commercial software players available for home computers were for Windows and (later) Macintosh. Thus, a consumer could have a perfectly legal and original DVD, a store-bought DVD-ROM in his PC, and be unable to view it in any way because he was running Linux, FreeBSD or some other alternative to Windows. In order to write the proper DVD-ROM device drivers and software for Linux, it was necessary to break the CSS encryption system. This proved to be a trivial task, particularly when one of the encryption keys was inadvertently leaked to the public in an unencrypted form (I'd have to go back and look up whose fault that was). The group whipped up DeCSS, which disabled the encryption and allowed Linux DVD software to take it from there, and a 16-year-old in Norway named Jon Johansen (a member of the group) posted a link to the source on his website. Now DVDs could be enjoyed by (and purchased by) consumers regardless of which OS they ran, and all was well. Right? Wrong, actually. At the behest of the Motion Picture Association of America, Nordic cops swarmed Johansen's home and took his equipment, and other links to the software worldwide were swatted down by cease-and-desist orders and threats of lawsuits. According to the MPAA, DeCSS violated a rather nasty US law known as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which labels attempts to break encryption on consumer products for ANY purpose (legal or not, fair use or not) as criminal activity. Trade agreements extended this US law to just about every nation the US does business with, including Norway, in case you're wondering how Hollywood producers had enough influence to make Norway's police mobilize and bust a teenager. Clearly, stated Jack Valenti and his MPAA drones, DeCSS was designed for rampant movie piracy. As it happens, DVD piracy was occurring worldwide long before DeCSS appeared (software existed to make bit-per-bit copies, actually copying the encryption as well as the content, and other programs grabbed the movie during playback (after it had been decrypted by the player) and dumped it to a hard drive for conversion to VCD). As it happens, this was the only method available for viewing legally-purchased DVDs on legally-purchased DVD-ROMs in non-Windows environments. This didn't slow down the MPAA's legal bulldozers, unfortunately; among others, 2600 Magazine (a US magazine devoted to hacking, cracking and assorted digital sleight-of-hand) was slapped down in court for maintaining links to the source code on their web page. You read that correctly -- not only was it "illegal" to distribute this software, but courts ruled that it was illegal to merely LINK to where the software could be found. This has some serious privacy and legal implications -- imagine if your web page points to a dot.com somewhere, it folds, the new owner of the domain name quietly fills the site with child pornography and you fail to update your links (having not heard about the abrupt change in format). Can you be arrested for distributing illegal materials? According to these judges, YES, you can be. An assistant US attorney likened DeCSS to "software programs that shut down navigational programs in airplanes or smoke detectors in hotels," claiming that it "creates a very real possibility of harm." This would generate a lot more snickering among the hackers of the world, if it wasn't for the fact that many US judges are far from technologically savvy and BUY these arguments, and rule accordingly. Naturally, DeCSS, Johansen and the DMCA have become major buzzwords among the legal and online communities, and the legal wrangling continues to this day. This is all off the top of my head, of course. Try: http://www.eff.org/Intellectual_prop...PAA_DVD_cases/ or http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/p...cgi?name=decss for more detailed information on these cases.