Educational CyberPlayGround ®

About TRADE SECRETS

AACS DRM DeCSS DMCA HD PQ DVD

We don't need more copyright laws
since hackers discovered government employees
watch porn and download movies.

2012 A group of hackers calling themselves Th3 Consortium and claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous and LulzSec broke into DigitalPlaground.com, the 3rd pØrn site it's hacked stealing 72,000 passwords and 40,000 credit card numbers. All 3 pØrn sites are owned by Luxembourg-based Manwin: Brazzers and 350,000 usernames and passwords were stolen. Then YouPorn was cracked and a million usernames and passwords were compromised.

Taxpayers don't want gov't employees watching porn on their dime. And Catching government employees engaged in watching pØrn or illegally downloading movies does not mean we need copyright laws.

Stupid government employees used their official email addresses to register for a pØrn site. As AVN.com reports, "According to Th3Consortium, it hacked 27 admins' names, usernames, e-mail addresses, and encrypted passwords; 85 affiliates' usernames, plaintext passwords, and in some cases, IP addresses; and 82 .gov and .mil e-mail addresses with corresponding plaintext passwords."

"And of course as this is a pØrn site," Th3 Consortium bragged in their release about the attack, "there was no shortage of .mil and .gov emails in their user list."

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom told TorrentFreak in an interview, "Guess what -- we found a large number of Mega accounts from US Government officials including the Department of Justice and the US Senate." And we're not just talking about usernames and passwords in MegaUpload's case. It's terrabytes of actual files. Luckily for these public officials, the government has control of that data for the time being.

RIAA cheep chief: ISPs to start policing copyright by July 12 Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon are among the ISPs preparing to implement a graduated response to piracy by July, says the music industry's cheep chief lobbyist. Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon are among the ISPs preparing to implement a graduated response to piracy by July, says the music industry's chief lobbyist.blah blah blah blah cnet.com/ RIAA and counterparts at the trade group for the big film studios, had penned the deal--with the help of the White House.

DVD RIPPER

12/06 AACS DRM cracked by BackupHDDVD tool?
Can it be? Is Hollywood's new DRM posterchild AACS actually quite breakable? According to a post on our favoritest of forums (Doom9) by DRM hacker du jour muslix64, his new BackupHDDVD tool decrypts and dismantles AACS on a Windows PC. Just feed the small utility a crypto key (it comes bundled with keys for a few popular HD DVD titles, with the promise of more on the way), and it'll dump the video right off the disc onto your hard drive, supposedly playable in any HD DVD compatible player. If true, this would instantly become the DeCSS of high def optical, as AACS is the copy protection scheme used not only by HD DVD, but by Blu-ray as well.
If the encryption code has been cracked, then any high-definition DVD released up to now can be illegally copied using the Muslix64 "key," according to technology experts.
Jeff Moss, organizer of Defcon, the world's largest hacking convention, said in an interview that Muslix64 appears to have found a real breach in the encryption system.

Digital Rights Issues in Art

DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGMENT

In the US, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal to create, use, or share tools that give you access to a copyrighted work. In the US, it's not illegal to watch a movie you purchased in another country. But the makers of movies on DVD don't want you to. So, under the DMCA, it's illegal to distribute a program that lets you watch a DVD you purchased in another country.

DVD Decrypter is a software application for Microsoft Windows (including Windows support) that can create backup disk images of the DVD-Video structure of DVDs. It can be used to image any DVD, but controversially it is especially useful for decrypting copy protected movies. The program can also record images to disc. Content Scrambling System< (CSS) decrypting software (such as DVD Decrypter and AnyDVD) allows a region-specific DVD to be copied as an all-region DVD. It also removes Macrovision content protection, CSS, region codes, and user operation prohibition.

About DeCSS a program that cracks the code designed to protect the content on DVDs from being copied--for either legal or illicit uses.

DeCSS is just such a program. The makers of movies on DVD have been trying their hardest to get rid of it. David Touretzky has a gallery of things that do the same job, the point is to show the futility of drawing a line between code and speech. Here are where you can buy DVD Players that are code free

  • DVD Zones - Which is the economics behind all this
    Market segmentation by country is deliberately outlawed by "free trade" laws and treaties, which exist to benefit consumers by letting them import whatever products they want from other countries.The federal DMCA has nothing to do with protecting copyrights and everything to do with protecting monopolies, as the judge agreed in the 2600 case.
  • First 4 Internet's technology encodes the music files with a heavy encryption that allows standard cd players to playback the music. There are also additional data files on the CD that further enhance encryption. All of which is easily bypassed by simply holding down the shift button when you load the CD into a PC. http://www.anandtech.com/news/shownews.aspx?i=23525
    One doesn't even need to hold down the shift key to disable this nasty DRM if one configures one's Windows system not to "autoplay" CDs when they are inserted. This is a good idea, since leaving this "feature" enabled can also cause awkward problems if a CD is left in a drive when the machine is rebooted.Instructions on how to disable "autoplay" (They'll vary for different versions of Windows) are available on hundreds of Web sites; consult your favorite search engine.
  • HowTos for all Windows variants since 95: http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-018
    Containing solutions for those happy playing in the registry, and software solutions for those less brave!
  • Wiki Rip a DVD Howto make sure to be prepared and have DVD Shrink then you can Burn a DVD

Under United States' Federal law, making a backup copy of a DVD-Video or an audio CD by a consumer is legal under fair use protection. However, this provision of United States law conflicts with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibition of so-called "circumvention measures" of copy protections. In the noted "321" case, Federal District Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California,ruled that the backup copies made with software such as DVD Decrypter are in fact legal but that distribution of the software used to make them is illegal. As of the date of this revision, neither the US Supreme Court nor the US Congress has taken definitive action on the matter.

How to "rip" a scene from an entire movie on a DVD? by Pat Pecoy, Ph.D.

First, download VLC (Video Lan Client) and install it. Use this freeware program as your DVD player. (By the way - VLC is great because it ignores region codes on DVDs -- you can play PAL, NTSC, whatever. I've yet to meet a DVD that VLC didn't like!!).
FOLLOW THESE DIRECTIONS
Next, for the capture part, download FRAPS http://www.fraps.com/. FRAPS is a shareware program ($37 ). Once you install it, using it is a breeze. Crank up FRAPS, click on the "Movie" tab, tell it what folder you want to use to save the captures and you're ready to go. Start your DVD and when you get to the scene you want to capture, press F9. When you get to the end of the scene, press F9 again. FRAPS will also capture still images (same procedure, only the hotkey is F10 instead of F9). It's so easy I've even been able to teach university level faculty members how to do it!!


Doom9
Software Downloads

Moving DVD's to Ipod Video

Links to Illegal Material
Liability - Part 1 - Part 2 - Criminal and Trademark Law, Deep Links/Search Engines - Linking Policies - Framing/Inline-Linking - Laws & Regulations - Paid Listings / Fake Error Messages - Other Search Engine News

3/1/04
A California appeals court has overturned a lower court ruling against Andrew Bunner for publishing the DeCSS computer program, which breaks copy-protection measures on DVDs. The court found that the DeCSS program had been so widely distributed before the DVD Copy Control Association filed its case against Mr. Bunner, that the technology may have lost its trade-secret status. Under the ruling, Mr. Bunner is entitled to recoup the costs of the appeal.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-dvd28feb28,1,1773972.story?coll=la-headlines-technology
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/legal/0,39020651,39147906,00.htm

Forwarded from: Marjorie Simmons <lawyer at carpereslegalis dot com>
 The following is an observation -- not legal advice. It pertains to infosec in an evidentiary way because of logs. Or rather, in this case, no logs.

Court opinion at:http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/documents/H021153A.PDF
 On Feb 27, 04, the California Court of Appeal (6th dist.) reversed the order granting a preliminary injunction to DVDCCA in the trade secret case DVD Copy Control Assn. Inc., v. Andrew Bunner, H021153 / CV786804. The court's opinion as rendered is a straightforward trade secret analysis. By the numbers, to colloquialize.
Note the opinion covers trade secret matters, not copyright, and is based upon the appellate record filed in that court. It is not a final adjudication on the merits, thus the ultimate determination of trade secret status and misappropriation would be subject to proof to be presented at trial. However, the court found that DVDCCA was not likely to succeed in its trade secret claim on the merits. (That's a big red flag for the lower courts.)
Also, the case was brought under California State law -- that state's Trade Secrets Act and its specific provisions. The states each differ in their similar laws. An intelligent and well-reasoned opinion, I'd say, overall. On remand to the lower court, the DVDCCA's claim for its intellectual property right remains.

<Opinion Excerpts>

"According to DVD CCA, DeCSS incorporates trade secret information that was obtained by reverse engineering CSS in breach of a license agreement.

. . .

The test for a trade secret is whether the matter sought to be protected is information
(1) that is valuable because it is unknown to others and
(2) that the owner has attempted to keep secret.

. . .

In order to qualify as a trade secret, the information must be secret, and must not be of public knowledge or of a general knowledge in the trade or business.

. . .

Publication on the Internet does not necessarily destroy the secret if the publication is sufficiently obscure or transient or otherwise limited so that it does not become generally known to the relevant people, i.e., potential competitors or other persons to whom the information would have some economic value.

. . .

[Here], the secrecy element becomes important at two points. First, if the allegedly proprietary information contained in DeCSS was already public knowledge when Bunner posted the program to his Web site, Bunner could not be liable for misappropriation by republishing it because he would not have been disclosing a trade secret. Second, even if the information was not generally known when Bunner posted it, if it had become public knowledge by the time the trial court granted the preliminary injunction, the injunction (which only prohibits disclosure) would have been improper because DVD CCA could not have demonstrated interim harm.

. . .

Bunner first became aware of DeCSS on or around October 26, 1999. But there is no evidence as to when he actually posted it.

. . .

[A]ssuming the information was originally acquired by improper means, it does not necessarily follow that once the information became publicly available that everyone else would be liable under the trade secret laws for re- publishing it simply because they knew about its unethical origins. In a case that receives widespread publicity, just about anyone who becomes aware of the contested information would also know that it was allegedly created by improper means. Under DVD CCA's construction of the law, in such a case the general public could theoretically be liable for misappropriation simply by disclosing it to someone else. This is not what trade secret law is designed to do.

. . .

*** It is important *** to point out that we do not assume that the alleged trade secrets contained in DeCSS became part of the public domain simply by having been published on the Internet. Rather, the evidence demonstrates that in this case, the initial publication was quickly and widely republished to an eager audience so that DeCSS and the trade secrets it contained rapidly became available to anyone interested in obtaining them. Further, the record contains no evidence as to when in the course of the initial distribution of the offending program Bunner posted it. Thus, DVD CCA has not shown a likelihood that it will prevail on the merits of its claim of misappropriation against Bunner.

. . .

[T]he preliminary injunction prohibiting disclosure was intended to protect the trade secret. Therefore, even if Bunner was liable for misappropriation, if the information had since become generally known, a preliminary injunction prohibiting disclosure would have done nothing to protect the secret because the secret would have ceased to exist. Further, assuming that an injunction against the use of information could be justified, we can conceive of no possible justification for an injunction against the disclosure of information if the information were already public knowledge.

. . .

[The court concurs with the Religious Technology Center v. Netcom opinion and acknowledges the dualities of the 'Net: ]

The court is troubled by the notion that any Internet user, . . . can destroy valuable intellectual property rights by posting them over the Internet, especially given the fact that there is little opportunity to screen postings before they are made. .

. . Nonetheless, one of the Internet's virtues, that it gives even the poorest individuals the power to publish to millions of readers, can also be a detriment to the value of pintellectual roperty rights. The anonymous (or judgment proof) defendant can permanently destroy valuable trade secrets, leaving no one to hold liable for the misappropriation.

There is little question that such behavior is unethical and that it probably violates other laws. But that which is in the public domain cannot be removed by action of the states under the guise of trade secret protection."

</Opinion Excerpts> see also: http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1078007042.html
Appeals court rules DeCSS is no longer a trade secret Ars Technica Newsdesk Posted 02/28/2004 @ 4:24 PM, by Fred "zAmboni" Locklear

The Futility of Digital Copy Prevention, by Bruce Schneier
Noted cryptographer says 'All digital copy protection schemes can be broken, and once they are, the breaks will be distributed...law or no law'
 15 May 2001 (Originally published)
Copyright (c) 2001 Bruce Schneier
Founder and CTO, Counterpane Internet Security, Inc.
Music, videos, books on the Internet! Freely available to anyone without paying! The entertainment industry sees services like Napster as the death of its business, and it's using every technical and legal means possible to prevail against them. They want to implement widespread copy prevention of digital files, so that people can view or listen to content on their computer but can't copy or distribute it.
Abstractly, it is an impossible task. All entertainment media on the Internet (like everything else on the Internet) is just bits: ones and zeros. Bits are inherently copyable, easily and repeatedly. If you have a digital file -- text, music, video, or whatever -- you can make as many copies of that file as you want, do whatever you want with the copies. This is a natural law of the digital world, and makes copying on the Internet different from copying Rolex watches or Louis Vuitton luggage.
What the entertainment industry is trying to do is to use technology to contradict that natural law. They want a practical way to make copying hard enough to save their existing business. But they are doomed to fail.
For these purposes, three kinds of people inhabit the Internet:

  • average users
  • hackers
  • professional pirates

Any security measure will work against the average users, who are at the mercy of their software. Hackers are more difficult to deter. Fifteen years of software copy protection has taught us that, with enough motivation, any copy protection scheme -- even those based on hardware -- can be broken. The professional pirate is even harder to deter; this is someone willing to spend considerable money breaking copy protection, cloning manuals and anti-counterfeiting tags, even building production plants to mass-produce pirated products. If he can make a profit selling the hacked software or stolen music, he will defeat the copy protection.
The entertainment industry knows all of this, and tries to build solutions that work against average users and most hackers. This fails because of a second natural law of the digital world: the ability of software to encapsulate skill. A safe that can keep out 99.9% of all burglars works, because the safe will rarely encounter a burglar with enough skill. But a copy protection scheme with similar characteristics will not, because that one-in-a-thousand hacker can encode his break into software and then distribute it. Then anyone, even an average user, can download the software and use it to defeat the copy protection scheme. This is what happened to the DVD industry's Content Scrambling System (CSS). This is how computer games with defeated copy protection get distributed.
The entertainment industry is responding in two ways. First, it is trying to control the users' computers. CSS is an encryption scheme, and protects DVDs by encrypting their contents. Breaks do not have to target the encryption. Since the software DVD player must decrypt the video stream in order to display it, the break attacked the video stream after decryption. This is the Achilles' heel of all content protection schemes based on encryption: the display device must contain the decryption key in order to work.
The solution is to push the decryption out of the computer and into the video monitor and speakers. To see how this idea helps, think of a dedicated entertainment console: a VCR, a Sega game machine, a CD player. The user cannot run software on his CD player. Hence, a copy protection scheme built into the CD player is a lot harder to break. The entertainment industry is trying to turn your computer into an Internet Entertainment Console, where they, not you, have control over your hardware and software. The recently announced Copy Protection for Recordable Media has this as an end goal. Unfortunately, this only makes breaking the scheme harder, not impossible.
The industry's second response is to enlist the legal system. Legislation, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), made it illegal to reverse-engineer copy protection schemes. Programs such as the one that broke CSS are illegal to write or distribute under the DMCA. This is failing because of a third natural law of the digital world: the lack of political boundaries. The DMCA is a U.S. law, and does not affect any of the hundreds of other countries on the Internet. And while similar laws could be passed in many countries, they would never have the global coverage it needs to be successful.
More legal maneuvering is in the works. The entertainment industry is now trying to pin liability on Internet service providers. The next logical step is to require all digital content to be registered, and to make recording and playback equipment without embedded copy protection illegal. All in an attempt to do the impossible: to make digital content uncopyable.
The end result will be failure. All digital copy protection schemes can be broken, and once they are, the breaks will be distributed...law or no law. Average users will be able to download these tools from Web sites that the laws have no jurisdiction over. Pirated digital content will be generally available on the Web. Everyone will have access.
The industry's only solution is to accept the inevitable. Unrestricted distribution is a natural law of digital content, and those who figure out how to leverage that natural law will make money. There are many ways to make money other than charging for a scarce commodity. Radio and television are advertiser funded; there is no attempt to charge people for each program they watch. The BBC is funded by taxation. Many art projects are publicly funded, or funded by patronage. Stock data is free, but costs money if you want it immediately. Open source software is given away, but users pay for manuals and tech support: charging for the relationship. The Grateful Dead became a top-grossing band by allowing people to tape their concerts and give away recordings; they charged for performances. There are models based on subscription, government licensing, marketing tie-ins, and product placement.
Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet. The entertainment industry's two-pronged offensive will have far-reaching effects -- its enlistment of the legal system erodes fair use and necessitates increased surveillance, and its attempt to turn computers into an Internet Entertainment Platform destroys the very thing that makes computers so useful -- but will fail in its intent. The Internet is not the death of copyright, any more than radio and television were. It's just different. We need business models that respect the natural laws of the digital world instead of fighting them.

More Info

DeCSS

January 5, 2004 Court ruling cleared Jon Johansen, 20, of piracy charges for programming the DeCSS DVD decryption software. Norwegian police have announced that they will not appeal a December 22, 2003, The police charged that Mr. Johansen contributed to the piracy of motion pictures from DVDs by creating and freely distributing DeCSS, which unlocks the DVD encryption system. The police brought the case forward on behalf of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which says piracy is costing the film industry over $3.0 billion each year, and was hoping for a legal precedent against ripping DVDs.
As Jon Johansen has written and testified many times, DeCSS was actually written by three people (including him). And the cryptographic reverse-engineering was in fact done by an anonymous German programmer and do not want his contribution and credit lost from the history.

Q. Who wrote DeCSS?
A. I and two other people wrote DeCSS.
Q. Mr. Johansen, what did you do next towards making DeCSS?
A. We agreed that the person who I met would reverse engineer a DVD player in order to obtain the CSS algorithm and keys.
Q. Who was this person that you met on the Internet?
A. A person from Germany. I don't know his identity. ...
Q. He wrote the encryption code?
A. Decryption code.
Q. Decryption.
A. Yes.
Q. Ham is a member of Masters of Reverse Engineering or MORE?
A. That's correct. ...
Q. And it was Ham's reverse engineering of the Xing DVD player that revealed the CSS encryption algorithm, am I right?
A. Yes, that's correct.
Q. Reverse engineering by Ham took place in or about September 1999?
A. Yes, I believe it was late in September of 1999.
Q. And you testified that it was this revelation of the CSS encryption algorithm and not any weakness in the CSS cipher that allowed MORE to create DeCSS, is that correct?
A. Yes, that's correct.
Q. You obtained the decryption portions of the DeCSS source code from Ham, correct?
A. Yes, that's correct.
Q. You then compiled the source code and created the executable?
A. Well, in the form I received it, it was not compatible.

On Feb 27, 04, the California Court of Appeal (6th dist.) reversed the order granting a preliminary injunction to DVDCCA in the trade secret case DVD Copy Control Assn. Inc., v. Andrew Bunner, H021153 / CV786804. The court's opinion as rendered is a straightforward trade secret analysis. By the numbers, to colloquialize.

Political History and Background search politechbot.com decss

Dave Touretzky's reply to the MPA's legal threat about his web site.

GALLERY OF CSS DESCRAMBLERS

The littlest DVD descrambler Small enough to print on a cocktail napkin and capable of decoding a Content Scrambling System (CSS) DVD file.

Hannum's C program, called efdtt, is no slouch, either. The programmer claims it can "descramble in excess of 21.5MBps" -- faster than the DVD specifications allow for.

DeCSS T-shirt
The source code for css_descramble.c is available on the back of this t-shirt

DeCSS lauded as copyrightable literary work:
A coterie of reputable computer science professors from some of the nation's top universities -- among them:
Brian Kernighan,
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/bwk/ Marvin Minsky http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/ and Richard Stallman http://www.stallman.org/
have filed a http://cryptome.org/mpaa-v-2600-bac.htm friend-of-the-court brief in support of 2600 Magazine, the hacker quarterly now knee-deep in a http://www.2600.com/dvd/docs nasty court battle with the entertainment industry over its hosting of the eff.org Intellectual property Video DeCSS DVD decryption utility. 2600 DVD CCA Complaint - DeCSS The professors have voiced opposition to a lower court injunction preventing 2600 from hosting or linking to the controversial technology, http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/16359.html asserting that computer code is indeed a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment. "Copyright law already recognizes that code, both source and object, may be copyrighted as a literary work or an original work of authorship," the scientists wrote. "It does not take a leap of faith to say that a copyrightable literary work is a work entitled to full First Amendment protections, regardless of its functionality."

Prime Curios
This may be the first known illegal prime. What folks often forget is a program (any file actually) is a string of bits (binary digits)--so every program is a number. Some of these are prime.
When written in base 16 (hexidecimal), this prime forms a gzip file of the original C-source code (sans tables) that decrypts the DVD Movie encryption scheme (DeCSS). See Gallery of CSS Descramblers (and its Steganography Wing) for more information. It is apparantly illegal to distribute this source code in the United States, so does that make this number ( found by Phil Carmody) also illegal?
Citation: Guadamuz A,'Trouble with Prime Numbers: DeCSS, DVD and the Protection of Proprietary Encryption Tools', The Journal of Information, Law and Technology (JILT) 2002 (3)