EDWARD LIN/Daily Bruin Senior Staff With some
newly-available technology, DVD movies like these can be copied and
traded by anyone with an Internet connection.
By Howard Ho
Daily Bruin Reporter
Two years ago, a 19-year-old Norwegian named Jon Johansen won a
prestigious national award for high school students, The Karoline
Prize, honoring extracurricular achievements.
Last month, Johansen was charged by the Norwegian Economic Crime
Unit for a crime based on those same achievements. If this riddle
seems bewildering, that’s because Johansen’s
innovation, the decoding of digital versatile discs (DVDs), is
itself a complex and unresolved issue.
Barely five years old, DVDs are becoming another subject (much
like MP3s and Adobe Ebooks) of the increased scrutiny that the
federal government is currently applying to piracy, whether through
file-sharing or sales of pirated discs.
Compounding the problem are issues that courts must first
decide. Is all copying of DVDs illegal, or is it the right of a
consumer? Are the major media suing to reclaim profits or to shut
down innovative technology that threatens their power?
Published and available around the world on the Internet,
Johansen’s DeCSS allows pirates around the world to bypass
the Content Scrambling System on DVDs and copy the movies onto a
hard drive. This software has found an ally in pirates in
universities and large corporations that have a lot of bandwidth
and can transmit the files relatively quickly.
A third-year UCLA political science student, who wished to
remain anonymous, knows of people with quarter terabytes (250
gigabytes) of copied films and television shows. A user of the
copying technology himself, he reveals how easy it is to do it.
“You can search on Yahoo or some server programs. You can
probably find it on Morpheus and Hotline. A whole bunch of stuff
comes up,” he said.
Many of the pirates using university or corporate bandwidth
share files within what is known as a “Warez”
group.
Last month, two men were charged with illegally sharing
information on their Warez group, “DrinkOrDie,” as part
of the international Operation Buccaneer, which has executed about
150 warrants to date. If indicted, the case would be a powerful
precedent in the war against piracy.
While criminal litigation is definitely a possibility with
illegal sales, copying material for home use and for sharing with
friends is a consumer right that courts tend to favor. Meanwhile,
civil litigation can flourish.
When the videocassette recorder, then in another form called
BetaMax, first came out in 1979, media companies feared pirating
and attempted to shut down Sony’s VCR production via
litigation until the Supreme Court struck them down in 1984.
Napster was deflated by the power of civil action from large
record companies that demanded royalties. Now Morpheus and KaZaA,
two of the top peer-to-peer servers, are being sued in the same
way. Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the United States Attorney’s
Office in Los Angeles, believes there is a difference between DVD
and MP3 piracy.
“Napster is interesting, because you have people tossing
songs around. What’s the value of a song versus the value of
a movie that cost a hundred million dollars to make? I don’t
know. I’m not about to put a judgment that one is more
important than the other,” Mrozek said.
While Warez groups are usually non-profit, Mrozek said that they
are still under federal government attention. For those who copy
and sell the pirated media, there is absolutely no recourse,
especially if profits reach Napster levels.
“We will go wherever an investigation leads us. If we find
out that you are illegally distributing “˜Lord of the
Rings’ and you’re charging people money and making a
lot of money, we may get interested in you and send someone to look
at your computer in your dorm or whatever,” Mrozek said.
While tools for piracy are certainly widespread, counter-groups
such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are fighting on behalf
of the so-called “pirates,” like Johansen, who may be
protected by the First Amendment. In Johansen’s case, he
helped write the DVD decoder as part of an open-source project,
Livid, that is building a DVD player for Linux systems, which has
yet to be licensed by the Motion Picture Association of
America’s DVD arm as a player.
Fred von Lohmann, an EFF senior intellectual property attorney,
has a theory about why the big guns seem to be picking on Johansen,
a kid who isn’t pirating anything.
“If the media companies were serious about stopping the
piracy, you would have expected them to actually start going after
some of the pirates. Instead they’ve been going after the
technology companies. This is not about piracy, it’s about
controlling new technologies that they feel threaten their business
models,” von Lohmann said.
The online Web journal www.2600.com recently published
Johansen’s code and was temporarily told to remove it from
the Web site. Last November a California appellate court
unanimously decided against the injunction, and the ruling is being
appealed once again. Using Pentagon Papers as a precedent, EFF
argued that the First Amendment allowed publication of such
material as the DeCSS.
“Just because third parties that 2600.com hasn’t met
might download the code for unlawful purposes, that shouldn’t
be enough to stop the presses. You can justify almost any kind of
censorship by saying that someone might misuse the
information,” von Lohmann said.
The real threat in all this litigation, however, is towards the
consumers. While VCRs have actually helped film profits with
rentals, major studios, all of whom declined to comment, still fear
losing the power to determine how you watch movies, how much you
pay for them every time, and how you can use the DVDs you buy.
“We have these technologies forcing us to sit through
commercials on DVDs. If I want to copy the DVD in order to skip the
commercials that doesn’t make me a pirate. It just makes me a
consumer who doesn’t want to watch commercials,” von
Lohmann said, adding, “The copyright owners are trying to say
that there’s all this piracy. But their solution is to wipe
out all the consumers’ rights. That’s going too
far.”