Being smart and telling the truth may land you in more trouble than you
ever imagined. Though programmers often look back at their lower school
years as an exercise in suffering, an ordeal that at least leaves us
with a shared basis for compassion, most of us actually find the "real
world" to be a congenial place. In the final analysis, it's assumed,
skill and smarts will triumph over hulking, stupid brutality.
Well, score one for the hulking brutes. Just as the tech world had drawn
breath over the release of Dmitry Sklyarov, news came from Norway that
Jon Johansen has been indicted on felony charges. At the age of 15,
Johansen helped create the infamous DeCSS program, which can remove the
access controls on DVD movies. More than two years later, the Motion
Picture Association of America succeeded in squeezing Norwegian
authorities into indicting him under antihacking laws.
The origins of DeCSS are fairly murky. The original DeCSS program was
released in Windows executable form, and created by a cracking group
called MoRE — Masters of Reverse Engineering — of which Johansen was a
member. (The other authors of the program have successfully retained
their anonymity.) But MoRE members also chose to forward the DeCSS
source code to the LiViD (Linux
Video and DVD) project, which needed such an algorithm for its
open-source DVD software. It's clear that the program's authors intended
their work to contribute to the general fund of knowledge in computer
science.
In the real world, pure research can't often be separated from
self-interest. But at its soul, the DeCSS program is nothing but a
statement of truth. "Copy protections of DVDs aren't secure," it says,
and it says that no matter what language it's translated into. See the
Gallery of DeCSS
Descramblers for a demonstration of the myriad different ways in
which the same thing can be phrased.
In other fields — literature, journalism, physics, archaeology — it's
understood that "telling the truth" is an endeavor worth protecting. But
in the field of computer science, research and free expression are everywhere under attack. Like Sklyarov, Johansen has never been charged
with making illegal copies of copyrighted works: His only crime was to
correctly point out that such copies are possible to make. In the
meantime, the concept of fair use is being systematically erased. The
entertainment industry has deliberately crippled DVD playback technology
with regional encoding and content-scrambling systems, and the music
industry is doing the same thing with copy-protected CDs. At the behest
of these powerful corporate interests, consumers are disenfranchised and
developers are persecuted.
"We're finding that it already has a profoundly chilling effect not only
on free speech but on science and innovation...all over the world," says
EFF attorney Robin Gross. She's
confident that the charges won't stick. Johansen is actually not being
prosecuted under copyright infringement laws, but under an antihacking
statute — even though the DVD "systems" he broke into were his own legal
property. "This is quite a stretch in the law for that country," Gross
says.
Sklyarov was freed. Johansen may win his case. Certainly there will
always be individuals capable of shrugging off the technological
shackles that the entertainment industry builds for its consumers. But
the price they'll be forced to pay is absurdly high.
Alas, the world is still ignorant, and the smart still suffer.
Shannon Cochran
Associate Editor
scochran@byte.com