Two DRMs not equal?

Posted Sep 9, 2005 6:31 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Actually, by decrypting the stream, it makes it impossible to make a faithful copy. Given that, how can you claim it's easier to make a copy with DeCSS than without?

I think we're talking about a copy of the movie content, not of the bits on the DVD. You can't make a copy of the movie content without decrypting.

It's been pointed out in other comments in this thread that one can often copy the encrypted bits to another DVD and then have an approved DVD player decrypt it. However, when the legality of DeCSS was being debated, there was no way for a casual copier to write a DVD, and copyright owners were hoping to get legal protections to make it impossible to create a usable copy that way (e.g. require blank media to have a serial number and the DVD player to match that with a serial number encrypted into the movie).

Today, given the reality of usefully coyping encrypted data, maybe the old arguments that DeCSS facilitates copying aren't as strong.