BY NELSON PAVLOSKY

In print | Published September 15, 2005

One of the more entertaining clubs on our campus is Films of Fury, which is dedicated to showing martial arts movies. Unfortunately, even this innocuous activity suffers from the excessive copyright controls of the content industry. As Matt Singleton (Films of Fury treasurer) explained to me, it’s difficult to buy a definitive version of the classic Jet Li movie, Fist of Legend. First of all, the version released in the United States by Dimension Films is missing over three minutes of footage, including a famous opium scene which is important to the development of a main character. In comparison, the Taiwan version is uncut and apparently has subtitles that make more sense than the US subtitles. “What’s the problem?” you may ask. “If you care so much, why don’t you just buy an import?” Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

When you buy a commercial DVD, it typically comes with a “copyright protection” scheme known as CSS. The data on the DVD is encrypted, and only licensed DVD players have the keys that will open the digital lock and allow you to play that data, in theory. A young Norwegian, Jon Johansen (known affectionately as “DVD Jon”), realized that this would mean that he couldn’t play his legally purchased DVDs on his legally purchased computer, since he runs Linux on his computer and there are no licensed DVD players for that platform. So he broke the encryption so that he could play his own DVDs on his own computer. As a nice side effect, this meant that he could circumvent another annoying “feature” of DVDs, the region coding. If you purchase the Taiwanese version of Fist of Legend, you will discover that most United States DVD players will refuse to play it, because most DVD players will only play DVDs marked with the code from their own region. Fortunately, if you use DVD Jon’s algorithm, known as DeCSS, not only can you play your DVDs on whatever platform you want, but you can also ignore region encoding and play imported DVDs. Naturally, Hollywood doesn’t like that, since they want to be able to price-discriminate, and sell cheap DVDs to low-income countries and pricier CDs to high-income countries. Of course, that will cause problems for you if you want to buy a movie that’s only available in low-income countries, but as usual the movie industry doesn’t care about the fans, just their wallets.

To demonstrate their contempt for their customers, and punish people who legally purchase DVDs, the content industry pushed a law through Congress in 1998 known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law makes it illegal to circumvent “copyright protection systems,” even if your action would otherwise be legal. For instance, it’s perfectly legal for you to watch a legally acquired movie, and it shouldn’t matter to the law if you are watching it on your Linux computer or your Windows computer. Unfortunately, under the DMCA, the very act of breaking the digital locks on the DVD that you have purchased is generally illegal. The DMCA also makes it illegal to produce circumvention tools, or even to tell people how to circumvent copy protection, which threatens technology journalists and researchers everywhere. Dmitry Skylarov, a Russian PhD student, was arrested when he visited the United States to give a talk at a computer security conference, because he told people how to circumvent the copy protection built into Adobe e-books. Princeton professor Ed Felten received legal threats when he attempted to publish a paper detailing the flaws in a proposed copy protection scheme for audio CDs. The DMCA threatens academic research and freedom of speech, but perhaps more importantly to Films of Fury fans, it prevents people from purchasing and watching the movies that they want to see where they want to see them.

Nelson is a senior. You can reach him at npavlos1@swarthmore.edu.

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