So Long DVD Decrypter

So suppose some of your fondest childhood memories are saturday mornings spent with Bugs, Daffy, Sylvester, Wyle E. and Marvin. Now let’s also say that you (somehwat reluctantly) grew up (or at least aged a bit) and now you’ve got 3 kids, ages 5, 3, and 2. You want them to enjoy the same animated violence you grew up on, so you go out and buy The Golden Collection on DVD.

Trouble is, kids and DVD’s just don’t fucking mix. Doesn’t matter how well you think you’ve locked them up, a shiny DVD is better than the most expensive thing the toy store has to offer. Trust me, I once found a two year old surrounded by DVD’s, and which one was he banging against the entertainment center? The special edition of Fight Club which had gone out of print almost exactly one week prior. Thankfully, there’s this thing called eBay.

So anyway, you figure you bought the DVD, it is yours now to do what you want with. In fact, it has long been considered fair use to make an archival copy of copyrighted material that you have purchased, provided you don’t sell or give said copy to anybody else.

Of course the entertainment companies had a problem with that, so they came up with all kinds of copy potection schemes. Macrovision for VHS, the Content Scrambling System (aka CSS) for DVD. Oh and what the hell, why not throw Macrovision onto DVD’s as well, so you can’t tape them.

Now, let’s digress for a moment and travel way back in time to about 1984. Many of you were probably not using computers circa 1984, but I was. For me it was all about the Apple //e and the Commodore 64. Software piracy was then, as it is now, running rampant. The software companies had a cow, and came up with countless ways to fuck up a 5-1/4 inch floppy disk so it couldn’t be copied. Of course they never denied that a user was legally allowed to make a backup copy of the software for personal use, but they set out to make it as hard as possible. An entire industry of high-grade disk copying programs sprang up. If you were there, you surely remember Copy ][ Plus and Locksmith. Every time a company came up with a new copy protection method, the copying programs would put out an update to bypass it. Apple never used copy protection on their own software, not even Appleworks which was easily the best selling software of the time. By the late 80’s the software publishers realized they were fighting a useless battle, and copy protection on computer software became a thing of the past. Iit remains so to this day. For example, Microsoft couldn’t give a rat’s ass how many copies of Windows XP you make, provided you buy a license for each one.

OK, back to the present, or at least the more recent past. It wasn’t long after the introduction of DVD that the CSS copy protection was shown to be laughably easy to break. However, not to let a little thing like fair use get in its way, the entertainment publishing industry managed to get a US law called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act passed by congress. The DMCA is full of odious stuff (agreeing to an unread license agreement by opening a software package, outlawing reverse engineering) but perhaps its foulest offense is making it a bonafide crime to circumvent copy protection. There was a huge battle over the above linked DeCSS code, many websites were shut down, and for awhile it was actually argued that it was illegal to even link to the source code. It was ruled that source code is not protected speech. In the most beautiful of ironies, the DeCSS source code was submitted as evidence in one of the trials, and thus became a matter of public record. Last year the publishers gave up and dropped their case.

So anyway, back where we came in, suppose a person bought The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, didn’t want their kids to destroy it, and had a legal right to make a copy for their own use. Well, there was still the issue of that pesky CSS to get around. Thankfully, a nice person made an incredibly easy-to-use DVD Decrypter, which he called DVD Decrypter. It was a nice one-click affair, put in a DVD, click a button and it was unscrambled and saved to your hard drive, or if you prefer burned to a blank DVD.

Could this software be used for piracy? Of course, but it also had legitimate uses. It’s a favorite argument of the gun lobby that, sure, you can use a gun to commit crime, but they must be kept legal since they have so many other legitimate uses. Seems to work for them, but not for the evil bastards who allow people to back up their DVD’s.

Well, anyway they just shut him down. He’s no longer allowed to update or distribute the program, and his domain name has been taken over by whatever company decided to crack down on him. Here’s a copy of his farewell message. All this thanks to the fact that it is now against the law to circumvent copy protection, even though you and I have a right to make copies of media we purchased for our own personal use.

But you know what I say? Fuck them. And you know what else? A lot of other people say that too. I advise everyone to check their favorite P2P network for DVD Decrypter 3.5.4.0, which will be the final version. Do they not know that they’re fighting a losing battle? Does the phrase “363 seeders” mean anything to you? Fuck. Them. Hard.