There are some extremely bright engineers working for movie studios. Some of them are employed by special effects houses making bigger and better movies for our big screens. Others are working on the next great animated feature. But the engineers I'm talking about are the ones being paid to treat the end user like a criminal.
Digital Rights Management is designed for one thing, and one thing only - stopping us from watching our movies (or listening to our music) when and where we want to. The Cory Doctorow link James posted explains the whole situation in horrible, gory (but interesting!) detail.
Anyway, Adam has been asking that I provide a link to the DeCSS gallery. The origins of this lie back in the days when the movie studies were trying to get people arrested for distributing 'non-licensed' DVD decryption software. The relevant US district court ruled that the computer source code was not to be classed as 'speech' and hence was not protected by free speech laws. So, computer geeks being the pedantic types that they are, the gallery was created to rub the courts' collective nose in the ridiculousness of that ruling.
Some personal favourites are the multi-stanza DeCSS haiku, the Computer Code Hoedown and the implementation in Brainf*ck (the programming language with only eight instructions: '>', '<', '+', '-', '.', ',', '[' & ']')
And, somewhat tangential, here's another interesting Doctorow piece on the nature of eBooks.
No comments:
Post a Comment