I've been in Austin all weekend. On Friday, I spoke at the University of Texas about EFF issues. Jon Lebkowsky was there — hell, he organized it — and he blogged the hell out of the talk:
Entertainment industry has tradition of attacking technology: the piano roll, the radio (sued by vaudeville), television (would destroy cinema!), "the Betamax affair"… the latter being the first consumer VCR. In Betamax case, argued that the ability to make a full copy of a broadcast work would not be a fair use (in terms of copyright). It was illegal enough that the VCR should be kept off the market, they argued. The Supreme Court got the case, and the thing that shook out of it was the Betamax principle: a technology is legal so long as it has substantial non-infringeing uses. This principle is under attack.
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 1998. Illegal to defeat a copyright measure. Regionalization system for DVDs. This is a control that limits distribution. John Johansen in Norway figured out how to break the content scrambling system and allows you to move from one region to another, override copy protection. It was called DeCSS – Johansen is facing trial for creating a piece of code.
