DMCA Disobedience

Posted on:: January 6th, 2003

Where is the organized civil disobedience against the DMCA? Am I missing it?

I’m up for something. For example, suppose we made up two “ribbons” like these:

$s''$/=\2048;while(<>){G=29;R=142;if((@a=unqT="C*",_)[20]&48){D=89;_=unqb24,qT,@ b=map{ord qB8,unqb8,qT,_^$a[--D]}@INC;s/...$/1$&/;Q=unqV,qb25,_;H=73;O=$b[4]<<9 |256|$b[3];Q=Q>>8^(P=(E=255)&(Q>>12^Q>>4^Q/8^Q))<<17,O=O>>8^(E&(F=(S=O>>14&7^O)$

$^S*8^S<<6))<<9,_=(map{U=_%16orE^=R^=110&(S=(unqT,"\xb\ntd\xbz\x14d")[_/16%8]);E ^=(72,@z=(64,72,G^=12*(U-2?0:S&17)),H^=_%64?12:0,@z)[_%8]}(16..271))[_]^((D>>=8 )+=P+(~F&E))for@a[128..$#a]}print+qT,@a}';s/[D-HO-U_]/\$$&/g;s/q/pack+/g;eval$

Look at the ALT tag. Each contains half of a DeCSS perl hack … sort of. To get it to work as an ALT tag, I had to encode some of the PERL operators into HTML character codes, so even put back together these two code fragments are not actually a working DeCSS hack. No, first you’d have to alter it so that “<“=<, etc.

Don’t like this? Who could blame you? So come up with something better, braver and catchier. I’ll probably be up for it.

The first ranking on Google for “DeCSS” goes to a site that has created innocuous software called “DeCSS” precisely to make life a little harder for those trying to enforce the anti-DeCSS effort (aka The Bad Guys).

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Categories: Uncategorized dw

4 Responses to “DMCA Disobedience”

Adina Levin, on January 6th, 2003 at 11:17 am Said:

Thinking about the call for civil disobedience to the DMCA.

An amazing feature for Apple’s iTunes and iMovie would be to enable blog entries referring to music and movie clips.

Wouldn’t it be great to point to a movie scene or link to a tune that you’re talking about. That would be 100% classic fair use, as intended by the Founding Fathers. It would be entertaining to try that one in court!

also posted here:
http://alevin.com/weblog/archives/cat_.html#000830

colin_zr, on January 6th, 2003 at 12:03 pm Said:

Unless I’m very much mistaken, the correct way to encode and ” in the attributes of a tag is to use <, > and ". An HTML parser will translate those to the correct characters for you. I’m not sure about ‘. I’m sure there was one, but I can’t find it now. You could always use the numerical reference '.

(Of course, if you’re looking at the source then you’ll just have to be your own parser. But that’s no reason not to encode it properly.)

David Weinberger, on January 6th, 2003 at 12:11 pm Said:

Yes, those are the right tags for those marks. In fact, that’s how I got the < and > marks in the body of the blog entry. But I figured that if anyone wants actually to use the code embedded in the ALT tags, they’re going to have to run a search and replace on it anyway. You’re probably right and I may get around to fixing it.

Larry J. Blunk, on January 8th, 2003 at 12:15 am Said:

Here’s a tightly coded Perl version of Tom Murphy’s “embed” program which clears the
16-bit embedding flags field of TrueType font files. Tom’s program has been challenged by
Agfa Monotype under the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. The script is
76 characters — considerably shorter than the Perl version of DeCSS.

$/=\4;map{?OS/2?|$m&&$m++==2?$p-=2+vec($_,0,32)/4:++$p||s/../\0\0/s;print}>

DMCA Disobedience

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4 Responses to “DMCA Disobedience”

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