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US court: Reverse engineering is 'presumptively legal'
News Those cases applied a federal law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it illegal to circumvent copy-protection schemes or traffic in circumvention tools. The case was closely watched as a test of how much protection...
[March 1, 2004, 10:40]
DVD encryption break is a good thing
News There are now freeware programs on the Internet that remove the copy protection on DVDs, allowing them to be played, edited, and copied without restriction. I've written about this previously in relation to software copy protection; you can't...
[November 12, 1999, 9:52]
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Blog That outlaws things that only exist to circumvent copy protection, and video conditioners -- ostensibly there to make 'cleaner copies' of legit signals -- clearly fell foul. Not that many people wanted the hassle of waiting for ninety minutes to...
[February 13, 2004, 16:50]
Government ordered to release secret ID card report
News The UK's data protection watchdog has ordered the government to release a controversial secret report detailing the costs, benefits and risks of introducing ID cards. Following the DWP's refusal to release the controversial report, the MP...
[June 9, 2006, 16:05]
Supreme Court backs off DVD case
News See the Digital Rights News Section for the latest on DVD-Ram, DVD-RW, zoning and copy protection. The DVD Copy Control Association's (DVDCCA) suit alleged violations of California's trade secret laws, and a state judge granted an injunction...
[January 6, 2003, 8:06]
M'Learned Web - Technology and Law in the UK
News How to make a nuisance of yourself under the Data Protection Act The office of the Data Protection Commissioner attempts to enforce the rules as part of its general supervisory role. Enough on data protection.
[February 15, 1999, 14:41]
DVD copier faces another lawsuit
News The DVD Copy Control Association, a Hollywood-backed technology group, filed a lawsuit against software company 321 Studios on Friday for allegedly infringing patent rights on its DVD copy protection.
[February 16, 2004, 10:40]
iTunes DRM-free backdoor reopened
Talkback I think iTunes (and similar sites) should be forced to disclose just how hindering the DRM copy protection is. If a company sold cars that had a secret (and unadvertised) feature only allowing the car to be driven on certain roads (probably toll...
[March 23, 2005, 13:50]
Sites spotlight reports of copy-protected CDs
News The backers of the sites ask consumers to return CDs as defective if they have copy-protection technology installed. A handful of Web sites are popping up to report sightings of copy-protected CDs, and already it's clear that there is far more...
[November 13, 2001, 13:06]
Arguments presented in DVD cracking case
News At one point, Judge Kathryn Werdegar asked whether DeCSS deserved a strict standard of trade-secret protection since it was already widely distributed on the Internet. See the Digital Rights News Section for the latest on copy protection, piracy...
[May 30, 2003, 8:05]
Sony rootkit remover on the rocks
News Sony became embroiled in controversy earlier this month after the record label was discovered to be distributing secret code similar to a rootkit with certain music CDs as a copy-protection mechanism.
[November 17, 2005, 8:40]
Accused piracy leader pleads guilty
News Such software is known as "warez" -- a name for digital content whose copy protection has been cracked by skilled programmers. See the Net Crime News Section for the latest on fraud, crime, child protection and related issues.
[February 28, 2002, 9:38]
Study: Win XP activation 'innocuous' on privacy
News A German copy-protection company has published details of Microsoft's technology for preventing casual copying of Windows XP, but concluded the technology allows for reasonable upgrades and doesn't threaten customers' privacy.
[July 11, 2001, 8:55]
Hollywood's war on open source
News According to the judicial reading of the Digital Millennium Act, DeCSS circumvents copy protection to play DVDs, and is therefore illegal. He had been accused by the DVD Copy Control Association of the theft of trade secrets for linking to DeCSS...
[February 28, 2000, 9:05]
Civil liberties group takes on DMCA
News Inventing and distributing a utility that circumvents that copy protection, which Edelman says he would like to do, would run afoul of the DMCA's legal prohibitions. After the recording industry briefly threatened Felten and his co-authors with a...
[July 25, 2002, 14:58]
Government tries to keep ID card costs secret
News The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is appealing against an order by the UK's data-protection watchdog to release a secret report on the costs, benefits and risks of introducing ID cards in the UK.
[July 6, 2006, 16:35]
AMD gives Linux a graphics boost
News In areas with intellectual-property concerns, such as copy protection and digital rights management, AMD won't share details with the open-source programmers, reserving support for those features only for the proprietary driver.
[September 7, 2007, 9:15]
Kevin Poulsen: A hacker Christmas
News More importantly, the DVD format recently earned a certain cachet when hackers took the trouble to reverse engineer the copy protection scheme so they could watch movies on their Linux boxes. A passion for LEGO's interlocking building blocks...
[December 25, 1999, 6:30]
A Year Ago: Kevin Poulsen - A hacker Christmas
News More importantly, the DVD format recently earned a certain cachet when hackers took the trouble to reverse engineer the copy protection scheme so they could watch movies on their Linux boxes. A passion for LEGO's interlocking building blocks...
[December 25, 2000, 6:00]
SDMI copyright technology easily hacked
News But the latest announcement by the nine researchers seems to indicate that at least four of the six copy-protection technologies have been broken. While the results have been kept secret, last week Salon.com reported that all six of the screening...
[October 24, 2000, 8:14]
