A Pirating War

The current legal DVD battle between the movie industry and the free/open software communities over DVD is a microcosm of an ongoing intellectual property war. This war pits intellectual property owners against such diverse groups as programmers opposing restrictions on reverse engineering and the publication of computer code and librarians opposing new restrictions on copyright rights of first sale and fair use.

Jon Johansen may be the youngest victim of this war. Because of software

posted on the 16-year-old's Web site, his home in Norway was raided in January

by police who seized two computers and a cell phone. Both Jon and his father

. . .
Of course “Hollywood” won and is still winning, dew to the copyright laws of the movies. Now the question that arises with this is why should DVDs be any different?

On the other hand if you were one of those people that worked in MGM or Universal, wouldn’t you make a big deal about this issue? If you were one of those people you would be losing money every time a DVD was pirated. Encryptions are a certain series of codes that makes it hard to copy a DVD. The best thing is that you don’t even need to buy a DVD-R in order to burn the movie off your computer. These actions of piracy can not come as total shock to these companies. Without the DVD drive you can’t do too much, but with it a lot becomes possible, including burning DVDs without buying those programs that were talked about earlier. MGM and other such companies have brought these hackers to court

and accused them of breaking the copyrights of these DVDs. Videotapes, audio CDs and computer software have been pirated for years without any serious damage to these industries.

Not only are there hackers that do this on a daily basis, but programs are now available for your computer. These programs can be bought for less then forty dollars, which compared to buying DVDs at normal price would cost you a fortune. These programs can either be mailed to you or you can download it right off the internet. First the movie would be copied onto your computer. Then you take it from your computer and squeeze it onto one CD by burning it from your CD-R. Now the DVD drive itself might as well be the device that enables copying of the disc.

Now ever since there has been DVDs, there has been hackers trying to break the encryptions on these DVDs.

Common topics in this essay:
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Approximate Word count = 819
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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