Steve Wildstrom, who to my mind is the savviest tech columnist in the mainstream press, flags an error in my DMCA paper, on page 12:
Did banning DeCSS at least make it more difficult to pirate movies? There’s little reason to think so. The CSS system prevents playback of DVD movies, but it does nothing to prevent duplication of the scrambled data. A pirate can make a perfect copy of a scrambled DVD without ever cracking its encryption. No circumvention software is needed to download CSS-scrambled video, burn it to a DVD-R disc, and play it in any consumer DVD player.
Via email, Wildstrom writes:
This is inaccurate because of a secondary, little-known protection scheme. Writeable DVD media come in two types, designated A (for authoring) and G (for general). A CSS encoded DVD can only be copied bit-for-bit onto Type A media, and by means that I don’t understand, the industry has managed to maintain extremely tight controls on the distribution of Type A disks. That is why commercial DVD copying software like 123 Studio’s DVD X Copy (forced off the market by DMCA litigation) was not able to make exact copies of commercial DVDs. The same is true of the numerous non-commercial programs still available on the Internet. Because CSS is trivially broken, the unavailability of of Type A media has probably done more to prevent amateur copying of DVDs than has CSS.
I did not know about this distinction, but I’m inclined to believe him, especially given that another fellow wrote to make the same point. So my apologies for the error.
I think it’s worth pointing out, however, that (at least based on my admittedly limited knowledge of the underlying technologies) this objection would apply only to burning DVDs, not to pressing them. Commercial pirates are far more likely to use the latter, so CSS isn’t going to prevent commercial piracy. I hope someone will correct me if I screwed that up as well.
Also, while I’m on the subject of Mr. Wildstrom, he’s got a great column up on the mess DRM is making of digital video.
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