First (and noting that tachyon is from Australia where the laws are probably a bit different), now that you've discussed publicly how to reverse engineer a script from the binary produced by the AS product, I don't need to be the owner of the original script. You've just shared with the world how to break an encryption scheme. This is one of the things forbidden by the DMCA and is exactly what is getting various Russians (visiting the USA) and 2600 publishers in trouble. Luckily for Perl Monks, PM is not on ActiveState's sh*tlist (and probably just barely on their radar) and it is doubtful that AS would be so boneheaded to go reporting PM to the authorities over this-- unlike Adobe their reputation could be seriously harmed by such a thing.

Second, there are plenty of purposes which are foreseeable for breaking the encryption on a DVD which are not illegal. Examples include: archiving, personal use sampling (say I wanted to make a compilation of my favorite scenes from the movies), Fair Use sampling (for academic works on movies or reviews), watching DVDs on computers or players for which there is no existing player software, watching DVDs using Free Software as opposed to $40 per license software. All of these uses are legally allowed, but technically impossible due to the encryption scheme. They would become technically posssible if it were legal to crack the encryption scheme.

This whole discussion points up why the DMCA is a bad law-- in the USA we can't discuss how to recover our own scripts without cracking someone else's encryption scheme, which is forbidden. Personally, I enjoyed seeing how this was done and filed the whole matter under "Why trying to obscure the source of Perl scripts is a big waste of time" with a cross-reference to "Avoid Active State add-ons to Perl" :)

In reply to (ichimunki) Re x 3: Security, is it to much to ask? by ichimunki
in thread Security, is it to much to ask? by tachyon

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