copy protection - was: Re: Is it time for playing games on WINE?

[Geoff Thorpe]

Hi there,

On November 6, 2003 02:18 pm, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> >So the question is whether the code in question is "circumventing" the
> >protection or not.
>
> If the code in Wine still doesn't allow unprotected CDs from running,
> there can be no problem.
>
> >I think you would have a hard time convincing
> >someone that a dummy driver that returns magic values is not
> >circumventing part of the copy protection, even if the resulting
> >behavior is identical to the original.
>
> If the resulting behaviour is that copied CDs don't work, while
> original ones do, there is no circumvention (the mechanism that
> protects access to a copyrighted work is still in place).
>
> If this driver works with a CD, regardless of whether it was or was not
> copied, then we have a problem, yes.

Of course, IANAL, YANAL, and MOUANLE (Most Of Us Are Not Lawyers Either). 
However I think the point here, and it seems to be Alexandre's reading of 
it too if I understood the thrust of his post, is that the "protection 
mechanism" here is a backdoor between the driver and the kernel that 
ensure, in the windows environment, that Microsoft (and whoever produce 
the driver) control your use of the protected CD. You cannot put a 
"virtualisation" layer in between the application using this "protection 
mechanism" such that it no longer has any assurance that the protection 
mechanism is authentic. In a sense, the protection procedure *can* be 
circumvented, which means it *has* been.

Yeah this is totally ridiculous, but the DMCA is totally ridiculous. We 
won't have difficulty finding common ground there. :-)

> Remeber, the "chilling effect" is when we let the DMCA control what we
> do further than what it was meant to do to begin with. I can't see
> anyone taking you to court saying "look, it's true that with Wine you
> can't do anything that you can't do without, but it's an unlicensed
> version, so it's a DMCA violation".

War crime tribunals, environmental protection treaties, privacy 
legislation, ... the ability to let chilling effects meet little or no 
significant organised obstacle has become the trademark of a certain 
breed of "freedom-loving" people. Bruce Schneier once said that the "war 
on drugs" was the root password to the US constitution. I think they 
changed the password recently to use "terrorism" instead of "drugs", but 
it's still much the same dance - ridiculous legislation is ushered in in 
the name of "protecting rights" when in fact it is invariably used to 
achieve quite the opposite. The issue is not whether you exercise a 
personal disobedience to it, because Wine itself certainly can't, but 
whether something can be done to aid efforts to overturn these laws. In 
the mean time, (and as long as people in the US are involved in Wine,) 
we're stuck with them.

Cheers,
Geoff

-- 
Geoff Thorpe
geoff at geoffthorpe.net
http://www.geoffthorpe.net/