alt Hacker NewsWorth noting the industry knew that CSS was a lousy scheme. Originally, Disney and others were boycotting DVD because of it. That lead to DIVX (the disk not the codec).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX
Some people were opposed to DIVX's 'phone home' PPV option, but the bigger issue was it seemed like a nasty format war was brewing. Then DIVX flopped quickly. Instead, the MPAA got the US Congress to "patch" CSS by passing a law.
Apple had an advertising campaign that you could "Rip. Mix. Burn." your CDs with a Mac. Obviously nerds could rip DVDs, but nobody ever could productize it like that.
Replies
anthk • today at 8:57 AM
Audio CD's where no DVD's. You are confusing concepts there.
It was good that CSS was a lousy scheme, for everybody, including for the DVD producers.
As long as CSS was not broken, I bought neither discs nor drives, because I believe that only naive customers (to not say losers) are willing to buy any kind of information that cannot be protected from the certain eventual destruction due to the decay of its storage medium, by making copies of it on any other kind of storage medium.
After CSS was broken and the tools to read DVDs became available publicly, I have bought several DVD drives during the following years and many hundreds of DVDs.
So the breaking of the CSS was how the DVD industry got my money, and presumably the money of many others. They should have been grateful to the one who did this.
When you "buy" copy-protected information you are not really buying it. You are just renting it until the time when its storage medium will become corrupt, which is certain to happen, sooner or later. (Or until your reader becomes defective and you can no longer buy a replacement, due to obsolescence.)
The copyright laws are stupidly named and frequently stupidly formulated. Making copies not only is not a crime, but it is a fundamental right of the owner of any kind of information, being the only way in which information can be preserved.
Only the distribution of copies to third parties may be criminalized. While most stupid copyright laws claim that even making copies by the owner is a crime, that is not only unjust but it also not enforceable against any careful owner, so the laws are doubly stupid.