DeCSS
DeCSS is one of the first free computer programs capable of decrypting content on a commercially produced DVD video disc.
Before the release of DeCSS, free and open source operating systems (such as BSD and Linux) could not play encrypted video DVDs.
The DVD CCA launched numerous lawsuits in the United States in an effort to stop the distribution of the software.
On 22 December 2003, the appeals court agreed with the acquittal, and on 5 January 2004, Norway's Økokrim (Economic Crime Unit) decided not to pursue the case further.
The program was first released on 6 October 1999 when Johansen posted an announcement of DeCSS 1.1b, a closed source Windows-only application for DVD ripping, on the livid-dev mailing list.
The group that wrote DeCSS, including Johansen, came to call themselves Masters of Reverse Engineering and may have obtained information from DrinkOrDie.
When Johansen was made aware of this, he contacted Fawcus to solve the issue and was granted a license to use the code in DeCSS under non-GPL terms.
The transcripts from the Borgarting Court of Appeal, published in the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang, contain the following description of the process which led to the release of DeCSS:[5] Through Internet Relay Chat (henceforth IRC), [Jon Lech Johansen] made contact with like-minded [people seeking to develop a DVD-player under the Linux operating system].
[6] Programmers around the world created hundreds of programs equivalent to DeCSS, some merely to demonstrate the trivial ease with which the system could be bypassed, and others to add DVD support to open source movie players.
[7] In protest against legislation that prohibits publication of copy protection circumvention code in countries that implement the WIPO Copyright Treaty (such as the United States' Digital Millennium Copyright Act), some have devised clever ways of distributing descriptions of the DeCSS algorithm, such as through steganography, through various Internet protocols, on T-shirts and in dramatic readings, as MIDI files, as a haiku poem (DeCSS haiku),[8][9] and even as a so-called illegal prime number.
