VideoLAN Announces libaacs 105
supersloshy writes "VideoLAN, makers of the well-known media player VLC, have just announced a new project called libaacs. The libaacs library's intention is to provide a free software library to implement the AACS specification, the copy-protection found on things such as Blu-ray discs. Note that this isn't meant to actually be a decoding library. It includes no AACS keys and is solely developed for research purposes."
Cease and Desist in (Score:2, Funny)
3... 2... 1...
Without the keys, it's 1201(g) (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Without the keys, it's 1201(g) (Score:5, Funny)
Fuck you, pipsqueak? ;)
Re: (Score:2)
>> I'd like to see how such a cease-and-desist notice might be worded.
> Fuck you, pipsqueak? ;)
HULK SMASH!
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
I'd like to see how such a cease-and-desist notice might be worded.
You seem to be under the impression that having the law on your side means that you won't be harassed by lawyers.
The cease-and-desist will claim some intellectual property violation and it will be up to you to give in to the intimidation or resist by contacting your host to get your site back online.
Which "intellectual property"? (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to be under the impression that having the law on your side means that you won't be harassed by lawyers.
This is the sort of thing that EFF jumps all over.
I'd like to see how such a cease-and-desist notice might be worded.
The cease-and-desist will claim some intellectual property violation
One does not violate "intellectual property" [gnu.org]. One infringes a copyright, infringes a patent, or infringes a trademark. Which of the three would apply?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
> One does not violate "intellectual property" [gnu.org]. One infringes a copyright, infringes a patent, or infringes a trademark. Which of the three would apply?
A very good question. Unfortunately, only a team of highly trained and well-paid lawyers would be qualified to determine the answer.
Did you know it's illegal in almost every state to "practice law" without a license? (source: http://www.dcba.org/brief/mayissue/2002/art40502.htm)
Re: (Score:2)
It isn't supposed to protect someone from bad legal advice, it's supposed to protect them from unqualified individuals passing themselves off as a lawyer.
There is a difference between advice on a law and legal advice, The state doesn't really care if you are both a moron and a lawyer as long as you can pass the bar and do not take too much of the courts time up when being an idiot, They do care if you pretend to be someone's lawyer. And this is pretty much true for about any country or political subdivision
Re: (Score:2)
Depending on if it registered or not AACS could be trademarked.
I don't know about laws elsewhere, but United States allows the fair use of a trademark [wikipedia.org] to claim that product A is compatible with product B or that product A may better serve a customer's needs than product B. Specifically, a trademark may not be used as an ersatz copyright or patent (Sega v. Accolade; Dastar v. Fox).
Hey, that law of yours that I think is supposed to protect your population from bad legal advice, how did it work out for you now that we have internet?
You can assume that nothing you read on the Internet is "legal advice" as the law defines it, except perhaps an e-mail digitally signed by your attorney. Instead, it's "legal information". Wik [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
What, even if you say IANAL first?
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Which "intellectual property"? (Score:5, Informative)
And the EFF has some bad-ass lawyers. I know one EFF lawyer, who spoke to a local group here in Chicago back in the Spring, who's been offered jobs by two industry groups. I guess they figured they'd rather be paying him a salary than facing him in court. He was an interesting guy. He'd made some dough doing mergers or something before joining the EFF and didn't seem to be phased by the dangling carrot. He was also an extremely persuasive speaker. I could understand why someone like the RIAA wouldn't want to meet him in front of a judge.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You seem to have forgotten about the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the concept of a "circumvention device". That was what they chased after everybody who distributed DeCSS for. Of course, it was totally futile then as it is now, but there is a legal stick to shake at people for this sort of thing, at least in the US.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You seem to be under the impression that having the law on your side means that you won't be harassed by lawyers.
This is the sort of thing that EFF jumps all over.
And that makes the harassment worthwhile?
Just because you might be able to get your legal defense for free doesn't mean that the harassment from the FBI, being arrested, potentially losing your job, etc. is all OK.
Sorry, epic logic fail.
Re: (Score:2)
One does not violate "intellectual property" [gnu.org]. One infringes a copyright, infringes a patent, or infringes a trademark. Which of the three would apply?
One migt think that pleasuring oneself to computer porn was a violation of intellectual property.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
One does not violate "intellectual property" [gnu.org]. One infringes a copyright, infringes a patent, or infringes a trademark. Which of the three would apply?
One migt think that pleasuring oneself to computer porn was a violation of intellectual property.
One does not pleasure oneself to "computer porn". One pleasures oneself to hot teens, sexy MILF's, or the serious freaky-deaky. Which of the three would apply?
Re: (Score:2)
Whichever ones an Intellectual Property lawyer can convince an Intellectual Property judge(formerly IP lawyer) apply.
Re: (Score:2)
You seem to be under the impression that you have to obey cease and desist letters.
Re: (Score:1)
>The cease-and-desist will claim some intellectual property violation and it will be up to you to give in to the intimidation or
>resist by contacting your host to get your site back online.
You need a hosting provider that won't act without a court order.
Make sure your contract with them puts them in breach if they shut you down without a lawful reason.
Re:Without the keys, it's 1201(g) (Score:4, Interesting)
The cease-and-desist will claim some intellectual property violation and it will be up to you to give in to the intimidation or resist by contacting your host to get your site back online.
Back when the first AACS decoder was released on Doom9, it was called BackupHDDVD and made use of a key obtained from PowerDVD (IIRC) for Windows.
;)
The programmer, however, implemented AACS decryption by following the specification as posted directly on the AACS Licensing Authority's website.
Food for thought
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
VideoLAN is in France.
DADVSI (Score:2)
VideoLAN is in France.
For one thing, France has its own counterpart to the DMCA [wikipedia.org]. For another, I am speculating on the right of United States residents, including the editors of Slashdot, to use VideoLAN products.
Re:DADVSI (Score:4, Interesting)
For another, I am speculating on the right of United States residents, including the editors of Slashdot, to use VideoLAN products.
Tangential riff: Anyone else notice CNN using videolan recently? It looked to me like they used it all the time for showing video of the oil spewing out of the well. They frequently had multiple videos running simultaneously, each in its own window and often there would be at least one 'dead' window with the trademark videolan traffic cone in it.
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect that's more likely because you were using the VLC browser plugin to playback those videos.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
For another, I am speculating on the right of United States residents, including the editors of Slashdot, to use VideoLAN products.
Using the product isn't the issue. The DMCA is about the distribution of a product to circumvent protection schemes.
Re: (Score:2)
For another, I am speculating on the right of United States residents, including the editors of Slashdot, to use VideoLAN products.
Using the product isn't the issue. The DMCA is about the distribution of a product to circumvent protection schemes.
One cannot use a product that has not been distributed. Please allow me to rephrase: I am speculating on the right of United States residents to obtain VideoLAN products.
Re: (Score:2)
One cannot use a product that has not been distributed.
Yes, but the distributor of the product is the one who gets in trouble not the user.
Please allow me to rephrase: I am speculating on the right of United States residents to obtain VideoLAN products.
And it's still irrelevant to what the DMCA says.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
The exemptions the librarian of congress recently decreed don't apply. See 4(ii) in the research exemption: MPAA lobbied sufficiently to get it crippled to the point of uselessness. And the fair use exemption is only for DVDs. If you want to legally play a Bluray, nothing has changed.
"legally play a Bluray" (Score:5, Interesting)
"legally play a Blueray" (same question for DVD)
What exactly does that mean?
A Blueray/DVD player that one may purchase at Best Buy also decrypts the disc. Is that circumvention also?
What exactly is the difference between a commercial player and an open source player (which also must decrypt the disc)?
The main difference that I see is that one is using the official specification, and one is using an unofficial specification.
But using an unofficial specification is not illegal.
Perhaps, If some are claiming that an open source player plays "BlueRay" or "DVD" discs, then that may be a Trademark violation, as it has not been certified.
Is that what you are implying? a Trademark violation?
Re:"legally play a Bluray" (Score:5, Insightful)
no, you miss the point.
players are LICENSED. money.
freeware players skip this. that annoys those who, uhh, like money.
get it?
its JUST that simple.
(then again, you can't GET a license just by asking for it. you have to bend over and kiss corporate ass and promise never to allow users to do what they wish with the media they bought)
back in the early days of linux/dvd, authors DID try to buy 'proper' licenses. they were refused. at that point, we all turned 'rogue' in the industries' eyes.
well, so be it. don't want our 'player fees'? then you get NOTHING.
but we still will be able to play our media. you have done nothing but stopped revenue to your own self, you silly mpaa morons.
Re: (Score:2)
players are LICENSED. money.
While i'm sure the money is nice gravy I don't think it's the only reason and probablly not even the main reason for keeping things tightly gaurded.
Open source and open standards are fundamenally incompatible with drm since if you have the unobfuscated source to a player or even a sufficiant spec (including all required keys) needed to implement a player you can create a player that does not respect the drm.
but we still will be able to play our media. you have done nothing but st
Re: (Score:2)
The money is the ONLY reason. It must be, since the ones promoting this are corporations, and it isn't a benefit otherwise.
As to key revocation -- sure, why not? But, existing material can still be decoded. Of course, "official" players would then have to be updated to play new discs. Which gives a very bad "out-of-the-box" experience. Imagine you (accidentally) purchased a new disc, and an old-stock player. Take it home, and discover that your Blue-Ray won't play Blue-Ray.
Until you attach it to the interne
Re: (Score:1)
As to key revocation -- sure, why not? But, existing material can still be decoded. Of course, "official" players would then have to be updated to play new discs. Which gives a very bad "out-of-the-box" experience. Imagine you (accidentally) purchased a new disc, and an old-stock player. Take it home, and discover that your Blue-Ray won't play Blue-Ray.
Until you attach it to the internet with an ethernet cable. Or give it an update on a USB stick, or order a special Blue-Ray from the manufacturer. Oops, you discover that your model is two years old, and no further updates are being done...
They just put updates for players directly on the new discs. No internet/usb/update disc necessary.
Re: (Score:2)
An update for every blu-ray player ever on one disc? Be glad you can store a lot on those discs I guess.
Some are already no longer supported.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Revocation works, and has worked, because all the keys identified so far came from Windows software players, and it's deemed standard operating procedure to have to patch Windows software occasionally. If someone gets the AACS key out of a Sony BDP-S370 or whatever, we may see a very different result.
Re: (Score:2)
It would only be illegal to play a disc if the disc, not the player, had an attached license that you would be violating. Player licenses only means you can't sell or distribute a device that decodes it without one. If you were intrinsically capable of reading the disc with only the power of your MIND, player licenses wouldn't stop you. Of course, that would also make disc license infringement a little hard to detect.
That's not to say that they do or don't have licenses on every blu-ray disc, I don't kno
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Cease and Desist in (Score:5, Insightful)
If they had the power to take down BluRay decrypters, they'd be going after the commercial tools that actually work. This is roughly the umpteenth open source library announced and what they all have in common is that they don't work on any of the newer movies with MKBv11 or higher and/or anything more than the simplest forms of BD+ protection. It's unlikely open source will catch up until the MPAA gives up the DRM fight, you may not see it but there's still a constant war of updates to make the decrypters work on new discs.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll buy BluRay discs just as soon as they can work in my player.
Re: (Score:2)
Its not like people have stopped breaking these codecs. Eventually they will be broken. All of them. (...) They are doing it for the joy of cracking a puzzle. (...) The economics of constantly updating the rom in players can't match the cracking joy the kids get breaking into them.
You really don't get how modern DRM works, do you? They don't have to constantly update the ROM, they just reveal the functionality bit by bit with new discs and so there's an endless war to reverse engineer and update the decryption software. It's a war of attrition and they're winning, it's more puzzles than people are willing to work on just for shits and giggles. It literally takes manyears of dedicated work to continuously update the tool and open source is lagging more and more behind, not closing up.
Re: (Score:2)
You really don't get how modern DRM works, do you?
Neither do you, apparently.
AACS works by encrypting the disk's key with every allowed player key and placing the resultant block of encrypted keys on the disk.
To decrypt a disk the player tries its own key on each encryption key in the block until it decrypts a key that can play the disk, or it runs out of keys to try.
To revoke a key they simply stop including a player's key in the batch of encryption keys in the block of keys.
This is fundamentally flawed because the decryption keys are on the disk / player
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks, but I know plenty. To get rid of AACS all you need is the MKB derived from the player key, but open source doesn't have that either. The other part of most BluRay disc protection is BD+ which works pretty much like I said. And now they're just starting to top it off with Cinavia too, an audio watermark that'll prevent decrypted copies from playing on hardware players. If you have a decrypted copy of The Losers (Region A) and a fully updated PS3, the sound will die after 20 minutes and a nasty messag
Re: (Score:2)
Thus explaining why I still only buy DVDs. When opensource software can play blurays the I will buy them.
One small error (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry guys. I submitted this article before I realized this. libaacs has been around for a while and was a project started at Doom9. It was just adopted by VideoLAN. My bad!
Re: (Score:1)
Well, it's a good thing Slashdot editors fact check articles before posting them, or that would be embarrassing.
What's that? Editors don't do a damn thing here? Carry on. Nothing to see here. Maybe this story will hit the RSS feed a couple more times before they get it right ...
Sounds legit (Score:5, Insightful)
"Note that this isn't meant to actually be a decoding library. It includes no AACS keys and is solely developed for research purposes."
Riiiiight
It's perfectly legal (Score:2)
To decode your own Bluray disks.
In the free world, anyway, even if not America.
Re: (Score:3)
Or Europe, after the EUCD. And it won't be most other places either, after ACTA. But over time you realize the law isn't a perfect democratic tool but often run by special interest groups, and how little the law means if sufficiently many disagree with it.
If ACTA gets ratified (Score:2)
I don't know about elsewhere, but they've been trying to pass copyright expansion legislation here in Canada for nearly a decade without any success.
Re: (Score:2)
largely thanks to a few good people that keep calling the bluff each time the legislation gets renamed and presented as something thats supposed to fix a new problem. Sadly, for each generation there are fewer thats willing to stick their neck out for those kinds of causes.
Quite the opposite (Score:2)
Since Sam Bulte [wikipedia.org]'s political career was destroyed due to her support for Bill C-60, only MPs in very safe ridings have been willing to take on the issue, and no government has risked letting a bill actually make its way to a vote.
The bills keep getting proposed to appease the Americans, but no government is going to have the balls to try to get them passed in the current minority climate.
Re: (Score:2)
Why is that marked as a troll?
Decoding ones own DVDs for watching purposes on a linux is illegal these days in many european countries and becoming illegal in the others.
Haven't bought a dvd since and will not.
Re: (Score:2)
This is a decoding library nothing more. It's useless without AACS keys. How you obtain those keys is your problem and the problem of the person who actually is in breach of the stupid American anti-circumvention laws.
Using this library is no more illegal than using a TV to convert 1s and 0s into pretty pictures.
Awesome (Score:4, Funny)
It includes no AACS keys and is solely developed for research purposes.
So was lysergic acid diethylamide. Looks like a win for us if things go according to history!
Re: (Score:2)
Nice Name (Score:1, Funny)
Wanted to be first in alphabetical listings, eh?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Sadly they'd still be beaten by my local ambulance chaser who is in the phonebook as "A Accident Attorney"....
Re: (Score:2)
Wow. What is this country coming to? Now even the lawyers don't speak English.... :-D
(For anyone who doesn't get it, "An" comes before a vowel sound.)
Re: (Score:2)
Better than mine. "Aardvark Accident Associated Attorneys".
Re: (Score:2)
They should improve the interface (Score:2, Offtopic)
While I appreciate Videolan's achievements, VLC's programmers should improve the interface in one key aspect that has boggled my mind for a while:
I would like to see video and audio controls on the active default interface. At the moment, if I am watching video and want to adjust contrast, saturation, brightness etc, I have to click an icon on the interface, then choose video controls which I first have to activate!
Too many steps for a simple thing in my opinion. With the present implementation, If one choo
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
So why are you telling us instead of Videolan? Nobody here wants to hear this crap. Go [videolan.org] tell someone who cares (Videolan).
Re: (Score:2)
Because most of the world cares about how the video player performs rather then how it looks. When I use VLC I want to press the play button and have the whole thing go away until I'm done. At this very moment VLC does just that.
This pu
Re: (Score:2)
That's really constructive advice, I'm sure that the GP is a programmer and had just never thought about doing it himself before.
Translation of research exception in the law (Score:5, Interesting)
From the cited ruling [legifrance.gouv.fr] which discusses application of the EU ban on circumventing DRM:
Which roughly translates to:
So libaacs is legally 100% safe so long as it stays in those boundaries. (That EU law is unjust and should be contested.)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Small correction, the last part of the translation should be:
(I misread an "en" as an "et".)
Note the incorrect wording (Score:2)
Bolded for emphasis. I put the French original into Google's translator and got
A very important difference. One says security and research are allowed regardles
.shn (Score:1)
It's weird how VLC plays every codec under the sun, but not SHN.
http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/632 [videolan.org]
Re: (Score:2)
It's weird how people expect VLC to play every codec under the sun, including little-used codecs that the average user would never come across.
Re: (Score:1)
Well...the slogan on the web page proudly announces, "It plays everything!" So yeah, I guess they want it to...do...that.
Re: (Score:2)
As I read it the "Plays everything" slogan refers to the types: "Files, Discs and Streams".
Just a little bit further: "It comes with support for nearly all codec there is." (emphasis mine).
Re: (Score:2)
Shorten isn't all that obscure, although it's fallen out of favor. There was a time not too long ago when it was the most popular and widely known lossless audio codec. Of course, the market for a lossless audio codec was pretty small back then--most people, as now, were perfectly happy with MP3s, and few people had the bandwidth to download lossless files. And nowadays, SHN (or "Shorten") has been almost entirely supplanted by FLAC and lossless formats from Apple and MS. Nevertheless, it's hardly "litt
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on whether you consider the Grateful Dead or Phish or other similar bands to be something. Shorten (.shn) was the standard lossless audio format among the "taper-friendly-band" recording exchange community until FLAC came along, and it hasn't been fully supplanted in that community yet, though its use is dying.
Re: (Score:1)
Jurisdiction etc. (Score:2)
Traditionally that has also been the case for VLC which was based in France where software patents don't apply and decss appears semi legit. I don't think they have much to worry about (more than now) by inserting an AACS implementation. Where they might g