The first DVDs went on sale in Japan on November 1, 1996, and a few months later in the United States on March 24, 1997. This was the movie studios’ second crack at home video, and they weren’t going to make the same mistake twice.
The first crack was the tape formats. Betamax came out in 1975, and VHS a year after that. For the first time, home recording — and arbitrary reproduction — of TV broadcasts was easy for regular people, and the companies who owned those broadcasts didn’t like it. They sued Sony (Betamax’s creator) arguing that the company was liable for any copyright infringement committed by Betamax end-users. The case, Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., went all the way to Supreme Court. The Court ruled 5-4 for Sony, paving the way for Betamax to stay on the market and … quickly get crushed by VHS. But hey, that’s not the point, the point is that VCRs stayed legal.
DVD was a mulligan. And the studios needed to get it right.
The first D in DVD stands for digital. And while 1996-era home internet connections couldn’t feasibly download movies, everyone knew they’d be able to within a few years. Digital + internet connected = infinitely reproducible at no marginal cost. So rather than fight it out in the courts, the studios decided to use technology to win the fight before it started. Every movie on a DVD came wrapped in Content Scramble System. CSS encrypted the DVD such that it would only play on authorized players and would not be copyable.
So DVDs launched and the content owners lived happily ever after.
Until October 1999, when a teenager named Jon Lech Johansen (who’s on Twitter at @jonlech) and two other people (who remain anonymous to this day) released DeCSS, open source software that rendered CSS powerless. Play and copy DVDs to your heart’s content.
This time, things went differently in court. In January 2000, eight movie studios sued three people who were serving DeCSS downloads from their websites. The case, Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes (Universal’s lawyers keep themselves busy!), got to the Second Circuit, which upheld the district court’s ruling that hosting DeCSS is illegal.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides that it’s illegal to “traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” The Second Circuit ruled that hosting DeCSS online constitutes such trafficking.
The content owners spent millions of dollars fighting to make it illegal to circumvent DRM. And they won. And here’s the most interesting thing: none of it mattered. Downloading DeCSS remained trivially easy before, during, and after the court case. And today, we exist in a quantum superposition of content being trivially easy to copy and yet not actually getting copied. Netflix has subscribers because it’s easy to use, not because it’s hard to copy the content.
DRM was born a relic. Native to the one brief moment in time when tech was good enough to make copying easy, but not yet good enough to make DRM irrelevant.
Which brings us to guns. (Remember guns? It’s a newsletter about guns.) Last week the ATF announced new rules to ban 80% receiver kits. Those kits are a technology that exists for this one brief moment in time when it’s possible to make easy-to-finish 80% frames, but not yet easy to make guns from scratch.
How long will that be the case? The Ghost Gunner already has a 0% receiver design out. At-home 3D-printing and CNC have been a thing for, what, ten years? We haven’t begun to see the depth of the changes they’ll bring. (For reference, it was still only 1983 when personal computers were ten years old.) Where homemade gun tech happens to be at this moment in time is a waste of time to think about, because we all know where it’s going to settle permanently: the ability to trivially manufacture guns at home.
The ATF’s rule about homemade guns is the launch of CSS. A successful conquest of an ever-shrinking island.
This week’s links
What it took to become a USPSA Grand Master
Brought to our attention by a newsletter subscriber (thanks João!). Success requires tenacity and an extreme interest in the details of executing your tasks.
Home Depot, the people’s FFL
🙃
First-hand account from redditor robbed at gunpoint
Interesting detail: one robber held him at gunpoint while another patted him down, presumably checking for weapons.
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