http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jan05/0105ldvd.html Excerpt : DVD Copy Protection: Take 2 The next generation of technology won't have a Hollywood ending By Tekla S. Perry In 1999, a 16-year-old Norwegian high school student took on the motion-picture industry and won. The teenager, Jon Johansen, wrote software that decrypted the Content Scrambling System (CSS) that rearranges the bits on prerecorded DVDs to prevent the discs' being played back on unauthorized hardware. Until Johansen wrote his software utility, which he called DeCSS, you could copy the bits from a DVD to your computer hard drive, but because those bits were scrambled, you couldn't play a movie from those copied bits. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Data processing is not a field of technology in the sense of patent law, and innovations in data processing are not inventions in the sense of patent law." (European Parliament 24-sep-2003) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Serge Marelli, Luxembourg E-mail : serge.marelli(a)linux.lu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LiLux - http://www.lilux.lu/ Defending Innovation against Patent Inflation http://swpat.ffii.org/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------