DVD Encryption

What is his intent?

Touretzky is an anarchist who fights any effort to protect intellectual property rights on the Internet – except where his own copyrighted materials are involved. He has railed against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), has defied efforts to protect anti-piracy encryption software for DVDs, and intentionally posted materials on his own websites held to be unlawfully posted elsewhere. However, research on the web shows that Touretzky has filed patents to protect his own intellectual property, and has been quick to use the DMCA to his advantage to defend against possible infringements of his own copyrighted materials.

DVD encryption

In order to protect DVDs against unlawful copying and piracy, manufacturers equipped the DVDs and players with a code intended to prevent the copying of the content. The system was called DVD Content Scrambling System (CSS). In October of 1999, a computer hacker broke the code and posted it on the Internet. When the manufacturers of this encryption system and Universal Studios tried to restrict the dissemination of the code using intellectual property laws, David Touretzky led a massive effort by hackers and other Internet anarchists to republish the code, pictures of the code as “artwork”, descriptions of the steps of the code in plain language – i.e., any means possible to disclose the entire CSS encryption system and eliminate any potential value that encryption might once have had to manufacturers.