What's So Free About This DVD? 

Go to any gathering of open-source developers and someone is bound to tell you that free software isn't free -- not free as in "free lunch," anyway. Free as in "free speech."

Such politics have sparked another technological transformation, this time freeing a DVD from the constraints imposed by copyright-protection technology.

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The documentary film Revolution OS was released Friday on DVD. The film features interviews with Linus Torvalds of Linux fame; Richard Stallman of the GNU/Free software project; Eric Raymond, author of Cathedral and the Bazaar (a treatise on marketing and open source); Rob Malda of hacker discussion and news site Slashdot; Larry Augustin, co-founder of VA Linux Systems; and others.

In the spirit of open source, the DVD was released without CSS, the content scrambling system used on most commercial DVDs.

J.T.S. Moore, the film's creator, said it's an experiment in going "CSS-free" -- one he fervently hopes won't blow up in his face. He hopes his film won't be pirated, and that his success will encourage other filmmakers not to use CSS.

According to the DVD Copy Control Association, a nonprofit corporation that licenses CSS to manufacturers of DVD hardware, CSS' primary purpose is to stop piracy.

But some feel CSS restricts far too many consumer rights in the name of copyright control.

"CSS is a sort of electronic-thought policeman that comes home with you, and works for the media owner," said open-source advocate Bruce Perens. "It controls what you can do in your living room with a disc that you've paid for. It prevents many legitimate uses in the name of stopping one illegitimate use."

Perens worked at Pixar Animation Studios for 12 years and is also one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative. He said he has sympathy for, and understanding of, both sides of the copy-protection argument. But he firmly believes CSS isn't the answer.

The copy-protection scheme stops people from easily making copies of a DVD for personal use -- even as backups or to view on a computer that doesn't have a DVD drive. CSS also makes it difficult to view DVDs on many Linux computers.

To get a license that allows CSS to be incorporated into a DVD player or other device, a company has to sign the CSS licensing agreement, something many Linux developers refuse to do. As a result, the majority of computers running Linux cannot use DVDs unless their owners opt to use DeCSS, a utility that decodes DVDs, allowing them to be viewed on a Linux computer.

The entertainment industry has taken several cases to court, alleging that the use of DeCSS violates the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which prohibits anyone from distributing software designed to circumvent copy protection.

Moore is concerned that his CSS-free DVD could result in unauthorized copying and screening of the film. The film has already been made available for download on a few websites and screened sans his permission at various small technology conventions and colleges.

He self-financed Revolution OS and worked for years without a salary to make the film. For those reasons, he said, it's important to him that people purchase the film rather than pirate it.

But despite his concerns, Moore said he couldn't rationalize releasing a DVD about open-source and free software that many users of that software would be unable to view. He's equally uncomfortable with supporting what he believes are increasingly Draconian copyright control techniques.

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