Who controls my movie collection?

There has been a variety of news in technology circles in recent weeks about the case Sony is making against a hacker (or if that has a bad connotation for you, tinkerer) who figured out how to "jailbreak" the Play Station 3.

All 21-year-old George Hotz wanted to do was to use the OtherOS feature to run Linux on his PS3 hardware, something Sony disabled last year. But now Sony is coming after him and his friends with a squadron of lawyers and guns blazing because in modifying his PS3, Hotz possibly provided users with a way to violate the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), designed to legally protect the encryption Sony uses on their Play Station disks (Hotz contests this).

In a similar scenario, let's say last weekend you went out to the store and decided to buy a copy of "The Social Network" now that it is out on DVD and Blu-Ray. You take it home, but eventually start worrying that the dog or the baby might start using the disk either as a Frisbee or a chew-toy. You decide you want a backup of the movie for safekeeping, just like that pile of MP3s on your computer from your CD collection.

Once again you are faced with digital encryption on the disk that prevents you from simply copy-pasting the content. Now if you figure out how to download some simple software from the net to circumvent the encryption and back up your movie, you just became a movie pirate.

Now, you may think that doing things like this isn't illegal. Heck, they decided before I was born (1984 - Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.) that making your own copy of your favorite TV show episode on a tape is okay thanks to "fair use" principles, so why not movie or video game disks?

Well, after doing some research, you may notice that in general, the same principles don't necessarily apply to other media. I think a lot of people do believe that it is fair to allow consumers to make a backup copy of media for their own personal use or to use hardware that they have purchased in whatever way they want, but there is technically no provision for that in fair-use law or in court decisions (note the "Citation needed" where Wikipedia says you can make backups of your movie disks).

For me, as a college student, I live in a small dorm room and also tend to move around a lot (I've had 8+ addresses in the last 5 years) as I change rooms on campus and go back and forth to internships. This means that I really didn't want to be hauling my very large DVD collection around with me as I move. What I'd like to do is be able to keep a copy of my movies stored on my computer hard drive or on my iPod while the disks themselves stay back home in Minnesota.

Sadly, I am not allowed to do this, not because the technology doesn't exist, but because the movie companies' fear of illicit mass-produced copies drives them to treat me, their end-customer, as a potential criminal.

Technically, ripping a disk to make a backup of its contents is illegal if it is protected by encryption software put there by the copyright owner (all Hollywood movies have this encryption), according to the DMCA, though I question whether it should be illegal for consumers to view their media the way that they want to. I understand it is illegal to make copies of movie DVDs or Blu-Ray Disks to distribute to friends or family who haven't paid for the movie or to rip a copy of disks from Netflix to keep for personal use. But should it be illegal to keep one backup copy of media you own just in case someone steps on the disk, the dog chews it up or it gets melted in a fire? Should you be required to always use the actual disk when you watch a movie unless the movie studio explicitly gives you a copy for your iPod? I don't think so.

When they were released a few years ago, HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray disks started to use a newer, more difficult to crack brand of encryption to stop movie pirates from copying the disks. But, within a year committed movie geeks (or pirates or hackers if you prefer) found the hidden code on the disks that would unlock the encryption (it was 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 if you were wondering). The studios' system is smart and lets them replace the code if it is found, but each time a new code has been used, it is simply located and the movie ripping continues.

In Hotz's case, his use of a similar encryption code to unlock the PS3 has caused Sony to attempt to muzzle him because of the possibility of his hack being used to allow the copying of PS3 games. Notably, Hotz has said that he expressly didn't want to allow users to break the disk encryption; he just wanted to get back the functionality that Sony needlessly removed from the PS3 last year.

Sony's move to remove software functionality that they sold to consumers was questionable and unprecedented in the electronics industry. Personally, I support George's efforts, because I hesitate to get a new PS3 without the Linux-running, protein-folding features that originally piqued my interest in that console.

As consumers, we are witness to an expensive and ever-increasing arms war between media companies who have legitimate reasons to protect their content and committed users who simply want to use the media they have bought as they see fit.

A good portion of the cost of a DVD, Blu-Ray disk, or PS3 game is for the setup and licensing of the CSS or AACS encryption that is required to be used on commercial disks. The only reason these encryption schemes exist is to prevent the disks from being copied by unauthorized publishers, but because they have always been cracked, they seem to have little real value and only cause a useless increase in the cost of media and decrease in consumer value (because the media can't be copied or backed up).

To some extent it all boils down to trust. If you were the media corporations, do you decide to trust consumers with their content and spend your money to ensure that police find and detain those that create large quantities of illegal commercial copies of media? Or do you treat everyone as a criminal, add an expensive barbed-wire barricade around your product when you sell it to customers, and then brutally attack anyone who gets through the fences?

I'm not sure there's a perfect answer, but as a consumer I dislike the extra cost and hindrance that digital protection adds to DVDs, Blu-Ray disks and video games. It makes me a criminal for simply enjoying a movie the way I want to enjoy it, when the real criminals are the groups overseas that create illegal batches of disks by the millions to sell on the black market.