A Pirating War
Would you rather pay twenty to twenty-five dollars for one DVD or less than forty bucks for a computer program which copies any DVD and stores it onto your computer? If you were a smart shopper it comes to you as common sense. There are such programs on the market that you can buy, but there are a few problems. There are certain little things called "copyright laws." This is how certain companies such as MGM and other such companies are winning lawsuits against people that distribute these programs and also hackers that break through the encryptions on the DVDs.The current legal DVD battle between the movie industry and the free/open software communities over DVD is a microcosm of an ongoing intellectual property war. This war pits intellectual property owners against such diverse groups as programmers opposing restrictions on reverse engineering and the publication of computer code and librarians opposing new restrictions on copyright rights of first sale and fair use. Jon Johansen may be the youngest victim of this war. Because of software posted on the 16-year-old's Web site, his home in Norway was raided in January by police who seized two computers and a cell phone. Both Jon and his father
Now ever since there has been DVDs, there has been hackers trying to break the encryptions on these DVDs. Encryptions are a certain series of codes that makes it hard to copy a DVD. MGM and other such companies have brought these hackers to court On the other hand if you were one of those people that worked in MGM or Universal, wouldn't you make a big deal about this issue? If you were one of those people you would be losing money every time a DVD was pirated. These actions of piracy can not come as total shock to these companies. Piracy of videos and music has been going on for years now. They have to realize that this is something that can not be stopped unless they plan on changing the copyright laws or the sale of movies. But seeing how DVD burners are now sold with every computer, it is even harder to enforce the copyright laws. Now the DVD drive itself might as well be the device that enables copying of the disc. Without the DVD drive you can't do too much, but with it a lot becomes possible, including burning DVDs without buying those programs that were talked about earlier. Although many people have already claimed that this could have disastrous consequences for the DVD format, the fact is that
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Approximate Word count = 819
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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