By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco for The Register
This article has been reproduced from The Register, with
permission.
In fact it contains code written by the Motion Picture Ass. of
America's villain of the week for several years running, 'DVD Jon'
Johansen, who was dragged through the Norwegian courts by the MPAA
using a very dubious extension of US law, for circumventing the DRM
on DVDs. Johansen eventually prevailed in having the spurious
charges against him thrown out.
The irony of a company using code from someone who circumvented
DRM to develop an even nastier form of DRM without even
saying "Thanks!" will surely feature in geek trivia quizzes
for years to come.
The British company that developed the DRM software for Sony,
First4Internet Ltd, has included free software code covered by the
Free Software Foundation's LGPL, a cousin of the GPL, amateur
sleuths have discovered.
The LGPL, or Lesser General Public
License, was designed to protect author's rights for chunks of
code rather than finished programs.
It's a complicated area, with subtle distinctions between rights
over code that is compiled into, and distributed as part of the
final binary program, or code that is only called at as the program
is executed. But it is pretty clear cut that First4Internet has
used code without observing the terms under which it's
distributed terms backed up by the power of copyright (one
of our greatest inventions).
And we all know
what happens to people who don't respect copyright.
Sebastian Porst
discovered code from the LAME project, mpglib and VideoLAN in
the XCP copy restriction, which has caused Sony so much grief. Jon
Johansen is a contributor to the VideoLAN project.
"I just want to mention that the function that can be found at
virtual offset 0x10089E00 in ECDPlayerControl.ocx is the function
DoShuffle from a GPL-ed file called drms.c written by Jon Lech
Johansen and Sam Hocevar (Google for it)," notes Sebastian.
A parallel, and even more exhaustive forensic examination of the
XCP code was undertaken by 'Muzzy' who published his
findings here.
So why is First4Internet in such trouble? If you use LGPL code,
the licence requires that you acknowledge the provenance of the
code you're using with a clear notification and an assurance
that you can provide your own source code on request. It's designed
to deter lazy programmers such as... well... the kind employed by
First4Internet Ltd.
FSF attorney Eben Moglen told us this evening he couldn't offer
a statement on what the organization planned to do next.
© The Register
2005
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