[linux-dvb] Re: CAMs - the never ending story...

[Marcus Kuba <marcus@kuba4u.de>]

Am 14.04.2002 19:54:11, schrieb Martin Springer <dtv@camorra.org>:

>However, I am pretty sure that the lawyers of the content industry
>consider watching pay tv using vdr *illegal*, because vdr users
>theoretically could copy and redistribute their recorded movies.

Reality-check, please! The same could be considered for anybody else owning a DVB-card or 
one of the commercial receivers with hd-recording. I haven't seen yet any event where either the 
producers of DVB-cards and the software or the makers of the commercial STBs have gotten 
legal problems with their products, even with the fact that their hardware doesn't support for 
example Macrovision...
The only difference between the users of the windows-stuff or a commercial STB and us (the 
users of  linuxtv/vdr) is that THEY CAN use every CAM and WE CAN'T! This has absolutely 
nothing to do with laws and questions of legality.

>In the near future, commercial STBs, whether they use Linux or not,

Why are you talking about the future of commercial projects when we were asking about a non-
commercial project that's going on for more than two years now?

>will not only have to support CAMs, but also the content protection
>schemes which are currently standardized by the DVB project.

So in the end you (convergence) will have to fix the CAM-support anyways. Or do I have to admit 
that your company will never deliver a working driver to your customers who are willing to 
produce linux-based STBs? Sorry for being a bit rude, but there are moments I wonder what your 
company is doing. The only things I see is a driver and lots of projects on the web-site, but not a 
single product available on the market. How do you earn money?

>By definition of copyright law, a Linux box that ignores content
>protection will be a "circumvention device". It is a bit similar to
>DVD CSS: if you want to obtain the DVD logo for you player, you have
>to licence CSS (which is broken). 

By definition of law, it is not forbidden to produce/program such a circumvention-device as long 
as it is not done for commerce (at least in that new german law, there is this small word 
'gewerblich', which makes the point). But despite that, currently there is no such content 
protection besides the encryption and the use of CAMs/smartcards. We are not asking you to 
ignore the use of this mechanism, we ask you to better support it!!
I think we all know that there are programmers who have been successful in building a software-
CAM that actually works better than your support for CAMs (at least that's what I could read in 
the forums. Currently, I'm in the lucky position of having one of the working CAMs. That may 
change when Premiere stays 'alive' and really switches to Betacrypt2...) I read in the forums that 
you are constantly trying to disable the use of such solutions in newer versions of the driver by 
removing functions needed to access the embedded descrambler of the AV7111.
In my opinion, this will not be of any use if you don't fix the firmware and provide the possibility of 
using legal CAMs and cards at the same time. The hackers will just keep using older drivers, 
since they are good and stable enough to get anything working that they need. On the other 
side, users who are willing to pay for subscriptions and buying CAMs, still are being impeded in 
doing so because it doesn't work. In the end, they will get other solutions that DO work, be that 
windows, commercial STBs or softcams.. none of them is good for you or the linuxtv-project.

>LinuxTV software is free software licensed under the GNU public
>license. As long as it is not illegal to write software for computers
>and distribute its source code under the GPL, we always can write the
>software we need in order to filter the signals out of the noise
>offered by most of the broadcasters.

What does that mean "in German"? If I wouldn't know better I could believe you are indirectly 
saying that we shall better use the softcam-stuff instead of waiting for a fixed CAM-support...

Greetings,   Marcus




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