DeCSS T-Shirts

We just received our DVD shirts from Copyleft today. On the front they say “DVD CCA” behind the universal circle & line “no” symbol. On the back they contain the css_titlekey(), css_decrypttitlekey(), and css_descramble() functions from the DeCSS code, making the wearer an official enemy of the MPAA and DVD CCA. Also included with each shirt is your official copy of the complete css_descramble.c source code printed on Copyleft letterhead, suitable for framing or handing to the judge when the MPAA hauls you into court for wearing their alleged trade secrets.

A Copyleft License for Artistic Works?

Not much happened over the weekend. The weather is warming up again. Susan and I attended our weekly symphony at the DSO. I ran across a new web site called Project Magnus that’s archiving interesting image tiles for use as desktop backgrounds. I dug up a copy of our Web Wrangler CD-ROM, sucked off about 30 of the more interesting tiles we created for it, converted them to PNG format and uploaded them to the Project Magnus site.

The other thing I’ve been pondering lately is a solution to the intellectual property problems that are cropping up as a result of the clash between the old way of doing business in the movie and music industries and the new way of doing business in the open source and Internet world. I think the solution is a new type of license for intellectual property that does what the GNU GPL license has done for software. Imagine a license which would make movies, recorded music, printed music, artwork, etc. freely distributable and usable by everyone. I’ve written a first draft of such a license. Once I get it a little more refined, I’ll make it available for comments. In the meantime, if anyone has any comments or suggestions on this idea, I’d love to get some feedback.