On Apr 7, 2005 10:24 AM, Joseph A. Caputo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'd be willing to be that such a reverse engineering attempt would fall > afoul of the DMCA.
Perhaps. > Reverse-engineering a driver for the purpose of simply using hardware > for which no driver exists on the platform is legal. As I thought. > However, when the *reason* no driver exists is because it would > compromise the security of the data handled by the card, then the goal > (or at least a side-effect of the goal) becomes one of circumventing > encryption, which is explicitly against the DMCA, even if the purpose > is to exercise you fair use rights. >From what I understand, we would not be circumventing any security. The CableCard has the logic, or a person's broadcaster-issued decryption key(s), within it to decrypt the encrypted signals. We would be utilising the encryption, and not breaking or working around it. Now, if we were coming up with a system to decrypt the transmissions WITHOUT a CableCard then it would fall afoul of the DMCA. To be absolutely candid, if the security is so simple that it can be decrypted without a card and there is serious danger of that being discovered, there's no point creating the system in the first place. The format appears to be similar to a PCMCIA card. If that is so, they should place the encryption and decryption routines within the card itself, and have some simple device functions to call (videoArray DecodeStream(bitArray stream), say), and as the Cable stream is two-way, updates to the card's parameters (Key validity etc) can be passed in and validated as completed. This is all supposition on my part, but I think you could develop for CableCard without falling afoul of the DMCA. Provided, at least, that the system is sound. > The DMCA is not compatible with fair use. Hear hear! _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
