As I marvel over how much Linux has improved over the years, I still find myself appalled by what seems to be a genuine conspiracy against this rather excellent operating system.

Take Fritz Hollings' bill. Please. This could be interpreted as prohibiting Linux operating systems because someone might use them to copy DVDs:

The Hollings bill's vague language makes it difficult to predict specifically how any new legislation would affect open-source software. Even so, the fears of the movement's junkies reflect more than paranoia. Just look at the controversy surrounding the encryption that's already embedded in DVD players. Six years after DVD players were introduced, no legal, "pure" (free of proprietary components) Linux DVD player is on the market.

The reason: Each approved DVD manufacturer has to sign a licensing deal with the DVD Copy Control Assn. It requires that each player contain the Content Scrambling System (CSS), which prevents, say, a French citizen from watching a Hollywood movie before it has been released in France, as well as inhibiting unauthorized copying and distribution (see BW Online, 1/16/02, "The French Have a Word For It: Hacking").

Since the licensing goes against the most basic open-source ground rules, no company that used Linux signed the license. Thus, Linux users are unable to to watch DVDs on their computers. "Hollywood doesn't just make movies, it controls how consumers can watch the movie," complains Larry Rosen, a Silicon Valley attorney and executive director of the Open Source Initiative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting open-source software. "They make it impossible for a movie to be legally viewable on Linux -- or on any machine they don't approve of. Does that hurt Linux? It hurts everyone."

Or so I thought. Without my having about it, it turned out that instead of a CD ROM drive, the SuSE machine has a DVD drive. I assumed that because this was the latest and the greatest version of what many people consider to be the best Linux distribution going, that it would be a snap to get the DVD operational. So I popped in a DVD I own (The Caine Mutiny with Humphrey Bogart), and that built-in "xine" player stopped dead with a nasty-looking error code. Puzzled by this, I visited the SuSE website, where I learned that there's no legally available DVD codec for SuSE Linux.

Surfing around a bit, I found this discussion group which supplies detailed instructions lovingly supplied by geeks to non-geeks. I don't want to bore readers here (I'm tending towards excessive prattle about Linux these days), but in brief, you have to uninstall the xine player which ships with SuSE, then install a whole bunch of different files. Apparently some of the entertainment titans think some of the files are illegal, but what do I know? The law is probably as unreadable as the CSS code, and I can't knowingly break incomprehensible laws. Besides, at least one court of appeal has held that the First Amendment even applies to computer code. Imagine!

What bothers me is this: why can't I play a DVD that I bought and paid for? Or that I might choose to rent? If the CSS code doesn't function in Linux as the entertainment titans might like, well, who are they to demand that the code of millions of users -- which existed before their lousy CSS -- be made illegal?

It's outrageous.

And it's not my problem that someone might manage to manipulate his Linux system in such a way to copy DVDs! To copy a DVD is one thing; that's piracy, and properly punishable as such. But it's as manifestly unfair to criminalize software which might assist in copying it as it would be to criminalize copying machines because some people misuse them.

Once again, the national kindergarten reduces us all to a level of enforced stupidity.

Of course, the comparison to kindergarten ends at the prison gates. The CBDTPA (short for the "Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act" -- a mouthful) provides prison sentences of 5 - 20 years.

If you don't like it, you don't have to just sit there and fume.

You can sign the petition.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the stuff I downloaded mades the DVD drive work perfectly. Fast forward or slow motion, in both audio and video, and more controls than I know what to do with. (And that's at the "beginner" level.)