Illegal art
Following a link provided by Aaron led me, slightly roundaboutly, to Illegal Art, a fascinating site featuring various kinds of illegal art.
I'm a big fan of intellectual property. On the other hand, I'm also a big fan of freedom of speech, and I think that remixing, appropriating, and hijacking imagery that has strong associations can sometimes lead to really good art.
And then there's the whole CSS-descrambler thing. (In this context, "CSS" stands for "Content Scrambling System," the system used to encrypt DVDs; no relation to the web technology Cascading Style Sheets.) On the one hand, I suspect that most people who want to read encrypted DVDs want to do so for reasons I disapprove of (such as making copies to give or sell to other people, without the creators or the people they've designated getting any money for it). (Yes, yes, I know there are lots of people who have legitimate non-copyright-violating uses for DeCSS.) On the other hand, I also strongly disapprove of the DMCA, particularly section 1201(a)(2), the part that makes it illegal to provide tools that are designed to circumvent copy protection.
And I applaud the ingenuity of the people whose work is represented in the CSS Descramblers Gallery. Lots of cool explorations of the areas where intellectual property and free speech run into each other. My favorite is Seth Schoen's DeCSS Haiku (featured in a Wall Street Journal article in 2001), which describes the algorithm in precise detail, using English words formed into haiku-like 5-7-5 verses instead of using a programming language. Which would be in the category of "fun idea but not worth reading for most people" if that were all it did, but the non-technical bits are a joy to read: full of discussions of philosophical and legal issues, literary terms, and sly jokes, like this bit:
Now I want a drink
(mnemonics in crypto poems
are great!); exercise
from singing so long
makes me thirst for a glass of
soda, slice of pie.
Where the first of those two stanzas, in case you missed it, consists of words whose numbers of letters correspond to the first several digits of pi: 3.14159265358. Hence, a slice of pi.
TrinSF on Slashdot comments, about this poem:
[T]he whole thing is built around the Greek epic poem model. It's written to evoke Homer and Hesiod, complete with initial invocation of a muse and subsequent references to that muse. It includes traditional asides, stops frequently to praise its heroes, and closes with a prayer (of sorts).
I don't know enough about Greek epic poems to confirm or argue with that statement, but pretty cool if true.
See the author's page about the history of the DeCSS Haiku for more information. (He appears to be a CTY alum, which probably explains a lot.) One of my favorite bits from that page:
I felt that expressing the fear of censorship directly and repeatedly within the poem itself created an interesting tension. It emphasized that the poem had really been written by a human author with a human voice and his own interests and passions. Aware of the prospect of censorship, the poem confronts would-be censors directly and takes them to task. By contrast, most source code is relatively defenseless: it can't fight against its own suppression....
There's also some really interesting discussion toward the end of that page about the fact that in 1915, a court case determined that movies don't count as speech/expression under the First Amendment. (That decision has since, of course, been changed.)
