From an Aug. 22d VnuNet.Com article by James Middleton:

An academic at Carnegie Mellon University has set up an online gallery
showing the different methods and media that have been used to publish the
controversial Content Scrambling System (CSS) which unscrambles code used
fro decoding the DVD format.

Such systems first came to light last year when Judge Lewis Kaplan issued a
ruling preventing the distribution of code for reading encrypted DVDs,
namely DeCSS. The ruling was based on a section of the similarly
controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Although Hollywood won the case, preventing the publishing of code for DVD
decoding, the ruling sparked off an outraged response from the internet
community, which came up with a number of ways to exploit loopholes and
publish the code.

One of the most ingenious methods includes Copyleft.com's sweatshirt with
the code printed on the front accompanied by the phrase: "I am a
circumvention device."

The online gallery's curator, Dr. David Touretzky, of the computer science
department at Carnegie Mellon, asked: "Would merely wearing such a shirt in
public constitute 'trafficking in a circumvention device' as defined in
section 1201 of the DMCA?

"If code that can be directly compiled and executed may be suppressed under
the DMCA, as Judge Kaplan asserts in his preliminary ruling, but a textual
description of the same algorithm may not be suppressed, then where exactly
should the line be drawn?"

(Complete article at http://vnunet.com/News/1124916)

Other creative "circumvention devices" contributed to the Carnegie Mellon
online Gallery of CSS Descramblers
(http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Edst/DeCSS/Gallery/index.html) are variously
mathematical, musical (both the code set to music--by Joe Wecker of the band
Don't Eat Pete--and the code as music--a MIDI file created by Jeff
Schrepfer), cinematic (DeCSS The Movie by Samuel Hocevar), dramatic (an MP3
reading of the css_descramble.c file by Xader Vartec), artistic, animational
(a DeCSS animation called Stairs of Freedom by Anders Sandberg) and
crypto-animational (Javascript and VBScript routines using animated
Microsoft Agents Merlin and Robby to explain the mathematical CSS decryption
formula contributed by Charles Hannum), translational (i.e., of the
Anonymous C source code into Standard ML, Scheme, Brainfuck--a
Turing-machine language with only 8 operators--"new-language.txt,"
"plain-english.html," "css-auth.eng" and "css-auth.babel-eng"), pictorial
(the code depicted in 3 page.gif files entitled "Screen Dump"), and a Yahoo
e-greeting card with the source code for css_descramble.c as the message
(submitted anonymously along with a coupon for a Slurpee).

Nor did poetry go unrepresented among the circumvention devices contributed
to the Gallery--an anonymous poet who cannot even be traced (this submission
having been sent via anonymous remailer) contributed "How to Decrypt a DVD:
in Haiku Form," headed by the following anti-copyright notice:

(I abandon my
Exclusive rights to make or
Perform copies of

This work, U.S. Code
Title Seventeen, section
One Hundred and Six.)

In haiku form the decryption runs to 37 pages, so I'm reduced to providing
only excerpts from it, but you can read the whole thing at
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Edst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt

Here is the poem's opening, in which the Homeric epic is brought to bear on
the haiku stanzaic:

Muse! When we learned to
count, little did we know all
the things we could do

some day by shuffling
those numbers: Pythagoras
said "All is number"

long before he saw
computers and their effects,
or what they could do

by computation,
naïve and mechanical
fast arithmetic.
....

Now help me, Muse, for
I wish to tell a piece of
controversial math,

for which the lawyers
of DVD CCA
don't forbear to sue:

that they alone should
know or have the right to teach
these skills and these rules.

(Do they understand
the content, or is it just
the effects they see?)

And all mathematics
is full of stories (just read
Eric Temple Bell);

and CSS is
no exception to this rule.
Sing, Muse, decryption

once secret, as all
knowledge, once unknown: how to
decrypt DVDs. 


Here are a few more of my favorite bits:

Reader! Think not that
technical information
ought not be called speech;

think not diagrams,
schematics, tables, numbers,
formulae -- like the

terrifying and 
uniquely moving, though cliche,
Einstein equation

"Energy is just
the same as matter, but for
a little factor,

speed of light by speed
of light, and we are ourselves
frozen energy."
....

The poet has choice
of words and order, symbols,
imagery, and use

of metaphor. She
can allude, suggest, permit
ambiguities.

She need not say just
what she means, for readers can
always interpret.

Poets too, despite
their famous "license" sometimes
are constrained by rules:

How often have we
heard that some strange twist of plot
or phrase was simply

"Metri causa," for
the meter's sake, solely done
"to fit the meter"?

Programmers' art as
that of natural scientists
is to be precise,

complete in every 
detail of description, not
leaving things to chance.

Reader, see how yet
technical communicants
deserve free speech rights;

see how numbers, rules,
patterns, languages you don't
yourself speak yet,

still should in law be
protected from suppression,
called valuable speech!
....

This part is really
exciting for movie fans:
decrypt DVDs!

Well, at least sectors
of DVDs, but they are
made up of sectors.

Sectors (of two to
the eleventh bytes) are the
encryption units.

Rejoice then, get some
popcorn out and butter if
you aren't vegan.

Margarine works well
if you're vegan, or if you
are watching your weight.

I've heard you can put
tarragon on your popcorn.
I haven't tried it.

Why did I tell you
to rejoice? Because we are
about to watch a

movie, at least if
we have a good MPEG-2
player close at hand.

We need two things now,
though, beyond our MPEG-2
players and popcorn:

a vector "SEC" of
two thousand forty-eight bytes,
disk sector contents.

(These start off in their
encrypted form, but we will
leave them decrypted.)

And a vector KEY
of six bytes, the decrypted
title key we'll use.

We will use these few
internal variables:
t1 through t6,

unsigned integers.
Remember them from before?
END is a pointer

to the end of the
sector, which is SEC plus two
thousand forty-eight.
....

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.

For this is the end
of the decryption process;
you can now go home.



But wait! I hear a
voice entreating me to stay:
"O, the Tables tell!"

Alas, I have not
as yet declared to you the
CSS Tables.

This is a major 
issue, in that I don't know
what these tables _mean_:

our noble guide has
told us in outline what they
are for, or something

of their structure. But
to me, a humble poet
of mathematics,

they are opaque, they
are certain combinations
of ancient, noble

Number. Their inner
logic, aitia, telos,
still unknown to me.

Herein a clear free
speech question: would courts see fit
to muzzle me, then,

from speaking numbers,
technical data, which I
did not make and more

cannot memorize,
cannot explain in detail,
cannot understand?

I have these numbers.
They have meaning, this is clear:
else why suppress them?

I wish to speak or
let the Muse announce through me
Tables of Numbers.
....

Mary Jo White, the
United States Attorney
for S.D.N.Y.,

your logic erodes
any meaningful power
Internet speakers

would retain against
state censorship. Do you care?
Have you any shame?

Fight, brave amici,
with effective, functional
Argumentation.

I'll try to help by
singing these octets, until
court orders forbid.


And so on, right up to the "uniquely moving" end, which I won't spoil for
you by extracting here--enjoy!

Candice