Instructor, author, developer. Creator of Beej’s Guides.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Off topic, but with DeCSS the problem wasn’t that it was proprietary or a trade secret. Once the algorithm got out, it was out. Since it had been a trade secret, there was no patent protection on it.

    However, some laws and treaties prohibit distributing code that circumvents copy protection schemes, and this is where they ran into trouble.

    And that’s why they were all those songs and t-shirts and other free speech items made with the DeCSS algorithm on them. Eventually the cases were dropped.