Open source campaigner to risk jail

With the dust from the Elcomsoft/Sklyarov case still thick in the air, influential open source activist Bruce Perens plans to go one better by breaking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) during a live presentation on Friday.

Fresh from giving RealNetworks a slating for not completely backing open source with its latest announcement, Perens said that during a Digital Rights Management presentation to be held Friday at the O'Reilly developer conference in San Diego, he would break the law.

The DMCA has been a sore point in the open source community since the outlawing of DeCSS, a tool created so that DVDs could be played on Linux machines, and more recently since the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov and the criminal charges faced by his employer, Elcomsoft.

Based on the recent history of DMCA contravention, Perens could face imprisonment or a $500,000 fine for his actions.

According to Infoworld the demonstration is to be carried out in protest at the regional system used by the motion picture industry to prevent DVDs released in one country being played on machines in another country.

During his presentation, Perens will demonstrate how to hack a DVD player so that it can play movies from any region.

"It is a political and social statement, and the statement is that the people do not need to have a hall monitor living in their stereo system and should be able to play any kind of media on the device they wish," he was quoted as saying.

But luck may be on his side, if last year is anything to go by. At the same conference in 2001 Perens made a presentation on the triviality of Digital Rights Management systems using exactly the same slides that got Sklyarov arrested.