license to view != license to decrypt? (Score 4)

The judge seems to have found that when you buy a DVD your license covers the encrypted data and not just the content of the DVD itself(ie the movie).

By the admission of both Jon Johansen, the programmer who principally wrote DeCSS, and defendant Corley, DeCSS was created solely for the purpose of decrypting CSS that is all it does.143 Hence, absent satisfaction of a statutory exception, defendants clearly violated Section 1201(a)(2)(A) by posting DeCSS to their web site.

Now if I go out and buy a DVD, and a licensed DVD player to watch my DVD, I'm decrypting the CSS as I watch it. I'm clearly not doing anything wrong here. But, if I buy that same DVD and put it in a DVD player that isn't licensed(say a Linux box) I'm again decrypting CSS as I watch the DVD but according to the judge I'm breaking the law.

Does this mean that a copyright holder can put arbitrary restrictions not just on who can view the material but how they can view it?

But later on in the decision the judge says

The first element of the balance was the careful limitation of Section 1201(a)(1) s prohibition of the act of circumvention to the act itself so as not to apply to subsequent actions of a person once he or she has obtained authorized access to a copy of a [copyrighted] work . . . . 163 By doing so, it left the traditional defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, . . . fully applicable provided the access is authorized. 164

this seems to say the answer is no, but it contradicts the judges earlier statement that simply decrypting CSS without a license to decrypt it(he didn't say that decrypting CSS is only prohibitted if you don't have a license to the underlying movie) is a violation of the act.

If you need both a license to view, and a license to decrypt (the one that comes with the DVD player) that seems to be an arbitrary restriction put on how I can view my DVD.

So if a DVD maker can say that you can only view the DVD on players made by company X, Y, and Z(licensed players) then what stops the a movie studio from releasing the same movie on a VHS and saying that it can only be played on VCR's from Sony(for example?).