DeCSS haiku is a 465-

stanza In poetry, a stanza (; from Italian ''stanza'' , "room") is a group of lines within a poem, usually set off from others by a blank line or indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme and metrical schemes, but they are not required to have ei ...

haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a '' kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a '' kigo'', or ...

poem written in 2001 by American

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means. Though the term ''hacker'' has become associated in popu ...

Seth Schoen Seth David Schoen (born September 27, 1979) is senior staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology civil rights organisation, and has been actively involved in discussing digital copyright law and encryption since the 1 ...

as part of the protest action regarding the prosecution of Norwegian programmer

Jon Lech Johansen Jon Lech Johansen (born November 18, 1983 in Harstad, Norway), also known as DVD Jon, is a Norwegian programmer who has worked on reverse engineering data formats. He wrote the DeCSS software, which decodes the Content Scramble System used fo ...

for co-creating the DeCSS software. The poem, written in the spirit of

civil disobedience Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government (or any other authority). By some definitions, civil disobedience has to be nonviolent to be called "civil". H ...

against the DVD Copy Control Association, argues that "code is speech."

History

DeCSS haiku was created in the context of a series of protests, coming from the international

community, against the arrest of Norwegian programmer

, and a series of related lawsuits against him and other hackers (such as '' Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes'' and '' DVD Copy Control Association, Inc. v. Bunner''). Johansen, a Norwegian teenage programmer, was one of the creators of the freely distributed DeCSS software which can be used to bypass DVD encryption, preventing even legally-acquired DVDs on running on unauthorized computers (which at that time included all

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

machines). Johansen and others who reposted the code, including ''

2600: The Hacker Quarterly ''2600: The Hacker Quarterly'' is an American seasonal publication of technical information and articles, many of which are written and submitted by the readership, on a variety of subjects including hacking, telephone switching systems, Intern ...

'', were sued by the

entertainment industry Entertainment is a form of activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience or gives pleasure and delight. It can be an idea or a task, but is more likely to be one of the activities or events that have developed over thousan ...

for revealing a

trade secret Trade secrets are a type of intellectual property that includes formulas, practices, processes, designs, instruments, patterns, or compilations of information that have inherent economic value because they are not generally known or readily ...

and facilitating illegal copying and distribution of content on said DVDs.

's goal was to provide tangible proof for the argument that "

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the ...

is speech" and hence should be given the same legal protections as

free speech Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recog ...

. A number of other activists, in the spirit of

, created works of arts containing the infringing code, on the principle that such works are subject to

First Amendment First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1). First or 1st may also refer to: *World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement Arts and media Music * 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and reco ...

principle within the United States. Schoen decided to create a poem, which he did in 2001. At first, Schoen released the poem anonymously, though he has publicly acknowledged its ownership since. The 465-

transcodes the DeCSS software, in effect allowing most computer programmers to recreate the DeCSS software from scratch, using the haiku as their only reference. This can be illustrated by the following short excerpt:

All we have to do is this: copy our DKEY into im1, use the rule above that decrypts a disk key (with im1 and its friend im2 as inputs) -- thus we decrypt the disk key im1.

At another point, the poem discloses a sixteen-digit master key to the

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone technolo ...

code that the entertainment industry lawyers considered a proprietary trade secret:

So this number is, once again, the player key: (trade secret haiku?) Eighty-one; and then one hundred three -- two times; then two hundred (less three) two hundred twenty four; and last (of course not least) the humble zero.

Gabriella Coleman Enid Gabriella Coleman (usually known as Gabriella Coleman or Biella; born 1973) is an anthropologist, academic and author whose work focuses on cultures of hacking and online activism, particularly Anonymous. She previously held the Wolfe Chai ...

noted: "in formally comparing code to poetry in the medium of a poem, Schoen displays a playful form of clever and recursive rhetoric valued among hackers; he also articulates the meaning of the

and software." David S. Touretzky in turn described this work as "ingenious poem... both a commentary on the DeCSS situation and a correct and complete description of the descrambling algorithm. Truly inspired." His work has been described as one of the most notable examples of DeCSS-inspired hacker art. It was covered by ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'', ''

San Francisco Chronicle The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. The pa ...

'', ''

Wired ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San ...

'', and ''

The New York Times Magazine ''The New York Times Magazine'' is an American Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times''. It features articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors. ...

''.

References

External links

DeCSS haiku

by Seth Schoen 2001 poems American poems Internet culture History of software DVD Copy Control Association Haiku Hacking in the 2000s Civil disobedience

History

See also

References

Further reading

External links