I have a confession to make: I am a DVD junkie.

There was a time long ago when I was simply a recreational buyer, but those days are behind me, and my habit has now grown into something much more shameful. Once over the summer, I told my boss I had to leave work early because of a death in the family. This of course was a flat-out lie, and I only took off so I could buy “Fight Club” before the 9 to 5 yuppies flooded Best Buy. Another time, I actually sold half of my comic book collection for the money to buy a collection of Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns. I didn’t want to do it, but … I had to! I love every one of my DVDs with a passion that would drive my ex-girlfriends into fits of rage, so you can imagine the panic that gripped me when my dad called me last week asking if I had heard of the “anti-DVD” T-shirts being sold. After realizing that I wasn’t being made the butt of some sick joke, I asked him to explain himself.

What has happened is that, like music, movies are now accessible for free, much to the chagrin of the motion picture industry.

The DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) is a non-profit organization that licenses its bastard offspring, a source code called CSS, to the manufacturers of DVDs, DVD players and DVD-ROM drives. CSS, or the Content Scrambling System, is a weak encryption system designed to prevent DVDs from being illegally duplicated. Manufacturers that purchase licenses from DVD association are able to install their DVD players and ROM drives with the technology to decrypt the CSS code and play the DVDs.

It’s a bizarre little system they’ve set up for themselves that, in my research, has amounted to nothing more than manufacturers paying for artificial restrictions that have little to do with actually stopping piracy.

In a move of bravura that smacked two high-profile lawsuits on him, Norwegian teen Jon Johansen and his small trio of programmers was credited with creating DeCSS — freeware that can decrypt the “protective” CSS code, allowing users to copy all or selected files of a DVD to the hard drive. The DeCSS technology has been around since 1999, and has spread throughout the Internet like a sexually-transmitted disease as advocates and curious speculators alike continue to hear about it and access the multitude of links available.

The association cried foul play, complaining that decryption software and its guerrilla distributors are grossly violating California’s Uniform Trade Secret Act by cutting open the protection technology from neck to crotch and exposing its guts to competitors and a public that needs to be protected from itself. One of those distributors includes Copyleft, www.copyleft.net, an online retailer of software products and “geek wear” clothing. Copyleft has come under the gun for selling a T-shirt with a module of CSS-related source code printed on the back. By itself, this small chunk of code isn’t nearly enough to run on a computer, and even with the complete paper printout of the source code included with every purchase, no one in their right mind would sit down and type that much code into a computer.

But I digress.

At this stage in the game, DeCSS technology makes copying DVDs possible, but certainly not accessible. A typical DVD holds anywhere from 7 to 9 GB of data, which can’t be burned on to a CD that only holds 650 MB. And although you could download movies on your hard drive, even that would fill up after one or two movies were accessed, and would slow your computer down to speeds that would make our school’s computers look like they’ve been on a guarana and speed binge. DeCSS is the beginning of a movement though, and as technology evolves, copying DVDs will move from being a possibility to an everyday occurrence. I support the advances that are being made here, and feel that the only way it’ll stand a chance of survival is if others do the same.

This isn’t a matter of movies losing money, because the bulk of that income is made in the theaters. This is a matter of you and I being allowed to record movies, and as long as we’re not pimping them on street corners for a quick buck, where’s the harm in that?