Qrpff Tool's Impact on DVD Security and Legal Challenges

The consonant-friendly program Qrpff was developed by a student at MIT to be used as an argument at a seminar on the legal intricacies of DeCSS, but now the tool is cropping up all over the internet. Qrpff is a seven-line . . . The consonant-friendly program Qrpff was developed by a student at MIT to be used as an argument at a seminar on the legal intricacies of DeCSS, but now the tool is cropping up all over the internet. Qrpff is a seven-line program written in Perl, which uses an encryption key to eliminate the Content Scrambling System (CSS) in DVD protection. The tool, like DeCSS, allows the content of DVDs to be copied and published on the internet.

The original DeCSS was allegedly created so that DVD movies could be decoded and played on Linux machines, as the encoding technique used by DVD manufacturers is Windows only. But the outcome of the US trial made it illegal to publish the code that comprises the DeCSS tool.

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