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Better yet Daimou (or whatever the dude's nick is), contact the EFF if you're in the US. You've done enough damage to yourself as it is. It would be best to stop talking about it and get your ass protected now rather than later.

If I had mod points you'd get them. I would also add contact IBM and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
Their lawyers might even represent your interests and of course that of the GNU Foundation.

I had interpreted it as an analogy, as in the general case "the power to do X is good if limited to the intention of X". As far as the PATRIOT act, the bigger concerns aresurveillance issues. Perhaps rephrasing as "The power to spy on criminal suspects is good. The power to spy on whoever you feel like is bad." That is within the powers provided by the PATRIOT act.

I don't know if this had previously been discussed but I've been thinking that something like this would be a good idea. We constantly see the effect Slashdot has on webservers. I would imagine a PAC consisting of even a portion of slashdotters could do great things. Especially if we worked together with other groups such as Citizen Works, the EFF, and the ACLU.

What was your point again - that the EFF should only defend fragrant and sweet-smelling defendents? The law isn't a beauty contest - sometimes you have hold to your nose.

I have only had a few discussions with those in the government security community as a civilian moderator on a government security forum. What I have learned is the following:

1) The NSA is the most likely to be concerned about "unreasonable searches and seizures" and other Bill of Rights issues. The FBI and CIA routinely take the "extreme circumstance" route and use common loopholes to justify citizen and non-citizen monitoring. I would argue, however, that I have yet to see an ill-intented abuse of their power.

2) Members from all branches of the Department of Defense are active Slashdot readers and contributers. They just never talk about what they do and some use "Tor" to post from work.

3) The NSA has an extremely bright team of civilians that do the bulk of their cryptoanalysis work. One of which is famous, and not for the work he does in cryptology. You'd actually laugh aloud if you knew. I guess it is his hobby, but someone is taking him seriously.

4) The FBI is nothing like you see in the movies. The brightest agents last about 2 years before moving to a different area. Internally, the FBI has some serious issues with "dinosaurs" and "micro-management".

5) There is one member of the CIA that is single-handedly responsible for saving us from the plan devised by Jose Padilla. Unfortunately, they will never get the credit they deserve. It only took one person to say, "Why is this American talking with Abu Zubaydah twice?".

6) If you join the NSA, you voluntarily give up your rights to unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, you have to agree to have your phone tapped and everything you do is monitored 24/7. It's a life-long career choice, but they take care of you "very well".

Those wankers at Kazaa have hurt the p2p cause quite a bit. They knew they were doing shady stuff (adware, etc.) and now they are rightfully paying the price. For every step that people like the EFF make to make government realize it shouldn't over-regulate technology, shysters like Kazaa force things a step back to make a quick buck.

No word yet on an appeal.

Time for an update: EFF says they'll appeal.

Proxy services labeled as tax evasion tools, branded unconstitutional, and shutdown. Serverless proxies like Tor and I2P take off, become new targets from the government alongside of BitTorrent, Kazaa, etc.

did you tell the eff?

If Google starts making money from other news sites without actually paying them, then they risk legal action for use of copyrighted material.

You mean, like Slashdot has been doing since before Google was a little more than an overactive synapse? Of course, Slashdot has ads, and subscriptions, and is clearly motivated by profit. Is Rob Malda going to prison now? ($250k+5 years*how many articles with verbatim quotations?)

Fair use allows for this sort of thing. It is not written, "Thou shalt not make money."

Nor is it written "Though shalt not commit copyright infringement with non-beta software." I mean: WTF? It's a technical distinction. It has no legal or business meaning. To the technical people, it means simply: This is not yet deemed finished.

The Google News summaries are sufficiently sparse that I glean little more from them than I do passing by a newspaper box on the street. They're an insubstantial part of the copyrighted work. This is generally and historically OK, as long as you specifically are not Chuck D of Public Enemy.

You might do well to read up on copyright law. A good place to start might be here. A good place to end might be here.

Thank you.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't breaking this encryption fall under the DMCA definition of illegal breaking?

Not that I would shed a tear if it would, but AFAICT the DMCA only allows for cracking in the name of "research."

This paragraph, defining who is exempt from prosecution for cracking an encryption, is particularly funny:

`(A) whether the information derived from the encryption research was disseminated, and if so, whether it was disseminated in a manner reasonably calculated to advance the state of knowledge or development of encryption technology, versus whether it was disseminated in a manner that facilitates infringement under this title or a violation of applicable law other than this section, including a violation of privacy or breach of security;

Again, IANAL, but it seems to me the law doesn't care about user convenience in this case. In order for cracking to be legal, it looks as though there has to be a "scientific" interest such as verifying vulnerabilities in the encryption.

Again if I'm not wrong, Jon's defence was that it enabled users to make their rightful backup copies of DVDs. I can hardly see the need to break AirPort encryption for backups. Yes, I do realize the very legal uses of it, but are they rights granted by law?

I'm afraid a judge would rather look at the illegal actions (e.g., bypassing DRMs, breaking a company's encryption software, facilitation of privacy violation) than the legal, but not "protected," uses. Maybe a solution would be to publish the result in the form of a technical paper focusing on security (or lack thereof) of the algorithm?

I'm not sure why you brought the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) into this.

Anyway, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) doesn't go after GPL violations when they don't own the copyright, and rightly so. All GPL violations the FSF get involved with are ones where the copyright was either theirs to begin with or where it was assigned to them.

Just because they wrote the GPL, it doesn't mean they are its sole enforcers or the ones responsible for dealing with GPL violators. Just like any copyright violation, the person (or entity) who needs to deal with it is the copyright holder.

The Bridgeman decision is based on the famous Feist vs. Rural Telephone case. This Supreme Court decision that phone directories are not original enough to be copyrighted created the third-party phone book industry. When the Internet came along, the Feist decision permitted a whole range of directory-type services. As the Court put it, "The originality requirement is constitutionally mandated for all works.", and "No one may claim originality as to facts." This last is why databases of facts are not copyrightable in the US.

Corbis has a clever, but legally questionable, scheme for claiming copyright on public domain images. They add digital rights management information to the image, and then copyright the DRM information. They then claim that copying the DRM information violates their copyright, and removing it violates the DMCA. That's very similar to the argument Lexmark made in Lexmark vs. Static Control, and it didn't work there: "Generally speaking, "lock-out" codes fall on the functional-idea rather than the original-expression side of the copyright line." and "Similarly, a computer program may be protectable in the abstract but not generally entitled to protection when used necessarily as a lock-out device."

Calling himself a journalist doesn't make it so.
But keeping a journal does.
http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Apple_v_Does/
Thought I'd repost the link to the docs in the case.

I can see a lot of innocent people getting anally probed by the feds because their machines got hacked by a phisher. Do you really want a bunch of armed thugs breaking into your house and holding your family at gunpoint while they cart away every electronic device you own?

Having a search warrant executed on your property is not something you want to happen to you, especially if you didn't do anything wrong. It will take you YEARS and major lawyer bills to get your stuff back. If you think I'm making this up, re-read what happened to Steve Jackson Games during Operation Sun Devil:

On March 1 1990, the offices of Steve Jackson Games, in Austin, Texas, were raided by the U.S. Secret Service as part of a nationwide investigation of data piracy. The initial news stories simply reported that the Secret Service had raided a suspected ring of hackers. Gradually, the true story emerged.

More than three years later, a federal court awarded damages and attorneys' fees to the game company, ruling that the raid had been careless, illegal, and completely unjustified.

I did, and it's easy.

"The media companies are asserting that if a technology is primarily used for illegal activity, then it should be banned."

Where did you read that? I've read the brief and they appear to be saying nothing of the sort. They are trying to put Grokster out of business. They are not trying to ban P2P protocols. There are plenty of ways to implement P2P in a way that respects the rights of others (in fact, Wayne Rosso, Grokster's president, is working on just such a system), but Grokster sure ain't it.

There is a debate technique known as a "straw man" in which one deliberately mischaracterizes one's opponent's argument to make it easier to tear down. I don't know if that was your intention, but there are plenty of intelligent things to say on both sides of this case without having to resort to this technique.

"Since there are statistics showing that a majority of email is now SPAM, which is illegal, shouldn't we have to shut down email as well?"

Of course not. But I can imagine an instance where a spammer that's being taken to court trying the same trick: painting it as an attack on e-mail itself, and not the action of the abuser.

"Second, amici address assertions that checking for infringement should be built into network design. On the contrary, certain functionality (such as using filters) should not be done at the network level. To order network designers to add functionality to the network to avoid liability is to force significant inefficiency into network design. Because leaving out such functionality may represent good engineering design, no negative inference regarding intent should be drawn if a designer chooses not to add this functionality."

I was pointed there by Ed Felton in a response post on the brief's abstract page on Freedom to Tinker,

"I'm curious what you think of the corresponding section of the brief (Section II, starting on page 6), which makes the argument at much greater length."

I love getting some free Ivy League insight (as an aside, I go to Rutgers where we are always using information from our Ivy League friends).

This is why I contribute.

This Amicus Brief from August (From the EFF site) explains in excruciating legal detail why the Government is not permitted, by the Fourth Amendment and many obvious precedents, to demand ID "coercively" at airports. Nor even to pass a new law doing so. It's quite clear.

It also explains why any chance the government has of claiming that their law is constitutional (if it indeed exists) is nullified if they make it secret.

Enjoy, and many many thanks John Gilmore for doing what you do!

Amicus Brief Aug 2004

This had better not turn out like philosophy class, where the correct answer is "Why not?"

Citizens, do your part...

Those metal bill o' rights aren't allowed through the security checkpoints...

You might take a peek at the EFF's Tor project... if I understand it correctly, it should be capably of anonymizing any kind of traffic.

I just made a quick glance over the Sony v. Betamax decision (http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/sony_v_universal_d ecision.html)
and it appears that one of the major factors that lead to the decision was that it could not be proved that commerical viability/value was lost by taping shows to watch them later. If shows are being downloaded without their commercials in place of taping them with commercials, then the industry could make a fairly strong case that they have lost value due to the decreased viewership of the commercials which they make their money from.

IANAL, but I do have a gut feeling that someone does not have to be prosecuted in order for something to be illegal.

Actually, I don't care about a company that wants to try some crazy DRM scheme.

Actually, you should. You mention the DMCA in your post and then say that you are worried about the government stepping in to protect it. The DMCA explicitly does this.

If a company puts DRM in place on a file and then you remove the DRM you are in violation of the law. It does not matter how crazy the DRM scheme is or how easy it is to break. The DMCA is the legal extension of DRM and is how you and I will be prosecuted if we break the DRM law.

You can find more on this at: http://eff.org/ and http://www.drmblog.com/

Sell a box after this summer that easily allows me to mod it and override the controls of the damn broadcast flags. Become the crowbar of the 21 century.

Novemember 4 made me feel like a hopeless, voiceless shit. EFF makes that feeling go away a little.

Donate now. I just did. I'll wear my t-shirt with pride.

Talk without action is delusion.

Here's an impressive list of their legal victories funded by my/your donations.

This is really huge.

Novemember 4 made me feel like a hopeless, voiceless shit. EFF makes that feeling go away a little.

Donate now. I just did. I'll wear my t-shirt with pride.

Talk without action is delusion.

Here's an impressive list of their legal victories funded by my/your donations.

This is really huge.

• Lexmark v. Static Controls - just mentioned here on /. - an attempt by Lexmark to distort the use of the DMCA.
  
• DVD CCA v. Bunner et. al. - the lawsuit over DeCSS.
  
• JibJab v. Ludlow - a music publisher that challenged JibJab's right to parody, claiming they owned the copyright to "This Land is Your Land".
  
  In the Lexmark case they only apparently filed amicus briefs. In the DVD-CCA one they funded and coordinated the defense. In the last one they filed a complaint against the company that was threatening JibJab.
  
  There's plenty more listed on the EFF's own web site if you had bothered to look it up.
  
  Shall I continue?

• Lexmark v. Static Controls - just mentioned here on /. - an attempt by Lexmark to distort the use of the DMCA.
  
• DVD CCA v. Bunner et. al. - the lawsuit over DeCSS.
  
• JibJab v. Ludlow - a music publisher that challenged JibJab's right to parody, claiming they owned the copyright to "This Land is Your Land".
  
  In the Lexmark case they only apparently filed amicus briefs. In the DVD-CCA one they funded and coordinated the defense. In the last one they filed a complaint against the company that was threatening JibJab.
  
  There's plenty more listed on the EFF's own web site if you had bothered to look it up.
  
  Shall I continue?

• Lexmark v. Static Controls - just mentioned here on /. - an attempt by Lexmark to distort the use of the DMCA.
  
• DVD CCA v. Bunner et. al. - the lawsuit over DeCSS.
  
• JibJab v. Ludlow - a music publisher that challenged JibJab's right to parody, claiming they owned the copyright to "This Land is Your Land".
  
  In the Lexmark case they only apparently filed amicus briefs. In the DVD-CCA one they funded and coordinated the defense. In the last one they filed a complaint against the company that was threatening JibJab.
  
  There's plenty more listed on the EFF's own web site if you had bothered to look it up.
  
  Shall I continue?

• Lexmark v. Static Controls - just mentioned here on /. - an attempt by Lexmark to distort the use of the DMCA.
  
• DVD CCA v. Bunner et. al. - the lawsuit over DeCSS.
  
• JibJab v. Ludlow - a music publisher that challenged JibJab's right to parody, claiming they owned the copyright to "This Land is Your Land".
  
  In the Lexmark case they only apparently filed amicus briefs. In the DVD-CCA one they funded and coordinated the defense. In the last one they filed a complaint against the company that was threatening JibJab.
  
  There's plenty more listed on the EFF's own web site if you had bothered to look it up.
  
  Shall I continue?

Sitting around and doing essentially nothing is one option.

Another option is to actually get involved and start fighting for what you believe in:

http://www.freeculture.org/

http://www.eff.org/

http://www.publicknowledge.org/

Intro to HD PVRs

Broadcast flag info and list of HDTV cards

And BTW, the Elgato eyetv 500 is the answer to your question.

Intro to HD PVRs

Broadcast flag info and list of HDTV cards

And BTW, the Elgato eyetv 500 is the answer to your question.

Intro to HD PVRs

Broadcast flag info and list of HDTV cards

And BTW, the Elgato eyetv 500 is the answer to your question.

If you're in the SF Bay area, there's an EFF event on endangered gadgets tonight. RSVP and bring your checkbook.

The arstechnica article says...

Additionally, while the court ruled that the Toner Loading Program is not copyrightable, it agreed that the Printer Engine Program was a copyrighted work. However, the argument that SCC's Smartek chip provided unauthorized access to the Printer Engine Program was dismissed on the basis that it was the consumers' purchase of the printer that established such access, and the program in question was freely available to read electronically in memory. SCC's actions thus constitute a legal replacement of Lexmark's Toner Loading Program.

If that's actually what the judge said (I'll have to read the case when the EFF publishes it), that would set a very interesting precedent. Essentially, it seems it would make hymn perfectly legitimate. In hymn's case, the user has purchased the player and the music, and is authorized to play the music. iTunes has an EULA that Lexmark didn't, so I suspect that will come into play, too.

Here's my writeup about the DMCA, which I wrote because a project of mine might have been subject to its restrictions.

The controlling case here is Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade Inc., 977 F.2d 1510, 24 USPQ2d 1561 (9th Cir. 1992). The "Nintendo" bitmap in question, stored as a 48-byte cleartext bitmap in Game Boy and Game Boy Color games and a 156-byte Huffman-compressed bitmap in Game Boy Advance games, serves the same function as the TMSS code in Sega Genesis games.

Wha? you mean Marat isn't running a totally successful business?

sorry. I couldn't even say that one with a straight face.

I'm not too worried. the image is already copyrighted by Oscar Controls, and has been in commercial use for ages, as MAMEworld.net uses it for all their banner advertising. not to mention all the people contacting the USPTO on the MAMEdev's behalf.

if I were a MAMEdev, I'd be contacting the Electronic Frontier Foundation about this.

maybe a certain Site Admin or two should start a campaign to email the USPTO to make sure this never goes through.

Patents are (at least arguably) a necessary mechanism, but the way patents are being used in the United States is a problem. Especially when patents are being issued that are clearly barred by prior art and then used to extort money from small businesses that cannot afford to fight those patents. See the EFF for more info.

http://www.eff.org/awards/coop.html

Thought it takes my 1.7Ghz 3 months to test a 10mil digit prime.

The EFF's BayFF is having a related event next Tuesday in San Francisco. I'm planning on being there.

EFF Celebrates Innovation at BayFF!
Check Out the Latest Gadgets and Hang Out with EFF at Our February BayFF

WHEN
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005
7:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

WHAT
Inventive Gizmos - A Celebration of Innovation

Innovation. We love it.
The upcoming BayFF is a celebration of all the technological wonders we've been able to enjoy thanks to the legal shield provided by the 1984 Sony Betamax ruling. Come check out cool new gizmos from local tech companies Elgato, Slim Devices, and Sling Media. EFF attorneys and tech gurus will talk about how you can help protect the pro-innovation environment that allows gadgets like these to flourish.

WHO
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Elgato - elgato.com
Slim Devices - slimdevices.com
Slingmedia - slingmedia.com

WHERE
111 Minna Gallery
111 Minna Street
San Francisco, CA
94105
415.974.1719
(map)

This event is free and open to the general public. You must be 21+. Refreshments will be served.

See here

I'll get a simple cable and connect the sound card output to it's input. Then I'll record the songs. Of course I'll loose some quality if it's an analog output, but is it really that significant? I don't know, I haven't tried...

There will be a loss of quality from the D/A->A/D->recompress process, but it might not be noticeable if you have a good sound card and you have the volume levels set appropriately so as to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio without clipping.

Don't think the RIAA doesn't have their eyes on that method too, though. They'd like to see mandatory watermark detection in all analog-to-digital converters in order to plug the so-called "analog hole". See the EFF's Endangered Gizmos list for more info.

First, I believe you are mistaken with respect to the bnetd case. I direct you to the judge's finding.

This case touches on many aspects of intellectual property law, and that is the reason I have written at least two articles on the topic. To briefly summarize for the impatient:

Without discussing other aspects of the case, the judge ruled on two very important topics: enforceability of EULAs, and first sale doctrine.

First, in pages 17-19, the court found the EULAs were indeed enforceable. This finding hinges on two facts:

1. The defendents clicked on "I Agree"
2. Under UCC (Uniform Commercial Code), "a contract for the sale of goods may be made in any manner sufficient to show agreement, including conduct by both parties which recognizes the existance of such a contract."

Let's focus for a moment on what has just happened. They have found that because of (1), the UCC binds them to the EULA because a sale took place.

Next, regarding the first sale doctrine on pages 19 and 20, the judge then argues that no sale has taken place, and therefore the first sale doctrine is not applicable:
"The first sale doctrine is only triggered by an actual sale. Accordingly, a copyright owner does not forfeit his right of distribution by entering into a licensing agreement."
...
The EULAs and TOU in this case explicitly state that the title and ownership of the games and Battle.net remain with Blizzard. Defendents do not produce sufficient evidence demonstrating that title and ownership of the games passed to them. Therefore the Court finds that the first sale doctrine is inapplicable here. [Emphasis mine]

This is incredible on a few levels. First, the court finds that EULAs are enforceable once you click "I Agree" because the software is sold, and that the first sale doctrine does not apply to software (of any kind!) because it is not a sale. Not only does this case touch on these points, but makes findings so broad as to affect all of software, and does so in a way that is self contradictory! This finding would even affect the ability for game buy-back stores to continue operation legally, since practically NO software is "sold", it is rather "licensed".

Anyone who is interested in a more detailed discussion are free to read the articles I wrote available on etherplex.

Ain't no way I'm spraypainting a Powerbook keyboard in camouflage. My old beater K6-3 with the EFF sticker, though - yeah, baby! I'll 0wn the Barnes & Noble cafe, see if I don't!

Have you tried contacting the EFF? My hunch is they're looking for a test case.

I think I speak for many Trek fans that when I first heard about Enterprise, the possibilities for a prequel series seemed very interesting, and after Voyager we deserved something decent.

Like many I was worried about Berman being involved. I became more worried when the opening credits feature a dreadful recycled pop song instead of something symphonic. Then the temporal cold war silliness starts. Meanwhile, all along has been little effort to remain consistant with the Trek universe.

I will admit, I have not laughed so hard in a long time as I did when I saw the Xindi Nazi at the end of last season. But I don't think that was the intended effect.

For everyone who who is proclaiming this season is much better, how could it get much worse. Paramount and Berman especially should be ashamed at how they have treated such a large and loyal fanbase.

That said, I'm actually surprised that UPN killed it. They kept Voyager going for seven years and it was horrible most of that time. Enterprise seems like the high spot on their garbage filled network.

Trek needs a rest. If you want to send someone your money give it to http://www.eff.org/ or some other worthy cause. Don't worry, there will be more Trek, it has made too much money to be ignored forever.