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Okay, hypothetical:

Say there is a difference, and a law passes with better definitions. This makes it such that certain regulated devices (eg., TV capture cards) must contain these "cop-chips" to disable copying of watermarked content.

But the ADC is the same chip in a digital thermometer or whatever, only with the copy control mechanism added.

What likelihood is there that a "mod-chip" industry pops up, selling replacement ADC chips that are not actually regulated (because these ADC chips are just raw chips, not copying devices) and including instructions on how to wire your new ADC onto the board of that TV capture card so that BAM! cop-chip is disabled?

I think it would be highly likely...so, given the MPAA's rabid fanaticism about content CONTROL, I think it highly likely they would push hard for the law to NOT have exemptions and only cover copying devices specifically, but to regulate EVERY ADC made/sold in the US.

And given that customs will soon be allowed to open all international mail without a warrant buying those ADCs from overseas gets a little more touchy.

Care to give some actual examples? My copy of Mozilla has been great at rendering CSS for a looooong time.

One example I stumbled across today is Politech. It looks like there should be two columns of links (a navbar down the left side and a list of links to the right), but the list of links gets rendered on top of the navbar. I've put a dump of what it looks like here. (I'm using Mozilla 1.0RC2.)

The message they sent to their users just says things like "We value your privacy," and "you may want to update your settings." It doesn't say anything about them changing users' settings against their will.

This is equivalent to Ford sending a letter to car owners saying "We hope you're happy with your car, you may want to get gas for it. We have a special web page you can visit if you care about gas." and using that to justify selling all their pertinent info to third parties -- that is, unless they went to the special "gas" page to click the "no, I appreciate the opportunity to be taken advantage of, but I'm gonna have to say no this time" button.

So, to summarize:

1. Email customers. Don't mention that you're screwing them.

2. Point to fact that customers didn't figure out that you screwed them as rationalization for screwing them.

Dicks.

They may have lost their Linux Exec, but they recently acquired Whitfield Diffie! (For those not aware, Whitfield Diffie is one of the inventors of public-key cryptography, the technology used in PGP and elsewhere)

following the FRONT PAGE LINK on privacy impact statements, one finds that the senator in question is in fact Mr. Barr of Georgia. Also...if you're going to sling a baseless insult at the argument given, at -least- use real verbs and spell them correctly

has been posted here

Third time's the charm, right?
While I have enjoyed this story every time that is was posted...

1 Another Go At Making Spam Cost Money by timothy with 81 comments on Tuesday April 09, @04:23PM
2 Class Action Lawsuit Against Spammer by CmdrTaco with 299 comments on Friday March 15, @04:24PM
3 MoFo Sues Spammer by timothy with 17 comments on Thursday March 14, @07:36PM

...there's a lot of other spam news out there that we could be reading. Check out http://spam.abuse.net for a variety of exciting, spam-related news and information, such as:

RULINGS IN INTEL V. HAMIDI BULK-EMAIL CASE (California Supreme Court agrees to hear Intel V. Hamidi).

Or you could read this story again...whatever... =)

Of course, some people or idiots. Fleishman-Hillard (a PR firm) is blocking all email from well.com because somebody couldn't figure out how to unsubscribe from the Politech mailing list. She reported them to her sysadmin as a spammer. Never mind the fact that Politech uses a double opt-in (You have to opt-in and confirm).

3) This would KILL hobbiest efforts (I learned by building computers).

My (admittedly quick) examination of the law couldn't find anything dealing with building computers for hobbiest purposes. In fact, the only restriction is on a "manufacturer, importer, or seller of digital media devices" who "(1) sell[s], or offer for sale, in interstate commerce, or (2) cause[s] to be transported in, or in a manner affecting, interstate commerce" such a device. So a hobbiest likely won't fall under the definition of "manufacturer", and even so, is only breaking the law when s/he sells or gives away the device.

Oh my god

Look at those unreadable .jpgs.

Consider the fact that they would be 1/2 the size and twice the quality as PNG's.

Posted by Michael Fraase, 3/23/02 at 9:54:46 PM.

When elephants dance, its best to get out of the way. Thats exactly whats happening now as the entertainment industrythe recording, publishing, and motion picture industries, mainlyattempts a worldwide intellectual property power grab with two distinct targets. Think of it: a coup and a lock on all published content in the same year, amazing isnt it?

Target number 1 is the average customer: anyone who purchases software, an audio CD, an electronic book, or a movie on DVD. The entertainment industry sees customers as pirates, plain and simple. In their collective minds eye, we all have a wooden leg, eye patch, and a filthy talking parrot on our shoulder. While the Constitution grants customers certain rights with regard to copyrighted material, the entertainment industry very much wants to separate us from those rights.

Target number 2 in the sights of the entertainment industry are technology behemoths like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and Apple. These companies, in the perverse worldview of the entertainment industry, make the toolscomputers mostlythat allow customers to practice their piracy.

Let me point out that I am a copyright owner, as is everyone else who has ever created a work in tangible form. Thats all authors, for short. Authors are almost never members of the entertainment industry club. The entertainment industry hates authors almost as much as they hate customers. Sometimes, especially when authors get uppity, the entertainment industry hates authors much more than customers. Until recently, authors have always been seen to be at least a marginal threat while customers were seen as merely necessary annoyances.

To complicate matters by at least an order of magnitude, the consumer electronics manufacturersthe companies that make stereos, VCRs, and DVD playershave aligned with the entertainment industry. At least some of them, and at least to some extent.

Unfortunately for usboth authors and customerswere likely to get squished as these elephants dance. The intent of the entertainment industry, believe it or not, is to outlaw personal computers. As security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier explains it to Mike Godwin: If you think about it, the entertainment industry does not want people to have computers; theyre too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc.

Copy-protected CDs

The recording industry is selling shiny plastic discs that contain music that cant be copied to or even played on some customers equipment. Philips, the owner of the CD format says these discs cannot be called CDs because they do not meet the standard of what a CD is. Sony, one of those weird hybrid companies that, as a member in good standing of both the technology and entertainment industries, finds itself on both sides of this issue says it cant guarantee the audio quality of these discs. The technology used to protect these discs sometimes prevents the discs from playing on computer CD-ROM drives, DVD players, and other devices specifically designed to play standard audio CDs.

Sales of recorded music are down 10% in the United States over the last year. The recording industry blames this downturn not on the economic recession, not on the crappy music that theyve released in the past few years, but on Internet piracy.

And its only going to get worse. Hilary B. Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) told Congress on 28 February 2001 that the practice of copy-protecting audio CDs would expand in the United States. If technology can be used to pirate copyrighted content, Rosen wrote in her response to a Congressional query, shouldnt technology likewise be used to protect copyrighted content? Surely, no one can expect copyright owners to ignore what is happening in the marketplace and fail to protect their creative works because some people engage in copying just for their personal use. Her pal, Michael Eisner, head of Disney, said he was tired of being finessed by the technology industry, whatever that means.

Unfortunately for Eisner, Rosen, Disney, and the RIAA, personal useand more importantly the rights associated with that use of copyrighted materialis exactly why copying of copyrighted material is not just allowed, but mandated by the Constitution. That some individuals illegally sell copied CDs or distribute copies of the music on the Internet is immaterial. In fact, fairly casual observation indicates that if customers are treated like criminals they will indeed begin to behave like criminals.

It has become common practice for music-loving computer owners to legally transfer audio CDs they purchase to .mp3 format files on their computers. The copy protection technology employed by the recording industry prevents such transfers by adding distortions to the music of the recordings. The industry insists that these distortions are inaudible when the disc is played on a standard CD player but result in pops when the music is transferred to a computer. In any case, its usually impossible to tell whether or not a disc includes the copy protection technology; in general, the copy-protected discs are not labeled.

Ironically, or probably not, .mp3 player manufacturers could easily defeat the copy protection technology, but they fear doing so would risk prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which prohibits the bypassing of copy protection systems. In 1999, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that .mp3 players did not violate copyright law because customers have the right to space shift music they have purchased.

Moral rights

Interestingly, the act of using the copy protection technology is much more prevalent in Europe. Most European countries, unlike the United States, recognize an artists moral rights in the work they create.

Moral rights are a package of intellectual property rights granted to the original creator of a work, and include:

• The right of integrity;
• The right of attribution;
• The right of disclosure;
• The right to withdraw or retract; and
• The right to reply to criticism.

These moral rights are separate from the economic copyright that these days generally transfers from an author to a publisher and they can survive the author. The idea originated with the French, who believe that any creative work, by definition, includes the personality and character of the author. Where copyright is a property right that can be transferred, moral rights are part of the authors personality and character and non-transferable.

The first two moral rightsthe right of integrity and the right of attributionare especially important because they are codified as international law in the Berne Convention. The United States claims its intellectual property law complies with the Berne Convention, but this is just two instances where it doesnt.

The most important of these rights is the first, the right of integrity. Basically it prohibits an authors work from being distorted in any way that would harm the authors reputation and dates to the 1957 French law of droit au respect de l'oeuvre. Its a safe bet that a cross-reference over which the author had no control would be seen as a distortion of the work.

Seemingly, in Europe at least, an artist could make an argument against the production of a copy-protected version of her work on the sole basis of moral rights. Especially in the case of an audio CD to which distortion is intentionally added by the publisher.

In the United States, Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) appears to be taking the point position in questioning the behavior of the entertainment industry. He believes that instead of using copyright to obtain fair compensation for the works theyve licensed, the copyright owner industryincluding the recording industryis attempting to exercise complete dominance and total control of the copyrighted work.

And just how much money does an artist receive in the form of royalties? Use Moses Avalons royalty calculator to figure it out.

A DMCA rewrite?

Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) plans to introduce legislation that would regulateand maybe outright bancopy-protected compact discs. Boucher reportedly has concerns about customers buying copy-protected discs without knowing it and the compatibility problems inherent with the copy protection mechanism. In an interview with Wired News, Boucher said, The big problem initially is that consumers have no information that is complete and reliable about the disabilities which attend copy-protected CDs. These CDs will not play in DVD players, not play on personal computers (and) not even play on all CD players.

Boucher isnt talking about what kind of legislation he might introduce to accomplish his goal of protecting audio CD customers, and the possibilities are intriguing. At the simplest level, legislation may require copy-protected CDs to carry a warning label. At a more interesting level, Boucher may try to rewrite the DMCA. In fact, Boucher announced that he would introduce such legislation last July and reiterated his commitment to that approach in early March of this year.

Internet radio

Under the U.S. Copyright Offices interpretation of the DMCA, Internet radio may be a thing of the past. KFJC, KPIG, and RadioParadise may all be goners. Why is this tragic? Because any of these stations are orders of magnitude better than the sorry excuse for radio available on the traditional dial.

Internet radio is routing around an obsolete and unaccountable industrys safely padded environs and making a difference. Corporate radio sounds exactly the same from coast to coast because it is exactly the same. Sit and watch that website for a few minutes; if it doesnt nauseate you, itll damn sure hypnotize you.

Adding to the arsenal of tools deployed by big media is the Copyright Arbitration and Royalty Panel (CARP). CARP met secretly for the past several months and issued the CARP Report in late February. The keystone of this report is steep licensing fees for webcast music. Lets be clear: compulsory licensing is a good idea, consistent with the intent of copyright law. Usury licensing fees for small webcasters is not.

KPIG responded almost immediately with a plea to save the Pig from the digital slaughterhouse:

Independent webcasters such as KPIG are facing a grave threat to our existence. It may be an evil conspiracy on the part of the big record companies and corporate webcasters, ormore likelyits just a dumb mistake. In either case, KPIG could soon be liable for huge music usage fees ($5,000 - $10,000 per month) that would make it impossible for us to stay online. For background on the issue, see The Death of Web Radio? below and the SaveInternetRadio.org website.

Doc Searls, in his article Bizarre vs. Bazaar, eloquently sums up the combination of DMCA and CARP as the destruction of the Net as a commons and its replacement with a plumbing system for the distribution of content (a word hardly used in a shipping context before Big Media got all drooly over The Promise of The Net).

A brief history of copyright

Copyright, until this recent entertainment industry power-grab, has always been a delicatemaybe even precariousbalance between the rights of the author to benefit from his or her work for a short period of time and the rights of the rest of us to innovate and benefit from those works when they fall into the public domain.

The Constitution granted Congress the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. Originally, the Copyright Act of 1790 established the limited times of copyright protection of 14 years with an option for the author to renew the copyright for an additional 14 years if he or she were still alive. That copyright term was good enough for the first 100 years of intellectual property in the United States. During the next 100 years, Congress extended the copyright term 11 times.

Certain uses of a protected work that would ordinarily be seen as infringing are specifically allowed for education, criticism, etc. These uses are allowed under the fair use provision. The core concept of fair use is that, in general, any use that does not exploit the commercial value of the original is permissible.

The fair use statute recognizes four criteria by which a use can be determined to be fair or unfair:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. The nature of the copyrighted work;
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted wok as a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

William S. Strong, in The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide , provides an interpretation for working writers:

As a general rule a critic or reporter should not quote at any one point more than two or three paragraphs of a book or journal article, a stanza of a poem, or a solitary chart or graph from a technical treatise.

The Net allows ordinary citizens to exercise their fair use rights in ways never imagined by the entertainment industry. Subsequently, the reaction is to pressure innovation by extending the copyright term for any given work. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that will likely determine the legitimacy of the most recent copyright term extension, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. This law extends the copyright term to the life of the author plus 70 years. In the case of works made for hire in which a corporation owns the copyright, the copyright term is now 95 years.

While one side of the entertainment industry was pushing, an activity that eventually became the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, the other side was pulling. That activity eventually resulted in the DMCA. Designed specifically to control the uses that can be made of published works, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copyright-protection technology. The result: the entertainment industry controls not only what you see and hear but the methods and devices with which you see and hear it. Even if the copy-protection is circumvented to enable the fair use of a published work, it is prohibited and deemed to be a criminal act.

Digital TV

According to Mike Godwin, digital television is the tipping point in the war between the entertainment and technology industries. Never mind that every time the entertainment industry shoots itself in the foot, the technology industry comes to its rescue. Remember in the 1970s when the movie industry was in a deep funk and that vampire Jack Valenti said that VCRs would kill it for good? As it turns out, the VCR revived the film industry. The film industry was failing not because of customer VCR usage but because they were putting out epically craptacular films. Just like the recording industry todaywhen in doubt blame those dang customers.

Anyway, Godwin says digital television is the flashpoint because its quality (technical, not artistic) is way too good and unlike DVDs, its unencrypted and has to stay unencrypted to be useful. Oh, and the pesky FCC regulations say that broadcast television signals must be sent unencrypted.

The purveyors of digital television think they have the answer: digital watermarks. They think thats the answer for the online distribution of music, and any other digital content as well. Unfortunately for them, in order for a watermark to be used to restrict copying of digital content, consumer devices used to play the content will have to have technology included thats capable of receiving those watermarks. That would require the cooperation of the technology industry, and that cooperation has not been forthcoming.

Godwin cites the theory of Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton, holding that any sort of tagging system that is undetectable by the user will likely be easy to remove.

Digital rights management

Perhaps the weirdest part of all of this is that the technology industry is just as enamored of protecting intellectual property. Theyre just going about it in a minimally different way. Digital rights management (DRM) is the battle cry of the techheads. And where they differ from their entertainment industry brethren is the question of government mandates. The technology industry wants to lock up published content just as badly as the entertainment industry; they just dont want the government (or anyone else) telling them that they have to. Remember that the entertainment and technology industries both lobbied heavily in favor of the DMCA.

And then there are the schizoids, the companieslike AOL Time Warner and Sonythat are so large that they find themselves on both sides of the fence depending which way the wind blows.

SSSCA > CBDTPA

The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), kept on a leash but regularly trotted out by Senator Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, can best be thought of as a sort of appendix to the DCMA. It is clearly designed to further extend legal protections for digital content owned or licensed by enormous media conglomerates.

According to the draft language of the bill, it would be illegal to create or distribute any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies approved by the Commerce Department. Even though MIT professor and RSA Data Security co-founder Ron Rivest has referred to the proposed legislation as the Digital Rectal Thermometer Security Act its really just mandatory corporate welfare for media conglomerates subsidized by the actual creators and consumers of intellectual property.

Felony penalties for distributing copyrighted material without the certified security technologies fully enabled or using a computer that circumvents those technologies are up to five years in prison and fines up to US$500,000.

Even worse, the proposed legislation calls for manufacturers of digital devices and the media conglomerates to collaboratively develop a copy protection system. If, after two years, they cant come up with a mechanism both industries can live with, the federal government will specify a standard. Hollings bill fails to include the actual creators or users of content in any of the machinations.

Should we be surprised that four of Hollings top campaign donors are media conglomerates?

Predictably, the politicians split along party lines over the SSSCA. Or, more accurately, the split is along the lines of entertainment industry campaign contributions. Democrats, who received US$24.2 million in contributions from the entertainment industry tend to support the idea of legislating the protection of copyrighted material in digital form. Republicans, who received a relatively paltry US$13.3 million in entertainment industry contributions usually oppose the SSSCA, claiming it is too interventionist.

In mid-March 2002, the other shoe dropped. Senator Hollings, better known as the Senator from Disney, transformed the SSSCA into the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) and ceased his tip-toeing around. The CBDTPA is real legislation, and enjoys the support of five other co-authors: Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Breaux (D-Louisiana), Bill Nelson (D-Florida) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California). Just think, one more author and they could have been the seven dwarves. The CBDTPA would require all digital deviceseverything from fax machines to MP3 players and computers (as well as the software that runs on them)to be equipped with embedded copy protection schemes, approved by the federal government.

Whats most disturbing about this is relatively paltry sum it took to buy this legislation. During the 2002 election cycle, only two of the dirty half-dozen were in the top 20 recipients of soft money from the entertainment industry. So far in the 2002 election cycle, Hollings has received only US$19,000 and Stevens has taken only US$39,621. To get the real story, we have to look back several election cycles:

Senator

2002

2000

1998

1996

Total

Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina)

$19,000

$32,750

$215,284

$43,300

$310,334

Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)

$39,621

$69,900

$109,521

Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii)

$49,852

$49,852

John Breaux (D-Louisiana)

$120,920

$120,920

Bill Nelson (D-Florida)

$47,550

N/A

N/A

$47,550

Dianne Feinstein (D-California)

$211,638

$211,638

$849,815

Theres no question why Fritz Hollings carried the water for this puppy, is there? But check those senatorial links in the table carefully because they tell the even bigger story of who the top contributing industries were for each politician. In every case, the entertainment industry scored big in the top 20 contributors for every Senator. And remember the 2002 campaign cycle isnt over yet. Not hardly.

So, how much does it cost to get your bill through the Senate? Looks to me like itll come in right around US$1 million.

Enter DigitalConsumer.org

The technology industry was quick to respond to the CBDTPA threat by launching DigitalConsumer.org and its attendant Consumer Technology Bill of Rights. Launched by two of the co-founders of Excite, DigitalConsumer.org is basically trying to protect the fair use rights of customers in digital media. The groups principles, outlined in the Bill of Rights are deceptively simple:

1. Users have the right to time-shift content that they have legally acquired.
2. Users have the right to space-shift content that they have legally acquired.
3. Users have the right to make backup copies of their content.
4. Users have the right to use legally acquired content on the platform of their choice.
5. Users have the right to translate legally acquired content into comparable formats.
6. Users have the right to use technology in order to achieve the rights previously mentioned.

The depth and breadth of support this lobbying group will receive remains to be seen. Some of the precepts are in direct conflict with the interests of some of the largest technology industry members. Microsoft, for example, almost certainly wants to be the digital rights management company of record and is none too keen on, say, items 2, 3, 4, and 5.

A solution

The solution is actually quite simple and requires only three steps:

1. Revert the term of copyright to 14 years, immediately and retroactive to all existing works.
2. Recognize moral rights in the works authors create, like every other civilized country on the planet. Make it immediate and retroactive to all existing works.
3. Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations create nothing; theyre consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I dont know about you, but Im not much pleased any more.

The basis of the problem is found in a single court ruling: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In this 1886 dispute, the U.S. Supreme Court found that a private corporation was a natural person under the Constitution and enjoyed the same protections as a citizen under the Bill of Rights. Corporations from that point forward were granted all of the rights and freedoms of a private citizen, yet none of the responsibilities. We made a mistake; hey, shit happens. Its not too late to fix it.

Whoops! My bad. The correct link is here.

Look at Section 2. Findings, subpoints (1) and (9).

What do you mean? You can't have broadband yet! Don't you know that "The lack of high quality digital content continues to hinder consumer adoption of broadband Internet service"? Or that "The secure protection of digital content is a necessary precondition to the dissemination, and on-line availability, of high quality digital content, which will benefit consumers and lead to the rapid growth of broadband networks"?

Because the CBDTPA hasn't been passed yet, there's no way you could have broadband. Nice try. It's obvious that you are surfing less because there's no high quality digital Disney Approved Content on the web for you!

What do you mean? You can't have broadband yet! Don't you know that "The lack of high quality digital content continues to hinder consumer adoption of broadband Internet service"? Or that "The secure protection of digital content is a necessary precondition to the dissemination, and on-line availability, of high quality digital content, which will benefit consumers and lead to the rapid growth of broadband networks"?

Because the CBDTPA hasn't been passed yet, there's no way you could have broadband. Nice try. It's obvious that you are surfing less because there's no high quality digital Disney Approved Content on the web for you!

Continuing increases in sales across the tech spectrum as individuals, businesses and governments make sure their hardware and software systems can deal with the challenges and problems of a post 9/11 world.

Well of course there is going to be a boom, because we'll all need new hardware once the CBDTPA becomes law, hence fueling the "Post 9-11" tech boom.

Because in the post 9/11 world, we're all potential terrorists and thieves, and the gov't has to protect it's corporate cash cows.

Under definitions:

(3) DIGITAL MEDIA DEVICE. -- The term "digital media device" means any hardware or software that --

(A) reproduces copyrighted works in digital form;

(B) converts copyrighted works in digital form into a form whereby the images and sounds are visible or audible; or

(C) retrieves or accesses copyrighted works in digital form and transfers or makes available for transfer such works to hardware or software described in subparagraph (B).

It seems like there will always be a massive loophole with computer components. It may be feasible to implement a copyright control system for integrated consumer electronics devices which are opaque to most consumers (DVD, VCR, camcorder, etc.) and their intenral function is entirely under the control of the manufacturer. Such devices could gain effective protection by omitting external interfaces that allow unrestricted copying (analog video, SPDIF). Of course consumer acceptance will be hard to come by until CBDTPA approved technology becomes pervasive.

Computer components are meant to be integrated to form a functional device. The given definition of a digital media device covers both storage and I/O technologies. This suggests that the bill applies to hard drives, CD-ROM drives, NICs, broadband routers, and most other computer components that manage data. All of these devices would need to cooperate with each other, in order to enforce the CBDTPA requirements. I don't see how it would be possible to accomplish this given the variety of devices this would encompass. There is no single trade organization that can decree what the new "protection" system should be, and force all manufacturers to implement it.

The are large variety of interfaces used to connect existing components, each with varying degrees of complexity. You could possibly shoehorn copy restrictions into interfaces that depend on heavy layers of software encapsulation like 1394, or USB. How could you do anything to rectify PCI, ATA, SCSI and many other interfaces where raw speed is essential and there is direct access to the low level interface. Many of these interfaces have been in use for well over a decade and will continue to be used far into the forseeable future. Any changes would have to have built in circumvention capability in order to maintain compatability with legacy hardware. The best this bill could hope to accomplish is outlawing CD-ROM drives that permit CDDA from discs that have the copy protection bit set.

The end result is that it is impossible to implement CBDTPA for computers, thus leaving a permanent means for unencumbered management of copyrighted works. An exemption for computers would pull out most of the bill's teeth. The biggest threat to copyright holders is the unlawful distribution of their material over the internet. Once it makes its way into a computer there is no potential to enforce control. Their only hope is to put up barriers that will make it impossible to extract first generation quality copies from comsumer electronics devices. It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the next decade since it suggests the much touted "convergence" of computers and television will not happen as it is currently envisioned.

RANT: Congress should not be in the business of legislating technology. The DMCA Macrovision provisions (look for "gain control" in the bill) are a mistake but they are not a major thorn because Macrovision is only applied to dedicated (analog)video playback devices and it does not interfere with legitimate use. In his statement, Hollings tries to holds up the existing Macrovision legislation in a attempt to legitimize what he is trying to do. It is unfortunate that he and his supporters do not realize that the sweeping scope of this bill would paralyze the legitimate use of many products if it were, in fact, possible to accomplish what the CBDTPA enforces.

The most interesting thing I find about all this is the Business Software Alliance is opposed to this bill. For those who don't know, the BSA is the alliance of companices like Microsoft and Adobe that audit random companys, extorting money from them for failed license compliance. Basiclly, if the BSA is opposed that must mean MS is opposed as well. I am curious why they are not more vocal about this issue? And perhaps we will see some more favorable press towards it on MSNBC? Interesting indeed.

Not as I read the proposed bill. This only protects content that uses whatever proposed encryption and DCM standards are agreed to.

Also, it does not eliminate public domain or fair use. (For fair use information, see Section 3.e.)

The Politech site has more background here, including press releases from supporters and opponents. EFF and ACLU have not said anything on this new bill yet -- I hardly think they support it, but some statements would be nice.

In the former case, the federal government and the Federal Communications Commission took the lead. In the latter case, industry first agreed upon the "Macrovision" standard which Congress later codified by legislation. So, whether Congress or industry has led the way, the results have benefitted consumers and industry, by providing Americans with wider access to programming and content.

--From the Statement by Senator Ernest F. Hollings

We believe these activities should focus on three key matters concerning digital piracy: (1) establishing a "broadcast flag" to prevent unauthorized Internet redistribution of digital broadcast programming, the use of which will not affect consumers' "time shifting" of programming, (2) plugging the "analog hole" that exposes digital programming to potential widespread theft, and (3) limiting the rising tide of unauthorized peer-to-peer file distribution of copyrighted works.

while the Intel-AOL statement posted yesterday talks about:

...Significant progress has been made towards a technical solution that would involve a "broadcast flag" to signal that redistribution of digital broadcast content over the Internet is not authorized...

...Beyond digital broadcasting, additional issues exist that require serious private industry and public attention. One is the so-called "analog hole." Video content, even when delivered digitally in a protected manner, must be converted to an unprotected analog format to be viewed using legacy equipment (e.g., the millions of analog television sets already in consumers' homes). Once content is in an unprotected analog form, it may be converted back to a digital form and subjected to widespread, unauthorized redistribution via peer-to-peer as well as more traditional piracy channels. Private industry efforts are underway to select a watermark technology that can embed usage rules in content...

...An even more complicated problem is the phenomenon of unconstrained unauthorized copying and redistribution of copyrighted content over peer-to-peer networks. One contributing factor is the growing variety of increasingly decentralized peer-to-peer networks (e.g., Morpheus, Limewire, etc). Another is that content reaches peer to peer networks from a variety of sources including unprotected distribution, circumvention of protected content, camcording from theater screens, and diversion during production.

Does it worry anyone else that Hollywood is so confident they've figured out a way to protect their digital streams end-to-end that they are starting to focus the debate on preventing analog copies as a means of bypassing DRM?

"A spampoena is an overbroad subpoena of dubious validity 'served' by email to unnamed recipients throughout cyberspace. The first spampoena was deployed last January in the DeCSS / MPAA case; the second was just sent out in the matter of CPhack / Cyber Patrol. We may dearly desire that, quashed forthrightly, it will be the last ever served. A judge in Boston -- in a hearing at which no defense attorney was present -- granted a subpoena requiring that a Canadian and a Swede remove certain content from their Web sites. The lawyer for Cyber Patrol's parent company requested and reportedly received permission to 'serve' copies of the subpoena by email to hundreds of unknown others in all parts of the world. Several hundred of the spampoenas have been mailed (and fewer received). Here is an example. The ACLU's motion to quash the subpoena concludes:

"'The subpoenas must be quashed because they were not properly served, because they violate the geographic limitations of Rule 45, and because they impose an undue burden... that raises significant constitutional questions. More fundamentally, they must be dismissed because they are in aid of an underlying case that itself must be dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, lack of personal jurisdiction, and mootness. It is improper to impose on a third party the burden of any subpoena -- particularly one that raises a host of thorny privacy issues -- in aid of a case that does not belong in this Court in the first place.'"

Hollings' statement states

Specifically, our hearing demonstrated that there are three discrete problem areas that merit government intervention.

One other point: the parent post is right - this bill naming thing is really important. Remember the USA PATRIOT act? I attended a talk by Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) who spoke about how difficult it was to oppose a bill named that way (I believe he was the only senator who voted against it.) The current bill's title sounds like something everyone would want, making it that much more difficult to oppose.

Unless I misunderstood section 6A: Individuals are not allowed to tamper with any device transported via interstate commerce, but you can tamper with a device that was NOT transported via interstate commerce.

Dell, HP, et. al. should hate this bill. Why?

• Component manufacturers will build components with an easy-to-remove copy protection module.
• Components will be shipped lawfully via interstate commerce to facilities in each and every state.
• All electronic devices will be assembled from the components in these facilities and sold to consumers in the state.
• Consumers will lawfully remove the copy protection module.

The net result: Loss of economy of scale in manufacture of electronic devices. Prices go up. Content remains unprotected. Legal chaos ensues.

This whole thing is so ludicrous. How could anyone be so blind to think this bill will actually HELP ANYONE ?

Politech has announced that the text of this hideous creation can be found here. Read it for yourself, along with statements from Hollings -- and pals Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti.

Politech has announced that the text of this hideous creation can be found here. Read it for yourself, along with statements from Hollings -- and pals Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti.

Politech has announced that the text of this hideous creation can be found here. Read it for yourself, along with statements from Hollings -- and pals Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti.

John McCain. Sam Brownback.

Read it on Politech.

Not that I think the Republican party sucks any less for this. McCain is a badass, though. Wish we had more of him and fewer like Lott.

Bakunin, Goldman, Sacco, Vanzetti You know, many of the early Anarchists, and even some young idealist types of today, were of the belief that each and every man, woman and child ought to decide which type of governance was best suited to individual taste and need, all of course through non violent peaceful means, if possible.

What these anarchists failed to understand is that every man, woman, and child do decide which type of governance they have. It's just that only through social cooperation can we actually achieve greatness. An individual could not accomplish StarCraft, and if they did, they could not enjoy it in the same way that a consumer would. So we must socialise to make our lives better. By socializing, we accept the societal norms of the societies we ally ourselves with.

There is nothing preventing any of us from getting a gun and holding up in our house until the FBI burns it down. It's just that one has to remember that authority comes from force. If the FBI or any other government agency can overpower you, then you do not have as much authority as them. I ownly own my home because if some random person kicks me out of it, I can appeal to authority to use it's force to evict the evictor. If the one with the most authority (read force) unilaterally decides to take my house, there is little I can do about it regardless of what a piece of paper thousands of miles away says.

Globalization is all of the societies deciding to cooperate in the hopes to achieve the most amount of greatness. Unfortunately it means the homogenization of system of governance among the large cluster. It also mean a bigger gap between the lifestyle of those in the cluster and those outside of the cluster. If a society falls out of line, such as allowing the free choice among it's subcribers to imbibe by any number of classified psychoactive substances, or by failing to provide unique identifiers on CDs, or by aquiring the same weapons that larger (controlling) countries own, then the society can be shunned from the whole. The gap between the quality of life and the achievable quality of life will encourage the society to homogenize and cooperate again. This will happen either by leaders changing their minds or the people changing their leaders through election or revolt. The quality of life in the society will have to become very low before revolt is an option. However, the controlling countries from the global society will be there to provide food, training, and equipment to the revolutionaries.

Note that Globalization is the result of the fall of Communism. This event depolarized the world. The psuedocapistalist system outlasted and now has a monopoly, no, a trust (def 8) on "the world system". This system, like other trusts, will abuse it's monopoly position to push down anyone entering the market: offering a new system of life. The leaders of the global system will shout "you are either with us or against us." Dissidence will be illegal in order to further increase the gap between cooperators and defectors.

The modern corporatisation of the world is scary enough to make even the most bloodthirsty early 20th century industrialist/mine owner turn white with fear.

That is because Globalization has more authority (read: force) than the robber barons ever had. It can strike down with great vengence and furious anger and those who attempt to poison and destroy it by offering alternatives.

We are truly on a vector into a dark age for individual rights. The current prevailing meme is that corporations make a society strong. Layoffs are to strengthen the corporations. High executive salaries are to ensure the corporations have the best leaders. Drugs are banned to prevent individuals from becoming slothful and unproductive. Legistlation is turned down because it might hurt the bottom line. Individual welfare is cut so that tax breaks to corporations will fit the budget. Unions like marriage are encouraged because survival as an individual will be increasingly harder and harder.

I know that eventually something will break. The pendulum will swing back. Disenfranchised individuals will no longer tolerate the restrictions put on them. The first ones will be crushed. The next ones slaughtered. Then killed. Then maimed. Then eventually, there will be enough across the world to throw off the schackles this system places on them. But we aren't talking about the few thousand deaths in the US Revolutionary War or the couple thousand of the October revolution. This will be a massive global insurrection. Hundreds of thousands of people will die.

And then the cycle will rebirth.

Many people here seems to wory about what will happen with their current devices. According this page, you can keep 'em. Excerpt:

(b) Exception -- Subsection (a) does not apply to the offer for sale or provision of, or other trafficking in, any previously-owned interactive digital device, if such device was legally manufactured or imported, and sold, prior to the effective date of regulations adopted under section 104 and not subsequently modified in violation of subsection (a) or 103(a).

This ignorance has become dangerous to all of us. Like to back up your system using mass storage with Hollywood-style copy protection built in?

Hollywood has already bought the politicians who are going to decide on this. They don't get it. There's no political profit in getting this.

I've said for some time if the high-tech community from CEOs to end users all decided to pull together on an issue, that we can win regardless of opposition.

Collectively, Compaq, Dell, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Sybase, and Unisys are a probably lot bigger and employ more people than the motion picture industry. I mention these companies because their leaders signed an open letter to MPAA asking that the movie industry start having real discussions with them with respect to a solution everyone can live with.

Jack Valenti figures correctly that he doesn't have to compromise, and by the time Hollywood finds out that their own computers have been compromised by the solution the top corporate suits bought from Congress, he'll be in a very well paid retirement.

Perhaps it's time for high-tech industry to stop kissing their asses and start kicking them and see about enlisting our help in kicking them as well.

If these high-tech companies start buying media time and doing press campaigns about just what the Hollywood solution means (start with pictures of dark factory floors, blue screens on computers, etc.) in conjunction to putting out a call to write letters to Congress to their employees and their developer communities and to communities like this one.

I'd certainly write my own Senators over this issue even if the request was signed by Bill Gates.

I've been telling people to avoid XP and I've been running AMD in my boxes for years and years. However, there are issues where the most die-hard Linux fanatic with any sense will realize that we've got common interests.

If the Senators don't get the point, a number of them are up for re-election this fall. High-tech money and voters can make the difference between who wins and who loses.

We know who our enemies are. We can't do anything permanent on them by ourselves. A high-tech coalition can probably remake Congress in our own image. We don't have to like Microsoft, just be glad they're on our side for a change and be willing to work with them.

There are other major corporations who would be greatly inconvenienced by having MPAA use Congress to tell us what our computers are going to look like and what can and can't be done on the Internet.

It's coalition time. It's single-issue politics time. . . us vs. the laws Hollywood has used Congress to ram down our collective throats. I know that every major corporation I mentioned specifically has people reading slashdot. Carry the word back to your bosses that it's time to see what kind of coalition we can put together.

High tech developers and users plus high-tech corporate money is probably an unstoppable political force. There are few issues that we can all agree on, but on those issues, we need to work together.

Here's some background: Boston judge to hear first test of GNU license used in MySQL and NuSphere replies to Politech post about FSF and Boston lawsuit. Looks like the GPL isn't an issue here after all -- in other words, it may just be a run-of-the-mill contract dispute between two parties.

Here's some background: Boston judge to hear first test of GNU license used in MySQL and NuSphere replies to Politech post about FSF and Boston lawsuit. Looks like the GPL isn't an issue here after all -- in other words, it may just be a run-of-the-mill contract dispute between two parties.

You say you read the Wired article but can't find the text of the bill? Read more carefully. In the first paragraph that mentions it, there's a link to Politech's copy of it: http://www.politechbot.com/docs/hollings.090701.ht ml

http://www.politechbot.com/p-03104.html

This issue has nothing to do with copyright laws.
It's about freedom of speech.
(and about those little numbers and barcodes you see at the center of a cd)

The original parent said " a new compressed audio format (which the average consumer can't tell from MP3)". Yes, new players could be (and already are being) developed to play files encoded with some sort of DRM scheme. But consumers will most certainly notice it's a new format when their old several-hundred-dollar player won't play the new file. And they'll probably feel pretty bitter, sort of like when they buy an audio cd only to discover it's actually a sort-of-audio-cd that doesn't play in their dvd player (or macintosh, or playstation, or whatever).

No matter what, copy protection fucks the consumer. And there is no way to quietly slip it by them, which is why Universal has instructed retailers to accept returns cd's in this new broke-ass format.

I saw an episode of the Soprano's the other day where young mobster Christopher tells his girlfriend how the music bussiness used to be mafia controlled.

The sad thing is, it still is. It's just a different mafia. The NEW mafia is so powerfull that they can put a 100% tarrif on exports from a poor country that doesn't want to play the game. Read all about it.

Can anyone say, with a straight face, that it's in the consumer's interest to have every cdr ever burned encoded with the serial number of the cd burner, as well as the plant where the blank was manufactured? Do most people who burn cd's even realize this is the case?

Sorry if I'm getting a tad offtopic.

Copyrights last 95 years [everything2.com] unless you're a freelancer creating works on or after 1 Jan 1978, in which case they last life plus 70. (To renew a copyright for 20 years, simply stuff millions of dollars into the pockets of both parties in the United States and all major parties in the European Union.) Either way, they last additionally until December 31.

...and, if the new laws that Bush and Ashcroft want, get passed, stuff in the public domain will be able to be re-copyrighted.

I asked Declan McCullaghahalulagh about this and it looks like Glaser isn't on the board anymore. He also pointed out that he could've been on it before RealNetworks took this sort of turn. I'm not really sure what they won it for, myself. The awards pages aren't in english, since the show(s) they were awarded at weren't in english either. The only dirt I have on RealNetworks is the tendency of their download program to monitor users and gather information to be sold to marketers. Which is good (bad) enough for me. Although it's probably mentioned in legalese on page 124 of the license agreement.

Unfortunately, all the paper in the world is marked. The manufacturer has inserted a unique watermark, and they have extensive records of who buys each sheet of paper.

This already has happened, but in a different way. Xerox puts a unique code in all color copies one of their machines makes. Check it out at the original follow up.

On Declan's website, here is the RIAA response to Gilmore--Don't cheer piracy! (RIAA words, not mine).

On Declan's website, here is the RIAA response to Gilmore--Don't cheer piracy! (RIAA words, not mine).

You mean the one that murdered the men, women and children at Waco and Ruby Ridge? Or the one that shot down twa flight 800 and covered it up? Or maybe the one that still arrests people for marijuana possesion in states that have decriminalized/legalized it for medical use? Umm, maybe you mean the one that invented the "incident" in the Gulf of Tonkin to drag us into the vietnam war? Or the one that let the FBI infiltrate protest groups in the '60s, subverting their rights to free speach? Wait, you mean the government that setup this phony war in Afghanistan, so we can build an oil pipline?

You talk about the loss of rights under the constitution. You must not have read the PATRIOT act, which schreds what little there was left of the bill of rights. With its passage you lose the right to trial by jury, the right to be free from illegal searches and seisures, the right to confront your accusor in court, and the right to criticize the government.

Heres an idea for you, turn off MSNBC/CNN/Fox News and look at some news sources that aren't run by and for the government propaganda machine.

Personally, I hope to be ready when the rest of America wakes up and decides its time to throw off the chains we've put ourselves in.

websidestory.com and statmarket.com are basing their statistics on their web tracking technology through the use of advertising. The problem is, they use web bugs (see here, here, and here) to accomplish this. Windows users typically do not take actions to inhibit these web bugs, but Linux, BSD, and even many other Unix users do. There's software out there to help, too. Those who do block these web bugs, or all the hitbox.com sites, as I do, won't ever be counted.

Statistics based on web bugs should never be counted to determine platform penetration. Instead, actual HTML loads from a wide variety of real sites should be used, and the distribution variations show, too. I'm sure Slashdot gets more Linux and BSD just because of what it is.

Find out what other sites that /.ers visit, then get platform stats from those sites, and only for their main page HTML hits (not for images or ads or anything else). Then check the variation of that.

I had to go remove them from 6 different blocks in my network to just to view the linked page.

Give my buddy Declan McCullaghalala his credit for breaking the story first.

Plenty there to suggest that the owner of Codex is a slimeball, and lies about the capabilities of his product. But D.I.R.T. does appear to be a real Trojan with surveillance capabilities (as well as the ability to plant evidence on the suspect's hard drive), really being sold to government(s) by this creep.

That Magic Lantern is a custom version of D.I.R.T. was suggested here.

More from Politechbot

According to Declan McCullagh's Politech mailing list, Magic Lantern was produced by Codex Data Systems.

Please. Someone told a professor that what he was doing might not be legal. Nothing more. There is no case. It was a stupid case to begin with.

You don't seem to even know what the RIAA sent to Felten. They didn't say "might not be legal". They said:

Unfortunately, the disclosure that you are contemplating could result in significantly broader consequences and could directly lead to the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. Such disclosure is not authorized in the Agreement, would constitute a violation of the Agreement and would subject your research team to enforcement actions under the DMCA and possibly other federal laws.

That sounds a tad more threatening "oh, you might not be doing something legal.".

Quote curtesy of Politechbot.

It appears that until you or some other legitimate researcher goes forward with publication and is sued or prosecuted for it, the courts may think you are just crying wolf to try to get a law you don't like changed. A number of researchers have stated that they now intend to stop working on analyzing content protection. If this court decision is upheld, that will prevent the DMCA from being overturned.

Are you willing to go forward with research and publication in violation of the DMCA? The only way to stop you then will be to actually use the DMCA against you, and it can finally be tested in court. Will you take this risk when so many researchers are backing away?