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EFF Makes Call For DMCA Help
We are looking for diverse, real world examples of the ways in which the lives of ordinary fair users are strangled by the anticircumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
According to Judge Kaplan's ruling in the New York DVD Case (where 2600 publisher Eric Corley was ordered to take down DeCSS and any links to DeCSS), the DMCA makes circumventing access controls wrong, regardless of the reason you are circumventing. If your circumvention intentions are grounded in fair use, good for you. Fair use continues to be constitutionally protected by the First Amendment, but making and providing circumvention tools and even circumventing to do legal fair use is no longer allowed, thanks to Section 1201 of the DMCA.
Applying this rule to videos would mean that although recording David Letterman is constitutionally protected, the use of VCRs and Circuit City's "trafficking" in them are illegal.
We at the EFF feel that following this path will essentially destroy fair use. We foresee countless scenarios where librarians can't create a copy of encrypted material to archive, even if the archiving itself is a lawful use; professors can't use excerpts of encrypted material in classrooms even though the excerpts are a form of protected expression; scholars can't write their own computer programs to analyze the full digitized versions of copyrighted works in all media; and music aficionados can't customize digital searches for thematic research. But what else?
Surely there have got to be more examples, and we need to collect a short but powerful list of them. Tell us your most Draconian visions for a world where circumvention is always criminal even to get to the fair use that's not. Who would lose? And how?
Points will be given for brevity, concreteness and the ability to have your grandmother easily grasp the problem. Demerits applied for overuse of technical jargon, long-winded diatribes and multiple, repetitive messages. The winning scenarios may be discussed in our legal briefs, and, if they're very good, maybe even relied upon in a landmark legal decision throwing the statute out as unconstitutional.
Let's "open source" this problem.
Thanks,
EFF
(1) If i own the music, then I can copy it freely, since it's mine.
or
(2) I don't own the music but only a license to listen to it. So if I have a Beatles cassette, I can make a copy of the CD without paying for it, because I still have "a valid license to listen", right?
Take the movie clip example a little further, using it to touch upon an issue that the lawmakers can relate to:
I am (hypothetically) preparing research on movie violence and gore, and how they both mess up kids. Obviously, I'll want to get my point accross using examples, such as the scene in The Patriot with the cannonball. The DMCA wouldn't allow it. The DMCA _wants_ my kid to grow up messed in the head!
Scenario: "You may only play this CD in a Sony Walkman. If you want to play it in your Phillips stereo, you'll have to buy the `Phillips stereo' edition." Company lawyer's argument: you can't read the groove of a CD by eye, so the CD coding must be "effectively controlling access".
What is to be the legal definition of "circumvention"? I see a future where companies twist it to mean any way of accessing a work that isn't what they intended. CSS never really controlled access; it was never encryption; it is only an obfuscation, and yet de-obfuscating the content has been deemed to be circumvention of an access control measure. Any kind of coding that is not legible to the unaided senses could be so deemed to be an access control measure. (Word documents are usually "copyrighted works"; the Word file format "effectively controls access"; hence reading a Word document, even one to which you own the copyright, in anything other than Word is illegal. KOffice is a circumvention tool and trafficking in it is illegal.)
What if we broaden this "any illegible coding" standard to things that are only partially human-readable? HTML... viewing a web page in anything other than the page author's favorite browser is illegal. What about foreign languages, or slightly non-standard or embellished versions of one's native language? Pretty much any work could be deemed to have access controlled by *something* - hence accessing any work in a way that the copyright holder doesn't like could be illegal.
Here's one -
We all know that email (and other information that is sent over TCP/IP) is covered by copyright. Currently, it is easy to forward copies of email to third parties without the author's permission. Suppose the following were to happen...
A consortium of "well-meaning" telecommunications companies decide to add a "do not forward" indication on every TCP/IP packet. If the bit is set, any information in the packet is indended for the receiver only. Software would be written to detect the "do not forward" indicator and respect it.
Of course, it would be trivial to circumvent the "do not forward" indicator simply by writing software that ignored it. To deal with this problem, the telecommunications company uses a proprietary encryption scheme to encode all the information in each packet. Only "blessed" software would be able to unencrypt the information in the packet.
The results would be two-fold: All data communications software would need to be purchased from the telecommunications consortium. But, even worse, all hardware that routed the packets would have to be purchased from the telecommunications consortium. They could effectively lock out any new competition. The current companies would be the only ones able to produce new datacomm hardware.
"Exactly, Shakespeare quotes it best in Hamlet:
"Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so". (it's a paraphrase, too lazy to find it on the web)
Everyone has different morals, and no-one should ever be subject, against their will, to someone else's morals or beliefs."
Careful here. You basically leapt from the premise that "you will always have debates about degrees of rightness or wrongness" to the conclusion that "Nothing is good or bad."
There is a vast difference between saying that the line between right and wrong is fuzzy, and saying that it doesn't exist at all.
[...] how else are you going to prevent someone from totally ripping off your design?
There's a legal concept known as trade dress, which is similar to trademark but not identical. It's rather fuzzy, unfortunately, but essentially if someone copies your layout to the point that a consumer would assume a relationship between yours and theirs, they are misappropriating your trade dress.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
That of course is DMCA, not DCMA.
sigs are a waste of space
Now comes the catch. First of all, the liquid music file was only playable by the Liquid Music player on the computer that it was downloaded to. They did provide the ability to burn the song on to a CD *BUT* my CD-R isn't "supported". Never mind that the CD-R is a quality, name-brand burner with support on many platforms. Also, there is no liquid music player for Linux, or any other *nix.
So, if I had purchased this song, it would be entirely unavailable to me anywhere besides the Windows computer that I downloaded it on to. Yeah, that's a great deal. Thanks guys!
Solutions-
In this case the ability to decode the music format or hack in support for my CD-R would have both been solotions to my problem (and would have both been, I believe, covered by "fair use"). The anti-circumvention clauses in the DMCA now prevent these solution from ever being legal.
Solutions under DCMA
It turned out that the CD was published under an indie label (no RIAA) so I felt good about buying the whole CD. It is hard to argue that the DCMA doesn't hurt the consumer. I hope this example helps.
-Derek
Related links:
Now comes the catch. First of all, the liquid music file was only playable by the Liquid Music player on the computer that it was downloaded to. They did provide the ability to burn the song on to a CD *BUT* my CD-R isn't "supported". Never mind that the CD-R is a quality, name-brand burner with support on many platforms. Also, there is no liquid music player for Linux, or any other *nix.
So, if I had purchased this song, it would be entirely unavailable to me anywhere besides the Windows computer that I downloaded it on to. Yeah, that's a great deal. Thanks guys!
Solutions-
In this case the ability to decode the music format or hack in support for my CD-R would have both been solotions to my problem (and would have both been, I believe, covered by "fair use"). The anti-circumvention clauses in the DMCA now prevent these solution from ever being legal.
Solutions under DCMA
It turned out that the CD was published under an indie label (no RIAA) so I felt good about buying the whole CD. It is hard to argue that the DCMA doesn't hurt the consumer. I hope this example helps.
-Derek
Related links:
P.S. I posted this earlier, but it didn't seem to show up, sorry if this turns out to be a re-post.
Sony Playstation.
Now, the explanation:
1) Region encoding
2) Sector 12-15 (or so) burnout to prevent copies
In order to get a backup disc made (glad I didn't break any lately) or play a legally-purchased Japanese version, you need a special modification done to the console whether by chip or external parallel port module. So I pay $20 extra for a convertor for the privilege of playing games I've purchased or a backup of a broken CD. This would obviously be circumventing a copy-protection system.
People breaking their copy of Final Fantasy Tactics get the pleasure of bidding upwards of $80 on Ebay to get a replacement due to short supply.
Election software is judged as content. No one is allowed to reverse engineer it because of the content control mechanisms put in place. Evil Corporation X fixes the elections with nasty software. No one can legally discover that the elections were fixed.
-l
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According to the ruling by Kaplan. If I can't link to illegal materials, it would be illegal for me to tell the police where the drug dealers that live next door are. I would be linking to an illegal material.
It should be fixed now.
Consumer reports, the insurance institute for highway safety, the ntsb? (U.S. govt safety group) are all able to crash cars, rip them open and compare them for safety, quality of construction, etc. As vehicles become more computerized, the role of software in vehicle safety increases, as does the amount of the car that ties into them.
Measures intended to protect the auto makers' software might some day be so closely coupled with the rest of the systems in the car, that failure analysis, crash investigation, etc. might all be hampered by the DMCA.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
it's not in your video card, its in the DVD player, i have a tnt2u too (or did) and tv-out worked great, until i wanted to play a dvd
That's ok, we can sue them for infringement, since we didn't give them a license to do so. ;-)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
No, but possibly their trademark.
--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
I currently burn CD-Rs of all of my music to put in my CD changer in my car. This is due to the fact that I get higher density that way (I can fill those CD-Rs up to 74 minutes vs. the 45-55 minutes that are on a typical CD. And yes, I know about 80min CDs, but the firmware in my car's CD changer gets confused by them). This is also due to the fact that my car tends to damage the CDs over time (long radial gashes along the CD when I hit a bump, combined with the extreme heat of Texas summers). By putting my music on CDRs, I protect my original investment. As an added bonus, I can bring along just the tracks I'm interested in. Anti-circumvention policies applied to new media would restrict my ability to make these lawful copies.
Eventually, I plan to get an MP3/Ogg Vorbis player installed in my car. (Probably when I get my next car.) By the time I get it, the music industry is likely to have a favorite new digital music format with some sort of access control. Meanwhile, I'm going to be trying to put all of my music into my car in Ogg Vorbis format where possible, to provide the highest possible quality with the least likelihood of getting sued by Fraunhaufer. I won't be able to do that legally, though, if the new music formats have some sort of "encryption" ("XOR 64" anyone?) on them.
On a side note, the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause almost guarantees weak "encryption" and "protection" measures by exchanging technology for laws. Fun.
And now for a fun odd-ball question: Is the pattern of light-movement created by a graphic equalizer or other visualization method (eg. the visualizations that various car stereos and such provide) considered a "derivative work"?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
That should be: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced." --Gregory Benford
I can see the fnords!
The dvd pay-per-view lock is what DiVX did, note that DiVX died.. wonder why.
It would seem to me that the DMCA would also have the effect of making a companys or an individuals need to maintain their copyright compleetly unnecessary for eternity. If it is illegal to even attempt to access any information that is currently copyrighted what about when that copyright falls void? I Could see there being a real problem if Shakespeare or any of the other 'Greats' had encrypted and copyrighted their works... these works would *NEVER* come into the public domain and yet with no one to maintain that copyright through the ages we would be left with only current copyrighted or entirely uncopyrighted works.
Hmm. I'm almost positive that I've got a copy of "The Carl Stalling Project" that I bought on CD a few years back. If you'd like, let me know and I'll try and dig it up to confirm.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
I ask because I had a simlar problem - DVD player and an ancient TV that only has one coax input. I tried hooking the DVD through the VCR, but I ran into Macrovision. So I bought a box that converts RCA inputs to coax and a switch for choosing between the coax inputs. It is a hassle, but its a lot cheaper than a new TV.
Of course I agree that we shouldn't have to do stuff like this just to use equipment that we obtained legally.
"That fat, dumb, and bald guy sure plays a mean hardball."
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
You should be able to get the hardware you need at Radio Shack. From talking to the techies there, this seems to be a fairly common problem.
"That fat, dumb, and bald guy sure plays a mean hardball."
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
Microsoft hasn't tried anything that evil yet. When Office goes to a subscription model, it will simply fail to create new documents. But even if it refuses to open existing documents, and you had the option to buy a non-expiring version, they're in the clear. Just like expiring demo-ware. You know, the kind that lets you do whatever you want for 30 days and then shuts itself off... They're not violating your rights by shutting down at a predetermined time, because you're fully aware that it's a time limited version.
Leaving enterprise decide alone of who can read some media is allowing them, in the future, to lock access to some of them or to restrict it to some specific peoples (who will ave access to uncrippled decoders).
For example : a reportage, if only available on "protected" formats, may be locked 2 years laters if some people find it disturbing (corporations, not governments). And it'll not be something planned, it will only be a "mistake"... So no court order could do anything ("sorry, we just noticed the format that doc was saved in is invalid and incompatible with new systems")
Unfortunately, CueCat's statement is bullshit. As draconian as DMCA is, it does not apply to the CueCat situation, and therefore that particular situation does not serve as a serious example of DMCA doing harm.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Linux is becoming a bad example for this sort of thing, since it is gaining popularity as an end-user platform. Licensed DVD players will appear soon, causing the example to lose strength. I recommend you replace Linux, in your example, with platforms a little more on the fringe. OpenBSD, QNX, Amiga, etc.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
That was me. :-)
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You evil son of a ... *sigh* That would work.
Mixing your IP with someone else's could keep them from accessing their own IP. Ah, but isn't this a double-edged sword? If they sued you under DMCA for accessing their IP without authorization, you could sue them, also under DMCA, for trafficking in a tool that accesses your IP without authorization.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Bad request
Your browser sent a query this server could not understand.
Just what kind of monitor is that again?
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
I think the submitter with the word processor scenarior is onto something, but let me tweek his sugesstion slightly. Lets say a national depository library, which is tasked by law to store significant works, uses a tool to store the work in an encrypted manner. Lets also state that ALL hard-drives use an "encryption" mechanism called 4B-5B to limit the sequence of nulls to no more than three repeating so that the magnetic media actually has a signal to store. The author of the original work now is prohibited from retreiving his/her work even though they hold all rights. This is a case of conflicting needs and is one of the methods of argument used to throw out the Jim Crow laws of bygone years. The need of the depository library to store the work, and the author's right to access the work are in conflict and cannot be reconciled under this ruling.
The 4B-5B thing is extra fodder, as the ruling covers ALL encoding methods, this would implicate all magnetically stored information, even that which is not expressly "encrypted".
Okay, so I'm driving to work. I turn on my radio. Static. I go through all the channel buttons. Static. I start scanning. Loud static, quiet static, a little talk radio, no music. You see, a radio station's equipment is all circumvention equipment. The machines are almost all illegal, even though the station has purchased licenses to play proprietary music. You see, they can play the music, they just can't use machines that will let someone record any... off the air. Yep, same old argument when cassette tapes and digital radio and other such things were new.
I finally find a pirate station playing some obscure band nobody's heard of, but they're good. Then the announcer comes on and says they'll be off the air for an hour so the police don't find them. Later that evening, I hear on the news that a playback and recording device (a tape deck with built-in CD player) has been confiscated from a pirate broadcaster. But the FCC isn't pressing charges, just the music companies.. the guy had all the FCC licenses he needed.
Is the DMCA this draconian? By the spirit of the law, and by the strictest letter, I believe that it most certainly is.
After the old lyrics.ch server was taken down due to copyright infringement, they eventually brought it back up with the blessing of the RIAA. But, in its new form, they have all the lyrics displayed in some java applet with stanzas scrolling by one at a time, so that you:
The only way to get the text would be to circumvent their java applet, which may be illegal under DMCA, even if what I do with the lyrics falls under fair use.
OK, so I guess you've seen this story many times...
Step 1: Purchase media
Step 2: Play media for a while, but not long enough to get sick of it.
Step 3: Fail to protect media from damage
Step 4: go to step 1
In my case Step 3 is usually one of my children, the most recent is teethmarks round a DVD which of course stops it working (and crashes the PC). I went out and got a 60Gb disk so I can copy those frequently-watched films using DeCSS so that the kids can watch jungle book till their hearts content.
Already my 2-year-old can run programs on the PC.
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
and "encrypted" is subject to interpretation.
Doesn't need to be encrypted, even.
The DMCA protects "security measures that protect a work".
The measure might be encryption, or it might be a flag in a streamed video that means "displaying ok, saving to file not ok".
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Are there other countries that have implemented their own versions of the DMCA?
All the countries that have signed the WCT has, or are going to get something similar to DMCA.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
gold watch in half but want to be able to magically put it back together. They want you to buy a new watch. And their arguments are mostly based on the fact that if your CD was in fact a gold watch, you wouldn't be able to put it back together, so you'd've lost its value and would HAVE to buy another one - they want to maintain the same advantage of reproduction difficulty in the digital domain as they have in the physical one. *WE* know this doesn't really translate. But the best arguments will be ones that 'end run' this controversy and instead address other failings in the DCMA (of which there are plenty).
Just a thought on the construction of effective arguments.
Examples are easy to construct:
a) You move from Europe to America. All your DVDs are now illegal to watch, because they have a european country code.
b) You download music from the internet. It happens to be locked to your CPU. Which you might not realise, till one day it breaks or you upgrade your computer.
c) You want to watch one of your movies at a friends (DVD or whatever), but it is locked to your player. So you have to carry the player, too...
d) You want to tape a football game, because it is late at night and you have to get up early. No way, as the station doesn't wont you to tape it.
Actually, I don't think that said "tool" would be legal. It is true that this tool will allow the owner to recover the contents of their own document. But, in order for this tool to do it's job it must reverse engineer the document format and any protections that format may contain. The tool then has the ability to obtain information from document's to which you don't own the copyright; hence, by the DMCA this tool IS A circumvention tool and is therefore illegal. It is in the same situation as the DeCSS tool. By itself, DeCSS is not a pirate tool, but it can be used as a pirate tool. I could make my own DVD movies and encode them with the MPAA's format so that others could see my movie. I would then own the copyright to my own movie and should be able to recover it from my own DVD (say in case my masters were destroyed). However, I can't recover my original content because the tool that would allow me to do this is illegal. The tool is illegal because the tool can also recover content from others without their permission. From what I can see DeCSS is not about what the tool actually does but what it is capable of doing. If a tool, makes it possible to circumvent the copyright of others (whether it is used as such is irrelevant), then it is illegal by the DMCA.
His comment is indeed insightful. And I can see that one could create content that you own, but can't access or use because your access was taken away. This may be a good example of why the DMCA should not be allowed to exist. It could create a situation where software users are at the mercy of their tools.
-- Juan
I know this has been posted before, but it bears repeating:
Macrovision blocks a number of uses that are "fair" (such as hooking the DVD player to the VCR because the TV hookup is hard to reach). If circumventing them for legal uses was to be outlawed then we would be denied fair use.
Microsoft Works 2000 also has this problem - MS was able to do something to the CDs that makes it impossible to copy them. My first thought when I discovered this was "If I can't copy the CD, this means they're infringing on my legal right to make a backup copy of the CD." The license agreement did mention the fact that the CD could not be copied and that a utility was provided to make a backup copy (I never got around to finding out exactly what this was, but my assumption is that it could only backup to a hard drive, not burn a duplicate). Anyone else know anything about this?
Back in about 1990, I swore off cassette tapes, gave away the 300+ tapes I owned and never bought one since. Now I have 300+ CD's (although I don't remember buying 2~3 cd's a month for the past 10yrs). These CD's have not seen the light of the inside of my apartment, since I found I could rip a CD to mp3 in 30 minutes. Now this is about a 5 minute process. We are now here at 2000, and I have sworn off VHS tapes. This will hopefully be the end of my relationship with magnetic tape media. No longer will I be required to purchase a second or third copy of something, due to over use.
We should be able to buy a piece of digital media, and transfer it to our digital media platform. I store all of my new CD's and many of my preffered old CD's on my computer. I will be transferring my DVD's over as I gain more hard drive space. These files, movies, songs, etc are not for distribution, other than distributing music to myself at work, or when I'm out of town, etc...
Also, many of my older CD's were unlistenable due to scratches. Mp3's don't skip, they just have a popping where they would have skipped. This was a blessing since I've had a great number of CD's that were all but lost.
I have had many CD's stolen over the years and it sucks. Had the technology been available in the past to record those CD's to mp3, I would still have some music that cannot be purchased. (Ice T's CopKiller, free speech, but not allowed in the US)
As an average consumer I am disturbed that I am accused of being a thief.
I do not have a real issue with digital signatures being imprinted on my mp3's or mp4's, so if lets say I happen to begin distributing files to thousands of people a copyright holder would know this copy has made it to 50 warez sitez. But, if a devious person cracked my box, and distributed my stuff, where would the innocent until proven guilty come in?
The MPAA (or rather Mr. Valenti) has stated it is a small gov't. But do they not have to follow the rules defined in the US constitution? A gov't formed within the US, should still have gov't rules applied to it.
The only real reason I can think for these rules against copying to digital, is marketing fears it will not be able to sell you that movie you purchased on DVD, in 5, 10, 20 years in yet another format or version because you will not choose to buy it. How many different copies of the Star Warz Trilogy do you have? Now just think it'll be another 5 years before I can actually enjoy those movies. *sigh*
Since marketing is where the great losses are for the Industry (according to the RIAA FAQ on why CD's cost so much). Perhaps someone should let them know, we're tired of having them tell us what we like, even though we don't. Napster gives the RIAA 30+Million users who can help guide marketing. Nah, instead lets just shut them down and raise prices.
It just so happens I like digital media so much, that I work for a company that distributes movies, tv, and music *legally* over high speed access(cable modem/set-top-box, dsl, 384k~1.5M content). The licensing is the hardest part. Fear. It would be nice if we could encode mp2 & mp4 off DVD, rather than DigiBeta.
Don't know if such a scenario has been posted - haven't read all 5 (!!) pages of comments, so mod me down if this is redundant...
Various posts have related to how the DMCA (and the UCITA) could be applied to cars, but here is one I have come up with (and posted before).
Imagine a sensor in your gas tank (or line, or carburator) that could "read" the gas, and tell whether it was "approved" gas for that brand automobile. Maybe it starts out by only allowing you to put 89 octane or higher gasoline in your car (if the 87 is cheaper, you are SOL). Soon, you can only put in a certain brand (say, Mobil). Then, only manufacturer's brand (Dodge D9 gas).
Reverse engineering the car's computer, software/firmware, sensors, or gasoline would be against the "law" - you might be fined or jailed (or both), for attempting to use another brand of gasoline in your car...
Just a thought...
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
If you want to copy your movies on to VHS run the Signal out from your tv into the signal in of your VCR. Then record that. I have done this on a Sat. Dish and it works well. The down side is if you change any volume, or do any function that causes menus, or prompts, etc, they show up on your tape. This is a small price to pay though in my opinon.
I mod down any one who says "I'm sure I will get modded down for this"
No you shouldn't. But I live in the real world, and work with real solutions. The rest is saved for philosophy courses.
I mod down any one who says "I'm sure I will get modded down for this"
Would you let someone tell you that you HAVE to read the dust jacket, then the preface, then you can start reading?
How about if someone told you that it was illegal to copy sections of the book for your own use? How about if they printed it in a special way so that you couldn't copy it with normal copy machines, then made a LAW that new copy machines were illegal.
Would you want what is being done to DVDs/CDs being done to books?? Books have been easily decoded and copied for quite sometime and they dont seem to have any piracy issues. Perhaps its not the format, or the ease of copying, but the industry and its practices.
FunOne
FunOne
Ah, but you forgot one little detail: You're daughter may well have played that great flute solo, but did she compose it? Most probably not, and the music composer also holds copyrights on the recordings, and need to be reimbursed for any public performance. So, the encryption is not only protecting your daughter's copyright, but also the composer's, and he'll sue you into oblivion once you got that flute solo to your computer's hard disk.
I think this song covers my feelings.
--
Instead of taking up the traditional "fight the power" battle, consider what can be accomplished by embracing the DCMA. My own little protest is up at www.datafetish.com, whereat I apply an "access control device" to various softwares (and I don't mean the index page; that's supposed to be satire). Now, unless you circumvent that access control device (thereby violating the DCMA), how do you know that what I have is actually what I say it is? I'm no lawyer, but it strikes me that just about any kind of encoding software format (tar, gzip, MIME) could be argued as being protected by the DCMA. I mean, where does the DCMA allow us to draw the line between the content and the presentation?
I hadn't realised that it was hard to avoid region coding when you are the person creating the DVD. Does some software not give you the option of making a "regionless" DVD?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
You don't like SDMI? Buy a device that doesn't use it.
There are no devices that don't use it? Well, that's an anti-trust issue. It's important, but it has nothing to do with the DMCA.
(Unless SDMI is required by law, in which case this is all wrong... is it?)
MSK
There's always maple.
--
www.alphalinux.org
www.alphalinux.org
Maybe the EFF should read the responses and comments MANY of the folks on slashdot and other forums sent in to the Library of congress back during the beginning of last year. There were many good scenerios submitted as examples.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
I believe that there was an issue a while ago where Stephen King would be violating the DCMA if we wanted to read his own book because there was (maybe there is now) no viewer for his ebook for the macintosh (his computer). It comes down to being able to view content that one payed for however one likes.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
got it professionally repaired (new motherboard). However, the OS
"First Aid Recovery Kit" CD that came with it refused to
reinstall the OS, claiming that it wasn't an HP Pavilion. I'm pretty
sure that the CD was made so that I couldn't (for example) loan the CD
to my dad, to let him upgrade from Win 3.1 to 95.
Under DMCA, the tweaks required to make the OS run on the post-repair
computer are illegal, despite the fact that all the components were
both purchased legally and used in ways an ordinary consumer would expect
to work.
--Beth
[P.S. If you're wondering what happened to the PC, we eventually got
it to limp along, but the windows-side of it still won't play Diablo 2.
The Linux side we installed on it works fine.]
However under the DMCA certain restrictions apply:
Sure, you'll want to break that lock off of the book after the 1st time that book slams shut when you get up to pour another cup of coffee but well, the DMCA says, "Suck it up and buy another key, little man, my porsche needs a tune-up."
If the DMCA is not stopped every man, woman and child can expect to have a library of locked books, DVD's, CD's, VHS tapes, Cassette tapes, records, etc. that they cannot use.
-- I like the phrase but I digress. --
What the fuck is a junk repetitive character post and why is it keeping me from posting a reply?
What's funny here is that when I originally posted the parent message, my "real world example", it got rated as a "repetitive character post" too. So I switched from "plain old text" to "html", and it let me post.
The lameness filter is lame. aborted.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
That's exactly the situation, single co-ax.
Didn't know you could do that, thanks.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
>The DMCA defines "circumvention" as decrypting or otherwise gaining access to a copyrighted work without the authority of the copyright holder.
That's true for provision 1201 subsection (a), Violations Regarding Circumvention of Technological Protection Measures, if you interpret the commas in the most sensible way:
But not for subsection (b), Additional Violations, which also prohibits circumvention devices:
MacroHard quoted (a)(2) instead of (b)(1), which is identical save for the numbering. The drafters deliberately took the effort to create two different prohibitions against circumvention devices. Or they were stupid. Or both.
>You make it sound as though I will be violating the DMCA even if I create a device that does nothing at all...
That is correct. 1201(a)(2)(B) and (b)(1)(B) don't say the device must circumvent access controls, only that it must not do anything else that's commercially significant. If you create your useless device you will be violating the letter of the law. Note that a device includes a service, so if you perform a commercially insignificant service (e.g. casting a shadow), that's illegal too, in theory. Components of devices are included, although it's not clear whether the component must do the circumvention on its own, or whether it need only be part of a potential or actual device. If the latter, it's not clear whether components that are also used in legal devices are excluded.
Ask me if I've been required to disclose any crypto keys.
This would be just my room. My own residence. I'm not talking about a common mingling area where anyone can waltz about and watch whatever. This would be my residence (the common area being shared by my suitemates). Good thing you pointed that out. I wanna make sure I'm clear here.
-- From my Best Friend (Written to me over ICQ): "i was gonna go to a party...but i had to reinstall windows"
In my dorm next fall, I plan on implementing a system by which I would take the DVDs that I currently own (and have paid PLENTY for already) and extracting the content to my computer's harddrive (in compressed form, of course). I will run the videocard's TV-out out from the computer's resting place and to the TV in the common room. The whole system would be remote controlled by palm/i-opener/whatever-I-can-get-cheap-and-hook-up -to-it-that-will-control-a-perl-script-on-the-serv er-side. This will not be legal with the DMCA in effect unfortunately.
-- From my Best Friend (Written to me over ICQ): "i was gonna go to a party...but i had to reinstall windows"
I agree with your sentiment. While the DMCA technically protects "effective" copy protection measures, and to me that means the measure has to actually prevent someone from being able to make readable copies, the DMCA specifically mentions encryption, which could include practically anything.
This was a problem I had with the DVD issue: in principle, I could make an exact copy of a DVD, and it would still play on any DVD player. A lock that every player has a key to isn't an "effective" lock.
Now, I might back down in the case of DVD's, because the DVD-R's you can buy are pre-burned so you can't copy the encryption key, and so the encryption combined with the control of the production of "crippled" recordable discs is an effective measure (although it's not solely electronic.)
In any case, it becomes a burden on the user that they have to demonstrate that the "encryption" isn't an effective means of copy prevention, which permits copyright holders to use stupid schemes to restrict fair use and overstrengthen their copyright privileges, depending on the high cost of litigation to keep users from fighting back.
Is translation into another language encryption? (The Navajo language was used as code in WWII, so it can be used to prevent copies from being understandable.) If I cook up a jury-rigged Babelfish (I think I'll call it "Barneyfish") to convert my book to Welsh, and sell the book, with Barneyfish, so you non-Welsh speakers can read it, can I sue you for DMCA violations if you use Babelfish, or some other automatic translator, instead of Barneyfish? After all, if you make a copy of the book, it's still all Welsh to you, unless you use Barneyfish or some "circumvention device."
(As a side note, what if you have your Aunt Gladys, who knows Welsh, read it to you? Is she circumventing the copy protection? Surely this is fair use. If the DMCA allows the big bad copyright holders to sue poor old Aunt Gladys, it must be a bad law.)
Think about segregation. People who were for it could say, "Well, it doesn't hurt them any. They still have a water fountain, they can still ride the bus, and still go to school, so what's the problem?"
The problem was it was just plain wrong. You even say in the letter the Constitution protects Fair Use. It may be difficult to come up with a specific example (I'm sure other posters can).
Maybe with control of the DVD market, the MPAA can create a monopoly with licensing fees so that certain films cannot be put on DVD. They could also raise the price to their liking, without regard to competition.
Couldn't the DMCA be used against the MPAA?
Take this hypothetical:
I write an original program that alows me to watch a DVD movie on my computer, let's call it DeCSS2. However, knowing the current situation with DeCSS, I decide not the spread it around. I do post it on my web page but encrypt it with a 40-bit key and only give the key to people I explicitlly trust. And lets also assume that these people do not give the key or the unencrypted program/source away. A few weeks later, the MPAA, DVDCCA, and all their cartel cronies are knocking on my door to sue me over my litthe DeCSS2 program.
Couldn't I be able to claim that, because the MPAA/DVDCCA/etc must have broken the "effective protection device" to know that DeCSS2 played a DVD movie, that their evidence against me was illegially obtained and that THEY were the ones violating the DMCA?
Encrypting information into a printed format (English, for example) can only be decrypted by teaching a human being how to decrypt that information (being taught how to read). Since trafficing in circumvention methods is outlawed under the DMCA, doesn't that mean that teaching reading and arithmetic skills is now outlawed?
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
Here's one example: Suppose you are blind. You LOVE DVDs because the alternate audio channels featuring director/actor/producer/composer/etc comments on EVERY scene, finally making movies something that you can really experience.
But you can't get to those alternate audio channels without navigating through several purely VISUAL menus. Perhaps you could write your own DVD menu program that reads menu items out loud, but you can't without getting licensed or getting in trouble. I'm pretty certain an individual can't afford licensing fees, and your other, less legal options, get you in trouble even though all you want to do is listen to a DVD that you paid for.
J
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
....my copy of "The Carl Stalling Project" from tape to CD (in which it is not available). ...
Off topic, but I bought my copy of The Carl Stalling Project on CD.
To be a bit short, is Richard Stallman's The Right to Read not enough?
Carol sends email to Bob asking if Alice's web site is a good deal. To support his answer, Bob would like to copy a portion of the protected page. Carol can't access it directly because she's not a member. Bob can only report his subjective impression that Alice's website is not a good deal, without offering evidence.
Next Bob contacts the police and accuses Alice of fraud. But he has no concrete evidence of Alice's refusal to furnish the free cordless phone, because he cannot print, save, or copy-and-paste the "protected" document. When Alice hears that Bob has gone to the police, she stops the advertising campaign and modifies the "protected" page so that it no longer violates the law. Although millions of people have read the document, she is able to instantly destroy all copies of it, leaving no evidence of her fraud.
If ROT13 counts as "encryption", then pencils, paper and brains are a circumvention device. Use and/or possesion of any of the above will constitute a federal crime.
Gah
Do you have those letters posted online? I'd like to see them. No becuase I doubt you, but because I believe you. Something like that could really get some people upset.
Those who don't know me, probably shouldn't trust me. Those that do know me, DEFINITELY shouldn't trust me.
With no one left to collect your money, there is no one left to provide you with another years worth of access.
What if they simply decide not to support the "book" anymore?
They can just decide to no longer sell access. Therefore there would be no legal way to read the information, and perhaps pass your classes.
Those who don't know me, probably shouldn't trust me. Those that do know me, DEFINITELY shouldn't trust me.
After reading an earlier post I hauled off and became a member, and decided to donate a bit more than $20. If they're out there fighting for my freedom to do whatever the hell I damn well please with the things I buy with my hard earned money then they deserve to be supported. Who else is going to do it?? The government certainly won't, it seems every time they think they're doing something to protect us, things get worse. Bah.. I'll stop now before I launch in to a rant.
"We're so tough we're made of nerf!" --D&D Character Tagline
I don't think you can copyright a design. As long as you don't try and decieve people into thinking that your product is the offical one I see no reason why you can't make a can of soup that has the same basic design as campbells soup; oh wait store brands do that all the time.
guvf vf zl fvt
Remember that US laws do not apply in Costa Rica. I haven't checked, but I assume that Costa Rica does not have an equivalent to the DMCA. John could probably gain back some freedom by returning to Costa Rica.
A giant software company hires a guy to write a module. He works alone, and stores all the source code on his own machine. It takes him a year to do the work.
At the end, he asks for a little raise of, say, one hundred billion dollars. When they laugh at him, he quits, leaving his source code mildly encrypted, sitting on his machine, with a note saying he's filed for copyright on everything he's done.
IANAL, but I would think that even though he signed a contract giving up whatever rights, DMCA would override that and protect him.
I guess the general point is that any industry that relies on workers creating intellectual property is now vulnerable to people copyrighting their work (even if it violates their contract), and demanding a ransom.
Well, say our records grow and grow, and WeEncrypt doesn't and it turns out they implemented the (open) DES algorithm really poorly so it encrypts/decrypts at about 1/1000th optimal speed (common problem). If you then move to another company, say SuperSecurity.com that uses the exact same encryption algorithm (vanilla DES straight from the IBM whitepapers way back) are you allowed to use that to decrypt the data encrypted by WeEncrypt's software? I suspect under DMCA, no. Even worse, the DMCA may well make it illegal for both companies to encrypt and decrypt data to the same format (DES).
Frums
Actually, it's pretty common practice for companies to unlock the CD check on games about a year after they're released, when they're making only minimal money off of CD sales. Most of the people who wanted to buy Unreal Tournament have done so already, so Epic won't lose much money from pirates at this point. Incidentally, I believe id software did the same thing with the Quake 3 1.17 point release.
I wear that shirt as an expression of support for the hacker community. I haven't read all the code, and probably wouldn't understand it terribly well if I did. That shirt is only an expression of speech and support, and the DMCA is limiting my comfort in expressing that support.
MyopicProwls
MyopicProwls
My homepage
The best fair use example I have seen of what would be a violation of the DMCA anticircumvention was provided by Nandy in reply comments to the Copyright Office. At http://www.loc.gov/copyright/1201/comments/reply/1 13nandy.pdf
He writes that vendors for medical databases omit export functions for data so hospitals and doctors are stuck using their software. At times they either have to abandon their data or hire a programmer to crack the database so the data can be exported to another platform or whent he software vendor goes out of business. This is a violation of the anticircumvention provision, but one the author feels is necessary to save lives.
Assuming that your actions are legal because you are the copyright holder, could you extend this to DeCSS? Make a video clip of yourself talking about the benefits of raisins, encrypt it using CSS and one of the proprietary keys, and distribute the clip along with DeCSS, arguing that the DeCSS distribution is necessary to view the clip, of which you are the copyright holder, and give permission for others to access.
Nope. Just the "land of the free (tm)".
I have a TV-tuner card, because my computer monitor is much nicer than the little TV I own. Until recently I had a cheap mono VCR, but I wanted something a little nicer to hook up to my stereo to go with the nicer picture. So I bought a (fairly cheap) stereo VCR. Problem is, when I hook it up to my TV tuner card, the VCR thinks it's another VCR and that I'm pirating video tapes, and engages Macrovision, destroying the picture. (Well, inserting stupid little wavy lines.) Now, I understand I can go to an electronics store and get a "gain stabilizer" or something to defeat the Macrovision for this (perfectly legal) use. However, under DMCA gain stabilizers become illegal, even though all I want to do is watch a movie (or even TV!).
-Erf C.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
The DMCA specifies certain infringements that copyright holders may sue over. In this case, as the copyright holder, you cannot infringe your own copyright (and you could also grant waivers to other parties). So there is no illegality in your example. The examples that the EFF are after concern fair use of products whose copyright are held by other parties.
You're right that the DMCA does nothing to prevent someone from accessing their daughter's flute solo on a proprietary recording device, if that person is a software engineering guru with the ability to hack the system independent of input from other individuals. For the sad majority of the population, which does not consist of privileged elite technocrats such as ourselves, this is impossible. And for those of us who possess the skills to do this, we are condemned to duplicate effort since the DMCA makes it illegal for us to share our tools or publicize the means by which we accessed material to which we owned the copyright, since that information could then be used to bypass the protection on material for which we didn't own the copyright. Read this way, the DMCA actually makes it illegal to publish or distribute your own work (the means of accessing your material).
As this trend continues, it will become harder and harder to acquire information which can be reused for anything other than the benefit of the "owner" of that information. When it becomes impossible, it will no longer be worth anyone's while to acquire information as it cannot benefit them at all.
Scenario: Wolfram goes out of business. I get a new computer. Even if I wanted to tell Wolfram that I've got a new computer so need a new key, I can't. Oops. Now what?
Well, traditionally big media companies (book publishers, mostly, but lately also Disney and others) have succesfully lobbied lawmakers to extend duration of copyrights when important ones would end otherwise (Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck etc. probably will never become PD if the copyright extension schemes continue like they have so far).
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
This looks like a really good one - an illustration that the DMCA is potentially restraint of trade (UK-ism for anti-trust, more or less.)
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
"Once you have flown, you will walk the Earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, there you long to return." -- DaVinci
Under the DMCA, unauthorized analysis of a computer virus and development of a method of circumvention is explicitly illegal. While the author is not likely to file a civil complaint to obtain his $2500 in damages per-incident, the US federal government would be obliged to prosecute the product developers as trafficking in access control circumvention software. How much will your antivirus software cost if the developer needs to pay a million dollar fine for each counter-agent he develops?
I am in a field of science which relies heavily on historical data (specifically, atmospheric temperatures, NASA satellite imagry, etc.). This data has been collected on computers since the 1950s.
A great deal of the pre-analysis work I do (maybe 60-80% of the time of some projects) involves taking old data formats, and fragments of old code in Fortran, C, old Basic formats, etc, etc. and porting it to the latest thing. Many times, due to University purchases, this includes proprietary formats such as Visual Basic (sorry about that! Not my choice!).
Fortunately, Visual Basic source is still, at its heart, a set of text files. Now, let's say that it wasn't (no reason why it has to be!). Or even if it IS text...Let's say I write a set of algorithms for my work.
So, when the trends change, 10 years down the line, and Visual Basic joins the old language pile, and I join the old programmer pile and am no longer around... Can my successor, within the university/company that commissioned my work legally port my work without a Visual Basic license?
Or is reading old source and "decrypting" it into a new language illegal under the current law?
Word processing is the perfect example. The ability of many Office Suites to compete with the current dominant package (Microsoft Word) depends on their ability to at least import the text of Word documents (never mind proprietary fonts, etc.)
If it becomes illegal to open documents which I created without a specific license, all users will be forced onto a single format, effectively removing any and all competition.
A simple and effective analogy would be: if the company that patented the stapler also patented the staple remover, it would make it illegal to straighten the staple by hand! Clearly, this is a ridiculous abuse.
Wait, can I make DMCA work for me? Suppose I write a letter to my terrorist friend saying that I will kill the president and how I will do it. And I ROT13 it. Does that mean that if this letter is found it can not possibly be used in court against me because reading it would violate my copyright on it?
As I travel occasionally and enjoy movies, I prefer to buy DVDs; that way I can watch them on my notebook during the airline flight. (I also prefer the DVD's full widescreen image) :)
I've bought quite a few (about 60) so far. Several have been childrens movies; as a family we travel to my in-laws for Christmas. Watching "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" or "The Iron Giant" makes a long flight -uh- fly by.
When we get home, the kids want to watch the movies again and again. But DVDs are fragile, and children don't understand "handle it carefully". In comparison, videotapes are almost indestructable. Shouldn't I be able to copy the DVD to tape so the children can watch the show when they want? It seems quite unreasonable to me that I must pay for a DVD, then pay again for a tape, simply to keep children's fingers from destroying the DVD.
(isn't a backup allowed under the copyright laws???)
- ajw -
Although the current technology doesn't have this, consider a DVD set up with a "pay-per-view" lock. You purchase a movie, and then must buy a "key" that lets you watch it a fixed number of times. The company you purchased the movie from goes out of business. If nobody can circumvent the technology, they can't legally watch that disc ever again. Even if you say "so what, the consumer got what he paid for," libraries and archivists are in the same boat.
This is exactly what DivX was. Thankfully, it didn't survive for long...
---
"Fdisk format reinstall, doo dah doo dah,
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
So when the DMCA outlaws tools to circumvent encryption, does it then require all software to be buggy?
Hence the reason Microsoft supports the DMCA.
---
"Fdisk format reinstall, doo dah doo dah,
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
... and "encrypted" is subject to interpretation. Aparently XOR/Base64 = encryption. So maybe the algorithm used to encode the info to tape can also be an excuse for encryption.
Actually, it would not be allowed. Routing around malfunctioning devices was only allowed for the category of (paraphrased) data compilations. Musical recordings are not an exception, even if the device is malfunctioning --only databases and other things that could legitimately be classified as data compilations.
Writing is the only socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. (E. L. Doctorow)
Even better -- would walking out of the room during the ads and coming back for the movie be called circumvention? (I can just imagine: DVD players sold with a matching couch, maybe with straps to tie you down, that require you to be sitting on it in order to play the movie.)
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Aren't they the ones that are against the traditional idea of civil liberties and way of doing things? If they're at all consistant, they'll be pro-DMCA.
Here's a link to some things that the ACLU may very well be involved with.
I can see sending money to the EFF, but certianly not the ACLU.
I recently hosted a small room party at a science fiction convention. To prepare, I took a bunch of CDs that I legally purchased and copied the music onto my laptop so I could play background music unattended. Doing this with DVD videos, something I'd like to do, would be illegal thanks to the DCMA.
End user forgets his password to his portable system. Calls me (portables tech support) and I have to tell him that there is nothing that I can do to help him. Now he has to loose all that nice data that he has been working on for so long because anything that could crack a NT password is now illegal.
Pithy, yet ultimately meaningless, phrase expressed with gusto!
Since the recordings are neither digital, nor encrypted (or otherwise copy-protected), I don:t think the DMCA applies.
Well, maybe if you:re recording the DeCSS song from reel to reel.
yes And furthermore, even if you could use some other program and make a DVD that can be played in all regions, many players would refuse to play it.
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=cdimage.iso
yes
but It makes it illegal for the programmer
to write or distribute the tool to do so
Modern vehicles are highly dependent on Electronic Control Units (ECUs) and their associated software. With ECUs controlling engines, transmissions, emmissions, anti-lock brakes and other safety devices, a car today couldn't operate if the ECU malfunctioned.
Under the current regulatory scheme, should a vehicle manufacturer build vehicles with a mechanical flaw that threatens passenger safety, There is a well defined process for voluntary inspections, notices, and if necessary full recalls.
Now suppose a vehicle manufacturer built vehicles with faulty hardware or buggy software. Given that the DMCA was passed after most of the recall regulations were put in place, a manufacturer could prevent reverse engineering or 3rd party inspection of their ECU's. If anything was learned from the recent Firestone tire debacle, manufacturers will drag their feet before admitting to any problem.
Imagine if someone discovered a flaw in an anti-lock brake module that caused it to fail under certain circumstances, or a faulty engine controller that could cause the vehicle to surge and loose traction... Now imagine the public being kept unaware by the manufacturer that chooses to silence the information rather than loose some profit.
Kewl thanks for the info.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
More importantly, you could not buy a wrench to fix that leaking tap in the kitchen because you might use that wrench to change the oil on your car without having an oil changing licence.
There is no such law here in Canada, but lord knows they've been trying. You'd think the lobbyists would clue in after the first few times being shot down with such colourful language as: hideously immoral, distasteful, an affront to our citizens' rights, etc...
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
That's much of the problem. A program capaable of recovering *your* work (in theory legal) would also have to be able to recover the works of others (illegal). Assuming such a tool was let loose to the general public, it *would* create massive piracy, be it CSS/SDMI/whatever decryption and that part outweighing any potential legal use (say e.g. Napster?), and how else could such a tool come into existance? Everybody closing themselves in for a few years to reverse hack the format? I don't think so.. there'd have to be a certain noumber of people wanting that hack, and from those it *will* spread. Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I have legally purchased copies of Terminator and Terminator 2. I copy these movies, so that my kids can play them and not destroy the original copy, which is being carefully stored somewhere out of reach. While I am making the copies, I choose to remove the one gratuitous sex scene, on the grounds that it is far too graphic for my kids to watch, even with parental guidance. I also remove the ads from this copy, so that the film takes up less space, and we are not inundated with rampant that commercialism we had no desire to see.
I do this with a VHS machine fairly easily and accomplish not only the copies, but get them onto one tape, which saves a ton of clutter when the tape winds up on the floor.
I cannot do this with DVD, since I would need DeCSS to access the data on the medium. DMCA makes this act alone illegal, since possession of DeCSS violates the anti-circumvention clause. I therefore cannot take subsequent steps to make a single edited copy that I consider acceptable for viewing by my children.
I note that this step goes even further than the 1st Amendment and touches on the rights and responsibilities of parents affirmed by the Supreme Court regarding the rearing of their kids. DMCA effectively renders my ability to regulate viewing content and provide appropriate parental guidance to my kids, both in the movie content and in removing the ads that we don't want them to see.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
No I know that many previous posts covered this but here is my personal experience.
A short while ago I purchased Baulders Gate (I already had the sequel) And I went to install it. Unfortunalty I could not install it because my CD-Rom was too fast to read the CD correctly. I then took the CD to my Linux Server dd'ed it and burned an image to a new CD. That CD installed fine.
Not if the Baulders Gate CD was copyprotected (luckily it was not) If I managed to make a copy I would have broken the DMCA, but if I did not I would not even be able to get my FAIR USE out if the game in the first place.
Just my 2c.
I sig therefore I am...
Careful dude, someone might be listening;-).
Bite my yammer.
Not only that, but whenever you close the book, it locks, and whenever you turn the key to open it, an advertisement pops up and you can't do anything else with the book for three minutes until the ad goes away.
also, when the copyright finally expires, it will still be illegal to break the access protection under the DMCA because other works may still use the same protection.
Revenge is a dish best served cold -- grits should be served hot!
They'd be not allowed to de-obfuscate any of the entries! ( http://www.ioccc.org/ )
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
No offense or anything, but I believe this is already illegal. It's called Broadcasting Copyrighted Material. It would be fine if it were in just your room, but in a commons room is questionable.
Say I write an application that asks for a password and then displays a document. I then send you this program via e-mail. Under this law, it is illegal to make a tool that will decrypt my e-mail without my permission (which ofcourse I won't give to the NSA or whoever.) OK. So, now you get to flip all of the governments arguments against encryption against them. Now terrorists, child pornographers, etc. have a legal means to prevent you from decrypting their communications! Let's see how the government likes that...
Randy.Flood@RHCE2B.COM
There was once a case where even though the military had properly licensed some software, they did not ship the correct license file with the machines and so all around the world, machines in a military computer system started refusing to function. Luckily, in this case, the componet was just a word processor and spreadsheet application. But, what if it had been something more mission critical?
Randy.Flood@RHCE2B.COM
You miss the point. SMDI, encouraged by the DMCA, puts tamper detection into the recording device. A side effect of that tamper detection is that is could prevent you from accessing your own recording.
As a hardware security expert, I find it to be a plausable real-world scenario.
cracking the word processor to view your own documents, I think this would be somewhat analogous to stealing gas for your car. Of course, it's only an analogy. In real life, I have bought that fucking word processor, and if I want to reverse-engineer it in order to see how it works, this fucking software is my property, do you understand you fucking son of a lawyer bitch ? Next time you try to make me believe that what I have bought with my own money is not really my own property, you're taking the risk of receiving a bullet from my own gun in you fucking son of a laywer bitch head.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
Go to radio shack tell them you want a converter which lets you hook up your dvd player to an older tv through a coax hookup. I believe it runs about 50$ and is much cheaper than a new TV however it converts the digital signal back to analog which lessens the picture quality slightly.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
- 8 tracks came and went
- vinyl LPs came and went
- cassettes are rapidly giving way to CDs
- Beta got clobbered by VHS (even though most people agreed it was a superior technology)
- a friend of mine once bought a laser disk video system 12 years ago (with the 12" disks, remember those? back when "laser" was still a catchy buzzword)
- DIVX anyone?
- I've owned 8" disk drives
- and 5.25" disk drives
- and friends of mine had to use cassette tape to store their programs (good ol' C-64!)
- for a more recent example, look at Iomega - their Zip and Click drives - while I love the company, if it should ever go bankrupt, or decide that a given drive is not worth pursuing anymore, you're outta luck and your data could be irretrievably lost
All of these media formats went the way of the dodo - although the data/music/images stored on them are still very valuable.I personally have re-purchased several music albums twice and possibly even three times - simply to have use of it in different formats. My friend with the laser disk video system paid over $100 for each movie - and while the hardware system still works, when it breaks that investment in the media (or licensing of the media) is gone.
How can anyone not understand how this will impact their lives? There is an enormous amount of historical evidence to suggest that you will have to re-purchase items that you already have a legal license for... unless you have the right to make back-up copies.
And if the hardware company you're reliant upon suddenly goes belly up, you better have a way to reverse engineer your back-up system.
Yes, this seems obvious to US, but don't forget, the legal system is geared towards INCREASING competition, not reducing it. Anti-trust laws, and laws prohibiting collusion are there precisely to foster competition.
Ford and GM can't work together to make a (fill in part of car) precisely because the system WANTS the other to try to improve on the part that the first built. That's how we get innovation, and technological advance. Ford makes something, then GM tries to make a better one, so Ford has to try to make a better one yet. The consumer wins. It is not only legal for Ford to buy a Chevy and take it apart to see what GM is doing these days, it's encouraged.
DMCA does precisely the opposite. It makes competition more difficult, and it prevents innovation.
Sir Isaac Newton said, "If I have seen farther than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants". He was able to learn from those who preceded him, and take their work and extend it. DMCA stops that. We are putting barriers to knowledge exchange, precisely at a time in our history when our education system is recognized as in need of improvement.
When we were children, taking things apart and figuring out how they worked was encouraged, and a sign of intelligence. It enabled us to grow up to be the hackers and Engineers and make the technology that feeds this great economic boom. DMCA deprives that next generation of that start, and ensures that we will criminalize the very people we need most, young people who are curious and smart enough to make technology for the 21st Century.
Corporate profits should not stand in the way of education and the free sharing of knowledge.
The manufacturers did not see fit to issue new, virus-free CD-ROMs. They sent out a floppy disk with an updater, posted a new install program on their BBS (not website), or (in one egregious case) sent out only a warning and recommended some free virus fighting software to download.
Today, a few things have changed. I've upgraded my system to a machine without a floppy disk drive, the free virus fighting software of that era is no longer compatible with the current OS (though the viruses still are), and most annoying of all is that the ephemeral nature of software updates makes it impossible for me to find the patches which were originally distributed on-line.
My personal solution is that I burn copies of the CD's without the virus (or with the bug fix or new installer or whatever). I'll try to hang on to the original distribution medium in the same way I'll hang on to a "proof of purchase" sticker, but the original software is detrimental to me to even stick it in the my CD-ROM drive (in the case of the auto-play virus).
This isn't a situation that's limited to viruses either. Some companies use special install applications which fail to work on newer operating systems. Since there are several common third party installers that are actively supported, if the software used one of these then in some cases it's possible to (legally) obtain a more recent version of the install program and burn a new CD with the newer installer executable. Is this legal? It certainly doesn't sound like it fits with the letter of the law at all.
The software has an EULA (End User License Agreement). The EULA is agreed to before the software is used. The License Agreement specifically states that all information entered into the software becomes the Intellectual Property of the software author.
Not in my version of Word (Microsoft Word 97 Japanese), unless I'm overlooking it. Though I will agree that this scenario is definitely conceivable, and disturbing.
But you don't even need to go that far; the software company can argue that the intellectual property being violated is not that of the person who created the document, but that of the person (company) who created the file format. It's sort of like having an encryption routine where the routine is itself encrypted--in this case, the routine (file saving) is "encrypted" by being stored in the program, which of course you aren't allowed to reverse-engineer, disassemble, or anything like that. By creating a routine of your own which manipulates files in this format, you have effectively circumvented the "protection" applied to the original routine.
Now, I can't really imagine any sane judge accepting that argument as is, but you know what they say about an infinite number of Microsoft lawyers and an infinite number of typewriters...
--
BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
I'd guess that the 50-60Hz would be a bigger problem. Stepping down from 240-120 Hz is trivial. Frwquency conversion depends on the equipment
The best dumb examples I can think of are these:
A person can use the DCMA to nail you for forwarding a piece of email that they've sent you. A person can REALLY try to send you to hell if he'd ROT-13'd the message to you first, and you sent it to someone else after ROT-13ing it again.
A person can use the DCMA to nail you for converting a jpeg to a gif. Apparently even if it's for your own use.
A person could nail you for stripping the tags out of a paragraph in a page of HTML, apparently even if for you own use. If that page of HTML arrived on your PC via SSL, look out. You're going to hell.
The DCMA would prevent me from splicing two reel-to-reel tapes together into one long tape with a peice of scotch tape. (Doesn't have to be hi-tech. You're still using technology that they don't want you to to do things to their material that they don't want you to do. Or burning the contents of those tapes on to one CD. Even for my own personal use.
See, the thing about the DCMA is not that it tries to protect copyrights. It overreaches that. The DCMA seeks to mandate acceptable use of pieces of technology, seeks to grant manufacturers the right to say *how* you may view their material -- preferably on their devices, and their devices only. It's not about protecting their copyrights -- it's about protecting their investment/sales of hardware to play it back. That's monopolistic. Bigtime. And it's wrong.
Ed R.Zahurak
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
My biggest gripe with the DMCA has been the MPAA's use of it to squash any attempts at making 3rd party players for DVD's. I can easily see a future where merely TRYING to make a player for some media format that's all the rage was turned into a crime, punishable by harsh fines and even prison.
What's worse, is that the motion picture industry can say that just because 2600 POSTS source code to a method to circumvent DVD access protections, that they're violating the law. This is akin to owning a gun (in this case, the source code) but never shooting anyone with it (in this case, using it to decrypt a movie). The DMCA takes too much away from the average citizen and gives it to the large corporations.
On a broader scale, look at products like Bleem! that play Playstation games-- what if Nintendo includes 'anti-piracy' encryption techniques on those nifty new discs for the GameCube? Would writing a player be a punishable offense? Would distributing source code that reverses the encryption land one in the Federal Courts?
What about regular office applications and their file formats? Etc, etc.
IMHO I think more thought should be given to the DMCA.. copyright holders already have rights to protect their works (I'd say they have too many, but that's another story), they don't need a way to protect their 'secret handshake' to gain access to their exclusive clubhouse.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Top Five Things You Shouldn't Say at /.
5. got some philes, d00d?
4. anything about sexual relations with tipper gore (i thought i was going to be reading abuot darwin or apple. . .)
3. Industry analyst, Willie the psychic dog, commented. . .
2. there's this thing, attached to my computer, and i don't know how it works. . .
1. what is this about? or what this is about? or any permutation thereof
!-- wit --!
12 inch Laserdisks were encumbered by high price. The promise was made they would be cheaper than videocassettes. Studios were afraid of a format that would last forever and either made the license very high for the format or refused to release in that format. The result was few good films at high prices or cheap stuff like "How to watch NFL Football" In 10 years I have collected less than 15 movies for my $1000 player.
I see the new CD audio format rejected by price and lack of titles + the added burden of the elimination of fair use. Only a few geeky audiofiles will buy them. It will be bought by the same people who buy the KIMBERKABLE silver speaker wire at jewlery prices. It won't appeal to the Monster Wire and below crowd. I predict the format will be stillborn.
The truth shall set you free!
I know what you mean. I also have a 10 inch Reel to Reel. It still works great. It was much better than the early cassettes. However with the advent of chrome tape, the fidelity improved a lot on cassettes. Remember when the Laserdisk was promised to be cheaper than videotape? I have a $1000 player and fewer than 15 movies. I'll never buy any new format until the chicken and egg game shows it a very established, usable and inexpensive format. (like MP3's and CD's are now.)
The truth shall set you free!
It almost died and got replaced entirely by CDR and CDRW. CD players became the universal music/data format the minidisk should have been. The added cost of the player for the SDMI made larger bulkier CD walkmans the norm instead until the RIO MP3 player replaced it. Blank CDR's are easy to find and you don't need a seprate recorder to record both audio and or data. Minidisc players have been replaced my MP3 players in the portable personal music market. This is a market the Minidisk could have had for years! Instead it became a niche market item with very limited use due to the high cost. Most minidisc players I have seen on display lately have been marked "closeout". Jaz and ZIP drives could have been replaced by Minidisc drives if they were open to BINARY and MUSIC formats. This could have made them cheaper and more popular and could have been the standard. The loss of the ability of recording anything to take jogging excluded this player from this market. CDR and CDRW are now the standard for computer backups and ripping CD tracks for use in your car. I don't leave my $15 - $26 original CD's in my car. As the sign at the lot says, don't leave your valuables in your car. The Home Recording Act permits copying a CD to cassette/MP3/CD to use in my car or in my walkman to protect the original. (a backup by all definitions) The restrictive nature of the MD player excludes it for this use. Home backups are the only way to prevent loss due to overheating in the sun or theft. Most record stores will laugh if I say I want to exchange my "Dark Side of the Moon" CD because I left it in the sun and it warped. A fifty cent blank CDR is a cheap insurance on the original "Mobile Fidelity Labs" original.
The truth shall set you free!
DCMA effectively makes security research illegal by forbidding people from exposing security flaws in software. End result? If DCMA was followed, we'd be up to our eyeballs in shoddy, bug-ridden, insecure software. And since no security flaws or bugs would ever be discovered, there would be no patches/upgrades, save for the bugs found by the software manufacturer. IMHO, this would actually slow down the software industry, since a significant impetus for producing quality software would be missing. Encryption? Bah. Since DCMA is in effect, simple letter substitution will be sufficient, thank you. No need for strong encryption anymore. DCMA protects us!
I've done that already. I first discovered it when I left a music CD in the drive when I had the downloaded shareware version. The Fragile and VAST: Visual Audio Sensory Theater fit perfectly. Helmet: Meantime is great in Q2; however, too bad the weapon firing code in Q2 sucked.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
In the first case, you wouldn't be circumventing, because you would have "the authority of the copyright holder" (yourself).
In the second case, in order to violate the DMCA, your package would have to have circumvention (i.e., unauthorized decryption) as its only commercially significant purpose, which does not sound likely, based on your scenario.
Why do you think this would be illegal?
And what paragraph of what law would make it explicitly illegal?
The DMCA defines "circumvention" as decrypting or otherwise gaining access to a copyrighted work without the authority of the copyright holder. Within the meaning of the DMCA, it is simply impossible to circumvent an access control mechanism on your own work.
If you create this device to access your own works it will have no commercial use, let alone outside of circumventing access controls.
This is why DeCSS would have been squashed under any circumstances. It has no commercial purpose, the players that will use it are free. It also has no other use, it exists to view DVDs, like a DVD player abvously does.
You make it sound as though I will be violating the DMCA even if I create a device that does nothing at all (it, too, will have no commercial purpose, let alone outside of circumventing access controls). If a device doesn't have any commercially significant uses at all, it's in the clear. The device only becomes illegal if it does have commercially significant uses, but all those uses are the circumvention of access controls.
"Commercially significant" is not the same as "commercial." It means "of significance to commerce." Even if DeCSS's use to view DVDs is not commercial, it is still commercially significant: it affects the market for DVD players (by creating competition), the market for DVDs (by supporting new platforms), and the movie studios' business model (by ignoring region coding and other stuff).
DeCSS wasn't "squashed" because it had no commercially significant uses (if that were the case, the movie studios wouldn't even have a reason to care about it), but because it was alleged that its only commercially significant uses (viewing and copying of DVDs) constitute circumvention within the meaning of the DMCA.
To clarify, I don't think myself that the DMCA is a good law, just that this particular example isn't very appropriate.
I have converted my library of (legally purchased) CD music to MP3 format and share the data with computers in my house via a private network. I cannot legally compose a similar private library of DMCA-protected materials unless I find a way to stream the encrypted materials and purchase a licensed player for each network node.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
While in Germany last summer, I bought a DVD, "Fight Club." While I knew that this was Region 2 and might not play when I got back, I wanted it anyway a) for souvenir purposes and b) in case I could play it I wanted the German audio and subtitles not available on a Region 1 DVD Anyway, I got back and found out that I could play it (on my computer - I don't have any other DVD player) but I could only switch to and from this disc 5 times, meaning I could really only watch it a couple times, which, while better than nothing, still pretty much sucks. This is my DMCA story, and the thing that defeats the "just get it in region 1 format" argument is the fact that the region 2 version includes features not included on the region 1 version (german language) so therefore they are not the same product. I'd be even more pissed if I lived in region 2 because tons of region 1 DVDs have loads of extra features that I couldn't get in region 2. The DMCA needs to go down!
Ok, so what if this guy makes a device/program that can unencrypt any of these devices, im sure the music industry would then claim DMCA since it could be used with OTHER devices.
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
When i got a new PC with a 3.5" disk drive, i found out that the case did not have enough room for the 5.25" drive. This meant that i could not play those games anymore!
Fortunately i had enough programming skills to circumvent the copy protection, and i used a friend's computer to put a modified version of the game on a 3.5" disk so that i was able to play again...
Had the DMCA been in effect back then, it would very clearly have been illegal (had i lived in the US, which i don't ;-). I would never have been able to legally play that game anymore.
Although the publisher *might* have published a 3.5" disc version that i then could buy. I do not believe that many publishers could be bothered with their older titles... When computer technology progresses and 3.5" drives become somehting of the past (iMac?), the same thing happens again. It will happen to CD-ROMs too, some time in the future. And because of the DMCA a whole lot of software (especially games, which i consider things of cultural significance) will become inaccessible for almost everybody because the required hardware is not available.
Come to think of it, all those emulators for older computers (ZX Spectrum, Atari, Commodore 64, MSX etc etc) can be considered circumvention devices too.
I agree with the principle, but one of your examples is flawed. I listen to my CD of the Carl Stalling Project (ASIN: B000002LJE) as frequently as I can.
Let's say I have a website where I review movies...
I want to use a short excerpt from a movie as a form of criticism. People do this all the time today - watch Siskel & Ebert, ET, etc.
Under the DMCA, I can't post a brief MPEG containing a couple seconds of a film to a website even though I clearly have a fair use right to do so. (Assume I own the DVD.)
The stock reply is that I get permission from the copyright holder, but would a copyright holder grant permission to excerpt a work for a negative review? Probably not.
My reasoning is that the Cue:Cat merely transmits the UPC code that's created by someone else, and therefore doesn't represent a "work of authorship" as required by the Copyright Act. Further, the UPC code is not a work of authorship, either, as it is a purely functional work that is covered under the "idea/expression merger" concept.* Since there can be only one UPC code matching a single input string, the idea/expression merger removes it from copyright coverage.
Since the Cue:Cat doesn't add anything (other than a fixed serial number, which isn't authorship, either) to the UPC code, its output is not subject to copyright, and therefore is not subject to the DMCA, either.
* If there's only one way to express an idea, to protect that expression would also protect the idea, and that's not the role of copyright (that's what patents are for). So, to avoid copyright overreaching its constitutional bounds, such works do not get copyright protection.
The corporations have already sabotaged our ability to make digital recordings of our own music. When CDs arrived, the next logical format to come was digital tape, to replace the obsolete analog cassette format. Yet, to this day, we are still using cassette. What happened?
DAT (digital audio tape) was developed, but crippled by the record companies. First, they refused to release pre-recorded material on the new format. Secondly, they coerced manufacturers to restrict the ability of consumers to make digital recordings. Modern DAT machines use a copy protection scheme called SCMS. Even if I record my own music onto a DAT, I can only make one digital-to-digital copy of that DAT. The only (legal) way around this is to buy a high priced "professional" deck that does not have SCMS. Even "consumer" decks cost a lot of money, despite the fact that they are no more complicated than VCRs. We can thank the music industry for this.
Predating SDMI, the corporations tried to foist off a copy protection scheme involving an "inaudible" alteration of the analog signal (sound familiar?). Fortunatly, listening tests with audio experts quickly revealed the absurdity of that plan.
The mini disc was created by Sony, and agressively promoted, so recorders can be purchased at reasonable cost. I believe that they also use SCMS. The MD is seductively cool. They are small, convienent, and sound great. I thought about getting one, so I could listen to some of the music I helped create with my friends. Then I realized that I cannot make a digital-to-digital copy of those discs (unless I cough up the cash for a "pro" MD machine...)
The only reason we now can make CD-R copies of music is because the computer companies developed the technology, independantly of the music industry.
Using a very loose interpretation of the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, it would allow all media players for ANY FORMAT to be declared illegal. From the human eyes perspective, a cassette tape can not have it's contents interpreted. It is effectively encrypted . Without a decryption device (cassette tape player), you can not access it's contents. By extension, it will not be long before cassette tape players are either licensed or made illegal. This can be extended to Television, Radio, CD's, even stereo speakers (since the electrical signal coming through the wire can not be interpreted without the decryption device - the speakers - the contents are effectively protected).
From an Electronics perspective, this means that most test gear would be considered decryption devices and subject to the anti-circumvention clauses. Devices like Spectrum Analysers, Oscilloscopes, MultiMeters, even simple logic probes - they are all decryption devices. They all decrypt a signal into a "readable form".
I can see where the anti-circumvention provisions will make it illegal to possess a simple Fluke Multimeter without special licenses. And before anyone asks - yes, there are some technologies that "encrypt" their signals as DC voltage levels on a wire.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
You have a point. Anyone else ever try making a backup copy of the Age of Empires II CD using a Windows machine? I was trying to help my brother-in-law do this. The burner software saw the disk as having two tracks. One very small, one very big. The software couldn't read the larger track, and therefore couldn't copy the disk. I never did try making a backup copy under any other configurations(OS, software, hardware), but if I found a way to make a backup copy of the disk, I would be circumventing the access control mechanisms, and therefore violating the DMCA.
In principle, anything capable of calculation is a "circumvention device" for any form of encryption, because decryption is a mathematical exercise.
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
Consider the scenario where you are a paying member for a web site, say for news articles or some other form of content, whatever it may be. Remember, when you download off the web with your browser, the files get saved in your Temporary Internet Files. You can go back through your browswer's History folder when you have the Work Offline feature enabled, to view these. I do this often, when I don't feel like wrestling with AT&T Worldnet's crappy dial-up lines to get a decent connection; it is far simpler for me to work offline via my browser's history if I know exactly what I'm looking for, and do not need to querry the web site for any further information. You can see where I'm going with this - it means that EVERYONE's browser is violating this statute, if they have ANY data caching turned on! My dumb browser went and copied all that content onto my hard drive without even asking me. You see, even my stupid computer understands the concept of fair use better than some judges I could mention. Kengineer
What is the world coming to?!?!?
-MR
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
Wouldn't a search engine be against the DCMA? Rather then link you to the main page of a site, it could link you directly to the page that meets your search criteria thus bypassing any banners, adds or other things that the web site operator might have wanted you to see prior to seeing that page. I can see it now, the next round of law suits will be against the search engines for that, and just think, id software suing Webcrawler because using WC you can find warez copies of Quake 3, they are linking to it so according to judge Kaplan's ruling, that's illegal, and plus it is bypassing the protection of buying and owning the CD.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Another example would be a beginning student in programming, copying code from a copyrighted example to learn how it works...
All in all the dmca stifles people interested in educating themselves better, stifles creativity and a whole host of things that makes life worth living.
-
What about compilers? Compilers just take plain text and convert it into a proprietary format, and yet companies do try to control what you do with them. I think this particular battle has already been lost.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
You write a book, and give over your copyright to your publisher. The book pisses off some big company, which buys out your publisher. The big company orders all licenses to the books terminated. This book can never be read or distributed by anyone again, including you. Even if you kept drafts or notes, you still can't distribute the information since it is copyright infringement.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Proprietary email formats with simple "encryption". 7 vs 8 bit streams, Reversing letters. Example: MS makes "encrypted" email and forces everyone onto .NET to read email to or from anyone else using MS email.
Compression masks data like encryption. So, creating a program that uses the same wavelet/cosine/zip compression as some company is then illegal? Example: Noone can learn about these methods in school by programming them?
More complex encryption/compression methods use many simpler steps, and the teaching/learning of the simpler steps is outlawed?
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Dear Grandma,
Uncle Boo wrote you and said:
"DeCSS creates the potential for a user to violate copyright laws."
That's true, but I just wanted to point out:
Creating an encryption scheme creates the potential for a company to violate the fair use doctrine.
Under the DMCA, the burden of proof lay with the user. This is backwards. Fair use is well established. It should be the creators of protection schemes that must prove they do not violate fair use, and if they can't, we must be allowed to accommodate ourselves.
Love,
Grandson
P.S. Folks may write you saying bad things about this letter. They're lies!
P.P.S. Uncle Boo isn't a lawyer either. Duh.
Sorry, I was sure I included this link to the Letter of Comment.
I think thats the core argument here. (Also include "when" and "where" and maybe "if" for completeness.) However, given current industry practices, it seems to be panning out that fair use is allowed except where prohibitted (such as by the DMCA).
Am I totally off base here? Can you sue to ensure that "fair use" is possible? It seems perfectly obvious to me that the courts have already spoken with the DeCSS case, ie., it is up to the intellectual property owner how, when, where, and _if_ the licensee can receive the performance. To take it to extremes, I'm not a DVD customer, can I sue the studios to make the VHS version of "The Matrix" as interactive as the DVD is? Say I'm really out there, my religion prohibits VHS, can I demand a betamax version? Super 8, in case I'm prohibitted from magnetic media? Live performance because I believe electricity is a sin?
Go ahead, mod me down, but I'm sure I _do not_ have the constitutional right to see, hear, or otherwise experience performance of anybody's intellectual property, furthermore, I'm a live theatric performer, yet you _cannot_ demand a command performance of my origional play because your transportation "crashed".
Its really just economics, corporate folks will put in as many restrictions as their customers will tolerate, and libraries are not required by law to archive the complete inventory of any given IP holding organization. But you're welcome to provide counterexamples, like that doctor who was too stupid to make sure his record system could export his own data to a useable format.
Cheers!
--
Sometimes stating the obvious is (score -1,flamebait)
Many legislators are ignorant of such technologies and the only people talking to them are from industry and they are only interested in protecting their precious copyrights.
I just don't think people are that outraged, or we would have seen riots when 8 tracks were deemed obsolete. Maybe it will change when DVD's are obsoleted.
To me its just the tyranny of the majority, ie., the majority of folks are perfectly happy buying DVD players and dealing with region codes. And all the legislators see are a bunch of GNU hippies mirroring criminal software and engaging in other sorts of subversive looking activities, its no wonder the legal system goes the way they do.
Windows 9x/ME often asks for this password when starting up but when not requiring access to the network it is easier to hit escape and get to the OS a bit faster. Because this password constitutes a protection measure, pressing escape then violates the DCMA. Working in computer support it is sometimes necessary to do this because the computer will have problems if it is not connected to the network and will take a long time before the connection times out.
How about reverse engineering in fair use? Competition is one of the fundamental building blocks of capitalism. Competition would essentially be eliminated in certain sectors (electronics, mechanics, etc) if reverse engineering was made "illegal" under these new fair-use laws, which are part of the second half of the DMCA. No longer would manufacturers of competing products be able to reverse-engineer to figure out how new and innovative products were created, and how to improve on them and/or create a worthy equivalent product. Worst case scenario is that this would lead to eventual monopolies in certain niche sectors of the marketplace.
That is just one situation that could have the potential to be a strong argument.
After reading the editorial in the current issue of 2600, which addresses these issues, I gained quite a bit of insight into this matter. It was actually rather sad to hear about all the things that are being done by local, state and federal governments, coast to coast, with regards to keeping information out of the hands of people. It's getting very real.
The second half of the DMCA, which proposes these new fair-use laws, were pretty much unanimously agreed upon in the House and Senate by a voice vote. And that is simply because nobody understood the full story, because many details were kept in the dark. Clinton simply needs to sign it into law. I'm sure with both of the boneheaded candidates up for running now (Bush and Gore), they will sign it if it doesn't come to pass at the end of Clinton's term. Both candidates are very pro-censorship and pro-religious_right, both of which go hand in hand with preventing society from knowing things they don't need to know.
We need to "become the media", like Jello Biafra said at the H2K keynote.
But honestly... who didn't see this coming?
As it stands now, there is no assurance of quality or guarantee of availability in any media product that I am aware of.
Remember the LP? I don't recall the recording industry putting together an upgrade program to aide you in converting your lo-fi audio to the higher fidelity quality of the cassette or the compact disc. Instead, you are expected to either continue to deal with an inferior product or pay full price a second time for the privelage of enjoying something that you've already paid for. And, remember this, folks... they expect that you'll willingly offer up an additional $20 for the title because they've finally figured out how to get the item to sound or look better, not because the copyrighted material has changed in any sense of a change worthy of introducing it as a new product. Fact is, a consumer group should have filed actions years ago, demanding compensation for parties who have been forced to buy an inferior product and then forced to buy that product a second time so that they can have a the quality of recording that the manufacturers claimed to have provided to begin with.
Anti-circumvention technologies violate your licensed rights as a comsumer if you are attempting to preserve (even, justify) your investment.
Until the MPAA and the RIAA address their own quality issues, I will continue to make illegal copies of items that I have legally purchased. It is my right as the license holder of a specific title to take whatever measures I have available to me in order to assure that my money does not go to waste.
I won't even mention the whole notion of items that copyright holders have opted to allow to go "out of print."
Can we consider login passwords for our local
ISP's as "access control mechanisms"?
If so, then checking the "remember my password" option for the windoze dialup connection dialog would constitute circumventing an access control
mechanism.
Sorry Grandma, you'll just have to memorize that
20 digit random string your ISP assigned you.
Why did the forum strip out all my line breaks and render that post almost unreadable?
jello.
aka aron.
Many legislators are ignorant of such technologies and the only people talking to them are from industry and they are only interested in protecting their precious copyrights.
If I understand DMCA correctly, third party service or after-market enhancements of any electronics gear would no longer be permissible. For example, aftermarket software for automotive proms (engine performance boosting, etc.) and independent repair of broken DVD players where the fix requires looking at the contents of _any_ part of the device configuration or the decoding software (even to the point of doing a checksum to verify that the program in question is 'bad')
Just wondering, but have the Judges considered whether or not the DMCA allows for Government operations? Can I sue the NSA for decrypting my copyrighted material? Can issues facing the Court be slowed or halted simply by invoking the DMCA? What about access to records used by attorneys? Say for example that Microsoft presents all of its information to the prosecution in encrypted format. The defense can't use it because it would violate the DMCA to decrypt it without appropriate permissions. Meanwhile, Microsoft has the permissions necessary, and can use its own files to benefit itself. Completely off base, or is there something to this?
Here at Two Party Systems, we make voting machines. We manufacture the hardware which counts ballots, and the software which tells the machines how to count those ballots. The software is tailored for each electoral district using our product. This software is encrypted before it leaves our factory and is decrypted inside the voting machines, where it is run.
A candidate thinks she lost the election because of some suspicious results coming from one precinct. She would like to scrutinize the code of the vote counting program. In doing so she would discover that an unscrupulous employee from Two Party Systems has deliberately programmed the machine to miscount votes, in such a way that her opponent gains the edge. However her legal team informs her that decrypting the source code is a violation of the DMCA, and that public opinino of bringing disputed election results before the court is at an all-time low.A recount by machine in the questionable districts produces the same results as before. Calls for a hand count of the ballots are dismissed, since machines are not subject to the bias of partisan politics.
This idea came from an article in The New Republic, http://www.tnr.com/120400/dugger120400.html
This is actually a good point. It should be modded up.
There is much rejoicing throughout the land as privacy advocates are justified, encryption become de-villanified, and company CIO's everywhere sleep soundly at night knowing that their vitals are locked down.
Then Company Foo disappears, due to a natural disaster, lack of profits due to their great pricing policy, or a guerilla attack from a government agency who's existance became much more difficult because of Algorithm Bar. Or even better, they decide to sit on their profits, and raise the license price by a few powers of 10. Either way, the licenses are not renewed. The software implementing Algorithm Bar deactivates itself. The hardware implementing Algorithm Bar deactivates itself. All those records, all that information, it's locked away safely from everyone, including the copyright holder. In a DMCA-friendly world, it would mean prision time for anyone to try to crack that encryption to access their own records.
To me, this is very very similar to suggesting that if I build a house, and lock my keys inside, I'm not allowed to punch a hole through my basement window to get back inside.
Suggesting that someone isn't allowed to access their information (be it purchased, leased, rented, or personally created) except through approved means is insane. If a law was in place that said they had to call a locksmith every time their door blew shut and locked them out instead of just opening it with a credit card, or had to call the police to open their gym locker if they forget the combination rather than cutting the two dollar lock off, people would be furious. Information is just a specific form of property. Why should we tolerate someone limiting our access to ANY particular form of property?
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Just lurking, thanks!
That will also tend to degrade your picture, if you are one of those people who really really care about getting the sharpest picture ever out of your DVD player (and into your 10 year old single coax cheapo TV).
I read the internet for the articles.
It sounds like he was referring to computer reel-to-reel tapes, which *ARE* digital.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
....but my example was written up in a proprietary document format. I no longer have a valid license for the software which created the document. As such, any attempts to make the document available to you would be a violation of the DCMA. ;-)
sigs are a waste of space
If your package produced identical output for the same input, it would violate the DMCA, even though the code itself is all covered by the 1st Ammendment.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
As far as I can tell, the Linux version dosen't require the CD in the drive anyways. But for windows, that's certainly a pain.
On a related note, Epic themselves have realised that they don't gain anything by having hte CD check there, and so they removed it from the latest patch version, 436. Just patch to that version, and you won't need the copy protection cracks. But yes, I'd say your example falls under fair use, even if I don't know enough about the DMCA to say if it's being violated or not.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Much of the solo music that is usually performed at the high-school or collegate level is actually in the Public domain (Hint: The idea of copyright largely didn't exist in the days of the "great masters" who composed most of that classical music...). If it is PD stuff that she performed, there's this little thing about recorded performances. If it's your daughter's performance, there is a copyright on the recordings thereof that belongs to her if she's of age or belongs to her legal guardian for the duration of her minority status.
Doesn't matter really. Distribution of circumvention is illegal under DMCA- meaning the original author's argument stands. If you own the IP or are acting on the behalf of the owner, and you're not a hacker- you're out of luck saving anything from a "protected" device unless someone breaks the law for you or you're some sort of hacker intimately familiar with the encryption scheme and the innards of the device.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Being ostacized because of being witless to the pop culture will only further us from the point of influence in peoples lives. A boycott of the media monsters would only mean an exclusion from the society we are trying to protect.
The church has somthing known as titheing, where poeple give a tenth of their income to the church. A scheduled donation to help battle sin, hmmmm....
In response to people's (including myself) hypocracy denouning the MPAA, but gawking over the latest movie, I will be giving money to the EFF dollar for dollar for every RIAA/MPAA movie or song, I purchase or pay them money for. If half of slashdot did that, think of the politicians EFF could buy(sorry but that is the way the game is played right now.) Look out AARP!
So next time you see someone drooling over Star Wars#, or the lastest remix of whatever, don't tell them to stop. Gently remind them to make two piles of money, and enjoy it.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
So, while this is a UK based situation, international treaties guarantee my right to buy copyrighted material from anywhere in the world and make use of it elsewhere, the region coding and/or macrovision technology prevent me from doing so.
After reading an earlier slashdot article about actually becoming a member of the EFF, I went to their website and became a student member for $20
For all the work they are doing to help you, have you contributed? $20 isn't alot for anyone here. I'd wager that most probably spent that in time posting to slashdot and preaching to the choir about what the EFF is fighting for.
I'm sure anyone could do the quick math, and realize how much financial support the slasdhot community can give to the EFF. So go and contribute your part to what this organization is doing.
I'll step off my soapbox now. I'll now bring you back to your normally scheduled trolls, already in progress. (^_^)
-- Some people say they can tell the time by looking at the Sun, but I have trouble seeing the numbers.
Some people learn by listening, others by reading, others by tinkering. I was the sort of kid that took everything apart, and asked for tools on christmas. Almost everthing that I know that is worth something comes from those times spent taking things apart, or fixing broken ones, or just trying to make them do something new. Between a reasonable set of tools and the library, it became possible to do pretty much anything given the ability to learn HOW THINGS WORK.
This freedom is something as a child that was a given. How else does one learn about things? You could answer "go to school" or maybe "get an apprenticeship". I dreamed of those things, and in fact did do work at a local TV repair shop FOR FREE just to learn more. (I have since fixed lots of televisions for people who needed it.) This sort of thing is ok, but not for all. Some of us want to learn early, or can't afford specialized school, or both.
My current position in life is a product of that early free time. I now get paid to help people, and solve problems. Just what I enjoyed doing as a kid. Lucky me -- or is it? Now I have to wonder as I have kids of my own, and they begin to ask questions. How do I answer? I know what I did, but that now is very quickly becoming criminalized. How can what I did be wrong? Why should the knowing be all mixed up with the doing? I feel just like the little kid long ago. Always being told basically that knowing how to do something is as bad as actually doing it. Worse I now am being told that if I actually do know something, that telling someone else is a crime because the information I possess is a device!?! WTF!
I believe that people have the right not to be dependant on others for things in life. This means fixing what is broken, learning new skills, and understanding the world around them. When someone has lots of money, they really don't have to worry. But when someone does not have a lot of money, well what do they do? They either do without, or learn how to better themselves, or become criminals. If you take away the ability to learn new things, or lock up information in such a way that it is hard to use, then what do you have left? Have-nots and criminals? Where is the sense in that?
My argument is this: The DMCA affects me in everyday life in that it restricts my ability to understand technology upon which I depend. This is not just movies, but understanding of the function of the world in a fundamental way. Does this understanding give me the power to break the law, and make use of material that I did not pay for? Most likely yes. I also know how to pick locks, copy media, and hot-wire cars among other things. Do I do them? NO! Those actions are morally wrong, unless someone needs them done, or I need them done for myself, on things THAT I OWN. We are not childeren. Most people have the common sense to make good use of what they know or suffer the consequences.
There has to be a balance between the control needed to keep the media giants happy, and letting people have some control over parts of their increasingly digital lives. Without this, I see a very harsh place to live where knowing something is as criminal as doing it. America the free becomes, America the ignorant.
Blogging because I can...
Wait a minute... While the scenario you mention is indeed regrettable, I don't think it's a DMCA issue. If the database was created by the doctor, then the software vendor is surely not the copyright owner. The copyright owner is the only entity whose permission you need to circumvent. That's why MPAA (not DVD CCA) sued 2600 (on the assumption that a MPAA member is always the copyright owner whenever CSS is circumvented).
Either the doctor owns the database, or no one does. If the doctor wishes to crack the database, DMCA can't stop him.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The firm you worked for was the copyright owner of the documents in question. Wang was not. Therefore, DMCA does not prohibit what you did.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
This is indeed a danger, and your comment is much more insightful than most of the examples I have seen around here. However, I'm not sure such software would be ruled illegal. (Keep in mind that this decision is really made by a judge, not the DMCA since it was so poorly written.)
DMCA defines the word "circumvent" in a weird way that most of us mere humans may be unfamiliar with. It's in the "circumvent" definition that the question comes up of whether or not the copyright owner's authorization has been obtained.
Therefore, if a tool is primarily used by people to gain access to their own documents, then the tool might be ruled as not circumventing! I don't mean that it circumvents with permission; I mean that it doesn't circumvent at all, since lack of permission is required to circumvention to happen. Therefore, the tool may be legal, since its purpose would not be to circumvent.
This is different from the DeCSS situation, since (so far) nobody has used that tool to access their own copyrighted work. Unfortunately, up to now, all CSS-protected works have been owned by MPAA members. Changing this fact may cause DeCSS to become legal.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yes, but how are you to bypass? You can't produce a device to do it, that's not excepted. You can't obtain a device to do it, that's not excluded. Anyone who creates a device to circumvent in this instance is in trouble for the creation, not the circumvention. God help the creator if they lend it to a friend, now they're distributing it.
Oh for petes sake, who gives a damn how it breaks? Perhaps the circuit board cushioned the hard drive, they can handle surprisingly large shocks. Maybe it sustained a large electrical shock that the hard drive didn't get in the way of. Maybe it was zapped by aliens who happen to have a soft spot in their heart for hard drives. Sheesh! Things break.
Indeed, this is part of the problem with the DMCA. It goes way beyond traditional copyright. By giving access restriction such holy status, it allows device manufacturors to control us in these ways, despite the fact we own the copyright. That's my very point!
VHS tapes have Macrovision on them all the time. Ask Disney.
Laserdiscs, of which I own about 35 or so, don't.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
If the DMCA flies, yes, software consumers will be scrooged. But will it stop there? When other big corporations see that software companies can ram this kind of legislation through the legislatures, will they ever be content with anything less?
Will the consumer of the future have any rights at all?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
In (a), it says "is primarilly designed ... "
... "
It doesn't say anything about circumventing copyright, just circumventing access controls. It doesn't matter if you intend the device to be legally used on your own materials, it still circumvents an access control mechanism.
in (b) in says "... limited commercially significant purpose
If you create this device to access your own works it will have no commercial use, let alone outside of circumventing access controls.
This is why DeCSS would have been squashed under any circumstances. It has no commercial purpose, the players that will use it are free. It also has no other use, it exists to view DVDs, like a DVD player abvously does.
The law is (imho) an obvious attempt to squash any form of competition against the (mon/duo)poly situation where a limited cartel of companies produce the movies and the mechanism to view them.
What the fuck is a junk repetitive character post and why is it keeping me from posting a reply?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Yes, you can't infringe your own copyright, but I think that the poster was also pointing out something else: in this legal climate, the technology won't even exist to violate your own copyright.
.mp3 facilitating system), rather it is the way in which it is used (hey, got that new Britney Aguilera track?).
While no fan of Napster (it's called a business plan people), the situation is similar. There is nothing inherently illegal about what they do (a p2p
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Let's not minimize point three. With the convergence of content providers with equipment providers (Sony being the most obvious example) what is to prevent Sony from making a CD/DVD/etc that will only play in Sony branded or licensed equipment?
Maybe that's what you are getting at, but I felt it needed to be repeated.
BTW, I've got several Beta tapes that have been 'archived' to VHS. Guess that won't happen again (and the ones that were worthwhile have been bought again on DVD. But suppose that, as often happens, the old, under-performing movies are not released in the new format. What happens then?)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Obviously, the DCMA requires that the player and monitor will detect an overly-long pause or monitor being off as a protection failure and they'll restart or shutdown.
I already haven't been able to put DVDs on my Christmas list because I won't buy DVDs until I can get Linux-compatible DVD players. I want to be able to use discs on any of my devices with screens, just as I can play my music CDs on any of my CD devices with speakers. The DVD industry and I are already unable to do business due to DVD restrictions.
Also, as you can tell by looking at the Cartoon Network schedule, "anime" is becoming increasingly popular here in the USA. I've liked it ever since "Star Blazers". But the DVD region coding is trying to block my ability to view anime bought from Japan. This undoubtedly is also happening for many other people with interests which happen to originate from other countries.
SDMI is trying to create music coding to restrict how equipment will process music. I anticipate future problems with people trying to listen to music from future international music crazes -- something which the music industry has depended upon for decades (anyone remember the effect of that little "English Invasion" in the 1960s?).
Even if there are no "region code" problems with SDMI, there will be small bands producing non-SDMI music which will accidentally trigger SDMI hardware. There will be other countries that will decide to create something like SDMI protection independently, and incompatible media will be produced (or worse: music damaged multiple times by multiple protection encoding).
And, of course, SDMI equipment is likely to make it difficult for me to put my legal CD in a player at home, have the speakers in my house detect me and have the music follow me, and have the same music from my favorite bands follow me out of the house and into my car, along the drive to work, and continue when I open my laptop. Right now I could do that, and makers of expensive whole-house music systems have been demonstrating much of that for decades. SDMI wants me to pay more for less -- or to listen to less music. [Technical note: I'd not use a radio link during my drive in the car. I'd use the IR or RF link between my garage and car to copy the music to the car audio system, and when I entered the car the car would tell the house to stop playing from the CD. I'm still listening to what I bought and nobody else is.]
However, a DMCA protection mechanism effectively secures this right for an unlimited time.
Also, this clause provides for an exclusive right. If I innocently use a DMCA protection mechanism to record my "Writings and Discoveries", then if circumventing the mechanism becomes necessary to retrieve my "Writings and Discoveries", but is illegal (or effectively so), then I have lost my exclusive right.
I used to be a cypherpunk for an e-commerce company. E-commerce obviously relies on good encryption, due to its use of credit card data. Indeed, failure to use such good encryption for credit data can lead to civil lawsuits for negligence, and possibly even criminal prosecution.
An e-commerce company is legally negligent if it uses encryption of dubious strength. The e-commerce company, or some trustworthy third party, must be able to test the decryption. The only way to do that is to actually try to break the encryption--something that, by virtue of the DMCA, is illegal.
Here's the scenario. A crypto vendor sells a "strong" encryption scheme. It unknowingly allows a "back door" (not rare at all--SSL had the "million question attack"). The current defense against such a vulnerability, independant attempts to crack the crypto (exactly what found the million question attack), are illegal.
The result is that the Bad Guys crack the crypto first, then start nabbing credit card data from an e-commerce site left and right. If the crackers are smart, nobody figures it out for months.
When people find out, customers file a class action lawsuit against the e-commerce site, claiming negligence because they used poor crypto hardware/software.
In short: the DMCA makes e-commerce a very risky business, indeed.
--The basis of all love is respect
Imagine being caught in a situation where the "legal decryption hardware" (descramblers, DVD players, etc.) are no longer available for sale. What if people switched to a rental model? Consumers would have virtually no protection.
--The basis of all love is respect
*HONK!* Better luck next time.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
A simple case: Computer programs that are written often have mistakes in them [bugs]. To find and correct these mistakes, programmers use special powerful programs called "debuggers". But these same debuggers are one of the main tools used to break encryption.
So when the DMCA outlaws tools to circumvent encryption, does it then require all software to be buggy?
I've thought about this some more, and I've changed my mind. Jerf's example is a good one, and I agree it is probably the kind of example the EFF were after.
though, this aspect of the DMCA is well worked over, and wasn't what
the EFF was after: they were after instances of *fair use* of
copyrighted material that DMCA forbids.
What was extraordinary about the DeCSS trial was that the RIAA
didn't pretend that either DeCSS had been used to infringe copyright,
or that it provided a viable technology for profitable piracy, but
argued speculatively that changes in price could make it profitable,
and this possible future use for piracy was the only relevant use of
DeCSS. Well, what was extraordinary was that they got away with it...
So my question is, what happens when DVD becomes obsolete? If the consumer has a license for the data, he can convert the data on the DVD to a new format and end of story. However, if the industry decides five years from now to:
- start manufacturing players and "disks" in the new media, and
- stop manufacturing DVD players,
the consumer has no choice but to repurchase their entire DVD library.A real-world example? Well, the closest I could come to a real-world example would be if the only people who could legally manufacture a record player, a CD player, a cassette tape player, or a DAT player, was a licensee of the RIAA itself, and that the licensee agreed to stop manufacturing the old technology as soon as the new technology was announced.
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This is not my sandwich.
Let's suppose that the manufacturer of a word-processor decides to go to a subscription-based sale model in which the word-processor disables itself after its subscription has expired. Given this model, I could violate the DMCA by attempting to access my own documents (of which I am the copyright holder). This is because it seems to be implicit in the DMCA that the means of access to copyrighted works is also copyrightable (??). We need a good legal case in which someone is sued for accessing works on which THEY hold the copyright. Even judges should get that
-- Rich
Free your mind and your Ass will follow -- George Clinton
All new monitors have both analog/DVI inputs.
False.
Samsung's newest top-of-the-line monitor doesn't have DVI inputs, just plain old 15 pin.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
VValdo.
I'll try a few more, though those are tough to beat.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
That's not quite true. You can buy a separate converter box from Radio Shack that converts an RCA pulg output into a standard coax for connection to your television set. Sample partnumbers from the Radio Shack catalog are: 15-1268 15-1269 15-1267. I'd give links to their website, but they have a screwy cookie thing that prevents you from pasting a link and having it function properly. These devices are intended primarily to allow game consoles to be attached to older televisions and ship with most consoles but I don't see why they couldn't be used for a DVD player or other device.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
Along similar lines, there are millions of reel to reel tapes out there. When we convert them to another format for archival purposes to be read on another machine some decades in the future are we not breaking DMCA big time? The tools we use convert the old reel to reel format to a CD format and while the information may be the same the format is not and it is a definite hack to convert it. Would the CIO's of the Fortune 500 step forward to be handcuffed?
As covered on slashdot and elsewhere, I was forced to retroactively change my class notes, change my syllabus, and forbidden from demonstrating DeCSS for my Linux Administration Class at UNC-Chapel Hill. Note this was months and months before DeCSS was found to be illegal.
Although at least one deposition taken in the 2600 case identified me and 2 other uses of DeCSS in higher education, I believe I was the only person who actually demonstrated its use in a legitimate classroom context. Or tried to...
Note that the LoC's recent exceptions have done nothing to change UNC's interpretation that it's illegal for me to demonstrate anti-circumvention devices (or DeCSS, anyway) in my class, regardless of how clearly it related to my class content.
Here is a real world example, this has not happened to me but to other people I know.
I am a freelance visual effects operator creating graphics effects work for feature films and tv commercials. The contract I sign when working explicitly states that I do not own the copyright to works I create, and that full ownership of copyright (usually) belongs to the production company.
Normally, after finishing a job the company will give me copies of the work I have done in a non protected digital format which I can then use for my own personal use in my showreel which I must show to other companies to obtain more work.
However sometimes things go wrong, the company goes bankrupt or there is a falling out between the freelancer and the company or they just forget and you don't have a copy to use for your showreel. In these cases I can get a copy of the DVD of the film in which work I have done appears and using DeCSS obtain an unencrypted portion of the shots I have worked on to use in my showreel.
This showreel is not distributed, it is taken by me and shown to a small number of companies to get more work and so falls under fair use. This same situation could happen to print graphics designers or sound engineers or artists once DMCA protected mechanisms become more prevelant.
I have a simple problem involving DVDs. I am planning to put together a web page that talks about the excellent cinematography that was done for some of the big 70mm epics of the 50s and 60s. I wanted to be able to grab a screenshot from the "West Side Story" DVD, and along with a screenshot of a more recent movie (haven't decided which one) shot using the crummy Super-35 format, and then compare the two.
Unfortunately, I cannot grab any such screenshots using licensed DVD players, since they all prevent taking screenshots. The only way to do this would be to use DeCSS to extract the MPEG-2 video off the discs and then grab single-frame shots using video editing software. However, this is currently illegal under the anti-circumvention provision.
I think this easily qualifies as "fair use", since it is for the purposes of criticism. It would be a very brief quote, since all I want is to grab a single frame, that is, 1/24th of a second, from a 2-hour movie.
The anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA is thus preventing me from exercising my fair use rights for the purposes of criticism. Are we really going to allow big companies to prevent criticism in the digital age?
Free Hans!
Actually, I would predict that market forces would probably doom the DVI standard. Just as the (original) DIV-X players enjoyed an early demise, so will go DVI.
When it comes down to it, those who care will buy monitors that have non-DVI inputs, and there will be a significant market for these devices. This is especially true as computer competence levels rise within the general populace (as it is currently in most universities).
Right now this is just Intel trying to be smarmy with the IP nazis, once they realize it'll lose them money they'll drop it.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
All this bitching and moaning from the RIAA and the MPAA is a red herring. The real reason they want these controls in place is because they will effectively allow these organizations to continue their publishing monopolies.
In the future, my garage band may be able to play its own music but the rest of the world may not be able to listen to that music because we won't have the RIAA blessing necessary to encode our music in the format everyone uses. Same thing goes for video or even plain text and program code.
The established industry wants to lock me into their established solutions. The DMCA is about nothing more than elminating your choices as a consumer and making it illegal to compete with the established media companies. And it ultimately will give them the power to allow or deny access to any idea anyone has anywhere.
If that's not against both the spirit and the letter of the First Ammendment and against the spirit of the original intent of copyright, I don't know what is.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
From what I hear, optical media breaks down after 10 or 15 years. If you find a bunch of DVDs in 2090, they probably won't be readable anyway.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I time-record episodes of my favorite TV shows in my dorm (on my TV card), recompress them with DivX/MPEG-4, and download them onto my laptop (via wireless ethernet) to watch when I need to spend time on campus between classes.
Ignoring the dubious status of DivX, this is something I'd like to continue to do legally! The way industry/legislation is leaning, they'd love to put a protection mechanism on upcoming digital broadcasts so that I can't do this. The DMCA will be a major tool in making it fly legally.
When vinyl disks were going out of fashion, I could legally copy some of my music on a tape. That was very fortunate, as those recordings have not been released on CDs ever, so there was no way I could buy the same music on a newer format. With the speed digital things move, it is not unlikely that todays music, videos, or encyclopedias I buy will be unaccessible to me in three years, and that I can not even buy any machines to use them.
In Murphy We Turst
I say we look at wrenches.
A car company build a car, using many patented
parts and copyrighted designs in the process.
If we applied the DMCA philosophy to a car, then
wrenches would be illegal, since you could use
them to take apart and copy those patented items.
YOU COULD NOT BUY A WRENCH, even though all you
wanted it for was to change your oil! THAT is how
the DMCA works!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
what's going to happen when the copyright expires
Copyright expires? I thought Congress made copyrights perpetual in the United States, exploiting a loophole in the Constitution.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Learning is essential to our nation to grow and be the beacon of light that attracts the best and the brightest, we need the right to Fair Use regardless of the data format, regardless of the encryption, and regardless of what the corporations think.
The citizens have the unquestionable right to decode and decrypt any part or whole of any data to use in the Fair Use doctrine.
Allow me to make my point using this example: NYU College of Dentistry has made it voluntary that students not buy the books as books, but to buy the books on a DVD ROM. The DVD is time sensitive, which costs $600 for one year of use. After which you will need to update your license to continue access to the books. You cannot print from this book, and notes taken will have to be kept elsewhere.
Now please look at your library of law books. Many of these volumes are old, and outdated to some degree or another, but the knowledge within is still valid, still readily accessible. A 25-year-old book can still be read, shared, and learned from.
Now imagine if all of those books were on a computer database that required you to pay a yearly fee to access (Westlaw not withstanding), what would happen if you could not access an important piece of information?
This is what we are fighting agaist. The naked profitism under the guese of protecting the copyright holder.
Content should not be allowed to be licensed. If the Content is in the form of software, it should not be allowed to be encrypted, and if encrypted, it should not be illegal to decrypt by any means. Fair Use is deeply tied to the First Amendment, and need to have all the protections granted to it by the courts.
Thank you.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
Don't you mean "The Land of the Fee"
As a computer consultant, user, and American four "worst case" scenarios for the anti-circumvention portions of the DCMA have occurred to me for your use:
1. As a database programmer, I am frequently called upon to rescue client's data trapped in legacy systems. Usually these legacy systems are software that is no longer supported, even if the manufacturers are still in business. Under the anti-circumvention restrictions of the DCMA, I would no longer be able to legally retrieve the client's data from an encrypted database, even if there was no other way to get the data! Two examples of data rescues that would now be illegal under the DCMA:
a. Shortly before Y2K, I needed to dump all of a client's bookkeeping data from ACCPAC for DOS into text files so that the data would not be lost when the application crashed at midnight, December 31st. The ACCPAC sales staff were quite uncooperative, claiming that I needed to purchase an "upgrade" for the unsupported product -- to the tune of $4000 -- before they would let me have the codes for export. However, information on the data storage scheme they used was available via the web, and a contractor I knew was able to piece something together that retrieved the relevant data (for about $700). This would now be illegal, and my client would be forced to pay $4000 to save their own data.
b. Frequently my clients lose their Microsoft Access database passwords, or mess up the security scheme so that they cannot get into their own database. I have a 3rd-party product which uses a disk sector read of the database in order to get the passwords, allowing the client to get their database back. Under the DCMA, this product, which could also be used for cracking, would become illegal and my clients would be helpless.
2. As a consultant, I often have to carry around CD media of software so that I can install and un-install certain components to my laptop and work with the client's software. The MSDN Library and the Windows 98 CD are good examples. However, dragging those CD's to every client's site puts them in some jepoardy of scratched and loss, so I make copies and leave the originals in a safe place.
a. Under the DCMA, if the software vendor put rudimentary copy protection or put the software on encrypted media (like DVD), it would be illegal to do this kind of back up. Thus I would be in constant danger of losing my only copy of some very expensive and vital software.
b. Even the most restrictive shrink-wrap agreements permit backup of licensed software for protection against loss. Why is Congress interested in enforcing more stringent copy portection rules than even the software companies want?
3. My fiancee' is a huge Highlander fan. She belongs to any number of online societies which circulate images and stories about the show.
a. Screen captures for this purpose are legal from VHS, but illegal from DVDs. What legal sense does this make?
b. Why does the MPAA want to illegalize the sampling of popular genre movies and TV shows by fans, when such fan groups are 75% of the audience for succeding movies and spin-offs?
I have a lot of slides. In the future, digital camera may take picture in proprietary encrypted formats. Those could be viewed only on specific devices (and be lost the day where the maker of the device goes out of business)
Note that digital information is often harder to preserve than non-digital information (ie: anyone getting its hands on a few millions of Word documents in one hundred years will be in deep troubles).
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Don't worry, everything will be copyrighted until the end of time anyway, and no-one will be allowed to create anything without the official MPAA/RIAA creation plugin for Microsoft Brain 2010.
Copyright on these works is owned by me, under the psuedonym d.valued and this
;), with the
work was initiated on 29 Nov 2000, 0511z.
Story One.
Dan, a man in his mid-thirties, was geting up and getting ready to go to the
office. He took the reading slates of the newspapers he read: Chicago
Tribune, Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He still received
the Financial Times in paper format, a notion considered 'quaint' and
'antequated' by the mainstream media in the USA. He reviewed each paper
and jotted down the article reference numbers of the article he wished to
rent, as once you retrieved a new day's newspaper, the old one was
irretrievably erased. Each paper had a seprate Network Access Device attached
to the Internet through his fiber optic phone line.
He slotted each r-slate in its own port, swiped his credit card, and in three
minutes his personalized newspapers were ready to go. He initiated a few
extended viewing requests on the article he had noted. One article was a
staff article, so he only had to pay the base daily rate of $10 for use.
The other articles were written by individual writers who charged by the
view outside the newspaper, which could run up to the hundreds of dollars if
viewed frequently enough. It was a pretty good way to make a living if you
wrote articles in demand, such as on higher-level stocks. Consequently, writers
were vying for the priviledge of writing the next day's article on the big
technology, media, biotech, and other popular public megaconglomerates,
while news about smaller issues outpasing the market and the monoliths
of postmodern industry were ignored.
He slid his slates and his writing pad into his briefcase backpack and
hopped aboard the morning express to downtown and the financial office
where he worked.
The rails were slow today; there was a small accident involving an
electric bike and alocal train. This blocked up the tracks and he took
out his Journal. He gripped the edge so his fingerprints would prove
his identity, and he had to punch in a custom PIN when prompted. The hand
that gripped served two purposes. Firstly, the r-slate was organized so
that up-down movements and menu access could be done from one side of the
device. Secondly, and more importantly from the point of view of the
copyright holders, you could only read the r-slate if the fingers pressed
on the pad and the prints could be read. As soon as the finger pressure
was released, the slate turned off until you held the r-slate properly and
punched in your PIN again.
It was frustrating when a gentle bump derailed his train of thought and
caused him to lose his grip for a few moments in the midst of one of the
retained stories. Now he had to pay for a second reading when he barely
even had a first, and there was nothing he could do about it.
At the office, he pulled out his Information Debit Card. Since the Internet
only proved profitable as an information distribution medium when the content
was controlled and paid for, this card was needed to access the most current
ratings on the stocks he traded within the company and recommended to his
clients. This information could only be accessed while onscreen; you could
not print it out (without an extrordinarily expensive Print Version; the
cost for a version which could go to hardcopy was about 1000 times more
pricy, as one could use it without further accountability) or save it
onto a local storage medium. It was a hard job which required a memory
beyond reproach, but he had one and he loved the challenge (and the
pay).
One of his coworkers was being escorted out while he was reading "Intel
and AMD: The Rivalry For The Next Twenty Years?" The escorters were not
normal security, or even normal cops. They were the Copyright Enforcement
Office, whose sole purpose was to locate people who were violating the
ironclad protections of copyright. They were an advanced intelligence
agency, one which could in time of war shut down parts of the DataNet
as needed. They were good at what they did. They boasted a 90% capture
rate and a 100% conviction rate. Like the early FBI, CEO involvement to
the eyes of the public, most police agencies, and most judges, you were
guilty. He felt sorry for his friend, who would be in a high-security
federal prison for at least nine years (assuming parole; federal sentances
mandate at least 90% completion of sentance before consideration for parole,
and in techcrimes, parole was less likely) and would have his assets
liquidated to cover at least part of the mandated $1,000,000 or 100,000 times
license fee, whichever was higher.
His heart pounded a little harder. He had bought, at high price, a small
device which could monitor DataNet transmissions without interference, in
theory. He feared discovery, as the CEO's were everywhere and encouraged
turning violators in for a share of the large penalties.
He wondered who the rat was.
This person was the one who introduced him to the device, and he claimed
that he used it for 'fair use', an antique concept that one could use
small segments of copyrighted works without needing to pay again for the
rights. He claimed he downloaded many works for future reference: music,
scripts, books, poetry, art. Probably was too zealous.
He unclipped the device out of fear just as his manager walked by. He
didn't seem to notice.
The CEO's were almost outside the door.
The manager snapped his fingers.
Almost instantly, the CEO's leapt upon him like a pack of wild animals.
They grabbed at him, restrained him, and patted him down to discover the
device.
He was dragged away.
End Story One
Story Two
This is the tale of two students. One lived in an affluent area, one
in the inner city.
Jack took a last look at the works on his library slate, and jotted the
concepts from the works just before midnight. At precisely 0000 hours, the
slate's memory erased itself. He had to plug it into a phone line before
morning, and he'd be up typing off the paper he had to turn in within ten
hours. He plugged it in, waited for the confirmation notice, and turned it
off. These measures were necessary to verify that the works were, in fact,
erased and that no extractions or duplication occurred. The library was now
free to lown its e-text to someone else with a proper slate, as they only had
a limited number of restricted use licenses for each work. The Copyright
Enforcement Office performed regular audits, and this little measure relaxed
the legal team at the library somewhat. He spent the next three hours typing
and proofing the digital text he had just created. He was pretty sure that
he hadn't done anything criminal, like using an exact quote or not citing
every source referred to. (Each source got a small fee from the school for
use.) He went to sleep a little more soundly as the text was copied onto a
mini-disk for computer assurance and grading.
Zoe had a stack of books in front of her in her small, one-bedroom apartment
in the near Southwest side of the city. Her library was one of a scant and
shrinking few to still have paper texts, and as her family couldn't afford
the cost of a single library slate, she was permitted use of the hardbacks.
They had their drawbacks, like being out of date the moment they left the
press, their weight, and the difficulty in tracking the segments relating to
a particular topic, but they were freer to use and utilize. She still could
not use exact quotes, after all fair usewas deemed a violation of copyright
holders' rights. She could get away with not listing a source or two, and
maybe a little smudging of lexicon here and there. (Not all works were in
digital format yet, and sometimes these little things got past the CEO's.)
She stuck in a disk and let the machine do its work while she got a few
precious z's before swimming practice.
Zoe's day started at 5:20, almost four hours after she went to sleep. The
disk was ready for inspection, and she stuck her old textbooks into her
schoolbag. Modern schoolbags were designed for the newer access-controlled
virtual books, so she had to use a large retro bag she picked up at a
garage sale over the summer. It was serviceable, and properly patched and
stickered it worked with her personality. She threw on some clothes to keep
warm, tossed her swimsuit and some clothes for during and after class in
her bag, and popped out the door with a couple of Pop-Tarts. She picked
up a pint of soymilk at the convinience store next to her bus stop. She
got on the bus, switched to a train, and got to school about ten minutes
before practice. She changed real quick, took a quick run through the showers,
and dived into the ice-cold pool. Coach's idea of a warmup.
Jack got into his car with about forty-five minutes to go before class
and a thirty-eight minute drive ahead of him. His small pack, smaller than
a laptop bag, contained the access-controlled, time-limited textbooks on
DVD his school bought into. The annual usage fee was about a quarter the cost
of a paper text, and the company assured "continual updates of the information"
on a near annual basis. So far, these versions were used for five years. They
had visual examples and a shorter, lecturelike style for the text itself, but
these books sometimes skipped and scratched and the replacement cost, at $200
plus license (which could sometimes run to $100 for a scholastic year) per book
was high even for an affluent school district. He straightened his tie, checked
his pockets.. he forgot the paper at home! Fortunately, he was just barely out
of the driveway and his first period teacher rarely gave detention for
tardiness.
Zoe finished practice. She had fifteen minutes to her first class, so she
took a slightly leasurely shower. When the clock said she had five minutes,
she scrambled to get dressed and to class. She was a half a minute late, so
she put her paper's disk onto the teacher's desk and took a seat. The teacher
was occupied running the papers through the CEO's systems. Already two students
of the five checked were caught with copyright violations.. make that three
of six. It was a very fine tightrope you had to walk on; too little and you
get a poor grade and a CEO warning for using too few sources, too much and
you probably violated copyright law. The teacher started to talk.
Jack had to scam a space in the boonies of the school's expansive parking
lots. He ran to the door, text-disks, player, and assignments in hand,
scrambling to the stairwell, going downstairs, making two rights, getting
to the door, and grabbing his seat. He was out of breath and took a moment
to catch it. "Mr. Chanar! Your assignments, please!" his teacher barked.
He fumbled through for the disk. The professor stuck it into a machine.
Zoe got lucky. Just enough sources. Just enough fudging of data. She passed.
Jack got busted. He received a zero-grade, in accordance with CEO policy.
Apparently, some of his style imitated the works cited.
Story Three
Blank tapes have been getting harder to get since the ruling. A legal, blank
VHS tape would both have a microchip tag and a macro-price tag of ten dollars
or more per tape, in bulk, easily. Illegal blank tapes without the chip
were at least doubel that, and possession was a crime since the chip prevented
recorders from recording unauthorized programs.
Even though the video quality was reduced, some still prefered the VHS to
the digital formats. Older, chip-free tapes were portable to older player-
recorders and had enough video fidelity (with a properly analog'd signal)
to record the stuff well enough for future viewing. Tape was still the
only way die-hard aficionados of certain science fiction series, like
the Star Trek series, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, and fiends of
the Monty Python Flying Circus would view the episodes.
Finding a source with the chipped tapes was hard enough. Manufacturers
focused primarily on digital tape formats with inbuilt copy restriction.
High-end shops and used equipment stores had them, primarily, but some
upscale retailers had small supplies available. Chip-free tapes could
only be obtained through the dark grey and black markets. Then, you
hoped for older, factory wrapped gear, as tapes manufactured by some outfits
were not reliable, some not even useful.
Chip-free tapes were the only way a digital-media movie could be copied.
That's why Marla went out. Their copy of "Titanic" was nearing the end
of its useful life. The license expired in two days and change, and she
liked the movie a lot, too much to have to pay the outrageously high
one disk, one player fee. That's why she ventured into this dark market.
"Fifty dollars, one hour. Two hundred dollars, two hour," the seller said.
She paid for the two-hour tape and walked away. Someone tailed her.
As soon as she put it in her VCR, a knock came from the CEO's.
That's it for now, I can't think of more as the Angel's Advocates. I've
put some ideas, like limited-use newspapers and library books, copyright-
checks in school and work, license fees for use. Some basic ideas, granted,
but some the courts probably can understand.
Ended 30 Nov 00, 0825z. Gotta go to church in a few hours. It's my
namesday.
I'm giving permission to put this out for the world to see, without charge
as long as not incorporated into a for-profit work, be it a novel, an
essay, or even a motion picture (yes I think evil thoughts
exceptions of the EFF (I know you guys are NFP, but I'm just covering my
rectum) and 2600: The Hacker Quarterly.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Our rights as citizens of this country are being infringed every day in a new way. (Look at FLorida. jk.)
This competition is a way of playing (since I assume (wrongly) you are a pro-rights person) Angel's Advocate in a world of devils. You gotta think in a wicked-evil way how the world would be assuming the DMCA's provisions are enforced in the way they appear to be. In addition, you get to show legitimate uses for freecopy (uncontrolled, unrestricted access of certain works) in modern life. Libraries and academia are given, but there are countless others.
You get to use your imagination. Create a data tree of possible cause-and-effect scenarios for The Future. I see a hypercorporatized world where governments exists to take care of the dirty bits corps don't want to and to protect the corps' assets and products first.
Oh wait, we're already there.
And now, d.valued's Prediction Of The Day: Within the next 24 years, another extension of copyright act will be passed by Congress.
Mickey's expires in 2024 (thanks to the Sonny Bono F+++ The Public, err Memorial Copyright Act), and Disney don't want the mouse in the public domain.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
here's a pretty simple example: you've got a TV with just an RF input on it. You buy a DVD player, but it doesn't have RF out, so you run it through your VCR. Problem is, this kicks in Macrovision and screws up the image. The only way to solve that is to get a 'video clarifier' that removes the Macrovision. But, that's now circumvention of an access control.
According to the DMCA, if you made a digital VCR (i.e. a VCR that transmitted and received signals via some digital means, instead of those lossy copper cables), it would be illegal to use it in the exact same way that US courts have been deemed fair use for regular VCRs in the Betamax case from the mid-eighties.
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I live in New Zealand, where the law considers DVD zones to be an illegal trade barrier. But in a few weeks I'll be moving to the USA.
How difficult is it to get zoneless DVD players in the USA? How easy (and cheap) is it to get the model of your choice "chipped" to become zoneless?
Would it be easier to mail myself a DVD player from New Zealand, and worry instead about replacing it's power supply? (NZ runs at 240V)
Being from Australia and moving to the USA I have noticed the same thing. I unknowingly bought a DVD player for my PC (which ran windows at the time) which included a Creative DxR3 decoder card. Now I have three DVDs (Seven, Face/Off and The Crow) from whatever zone Australia is, and if I buy more DVDs, they will be zoned for the USA. I effectively have no way to access the content on those DVDs. Making a device to get around the zone protection is illegal, as well is aquiring one. Using DeCSS to decrypt the movie to record it in MPEG would be illegal as well. Under the DMCA my only alternative is to buy ANOTHER DVD decoder card. ONE to play Australian zoned DVDs, ANOTHER to play american DVDs. Surely this constitutes a violation of the "Fair Use" clause in the constitution??
---
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
How about this: DVD Audio. The primary reason I got a CD-RW was to make custom music CD's. I have hundreds of discs, dozens of which I purchased because I really liked one or two songs on the album. I burn my own CD's with custom mixes, I rip the tracks into MP3's and upload them to my portable MP3 player. If I purchase a copy of a CD, I can do basically anything with it for personal use. I commit a crime when I give copies to others. I also burn copies of CD's I want to keep in my car.
DVD-Audio is supposedly a higher-fidelity audio standard than standard redbook audio used by CD's. Although there is little danger of DVD-Audio taking over soon, I can see the RIAA ceasing all production on CD's within 5 years, because of the additional protection granted to them by encrypting/watermarking/whatever on DVD-Audio. Although the encryption will be broken (DVD-Audio uses a different method than video DVD's), it will be illegal to distribute information about doing this. Thus, people will have to pay more money for additional copies, services like CD-NOW that let you make custom CD's for a price, and purchase individual songs on MP3 at higher price. Fair use, as I described in the paragraph above, will be dead.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
If the manufacturer of your hard disk goes out of business and the drive crashes, it would be illegal for anyone to try to recover the data from your crashed hard drive.
The reverse engineering aspect of the DMCA is perhaps its worst feature. It becomes illegal for me to post a message in a news group which says "By the way, the XYZ device stores its data as straight text" Why is this so? Because the letter 'A' is never stored on a digital disk as a physical 'A' it is always stored as some sort of digital code. The DMCA makes it illegal for me to find out what that code is. The DMCA does not require that the encoding be difficult to break, the encoding can be completely straight forward it is still illegal for me to find out what that encoding method is.
I am the system administrator for a small company.
I change the root/administrator password, but before I can communicate the new password to my boss, I die.
The entire network must be junked because circomvention of the encrypted password is illegal.
A small business uses a commercial accounting package that supports password access for security.
The bookkeeper disappears after embezzling funds and changing the password.
Evidence of the crime is illegal to obtain because tools to decrypt the password are unavailable. (as an example, programs to decrypt QuickBooks passwords are currently available)
Are there other countries that have implemented their own versions of the DMCA?
How can this be fought on a country-by-country basis?
What about the part of most software LA's that allows you to make a backup copy of the disk. If the company put some sort of copy protection on the disk could you be sued for circumventing it to make a backup the company already said you were allowed to make? I apologize if that's not too clear, it's still early. Basically can someone say "Sure you can make a copy of the disk but if you circumvent our copy protection we'll sue your ass." and still have it be legally binding?
This is a bowel disruptor, and you are just full of shit. - Spider Jerusalem
This one is quite scary, with an encrypted signal leaving your computer to your monitor. See http://www.digital-cp.com/.
All new monitors have both analog/DVI inputs. Eventually new monitors will have only DVI inputs, and computers only DVI outputs. This will force countless computer upgrades, as making a box to decode the DVI to run to analog will be illegal under the DMCA. So, summarily we have;
1) Our right to "reverse engineer" stripped away form us,
2) Software that will control what we see and when we see it, taking away any last remnant of "first sale" rights,
3) People who can not afford to purchase "the right equipment" left further behind and denied access to what others are seeing and using,
4) As copyright law is "primarily defined by use" it will become accepted business practice to charge a "per use" fee for everything, including public domain material like "facts" (i.e. phone books)
5) Richard Stallman's right to read scenario becomes reality.
To say this comes from the pits of hell is an understatement.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
A schoolteacher wants to show a small portion movie in school. A hypothetical protocol for a movie format has, as a condition of its licensing, the requirement that adverisements before the movie *cannot* be skipped. If anticircumvention technologies are illegal, the schoolteacher then cannot show the movie without first showing the ads.
(Aside: Would the mute button and turning off the monitor for the first part of class be considered a circumvention technology? Even if not, it's not a terribly satisfactory solution.)
Say, you own a Linux machine, and want to play a DVD you have legally purchased....
Although the current technology doesn't have this, consider a DVD set up with a "pay-per-view" lock. You purchase a movie, and then must buy a "key" that lets you watch it a fixed number of times. The company you purchased the movie from goes out of business. If nobody can circumvent the technology, they can't legally watch that disc ever again. Even if you say "so what, the consumer got what he paid for," libraries and archivists are in the same boat.
-Rob
I have a similar problem... Even though DVDs have a much wider acceptance rate in Asia than in North America, my company uses VCDs for promotional materials (even though DVDs would look better)--namely because of region codes.
This "region coding" phenomenon does more than just supposedly prevent piracy...it also prevents small-time, legal distribution of DVDs (say promotional materials that we've developed here but want to show in presentations over there) between regions.
And it also prevents someone like my boss from getting DVDs from Asia (where he is quite often--he just returned from 3 weeks there), even though he might need them.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
I moved from the UK to the US recently. There are a number of region-encoded DVDs that I would like to watch that will only be released in the UK (for example, UK TV programmes). The manufacturers are abusing the region-encoding system when they set it and have no intention of releasing DVDs in other regions.
Here are two examples, both related to making back-up copies. 1. I purchased several learning programs for my computer to be sed by my 7 year old son. Being a young boy he obviously does not handle the cd-roms with quite the care an adult would so there is a definate possiblity for one or more of these legally purchased discs to become damaged. Due to this I wish to make back-up copies for him to use on a daily basis. However these programs have copy protection implemented. Therefore I cannot create the archival copies that I am allowed under fair use as determined by the Supreme Court. 2. In a similar situation I have also purchased several DVDs which are intended for him to use as well. Again, boys being boys, I'm concerned that they will be damaged if he uses them normally day-in and day-out. Thus I would like to format-shift these movies onto VHS tapes, currently the only consumer recordable format with wide acceptance so my son can view these movies without having to have an adult help him with it (as well as viewing in rooms other than the one with the dvd player). Under the DMCA it is illegal for me to bypass either the Macrovision encoding to record directly from the player or to bypass the CSS encryption to use my computer to produce some other form of backup. 3. I legally purchased They Might Be Giants album 'Long Tall Weekend' from eMusic. This album is currently only available in the mp3 format. After buying the mp3s I made them into an audio cd so that I could listen to the album I fully paid for when away from my computer. Under the DMCA this could potentially have been illegal. If it was deemed that the mp3 encoding was an 'access control' then possesion of any mp3 player that allows you to convert them to a raw audio format would be a circumvention device. And of course these particular examples are representative of a vast number of possible cases involving these same issues. aron.
jello.
aka aron.
Note that I'm following here, because as a whole, my original post was triggering the lameness filter, oy!
Copy protection on CDs: Ok, this is a necessary evil to have to reduce piracy. However, as copy protection schemes move beyond current CD technology, people are finding that some older devices cannot read the disc due to the copy protection, and therefore can't use the media as purchased. In addition, it's been legal to make a backup copy of software for private use, but these copy protection schemes generally prevent the disc from being copied in it's entirity; if the disc is damaged, you can 'repurchase' a new one. However, there are sites out there that describe how to circumvent the copy protection to make such fair uses of the material, or small programs that do this, but by the DMCA, these are illegal. (Yes, these programs can enable further piracy as well, but that's not their only intent). The only solution for the fair use here is to spend more money to the media people, which is certainly not fair use anymore.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
DCMA is illegal in several ways.
1) By tying access controls to "Fair Use" materal they are attempting to control piracy by controling access to the data. Although their intension were ok, the way they do this block all legitimate use of the data without designing your own decryption device. Some of the "Fair use" items consumers can no longer take advantage of without breaking parts of the DCMA.
a) Backing up videos
b) Using segments for lawful criticism or journalistic features
c) Sound bites
2) The DMCD is and end run around the materal EVER going into the public domain. Copyright is a time limited monopoly, but if this kind of legislation were to continue movies will never fall under public domain. The copyrights might expire, but with no LEGAL way to recover the data the companies still retain full control and monopoly status on the media.
Some of the falicies that people work under is that we are living in a consumer driven society. The multinational coperations are driving our societies not us. They know exactly what to do to maximize their profits. Would CD's ever have taken off if the media companies didn't kill sales of records by refusing to buy them back. Do you think we have any control now as the media companies try to kill off "Piratable" media formats one by one. What happens when they do this next time? When DVD-RW are cheap and easy to copy.... when will it stop?
"Those who do not know their rights are bound to lose them"
Well, I live in Canada, so the DCMA doesn't apply to me, but I still think that its completely absurd that a law like that could even get to the parlament, let alone be passed.
.class files on his account at the school, but all the source code files were on his hard drive at home. His hard drive crashed, it was completely unreadable, he thought he had lost all his work and would have to start over from scratch, then one the members of his group found a java de-compiler, they used it on the program, and it managed to perfectly reproduce the code, saving him from hours of re-coding the project. Under the DCMA this de-compiler would be considered illegal because it can be used to circumvent the protection compiled code provides, and it can be considered a tool for reverse-engineering.
A couple of years ago, one of my friends was taking a class in Java programming, we had a final assignment where we were supposed to form groups and write a program of our choice (our teracher had to approve the program idea first, of course).
My friend and his group decided they would make a final-fantasy style RPG, after working for about 40-50 (hes not the quickest coder in the world) hours, my friend had a working overwold engine, where he could walk around and it looked pretty good. He had the compiled
I run my TV picture from my Netstream decoder card to it, and when I want to watch movies on TV and I'm running from my Windows partition, there's no problem, that's just fine--I use Remote Selector to turn Macrovision off.
Sadly, there's no Linux equivalent Macrovision disabler--so when I use the Netstream Linux drivers, I get Macrovision. And to add insult to injury, the Linux "miniviewer" program--which lets you play the DVDs to your X session, in which I could watch them unmessedup--does not work for me. So in Linux, I can only watch unMacrovised movies--my Hong Kong imports and the special-edition films from MGM/UA, which does not seem to encode its movies that way.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
However, in order to prevent you from pirating music with it (by plugging in the output of your music system to this thing's input), it has a copyright protection device on it, SDMI compliant. If it detects a SDMI watermark, it will record it but subsequently refuse to allow you to extract it to your own computer. Thus, it encrypts all recordings on it's internal hard drive so you can't just take the hard drive out, plug it into your computer, and extract the copyrighted audio. Thus, under the terms of the DMCA, this is an access control device.
So, having gotten a great deal on a device that records hundreds of hours of sound in a high-quality sound format, you decide to record your daughters band recital, where she has a very difficult flute solo. She pulls it off and brings tears to everybody's eyes, and the device captures it with ultra high fidelity.
Unfortunately, on the way out to the car, you drop the device. The hard drive and the recording is intact, but you cracked the circuit board the rest of the device relies on to communicate with a computer, and it's not ever communicating with a computer again. Unfortunately, the manufacturor has made it impossible to repair or move the hard drive to a new version of that device, because for security purposes, all of the devices use different factory-set encryption keys. (They don't want you to repair it, they want you to buy a new one.) The circuit board can't be repaired either, because you basically can't repair circuit boards that badly damaged.
If you could attach the device's hard drive to the computer, you could still extract your own recording, if it wasn't encrypted so you can't use the device to pirate. (It is safe to assume that somebody would come up with a way to decrypt the data if they can get at it, with brute force if nothing else.) It is, however, illegal to circumvent this protection measure, illegal to create a program that can decrypt this device's encryption format, and illegal to possess one. The DMCA makes it illegal to obtain your own recording because the access protection measure it is behind, put there to protect other people's recordings, is broken.
(Technically, you are allowed to break the protection under the exception it give you, but you must somehow do this without creating or obtaining a method or device to break the protection.)
If anyone wants to know how bad this can get, have a read of Road to Tycho over at the GNU website.
It talks about how reading books that someone else owns would be illegal.
Of course, if the school ever found out that he had given Lissa his own password, it would be curtains for both of them as students, regardless of what she had used it for. School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students' computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn't matter whether you did anything harmful--the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was.
Hi!
I'm the father of an eight-year-old with Down Syndrome. Annie is mentally retarded, and (like many Downs kids) she prizes the independence of watching videotapes on TV, and playing the companion CDs on her computer.
However, a mentally-retarded eight-year-old is nobody's idea of a "safe" user. She has proven, empirically, that crunchy peanut butter applied to a CD-ROM makes the perfect grinding medium for destroying the laser in the CD-ROM drive. She has proven, empirically, just how much popcorn you must stuff into an RCA VCR to make it eat the videotape. She routinely destroys videotapes and CDs.
I can address the problem by making copies--duplicating the media. Annie watches the copy, and when it is destroyed I just make another copy of the original. I can duplicate videos, CDs, and (through a client) DVDs. But--when I duplicate that content I am violating the DMCA.
An MPAA lawyer might ask "why not just buy another DVD? (or videotape or CD-ROM)?" For most media I could--but Annie particularly lives for Disney animation. And Disney, for years, has maintained the practice of only selling videotapes (and now DVDs) for a limited period of time. They will sell a movie, like Toy Story for a limited period of time. Once that title is removed from stores it is not available, anywhere, in any form. So the only way I can permit Annie to watch Toy Story is to duplicate the original, and let her watch the duplicate.
I have previously written to the EFF, offering to participate with Annie in any litigation regarding the DMCA. My offer still stands--I believe strongly in the legal benefits of intellectual property law, and am extremely conscious of the image that I project to my (other) children when I bootleg media for Annie. I'm violating the DMCA--and I know it. And they know it. And they know that violating the law is wrong.
All I want to do is let my little girl watch videos, achieving some pride in her self-sufficiency....
John Murdoch
jmurdoch@windgap.com
My TNT2 Ultra video card has TV-out. When I got it, I thought I could hook it up to my VCR and do some cheap video editing (since I have a capture card). Or I could hook it to my VCR to feed my big TV to play Quake (since my TV doesn't have video-in but my VCR does).
But the card has Macrovision, I suppose to defeat the criminal masterminds out there that would buy a $200 3D video card so they could make VHS copies of DVDs. Both of them.
Why put Macrovision on a stand-alone 3D card?
I have Quake. I bought the one with the mission packs ("The Offering"), and I have the case to it; however, I lost the Quake disc a while ago. Luckily, I made a backup of the directory structure in the disk (what luck!). Unfortunately, I didn't back up the ten audio tracks; the ambient music to Quake (composed by Trent Reznor; a must-have in any NIN-fan's collection!).
Now, I'm stuck with a choice. Should I give in, search for Quake (the Quake disc with WINQUAKE and GLQUAKE; that's what came with "The Offering")? Should I find someone who has the shareware demo disc (which has all 10 music tracks) and rip it to re-burn Quake? Or should I just search for the MP3's of the tracks (via FTP, Gnutella, etc. for a >140kbps collection) and re-burn Quake that way?
From what I've gathered, all of those methods fall under the "backup copy" clause of the license aggreement; however, it might fall under scrutiny because of the DMCA.
One thing really makes this thing ironic: the last time I had the disc, I was playing squake on RedHat 6.2! DAMN YOU LINUX, YOU MADE ME LOSE THE QUAKE DISC!!! (sorry, had to let out some steam.)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
As I understand it, Cue:Cat claims that the simple XOR scrambling they do of their output brings the device under the anti-circumvention provision. This points out a flaw in DMCA: it encourages content owners to be lazy; if (for example) ROT13 counts as "encryption" for anti-circumvention purposes, what's the incentive to use anything stronger? The end result is protection through legal intimidation rather than much more effective technical solutions.
I'm the sysadmin for a small local law enforcement agency. We have a proprietary custody management system that we've had for a very long time, and recently purchased some optical fingerprint capture stations using federal grant funds. One problem, though, was that the arrest data had to be entered twice; once into the fingerprint system, and once into the custody system. We asked both vendors to provide quotes to integrate the two systems, and the total cost was in the five figure range. It might not seem like a lot, but for a small department like ours that's a Godzilla-sized bite out of the budget.
It took two of us less than a month to reverse engineer the file formats and comm protocols on both systems and write our own interface in-house. Both vendors were hopping mad, but there really wasn't much they could do about it. We didn't break any laws, and we didn't violate any contract agreements we had with them.
Because of the DMCA, we'll probably be barred from doing anything like that again in the future. We can't risk having our software disabled, and we won't condone breaking a law. Not even a bad one. We'll just have to pay whatever amount of money the vendor demands, and siphon off the funds from the school district or the street department or whatever. This law is going to cost the taxpayer, one way or the other. They'll either get decreased service levels from government, or they'll pay more to get the same.
SDMI: needless to say, the ability of the music company to control how you can listen to your music, as well as forcing you to obtain a 'new' copy for a different device that you might want to play on, goes against fair use. Having a program that removes the protection but allows the music to be heard on any device you own will be illegal, though the final use is fair use.
HDTV: Broadcasters have been fighting to get into the HDTV standard a bit of data that prevents the ability for digital devices to record a show, even for purposes of time-shifting. Fair use in time-shifting has been upheld by the SC, but having a device that 'unintentionally' ignores this bit would be illegal.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
If IP controls had been in effect from the dawn of media (records, tapes, etc..), I would not be able to transfer my beloved copy of Yogi Yoresson's "Yingle Bells" from it's origional 78 RPM record to CD. I would not be able to transfer my copy of "The Carl Stalling Project" from tape to CD (in which it is not available). I would not be able to preserve a friend's origional Edison cylinder recordings to CD.
If IP controls existed on books from day 1, I would not be able to read my 1885 edition of the 'Last Days of Pompeii', or my 1900's Harold MacGrath books, or almost half of my collection.
What this boils down to is this: If IP is locked to a specific media, the ability to read those media will eventually be lost and the IP will be lost to the public domain and to the general public. If you find a bunch of Edison cylinders, you may not be able to find a player, but you can build one fairly easily. If, in the year 2090, you find a bunch of DVD's, how will you be able to recover the audio and video from them? When the next big thing comes out for video, do you HAVE to buy all your favorite movies again, many of which may not be available?
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I by a GeekBrand(tm) DVD player. Geekbrand is licensed and approved by the DVD-CCA DVD player. GeekBrand's CEO pisses off the DVD-CCA by failing to call them "your impereal majesties". All future DVD releases don't have the Geekbrand key on them.
This leaves me with a legally purchased DVD player that will not show any new DVD's. I am then forced to either buy a an "approved" player, or circumvent the encryption to view legally obtained movies on my legally obtained player.
Excuse me, reality interrupt.
First, you clearly haven't the faintest idea how much a quality designer costs per hour. I have worked for (among many others) grade-school textbook publishers. After spending thousands of man hours preparing camera-ready copy -- graphics, charts, graphs, layouts, formats, cross-indexing, etc. -- I assure you, the words are not the expensive part.
Second, one of the most popular applications used for precisely that kind of document is Quark which at least used to (dunno about now) had physical security. You had to put a dongle on your ABD chain, and if that frob got lost or damaged, you can kiss your documents goodby unless you're willing to pony up for another copy.
And if your copy of Quark or PageMaker decides not to let you access your document because it has decided that you might be a copyright infringer (not of your material, but of their software), suddenly you develop quite an appreciation for applications which crack the proprietary format of those documents and converts them to something useful.
Another example: I have been hired to do programming in Excel, which allows one to "protect" documents. I have been paid tens of thousands of dollars for single "Workbooks". If you were my client in such a case and discovered you had lost the password to a such a custom Excel document, how would you feel to be told that hiring a programmer to extract the code in such a document would be illegal.
And, Gosh, it would never happen that a secretary might quit a job in a huff and neglect to mention what password she used to "protect" her company's Excel spreadsheets or WordPerfect documents.
You know what? It's not illegal to break into your own home. It's not illegal to break into the home of someone else on their behest. It's not illegal to break into your own locked file cabinet. But the DMCA makes it effectively illegal to break into your own electronic home. You lock yourself out of a document, you might be able to card the door (dictionary attack on password), but you most certainly can't break down the door (parsing the document into another format).
In some places (e.g. NY) it is illegal to own lockpicks -- if you're not a bonded locksmith. I do not see any provision in the DMCA which allows for the virtual equivalent of locksmiths -- people who own cracking tools and use them within the law.
Imagine if you had put a document into a file cabinet and locked the cabinet and then, oops, lost the key. Imagine the locksmith showing up and saying "Hey, can I borrow a bobby pin? I'm allowed to pick locks, but not if I use any tool designed to do so."
Welcome to America under the DMCA.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
I produce the Tv show for my local high school, and have recently become the target of macrovision. Sony has saw it fit to cause all their video cameras to immediately self-destruct upon trying to record macrovisioned material. However, using copywritten material for the news is explicitly protected as fair use. Unfortunately sony does not provide a provision for legal fair use. I eventually managed to get around the problem, but I see now very clearly that non-circumvention limitations would severely limit protected speech in my high school publications.
The firm I worked for switched from Wangs to PCs without warning. Suddenly, the previous two years' work was inaccessible. I got together with a friend, and we jury rigged a Wang drive to the PC. (This took cursing and more cable than I ever want to see again.) Then we figured out a way to transfer the Wang stuff as RTF.
What we did to save the department's work would now be illegal under the DCMA, because we circumvented both hardware and software to read our obsolete information.
I also have obsolete images on CD-Rom that were processed over 12 years ago. These images are not in JPG, or even in GIF, which existed 12 years ago. They are on a proprietary format, created by a company which has since gone out of business. By the provisions of the DCMA, I am breaking the law when I try to reverse engineer the format to veiw the information.
The librarian of congress granted two short-term exceptions to the DCMA, but one is library related, while the other is related to obsolete hardware. My hardware can see the CD-ROM, and can see the fact that the files exist, and that they take up size. No software exists to let me see the pictures my husband took. The actual negatives were destroyed in a flood. The company which created this monstrosity no longer exists.
Lest anyone think that only small companies go out of business, please read Business Week for 1984 through 1986, and then discuss Wang computing.
1. Consumer Protection. If you buy frozen food, you have the right to expect that the package will contain the food that is listed on the front. You also have a right to expect that food to be safe for humans to consume, if handled correctly. By prohibiting the direct handling of digital information, consumers cannot guarantee their own safety.*
2. Consumer Protection II. If you were to go to a restraunt, you can be confident that, if the food is prepared in a manner which is unsafe, it will be observed and reported by consumers. Prohibiting consumers from looking to see how digital information is prepared ensures that no consumer can ever be sure if the digital products they buy are safe.*
3. The US Anti-Trust laws prohibit any company from using a monopoly in one area to acquire a monopoly in another. Any company, or group of companies, with a monopoly on the encryption technology must also have a monopoly on all players and recorders. Nobody else can build them. This also means that they have a monopoly on what gets recorded as they can decide who can use a recorder and what for.
4. It has already been decided by the US courts that digital recordings and computer programs are forms of free speech, as talked about in the first ammendment. If you were to digitally record your own spoken words, using a program you had written, and played them back, also using a program you had written, you would be performing an illegal act, even though every single thing you did was protected.
5. If it is illegal to preserve the history that is being made today, then that history will certainly be lost. The past happens only once. Many recordings in the past have been lost for this very reason. This must be weighed against the claimed possibility of a loss which cannot be known. The law favours that which is beyond all reasonable doubt. The certainty of past experience would seem to meet that. The claims on which the DMCA rests do not.
6. Medical establishments will suffer unnecessary delays in the sending and receiving of computer-based medical information. As this is the method most likely to be used only in the most critical of situations, it is likely to result in injury or death. Companies have no legal right to protection from manslaughter charges, especially if the defect is known in advance and cannot legally be prevented from harm.
*By "harm", I'm including such possibilities as:
a) Defective hardware, which cannot legally be examined for such defects, where the defect is likely to cause an electical fire.
b) Sounds, introduced by the decryption process or deliberately added at the time of recording, which interfere with the correct functioning of the senses.
c) Computer "viruses" installed by accident or design which can infect other devices.
d) The inclusion of offensive, indecent or otherwise controlled or illegal material being present on the recording or introduced by the decryption device.
In all these cases, the ability for third-party to lawfully and independently ensure that a product is acceptable is mandatory in every single part of life except that of digital recordings. At no time has there been proven damage to any other industry as a result of such safety and quality assurance.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Here is a real world example for the EFF.
This will require me to tell you all a little bit about my life:
I share a house with two other people, one other computer programmer and an air-conditioning repairman from Costa Rica I will call "John". John lives with us because, like us, he races mountain bikes, and we have built a little bike shop into the house for building and repairing race bikes. He's a good mechanic, but his english isn't very good.
We have a really good A/V setup, but no DVD player. Last week, John brought home a DVD player from Best Buy, and "The Matrix" on DVD. He hooked it into his T.V., only to discover that the picture was, as he put it, "shit".
I told John that the picture was screwy because of a technology called Macrovision, hidden inside his DVD player. It's purpose was to prevent him from criminally copying DVD's onto VHS. John said "but I don't want to do that, I just want to watch it!". I told John that the MPAA had assumed he was a criminal, and put Macrovision in his DVD player to stop his crimes. Because John's T.V. only has analog input, he cannot use his new DVD player. No one at Best Buy told him this. He has to buy a new T.V., which he can't afford.
John got mad.
Then I told John that buying a "Macrovision scrubber" to clean up the signal was against the law, as he would be owning a circumvention device. And I went on to tell him that when he went home to Costa Rica, he couldn't use any of the DVD's he bought there in his DVD player, because they had put a special code in the DVD's in Costa Rica so they wouldn't work, and he had to buy another DVD player when he went back there. If he tried to get around the code, he would be a criminal, because of a new law.
That's when John lost it. He got really mad. He threw the DVD player back in the box, took it back to Best Buy, and got his money back, but also got thrown out of the store for using his broken English to call them "Stupid Bastard Fucking People" - as he puts it.
I tried to calm John down, but I think in his culture they don't have the emphasis on restraint. When someone does something awful to you, you get angry, and you go yell at them. He doesn't understand that in America, faceless corporations do terrible things to people all the time, and you can't get mad, because all your anger will be wasted on some powerless teen-age clerk.
In America, the only way to do exert power is to spend money. That's why I donate to the EFF.
"John" now understands why the two rich guys he lives with only watch movies on VHS.
That's my real life example.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
true story. I bought a %100 legal good to go copy of UT (Unreal Tournament). I insalled it and had a load of fun. Then as will happen the CD fell into the hands of my 5 year old son. Needless to say it did not survive the encounter. Being used to this I had made a backup copy of said CD. But it does not run. Well I then went over to the fine folks at www.megagames.com and did a end run around the copy protection. This is an example of a tool that lets me get fair use from the product I purchased the I think is legal in the context that I used it and the would be illegal under the DMCA. What do you all think?
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
In the comment process for this part of DMCA, I found the following letter. I was surprised that this issue doesn't get more play
Briefly put: data produced or stored by a software package may effectively become the property of the software company, if stored in a proprietary format.
My doctor was 'held hostage' for a few years by his records software. He couldn't change packages without losing his records, even though he hated the software he was using. He finally had to hire a programmer to analyze the his records and write a converter to a tab-delimited database, so he could import it into another software package.
Under DMCA, this would be illegal. The proprietary companies often call their proprietary formats a security measure (to protect patient privacy), so it really isn't a very big step to call this 'circumvention of a security feature'
I don't know about today, but apparently this was not uncommon a few years ago -- and we can expect it to come back if DMCA gives the software companies a big stick