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AIMster Uses Pig Latin Encryption to Defeat RIAA
wiggles writes "On Sunday night, Napster started filtering out copyrighted song names from its system. People have been proposing alternate ways of naming their music files so as to defeat such filtering, but no workable solution has emerged... until now! AIMster is offering a Pig Latin encoder that will encrypt your mp3 titles. They state that, under the DMCA, it would be illegal for the RIAA to reverse engineer their encoding scheme and try and filter the encrypted filenames from Napster. Beating the RIAA over the head with the DMCA is fun!"
Had a talk with someone over at Aimster and found out that it barely depends on AIM. About the only thing it uses AIM for is to look at the buddy list. Everything else (file transfer, searching, chats, etc...) is in their software. In fact, you can run Aimster without having AIM installed (if you ignore some warning messages).
That has no bearing on what I said. I *know* that's what they mean. And in this case, that's not what aimster does.
This in no way appears to protect a copyright holders rights.
Catchty idea...but why bother with the whole big header? Keep the name in the filename, but make a header that's got a value of, say, "cow" in the file, and when decrypted, has the value of "chicken." Same deal as above, but much smaller header.
Cue The Sun...
The DeCSS case showed otherwise. DVDs don't have a seperate key: the "key" is included along with the "encrypted" data. The only secret it relies upon is the algorithm itself. Thus, it's really just a transformation also. And yet, it was ruled to fall within the scope of the DMCA.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The problem, obviously, is that the encryption is not desgiend to protect a copyright holder, sadly enough.
I suppose the only solution is to patent "A means for encoding and decoding filenames to and from Pig Latin". Where'd I put that patent form?
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
Rogerborg:
That's the first really funny variation of the "ALL YOUR BASE" quote I've seen yet (and that includes a few feeble attempts on my part).
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I think of information as things like news, articles, etc. -- things that are informative. You're not going to argue that music is informative, are you? Sure, some songs are, but people who download songs aren't looking to be informed, they just want something to listen to. And what about music that is just music, no words, like classical? It may be pleasant to listen to, but I wouldn't think of it was information.
Information wants to be free? Sure, but what is "information"?
00dzday!!!|! 0\/\/nl0d3day 374ll|(4may p3mays r0mf4y h15tay 3b517ew4y!
Yeah, they should have used a strong encryption algorythm.
Like EBCDIC.
Seriously, though, you could argue that the *list* of songs itself is a copyrightable work (recent stupid copyright changes make databases of public facts copyrightable), and thus DMCA applies. QED.
Unfortunately, lawyers are allowed to use sense, instead of just logic, unlike computers. This is why hackers get into so much legal trouble - it's *almost* logical, but not quite.
joe six-pack won't care when napster is taken away. All the world unconscious morons out there will go back to buying CD's because that's what they're told to do and that's fine with them.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
See the comments above, I know this isn't an encryption, but a "copyright protection mechanism" issue. But I can't let this one slip.
We need test cases to determine what a "copyright protection mechanism" is, and we have to start at the gonzo end and work our way up. Look at DECSS - a 16 year old cracked it without too much trouble. I don't think "It was easy, so they didn't try hard enough for it to count" is going to wash as a defence.
IMO, it's the intent that's the issue, not the quality of the mechanism. For example, the RIIA could argue that just setting the copyright bit in an MP3 could be enough to qualify. Daft, but no dafter than pig latin, right?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Users are not protecting the mp3s with this encryption. They're protecting the list of song titles which they compiled, to which (I think) they do have copyright.
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
>rot13(rot13(plaintext)) == plaintext
No shit? You`re smart!
Can you imagine the poor RIAA schmuck that will have to go through every song manually to decode them mentally? This guy is going to have Pig Latin as a primary language before to long. Thats what the RIAA will have to do, the laws they bought are now binding them as well.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Good... so I'm not the only one? :)
And I would like to agree about buying stuff that I've tried out on Napster, but to be completely honest with you... I haven't bought a CD in the past year. Was it because I was stealing it off of Napster... uhh.. no. Was it because there hasn't been a single thing released in the last year that I've had any interest in? Yup.. that's the ticket.
I swear.. one more boy band in the next year, and I'm gonna have to hurt somebody.
If you haven't checked it out, www.opensecrets.org is a great reference for these things. For the 1999-2000 election cycle, RIAA contributed $46,888 to the Republicrats. The breakdown is 51% to the Republican half, and 49% to the Democratic half.
OpenSecrets groups 24 entertainment PACs under the heading TV/Movies/Music. I don't know that all of these companies / PAC's are DMCA fans, but some of them certainly are (MPAA, ASCAP, Sony, Disney, MGM, and Time Warner for sure are fans.) The group as a whole gave $3,288,367 to the Republicrats (split D's 43% R's 57%).
If you ever had any doubts that most political contributions are for the exclusive purpose of buying influence with both parties (AKA bribery) as opposed to offering support to the one party that they actually want to win, here is proof. Some of the companies actually give money to only one party. This accounts for a whopping $55,000 out of the $3 million given. The rest of the money was contributed by companies and PAC's who are giving significant sums to both parties. The most even split in the Movie/TV/Music category is Disney. R's:$141,071 D's:$140,500. Disgusting.
Please don't take the Garth Brooks approach that "used CDs = piracy."
Oh, I'm not. I'm trying to illustrate the RIAA mentality that seems to suggest that a CD is actually just a nontransferable single-site license for one person to listen to nine songs, all other uses prohibited.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
You mean cat surely?!
Honoured to be a "crypto-head"!
http://blog.grcm.net/
Remember, there are songs on Napster not owned by any of the companies RIAA represents. While what you say is true, RIAA is put into a legal Catch-22... they can't download an arbitrary file encrypted in this manner, no matter how provocative the title, unless they are certain in advance that it's a copyright violation, because if they download something that isn't theirs, then they will be themselves in violation.
True, the protection may not extend to the illegal files, but nobody can be sure they're illegal until they are downloaded, which could itself be illegal. Oops. They will get some 'legal' files if they're not careful (for example, parody files).
For the purposes of the DMCA I don't know that it matters WHAT kind of protection mechanism is in place, only that you can't circumvent it.
A new music format could be double-rot13'ed (that is, plaintext) and if the RIAA sticks a label on it that says "This product is copy protected" then you could be sued if you reverse engineer the player software and discover that it's doing nothing, or even so much as attempt to play the format in a non-sanctioned player.
Well, IANAL anyway...
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
seriously.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
I think that these comments WRT us ( the enlightened internet community ) being afraid of them ( RIAA, the MPAA, the government, etc. ) are ridiculous in light of the greater issues at hand. If what we really want is to continue the status quo, have these huge organizations and bueracricies ( sp? ) running our lives and pulling on the puppet strings, then we should be careful not to piss them off too much while they relieve us of our rights slowly. If what we really want is to change the way things work in this society, enlighten or eliminate our buracricies ( sp? ), take control of our own affairs, and shake off the oppressive yolk of other men who wish to control our lives, we should stand up to them using whatever means we have! We may be defeated in court many times, napster may be shut down, and the next napster will be shut down, and the next, but the economic reality of the situation is that we as a people can no longer be controlled in all the same ways as before. The more they try and grasp and attack, the worse they will fair in the court of public opinion, and eventually public support will turn against them. This is one of the battles in the 'Information Revolution' that we are technologically destined to win, if we just suck it up and fight!
The problem with 'pig latin' and the DMCA is that there is not copyrighted material to protect.
Then solution is to create a plugin that creates an encrypted header (rot13, rsa, enigma whatever) that contains copyrighted information as well as the song name. The header should look like this:
Metallica.MP3 (Aimster Business Plan: Use DMCA to bludgen RIAA as much as possible. Copyright 2001 Aimster Inc.)
Then, decypting the 'copyrighted' portion of the message creates the infringment. Then Aimster sues the RIAA. Even searching for RIAA material will create hundreds of violations. Unfortunatly the larger header will consume a bit of bandwidth :)
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
Un-fay! Ee-way et-gay oo-tay ownload-way ll-ay ee-thay etallica-may e-way ant-way!
--
--hongpong.com
I concur. A quick search for Metallica, which *should* be the most heavily filtered name on the service, returned the maximum 100 matches. Most were songs. I did see a few pig latin variations... A few were non-metallica songs in metallica folders.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
...that it's doubtful that they *could* reverse engineer a Pig-Latin plugin.
And effective kind of protection mechanism.
The DMCA exists to add legal "effectiveness" to just about ANY protection mechanism. That's my point: they just have to put legal threats behind it and if it looks like the threats might deter people, the protection mechanism is effective.
At least that's how it's been used so far.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
AIMsteray Usesay Igpay Atinlay Otay Efeatday RIAAay
You've got a point there.
Having not read the DCMA itself, does it give a meaningful definition of "encryption"?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Nonsense. An inventory list isn't a creative or original work in the slightest. An list of contents could be a trade secret in certain cases (not MP3s; more like recipes for, say, Coca-Cola); but it's ludicrous to suggest that a list of MP3 titles -- a statement of fact -- is copyrighted.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The post to which this reply is attached is an obvious breach of the non-disclosure agreement that was part of the release of the encoder.
I quote:
Can I tell someone about how the Aimster Pig Encoder works?
IMPORTANT WARNING: DO NOT TELL ANYONE how the Aimster Pig Encoder works. Disclosing how the Aimster Pig Encoder works may be a violation of a federal law called the DMCA and subject to up to a $500,000 fine and 5 years in prison!
You're in big trouble now.
I'm sorry, but the average human mind CANNOT decrypt pig-latin in real time.
Even if you restrict it to the average english speaking person and english-pig-latin, it still doesn't hold.
Take it from someone that never learned pig latin as a child. I'm not joking.
You can learn any language as a child, and speak it in real time. Does that mean that translating something into a foreign language isn't encryption? There was one war where messages were encrypted by translating into an indian language (I think Cherokee, not certain), and it was the only code not broken in that war. (Vietnam? Again, not certain).
As someone who learned pig-latin only about 5 years ago, I can assure you that "real-time" for english is 600 words per minute reading, while enlgish-pig-latin is about 20-60 words per minute. That's slower than I speak, by a LONG shot.
Don't assume that just becasue you learned something in childhood that it's a trivial real time decryption. That just means that you're bi-lingual, nothing more.
Keybounce
Actually, no they didn't use de-encoding technology. They opened a shared file on your drive with a name that looks just like their song with a few letters rearranged. No decoding there.
I agree rot13 all the way! I suggested this back when Napster announced they were going to be doing this. It should be trivial to add into gnapster and other open source napster clients. All that needs to be done is have the search encoded before it is sent to Napster servers as well as encoding the song names when they are sent to Napster. The results would also be decrypted so the user still sees the regular query and not some funny looking rot13 encoded string.
Nope, for the same reason killing someone in self defense isn't murder.
--
There is no sin except stupidity -- Oscar Wilde
implesay nencryptioay
tcan'ay esuay
If you pronounce the first part 'C A D M ay' that is.. ;-)
Make affiliate bucks
unfortunately, the RIAA has going for them that the mangling of the bits was done by/with the consent of the actual copyright OWNERS with the express _purpose_ of protecting those copyrights. Of course as we all know, media is media, and it's impossible to actually make the encryption scheme actually directly protect those copyrights.
Hey are you British or something? What's with the funny spellin of algorithm?
As one possible alternative, I'd like to point to the etree project. Their goal is to create a collection of high-quality recordings of various concerts from artists that permit such recordings.
One could argue that it's not quite the same as mp3's (it's nice that it's higher quality, but it's a bit more unwieldy), but it does provide an alternative, particularly one that should be free of an legal problems.
Lawyers are quite adept at making ridiculous arguments with a perfecly straight face and not a touch of irony. You can't embarrass a trial lawyer.
___
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
We (you and me) can. Getting the Supreme court to interpret with us is another matter.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
Answer: Wazzzzzup!, and All Your Base ...
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How about just open secrets?
The RIAA's 98 lobbying moneys
2000 donations by TV/movies/music combined. -- over 100% increase since the 96 presedential election. The entertainment industry is ranked 8 in amount contributed to elections across ALL industries.
Time Warner, Seagram and Sons, and Disney leading the pack.
You can also look up individual investors. Jack Valenti (MPAA) knows which side of the bread to butter--ALL of them, donating equally to Gore, Bush, and McCain. His congressional donations are...interesting.
Hilary Rosen actually has a decent donation list. She gave Hatch 1000, but then took it back (apparently) and donated a decent chuck to a pro-choice group.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
apsternay akesmay 5 7 5
emay eelfay oorlypay
orfay iggiespay
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
s/syllable/phoneme/
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reverse-engineering an effective copy-control mechanism is illegal
I'm tired of seeing this on Slashdot (and elsewhere).
The DMCA uses the word "effectively" in this way: "... such that the method effectively controls access to the work" (paraphrasing). However, this does not mean that the method needs to be crack-proof, unhackable, or even all that great. "Effectively" is not being used in the sense of, "is good at what it does."
It is used in the sense of, "has the effect of." Go re-read the law again, only this time everywhere you see "effectively" replace it with "has the effect of".
"... such that the method has the effect of controlling access to a copyrighted work." is the interpretation that the courts use when they read the law, not "... such that the method is good at controlling access to a copyrighted work." That's why all this nonsense talk about 40-bit CSS encryption being a poor choice misses the point - it's not that the encryption is weak, it's that the encryption is there period.
--
Ah, somebody who DOESN'T need to be clobbered with a clue stick. Good.
It's sad how many people here are missing this point -- that this is merely a nice little publicity stunt by AIMster, but pretty much irrelevant otherwise.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
No. It's because the original artists sold their rights to to recording companies, who would really appreciate having actually *bought* something for their money that isn't taken by others for free.
For that matter, considering that if those rights ARE taken for free, there's no reason for a CD distribution company to pay an artist at all, ever; just do what everybody else does -- pirate the music and distribute it.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
We have the best legislators money can buy. Special interests with $$$ get whatever they want (DMCA, for example). No matter how much we try to educate our elected officials, the lobbyists are going to outspend and outtalk the geeks every time. We can't expect our elected officials to be any smarter or impartial than the OJ Simpson jury.
One plausible course of action is to educate our elected officials as to the limits of their power. By demonstrating both the technology and willpower to work around flawed legislation, these folks will eventually get a clue. Pig Latin encryption is a wonderful idea. It's not the best technology, but a legislator who sees a screen full of Pig Latin song titles will definitely get the message.
I don't know who the Congress was working for when they passed DMCA, but it sure wasn't us.
I don't think people will do that because,
a) they don't know such music exists,
b) they wouldn't know where to find it if they did,
c) the genereal populace doesn't like music that they haven't been told they like by extensive marketing campaigns.
Which isn't to say I wouldn't love for this to happen.
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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
In the ID3 tag, add a haiku or some other original content of your own, then argue that breaking pig latin is a way of circumventing the haiku copyright protection mechanism.
So the solution seems simple to me. Design a simple algoritm for effectively protecting your copyrighted essay or something. After that no one can legaly reverse engineer it and it can be used for other purposes. Right?
::No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater. Than central Air.
What, me worry?
Which leads me to:
I have been thinking the best way to encode filenames would be using the Erasmotron story generator.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
DMCA states that you are not allowed to circumvent access control "without authorization." It doesn't explicitly say whose authorization is needed, but the implication is that it is the copyright holder's.
Thus, if you piglatin-encode "Trapped Under Ice," then Metallica or someone who represents them (e.g. RIAA) is prefectly within their rights to decode the song. If they do, and then listen to the song and it reveals that you violated their copyright, then they can come after you and their evidence was legally obtained.
If they decode a file and listen to it and discover that it is not a copyright violation, then they aren't going to say anything. No one will ever know that they decoded it, and no one will ever be able to prove that they broke the law.
Thus, this scheme accomplishes nothing. Well, it accomplishes one thing: it reveals something about the mentality of the Aimster guys.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yes, that makes more sense for speaking, but I always moved the first letter only, regardless of whether it was a vowel or not, for writing that is.
I guess everyone has their own way of doing it.
...the DMCA states that it is illegal to attempt to circumvent a copyright protecion mechanism.
IIRC, it is not copyright protection, but access mechanism that is illegal to circumvent. This is what makes the DMCA so horribly broken - it allows the RIAA and MPAA to dictate how you can access your legally owned copies of copyright material.
Actually, I used to use pig latin to write to friends back in high school. It gave us something to do during long study halls. Anyway, we used to just move the first letter to the end and add ay. So "luck" would become "ucklay" which looks a lot different.
/. expressions in pig latin:
Some common
1. irstFa ostPa!
2. 13373ay OR 133734y
3. llaay ouryay p3'smay reaay elongba otay suay
Using this method, really short words look very contorted, it doesn't work with long words though: residentpay, usinessbay, etc.
Eventually, we started making up shorter equivalents for commonly used words, then it started becoming very unreadable.
The idea is that the filenames are a copyright of the user & thus attempts to decrypt the filename fall under that clause
If you are sharing your files via napster, you could hardly claim that it was invasive for someone to look at the shared file names.
And no, a file name would not have a copyright -- only creative works are entitled to copyright, so a purely functional title such as "artist - track.mp3" is not going to be protected in any way. Even in pig latin or french or any other language...
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Nitpick: Actually, it won't compile on every system. C99 forbids "implicit int", i.e. you can't declare main without an explicit return value of int anymore; and calling undeclared functions is illegal, too. Sniff around www.comeaucomputing.com for an online C99 compiler.
...except, of course, right in the Slashdot headline. So technically, /. is in violation of the DMCA by publishing the algorithim. Heathens.
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"You owe me a case of beer. Sucka'."
Doesn't have to be a copy protection scheme. The
DMCA says it's illegal to circumvent an access control scheme.
--
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
I don't think many will argue that the DMCA is a flawed and very unfair piece of legislation, and that for many different reasons it should be repealed / struck down. I also think that most would agree that the goal ( of the online community, at least ) in mind is to be able to share / trade information freely, without being monitored / jailed / oppressed / etc. So why are we considering trying to live within the tiny confines of a flawed system, when we should be trying to defeat the system itself? Live with the DMCA so that we can use it's relatively insignificant protections? I say, to hell with the DMCA, to hell with hundreds of years of copyright protection, to hell with intellectual property feudalism. Lets try and get down to the real root issues that people don't like, and solve the problem from the ground up. Trying to cobble together a compromise on top of a hundred years of irrelavant law may be impossible.
$38 mill total huh? I bet that much money could fund an online music business if the RIAA could take their head out of their collective asses long enough to see the possibilities.
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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Didn't Digital:Convergence argue for DMCA protection of their encoding/enciphering even though it had no key?
But they've been sending C&D letters WITHOUT downloading, solely on the title.
I'm sure I'll regret posting something that sounds like a defense of the RIAA, but the DMCA states that it is illegal to attempt to circumvent a copyright protecion mechanism. Inasmuch as Aimster's Pig Latin Encoder does not protect copyright, but just mangles filenames, it's not a copyright protection scheme. Thus, it is perfectly legal for the RIAA to begin using the encoder to request both the regular and pig-latinized versions of songs be removed from Napster.
Then by the exact same argument CSS is NOT a copyright protection mechnism. CSS just mangles the contents of the files through encryption, it doesn't hinder the direct bit-for-bit copy of the files in any way.
usicmay iesflay
ikelay indway -- awyerslay
irrelevantway
So the web site, and all web sites that LINK to them, should be banned, and if they use it it would be like using DeCSS
Victor
Go read the DMCA. The purpose of the encoding doesn't come into play only the intent to hide.
This is the reason the RIAA gets away w/ shit like this, because guys like you do the arguing for them based on your preconceptions which are based onh the assumption that there's nothing sneaky going on.
You can find the DMCA book at Amazon, Iuniverse, and at Barnes and Noble.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
IANAL...
The DMCA requires a form of "protection", which could be encryption or something as rediculous as pig-latin (or Sweedish Chef, for that matter!). It doesn't mandate what type of protection or how strong. As the law stands, "decrypting" a pig-latin-protected work is illegal. This just shows how dumb the DMCA really is.
I see a move/counter move battle similar to the ones between the sattelite TV industry and the sattelite TV pirates coming.
Napster filters certain copyrighted info, people cipher their filenames to get around the filter. Napster updates their filtering methods to compensate for the cipher, people develop new ciphers, napster compensates again, people develop new ciphers.....
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Simply breaking any old encryption is not, nor is it a copyright issue.
This is what has constantly amused me as I've seen the string of stories on Slashdot proclaiming how enterprising hackers plan to turn the DMCA on itself. The DMCA does not ban reverse engineering or breaking of encryption per se. I've read the DMCA and it specifically targets circumvention of copyright protection systems. Unless AIMSter users are encrypting music to which they own the copyright then they're so called claims of reversing the DMCA are so much piss in the wind. The DMCA would simply be a license to pirate/steal/share digital works and protect yourself by encrypting them if that was the case. The RIAA, MPAA and congressmen who drafted the DMCA are not that stupid.
Bottom Line: If you are not encrypting work to which you own the copyright then the DMCA does not apply to you.
Which just happens to be the reverse form of that which the law was supposed to apply to.
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Please don't take the Garth Brooks approach that "used CDs = piracy."
Trading songs on Napster creates a copy of the content. Buying the CD for fifty cents at Goodwill means that you are transfering ownership of the item, but that no NEW versions have been made without the copyright owner's approval.
--
RIAA == decrypt(MPAA)?
Damn! I guess I just broke an encryption scheme...
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Look at DECSS - a 16 year old cracked it without too much trouble.
In the DECSS case, a 16 years old didn't crack it without trouble. The group he was part of cracked it. The guy only wrote the front end, and a 40 years old guy in Italy who wrote the actual DECSS code, but the media focused on the 16 years old, because it looks cooler.
Je ne parle pas francais.
But there are algorithems out there, such as the encheferizer, that can do this. For instance, "Oops, I did it again!" would be:
Pig Latin: Oopsway, Iway idday itway againway!
Sweedish Chef: Oups, I deed it egeeen! Bork Bork Bork!
Valley Girl: Oops, man, I did it again! Oh, wow!
Jive: Oops, ah' dun did it again. Right On!
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
A single "artist - track.mp3" entry can not be copyrightable under current law. A COLLECTON of these entries (probably) would be - the courts have held that a database (list) of publicly available facts is copyrightable, at least under certian circumstances.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I never spotted one for absolute certain before. He has no clue what he's talking about, but he gets +2 Insightful because he rubs /. moderators the right way.
Look at that beautiful plumage!!
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Purely functional works are not protected? What about Operating Systems? They have a creative element to them, but I think it's obvious they are far more functional than creative(especially Linux since it borrows advances and great ideas from other operating systems). So does that mean Windows is public domain? I think you'll have to clarify your point.
And I believe the distinction people were making is that the filelist/playlist is copyrighted, not the filename(which would be really stupid). Since the filelist is personal(music you have purchased), you can provide it on whatever terms you see fit, such as "you can read/'decrypt' this playlist as long as you do not work for the RIAA". Since you 'encrypted' this work to take 'anti-circumvention' measures against RIAA employees(or those representing them), if they 'decrypt' it to see what songs are on it they would violate the DMCA. That's what I've gathered from the discussion so far.
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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
And the difference is?
--
There is no sin except stupidity -- Oscar Wilde
Since this is just a simple transformation and no key is required to undo it, it is not encryption, and thus probably not covered by the DMCA.
--
"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"
Anyway the pig-lation encryption is too weak and won't stand up in court - but consider the beauty of using a number-driven story generator like the erasmotron to encrypt the file INSIDE a story which is copyrighted and is then ENCRYPTED to protect that copyright :-) With a real encryption.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
By extension then anyone could say I've Rot-24 all my files decrypting is against the law. At some point the best evidence rules must give way to common sense in that encryption that the average human mind can decrypt in realtime on the fly is no encryption at all.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
that's absolutely correct -- so if your file and directory structure (which would legitimately be considered valuable information) is encrypted, the RIAA couldn't republish that information. But that's hardly what they're doing, they're searching for file names/ID3 tags that are publically accessable and marking down folks who have a given match...
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Isthay isay absolutelyay illarioushay! Onglay ivelay Apsternay!
look, the RIAA getting away with charging Napster for the actions of its users is one thing, but charging Napster for the actions of a third party company? that's just not going to fly.
Uh, it's not Napster that's "using pig latin," it's cohort of Napster's users.
.. let's take this legislative joke to its logical extremes and demonstrate to the public just how ridiculous it is.
Right, but that distinction is insignificant to the RIAA and to the courts (who, quite frankly, have not demonstrated a particularly vast amount of technical knowledge.) The bottom line is that Hillary Rosen and her legal army can go to the courts and say "Napster promised to filter out copyrighted material, and they're still trading copyrighted material. The only thing remaining that you can do to fix this situation is shut them down."
This would be a Bad Thing (TM) simply because of the size of the Napster community. As you point out, there are always other options such as OpenNap, but you are not going to get the depth and breadth of choice on an OpenNap server as you get on the "real" Napster, simply because there are fewer users. Now, if you're looking for the latest Eminem track, chances are you can connect to any random OpenNap server and be in luck. But if you're looking for a specific song from a specific live performance of a certain band, get ready to spend some time browsing OpenNap servers.
Napster is great because there is a ton of "alternative" material available on it. It would be a shame to see this resource die simply because a few of us had to "push our luck" with the RIAA. Again, I do believe if that there was ever a corporate entity that needed to be a taught a lesson, the RIAA is it. But we need to face reality here, and the reality is that the RIAA has got (bought) the ear of the courts and is currently in the position to shut Napster down with a single flick of Hillary Rosen's gnarled, twisted little finger.
Keeping Napster running does not mean that the protocol cannot be worked on, improved, and deployed in other capacities. I agree with you about the DCMA, though
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I hear the military are using ROT52. Apparently the NSA put a backdoor in ROT26 to facilitate key recovery. Go figure...
Digital Copyright Millennium Act?
Erasmotron happy slashdotting!
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
What does it mean to "Encode" the file names? The Aimster Pig Encoder encodes the file names by simply changing the words in the file name very slightly. For example, "Music" becomes "usicM", "Hello" becomes "elloH", and you can guess what becomes "uckF ouY, ouY pyS astardsB".
Is it considered reverse engineering a scheme if said scheme is advertised (ok not advertised but spelled out) on their web page?
RIAA: "We didn't reverse engineer anything, you told us how to do it."
"Me Ted"
BOSTON SUCKS!
Surely this would result in luckay (syllable goes nowhere since it's the only one then append ay.
Mersault.
Also an alternative.
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There are much better ways to do this.
Just publish some content (that you own the copyright to), using a access-control scheme that is compatable with their own. (For example, publish a CSS-protected DVD.) Then sue manufacturers for making equipment that is capable of playing your copyrighted work.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If you moved the first syllable, luck would become ayluck (because it only has one syllable). You move everything before the first vowel sound to the end, and append 'ay'.
That one doesn't even go to 2.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
No, we all understand perfectly that research has demonstrated quadruple ROT13 is no more effective than double ROT13, which is why double ROT13 is in such widespread use.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Purely functional works are not protected?
That's not what I (or the courts) said. Only creative works are eligible for copyright, functionality has nothing to do with it. Its completely possible for a work to be both creative and functional, and generally creativity is a VERY low bar to clear. But purely factual information ("this song is by britney spears. This song is 'oops, i did it again', this song is 3:00 long", etc) is not creative in any way, and limiting the ability of people to republish those facts would be VERY counter-productive of copyright law.
Particular arrangements of facts (dictionaries, encyclopedias, phone books, etc) are creative in that the arrangement of the collective work itself is an act of creation, even though the constituent facts are not creative. So you can republish all the phone numbers you like, but you can't list them exactly the same way as the phone company does in their phone book.
As to the file list/ directory structure, it would be an interesting question where the threshold is. Since you are sharing the information to anyone with Napster (there is no discrimination as far as I know for RIAA Napster accounts) you could hardly claim it was a violation of your rights for them to view your files (especially since they have no way of NOT viewing them when they search -- Napster decides which search results to return to a client).
If you encrypted your drive structure, and left the encrypted text file containing that info on a public drive, and the RIAA brute-forced it open to find out you have MP3 files, they would be violating the DMCA. But "encrypting" the individual files with pig latin and publishing the individual file names on Napster makes it a much harder argument to make.
If you had all your MP3 files saved as a tar file named "myfiles.tar.mp3" and the tar file was encrypted, I doubt they would be able to legally assault the tar file to determine its contents. If your had an UNencrypted tar file named "myfiles.tar.mp3" and they just decompressed it (which is similar to what is being done with piglatin -- a very common code is being used) you wouldn't have a leg to stand on (anti-circumvention-wise).
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Uh, right, they aren't the same, but rot(n) is (weak) cryptographic enciphering. Ciphers muddle around with the writing without regard for the content; hence they can be applied to anything that can be written down. Codes muddle about with a higher level, changing the symbols for concepts. Converting between ASCII, EBCDIC, and Morse is a cipher problem. Even though french, english, german, italian, etc all use the same set of letters, converting between them is not a cipher problem but a code problem.
Make sense?
Napster is dead in the water anyway. Whatever happens, Napster will never be able to offer good service because it is under the yoke of the RIAA. Napster is certain to be martyred to the point where the only mp3 you will be able to download is an FBI warning. There is nothing wrong with hastening it's demise.
It might even be positive in that it will keep the RIAA busy litigating Napster and not you, running opennap on your cable modem.
Bottom Line: If you are not encrypting work to which you own the copyright then the DMCA does not apply to you.
If this is the bottom line, then the MPAA is breaking the law by going after DeCSS. If I burn a home DVD with my shiny new G4, I own the copyright. CSS is encrypting my work. Since CSS has encrypted a work that the MPAA do not own the copyright for, they cannot block the reverse engineering of CSS, which means that DeCSS is legal.
No, not effective protection mechanism, but a mechanism that effectively protects. Look at previous comments. Someone clearly explained the difference the DMCA makes. The "protection mechanism" just has to be there, it just has to exist to protect access, it doesn't have to be good/effective(the way you were using it).
-----
"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
I compiled the list, so I hold the copyright. I am, therefore, entitled to control access to the list according to any criteria I see fit.
You're making a pretty clear decision by making it available to anyone on Napster. AFAIK, Napster does allow you to block users but beyond that has no provisions for negotiating licensing arrangements in return for access privleges. The act of sharing a directory is not passive, you have given Napster (also by their user agreement) and by extension others on the Napster network the ability to peruse your file list.
And Napster does not return your complete file list (when searching) -- only those entries that match a user search. And individual file results would not be covered under copyright regardless of your licensing statements (or else it would be illegal for me to look up a phone number in the book and tell it to you!)
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Right here.
I'd paste it, but there's this lameness filter thing.
And yes, it will compile and run on any system.
--Shoeboy
Napster is going to die either way. The RIAA has decided that they want Napster gone, and they've got the money to get it done. The only point that's really up for argument is how long it's going to take.
Taking that as a given, why not use the remaining time to have a little fun and point out the ridiculousness of the DMCA?
and its nice to see all those fps that are right on-topic...wouldn't want to turn /. into my personal chatroom or anything-it takes away from the credibility...
you think it's easy, but you're wrong...
Theres so much evil in the world its easy to get some of it confused with the other :)
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Get over it. Both parties. All parties. Damn. It doesn't matter as much as most of these people are talking about, and furthermore, there's nothing any of us can do about it.
Uh, it's not Napster that's "using pig latin," it's cohort of Napster's users. While Napster could legitimately be faulted for a weak-ass filtering system
The exact same thing was said about Napster users and swapping copyrighted material. And look who's in hot water...
---
Check in...OK! Check out...OK!
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
The filters are algorithms not people. Therefore they would have to decrypt.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
For the purposes of the DMCA I don't know that it matters WHAT kind of protection mechanism is in place, only that you can't circumvent it.
And effective kind of protection mechanism.
[sarcastic]
:) much like CSS (ie DeCSS), it's new... not necessarily good, but protected none the less.
Could you say that Napster uses ROT13 twice to encrypt the file names? Would that then protect your files from block, as they shouldn't know the encryption used?
[sarcastic]
It's a cute idea, but since it's a pre-existing encyrption(!?!) pattern, doesn't that make it mute? What they should do is develope something like like ROT13 but using 12 instead..
Under DMCA, reverse-engineering an effective copy-control mechanism is illegal. This is what the RIAA claims that DECSS does.
Simply breaking any old encryption is not, nor is it a copyright issue.
If that encryption is used for copy control.. then it is. This is not.
Just add a filename like:
_COPYRIGHT_2001_GENERALEMERGENCY
The government does not get to decide what a literary work is, you do.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
The workaround by RIAA would be to manually derive the pig latin version of their song titles and copyright those too. This is where we can learn a lesson from Microsoft. AIMster could "embrace and extend" PSS into something with features and semi-intentional bugs. The AIMster implementation of Pig Latin could never be translated by hand, thus requiring the use of the PSS algorithm to generate the pig latin file names. How about something really stupid, like the punctuation used by spammers on Usenet?
As revolutionary as the Napster concept is, the spin-offs (like the resurrection of weak encyrption) are even more amazing! If we can't outsmart them, we can outdumb them!
If they can't find all such services, the media companies can consolidate and buy ISPs until they can just shut down any server they don't like (in progress).
Can you say AOL-Time Warner?
---
Check in...OK! Check out...OK!
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
In the text, which is the important part, is this:
to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work...without the authority of the copyright owner...
I have a strong belief in the Second Amendment.
> (I think Cherokee, not certain)
Navajo in WWII, mainly the pacific theater. It was even on the X-Files. Ooooh.
----
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Clearly Napster is being cracked down on by the RIAA. It was just the next weekend that they were sending out cease-and-desist orders to all "Napster-like services" and hosting ISPs (as reported here on Slashdot) -- including every one of the open products that you reference.
If they can't find all such services, the media companies can consolidate and buy ISPs until they can just shut down any server they don't like (in progress). If that doesn't work, they can convince CD and hard drive manufacturers to include built-in copy-protection (in progress). If the servers are offshore, they can have lawyers and diplomats "educate" those ISPs about how much bandwidth they're "losing" (in progress). If push comes to shove they certainly will receive search warrants, break down doors, and make high-profile arrests, hardware confiscations, and heavy fines (also in progress, esp. at certain university dormitories).
I have a huge fear that our decade-or-so Internet Nirvana will soon look like the 60's, in which a bunch of idealistic college students were absolutely convinced that the government couldn't stop a revolution based on the people's power, and look foolish for it in retrospect.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I'm sure I'll regret posting something that sounds like a defense of the RIAA, but the DMCA states that it is illegal to attempt to circumvent a copyright protecion mechanism. Inasmuch as Aimster's Pig Latin Encoder does not protect copyright, but just mangles filenames, it's not a copyright protection scheme. Thus, it is perfectly legal for the RIAA to begin using the encoder to request both the regular and pig-latinized versions of songs be removed from Napster.
The RIAA is pissing off a huge portion of their fan base. They can see the impact on their bottom line when sales decrease after napster is gone.
What are you talking about? the RIAA doesn't have a fan base. Joe Sixpacks doesn't know who or what the RIAA is. He buys music (or downloads it off napster) and never sees "RIAA" anywhere at all.
Hell, most people I know think that they download their mp3's off of a website called napster.com. Also, I sincerely doubt many Jow Sixpack's got high speed access for Napster. A Jow Sixpack I know got cable because he wanted his games to run faster... when I asked him if he wanted to play online sometime he didn't even know you could do that.
And more importantly, when people start flocking to independent music that doesn't pull these kinds of shenanigans, sells music for reasonable prices, and generally doesn't treat the music-buying public as the enemy.
I don't see the hordes of teenyboppers that are the RIAA's favorite markey moving toward independent music any time soon. Or 95% of the rest of the music buying population.
Bill
Your trying to find a band but can't figure out how to spell it in pig latin?
Like, Oingo Boingo? This is just gonna be another cause of baldness.
Everyone pullin their hair out because they can`t figure out how to spell stuff in pig latin.
Thats what you get when you teach pigs how to speak!
No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater.
And, I have to add, the 'CSS' isn't either of these protections. One of them is a hardware setup where a program has to unlock it before doing certain things (which doesn't even involve the content, just the keys), and one of them is just selling disabled media. CSS is the actual content scrambling system that the keys decode. CSS is not involved in the lack of key copying ability.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
To be honest, I don't think the pig-latin thing is very good way of doing this. Better at the least to Rot13... at least it sounds like some impressive encryption. For extra protection because of more difficult decryption, better make it Rot1. ;-) I don't think the judge would be very impressed to hear case on the "illegal distribution of etallicaMay" ;-)
Also, a search on Napster only returns some files from your list(whatever matches the query). I'd imagine the RIAA would want to know ALL the files you're sharing. For that they'd have to 'browse user'. That could be construed as violating "your distribution terms" as I previously described. So despite the fact that Napster makes no discrimination, you should be able to(unless there's something against that in a Napster EULA for using the service in which case yours is invalid).
-----
"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
While this is true, I doubt that this type of usage is significant. With the spread of consumer CDR units, a large focus is placed on trading quality recordings. In fact, those who tape shows of a band I listen to specifically request that their recordings not be encoded into mp3 due to the lack of quality.
People have been trading live shows since long before napster was around. I bet it has had little impact on most people interested in enough to become involved.
This is funny - it had me laughing out loud - but I do have a few concerns about using legislation of which we don't approve in order to beat the nasty people round the head. Would Aimster react positively or negatively to someone producing an Open Source reverse-engineered piece of sofware for doing this? What if the RIAA did it themselves? Is this substantively different to DeCSS?
So, it's funny, and it's parodying the whole mess, but let's be careful, now. Do we see ESR writing closed source code to get back at M$? No, we don't...
Now, someone of superior intellect may be able to reverse engineer the algorithm solely by looking at the before and after strings! However, the fact that such reverse engineering is done without the aid of any computational devices or even a pen and paper in no way defeats the fact that this person of superior intellect reverse engineered the encription scheme.
The web page does say the encription scheme is similar to the well known pig latin scheme. But it doesn't say how it is different. That is the key point.
A natural language can be an encryption scheme as was proven quite wonderfulyl then non other
but the American goverment itself which used teh Indian Navaho (spell?) language in WW2
as an encryption scheme to keep their secret from the Axis countries...
Gilad
Gilad.
Seriously.
.. remember that bands like Phish and the Dead encourage their fans to tape their live performances and swap them with other fans. This is exactly the type of application that Napster was built for.
This is just going to be more ammo for the RIAA. When Napster says to the court, "We're filtering out all copyrighted songs," the RIAA can just come back and say "No they're not; they're using Pig Latin now." This will likely result in Napster being shut down entirely, regardless of the promises that David Boies and the rest of the team make. The RIAA has always taken the position that Napster users will do whatever is necessary to trade music "illegally." They will claim that this just demonstrates their point.
This would be shameful since there really is a lot of music legally traded on Napster. And not just the indie stuff, either
Now, I'm not siding with the RIAA here. They're a bunch of greedy bastards with little to no interest in the artists they claim to represent. But they're also a bunch of greedy bastards with a vast legal team and a bunch of sympathetic courts. The way things are right now, Napster can at least be salvaged for those of us who use it to trade "legal" material. So let's not goad the RIAA any more than we need to.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
using the DMCA surley can't work as a defence. Because you are circumventing protection...they can outlaw its use with the DMCA and you are right back in that loop all over again...
A nice idea, but you really dont want to add to the already large file size. The solution? ROT13 the last 256 bytes of the MP3 (ID3v1 tag) and then XOR the MPEG header by the MP3 filename minus its given extension.
You are hereby controlling access to the MP3's contents, and copyrighting its ID3 text value (over 200 characters). This will hold up under the DMCA, and simple ROT13/XOR will not add to the file size. (XOR probably isnt a good idea, but any rotating cipher would work just as well)
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Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
If somebody had told me 4 years ago that any of this stuff would happen (the DeCSS t-shirts, legally protected pig latin "encryption", etc...) i would have laughed out loud. I saw this story today, and i thought "okay, this seems logical" but then upon taking a step back, holy shit the computer culture has gotten even sillier than it was before...
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Play Six Pack Man. I
and will continue to buy Britney Spears and N'Sync in droves at Walmart, no matter what the RIAA does.
Is there a difference between the two? I've been able to put the author in the title field and the title in the author field and have it return results correctly.
That's really the fatal part. It means that the RIAA, acting with the authority of the copyright owner, can do whatever it wants to unencrypt the works....
If, for some reason the RIAA was violating the DMCA, how long do you think it would be before the same lawmakers who wrote the damn thing in the first place fixed the bug in the law to make AIMster the bad guys?
And, just curious, but totally unrelated, of course, but how much has the RIAA and its members given to the Republican party in the past year?
How 'bout the Democrats?
hmmmm?
Reality has a liberal bias
"The RIAA is pissing off a huge portion of their fan base."
The RIAA has a fan base???
Bullshit.
The vast majority of music-buyers are not technogeeks who will keep up with the newest way around RIAA-imposed restrictions.
What groups have become popular because of Napster, OpenNap, Gnutella, or the file- sharing program of the week? The groups passed around are the groups that are popular because of radio play and MTV.
They still control those channels. And Joe Scr1pt K1dd13 will still seek out the groups that he knows are k3wl, because MTV tells him that they're k3wl.
After Napster and its clones are closed, the RIAA will see their sales rise for a short bit, then level back off.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
"pushing for global piracy networks doesn't make sense because it isn't winnable. I'm not saying that there won't always be file trading networks around -- just that they'll be shut down frequently, and that finding them will probably be more trouble than it's worth."
Don't even bother with this line of reasoning, it isn't sound. One file-sharing service being shut down doesn't mean that all will, one hundred file-sharing services being shut down doesn't mean all will. Even if all that changes is the way the RIAA does business, it'll be worth the trouble.
-HobophobE
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
Sure the "encryption" scheme is weak, but it raises an interesting question.
What if people started using a third-party real encryption codec which also tells them what to search for using a simple translation dialog? Would it be illegal for RIAA and Napster to reverse engineer this?
/Smuffe
No way. While cat and echo are both pretty much functionally equivalent cryptography suites, I'd have to say that echo's user interface is far superior.
When I'm inputting a lengthy chunk of ciphertext into echo's decryption engine, I rely heavily on its advanced editing capabilities. If I discover a typo at the beginning of my inputted ciphertext, for instance, I can hit control-A, and echo jumps me back to the beginning of the line, where I'm just a few characters away from my error. If I try that in cat, I get:
What the hell is that? I'm sure the mathematicians and programmers who wrote cat were smart people, but why couldn't they spend a little extra time incorporating echo-style advanced editing capabilities?
And while we're on the topic of cat's user interface, what's up with it not exiting? After I decrypt something in echo, it drops me back to my command prompt, where I can quickly email the decrypted message to my cohorts. Cat, on the other hand, makes you do some control-C or control-D mumbo jumbo for no apparent reason.
To each his own, whatever floats your boat, yada yada, but I prefer echo's user friendliness. Comparing echo to cat is like comparing Microsoft Windows to Microsoft DOS.
Hey that's my Sig!
"This amp is special, see all the knobs go up to 11, that means it is one louder than other amps"
`(A) to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
The problem, obviously, is that the encryption is not desgiend to protect a copyright holder, sadly enough.
I'm the best IRC client ever.
If the people are giving the tool away for free, then the RIAA dosn't even need to reverse enginer it, they just have to download it.
Rate me on Picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
I think the big gap here is that naming files something else is not encrypting the actual files themselves. It's all pretty funny and pokes fun at silly laws, but seriously, do we want it known how easy it is to get past filters (so that they find a better way to control copyrighted music)?
--
Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Isthay isway osay oolcay, atthay eway areway eatingbay emthay atway eirthay ownway amegay.
Thanks,
Andrew Pinski
Then they completely fail to understand the DMCA. The reason why it's illegal to defeat their encoding schemes is, not as stated in another comment down to the triviality or otherwise of the method, but because the RIAA are stinking rich. Conversely they can do whatever they like to us because we're not.
This is my World Wide Web of Whatever
s/\b(.*?)(.{1})\b/$2$1/g;
I expect that I will hear from Aimster's lawyers soon. Slashdot, watch out! You're housing illegal code!
Now if someone wants to sing this and record it to mp3, etc, feel free.
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Or maybe we use H4X0R 5P33K to encode the filenames.
Metallica would become M374111C4
Greatest Hits would become 6R347357 H175
RIAA would become 14M3R2
and so on.
One could get the number of possible ASCII characters down to 64, thus making a basic compression algorithm possible. Then, to decode the data, those obscure compressions can be run through a program using an algorithm that converts them into plausible words. This algorithm could even be patented to screw up the legal system further for the RIAA.
The more we abuse the system, the more likely the flaws will be exposed.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Huh? The Cuecat people lost. They didn't have any legal leg to stand on, as barcodes are not copyrighted. Which they can't be, any more then credit card numbers or social security numbers can be copyrighted. They're id numbers, and enjoy the same sort of copyright exemption as names of things. You don't have to pay to say the name 'Microsoft', do you? (Trademarks are different, but they merely keep you from identifying yourself as said name, not copying it.)
Not to mention the fact they're also too short to be copywritten, and too unoriginal, and weren't even created by the cuecat people! If anyone owned the copyright on them, it would be the people who assigned them in the first place! Who clearly want you to copy them, as they print them in plain text in two forms (a machine readable format, and arabic numbers) on each item, and sell machines to copy that number into a computer.
Merely scrambling an uncopyrightable work doesn't give you any sort of rights to the results, even under the DMCA.
I love how people are using this as an example of how silly the DMCA was. In reality, they never even got to court, as they would have been laughed out. They really just started harrassing random people with no legal justification. Their legal counsel should be disbarred.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Now if the authors of Pig Latin had simply had the good sense to GPL it, private interests like AIMster wouldn't have been able to hijack it.
No it dosn't, but a bit-for-bit copy of a DVD would be nothing more then white noise, completly useless. I wish you people would actualy learn how CSS worked before flapping your jaws like idiots.
The decryption keys are on a physicaly seperate part of the disk, if you do a 'bit-for-bit' copy, you simply won't ever be able to decrypt the signal. So go ahead, I doubt the MPAA would care.
Rate me on Picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
>There was one war where messages were encrypted by translating into an indian language (I think >Cherokee, not certain), and it was the only code not broken in that war. (Vietnam? Again, not certain).
:)
I believe this originally occurred during WWII and it was the language of the Navajo (sp) tribe.
(my first post to slashdot
You are not allowed to decrypt this message.
Real pig latin moves the first syllable to the end and appends 'ay'.
Tried looking up a FAQ or some other 'formal' definition but no ucklay.
---
While the Pig Latin filter is a good start, a more advanced filter such as the & gt;Swedish Chef, et. al.</a> filters would be much tougher to "crack". And lets not forget rot13.
Seriously, though, if the user is given a method to find songs (i.e., "encript" the song name), couldn't the RIAA use the same technic to find the songs? The only viable alternative would be for everyone to have there own encoding (obfuscation) scheme and share this with their friends, requiring the RIAA to "decode" the names. Telling how the encoding works would defeat the protection offered by the DMCA.
The real silver bullet to good programs is caffeine; lots and lots of caffeine! *twitch, twitch*
There was no "key" with the enigma machine either, so I guess that wasn't encryption. And this whole time, I had thought it was some kind of big deal....
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
Okay, so I just got on Napster and nothing is being filtered out. Also...that isn't Pig Latin that Aimster is using. It would have the first letter of every two-or-more syabillic (is that even a word?) word at the end followed by "ay." All Aimster is doing is moving a letter to the left. How hard would it be for Napster (or whomever is actually doing the filtering) to simply add those to the filtered list. Sure, it will work for a while, but not forever.
Phone fraud, reckless misuse of advanced technology, theft of intellectual property...and the list keeps growing.
well, i found one: try beatles yesterday. i guess they're doing it by title only and not artist, a bunch of other beatles stuff does come up.
The fact that the webpage describes how the encryption works and gives examples of how to search for encrypted filenames completely negates any penalties that could be incurred. Napster can simply block any filenames that the page suggests users search for, i.e. any encrypted filenames. They shot themselves in the foot by advertising.
The "key" is knowing how to arrange the letters. If you use ROT13, the key is 13. If you XOR everything by 42 the key is 42.
As silly as it is, I think the logic is valid. I personally prefer double or even quadruple ROT13 for maximum safety, but this is an interesting application of the "logic" used to create the DMCA.
There's no doubt that as more and more legislation is passed, we'll see more and more examples of ludicrous conslusions drawn from the tortured reasoning behind the legislation. Face it, our generally techno-illiterate legislatures know what they want to do, but they don't know how. Preventing people from ripping off the record companies is a reasonable goal (not that they have made any effort to keep the record companies from ripping off the consumers, but that's a slightly different issue). However, any legislation that is going to work, has to crafted by people who not only understand intimately the capabilities of the state-of-the-art, but have enough insight to predict what things might be like 10, 20 or more years down the road. The current legislation smacks of 19th century law (which isn't bad in itself) and seems to completely fail to understand 21st century technology (which is disasterous).
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Is this actually true? References? As far as I've heard, the rotor configuration was parametrable, and indeed changed regularily.
According to the article I read, the 72 hour clock doesn't start ticking until the RIAA submits their list to Napster. Since the ruling was just made this morning, I doubt they've handed the list over yet. Even if they have, Napster still has ~3 days before they have to "flick the switch."
You have to differentiate the filename from the file itself. This pig-latin thing encrypts *filenames,* not files. So if you see a file called "ackstreetB oysB," it's not a violation of the DMCA to download it.
What *would* be a violation (at least according to the aimster people) is if the RIAA wrote a program that converted "ackstreetB oysB" to "Backstreet Boys" and then used that to search for pig-latinized filenames, because that program would be a "circumvention device" and would violate your copywrite on the names of your files.
So as long as they do the "decryption" by hand, they aren't breaking the law. It's when they write code to "circumvent" the encryption that they get into trouble.
the whole p2p and file sharing industry should cooperate and try to develop a file sharing system that will NOT be countered by any government or institution or at least be stopped.
after the napster controversy, there are numerous programs out there spawning in the hope of gaining market share from napster. better features are included in their program that is deemed to be 'unstoppable'.
i just suggest that all of those product makers like freenet, aimster, etc. create a universal program with plug-ins for each other.
it is nice to encrypt the data while having a p2p transfer system. you can also have index servers located worldwide that can be donated by people. you can also use the power of search engines to look for the files that you want thereby making the system rather difficult to shut down.
for the music and movie industry, i think that the concept of pay per view or pay per hear is also good. like a person can donate a $0.01 TO THE ARTIST each time the song/movie is played. in the long run, the artists are happy and you are happy. at least you can get the most updated songs all the time.
ha. RIAA may have won the first round. but let's wait and they will not be able to stop everybody from sharing files.
this concept is not just for the music sharing service. this can be good to share files like newest software versions without having to create a download site. this will reduce costs for companies and improve the overall speed of the net.
i hope that even though the unfortunate event of napster happened, the internet will not be and SHOULD NOT BE controlled.
johnlaw
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Owhay areway ouyay entlemengay? Allway ouryay mpay3 areway elongbay otay usway!
;).
PS I'll give props to the first person to write an on-topic haiku in piglatin
Alex Bischoff
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Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
It would be more valid to argue that the Aimster program itself is illegal under the DMCA because it was designed to circumvent a copyright protection scheme. But there are non-circumventing uses for a program like this: slowing down hackers -- er, crackers, I mean -- who break into your system looking for files, for example.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Right - I've just looked at all the discussion on /., and I'm going to post another comment, and it's a congratulation. Well done, Aimster.
/. is _right_ in the middle of their target audience) to see new things isn't always easy, so - time to generate some free publicity. And it's worked. People are debating the rights and wrongs of their (pretty specious, I suspect) argument, they're getting thousands of hits from /., and lots of links from the news agencies, probably.
We all know that this isn't really going to make anyone safer, or stop the RIAA doing anything. In fact, I doubt that Aimster really care how much they upset the RIAA, or if the RIAA care themselves. My suspicion is that it's a publicity play. Getting your users (and
Which is what they wanted. Nice work - you've got your users covered, you've made RIAA spend some money on _really_ checking with their lawyers, just in case, and you've raised your profile outside your user network, too. I rather like it!
This is what they've been doing. They alienate their fans by cracking down on "pirating", but whenever their profits show a dip, they immediately shriek that their business is being ruined by evil pirates.
They're not shooting themselves in the foot here... they're planning for the future. If they can bite the bullet and eat a loss now (as disgruntled 16 year olds quit buying music, waah), then they can whine about their losses to the government and get even MORE restrictive copy-protection laws passed. Their ultimate aim is to do away with fair use altogether, and go to a pay-per-listen model. And then they can rake it in.
Very clever, in fact.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
They've taken aim square at their foot, and pulled the trigger. Let's see what happens as they shut napster, opennap clones, and other servers down, and piss off not just us geeks who will grumblingly return to FTP servers and ratios or guntella/freenet/mojonation/etc., but the millions of Joe Sixpacks who got highspeed access just for napster.
The RIAA is pissing off a huge portion of their fan base. They can see the impact on their bottom line when sales decrease after napster is gone.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Can someone give an example of something that is filtered?
I have been trying different titles and haven't been stumped yet....
Shit here. If you do something with illegal or unconstitutional or detrimental effects it doesn't matter if the DMCA says you can do it. By using this software your directly violating court orders. Oh well.
According to sections lifted from the Privacy Policy for Napster, they will:
"We also ask you after registration if you would like Napster to scan your hard drive(s) for material that you would like to share with the Napster community. This scan, of course, is optional, and you choose which directories you would like to share with other users.....
In addition to information on your Internet connection, each time you login to one of our servers, the Napster service collects your user name, connection speed and the names and location of the files you have chosen to make available. All of this information is publicly displayed and/or available to any user of the Napster service, and may be recorded by any other user who chooses to do so, or by Napster"
In signing up for Napster, don't you agree to these conditions. If so, why the brouhaha about them scanning file names. It's not like they didn't SAY they were going to do so.
Course, if you're _only_ getting copyrighted material, then you might have a problem with this...
BTW. Just being Devil's Advocate here. Personally, I've gone out and bought more CD's after listening to the artists on MP3 that I would have without such a test-drive. When I still had broadband I regularly tried out stuff by artists and bought the stuff I liked.
Arguing with a typical adolescent parasite about Napster, I asked hmi what the hell he did for money. He cooked. So I said, "Make me a samwich, bitch," and he took offense. Seems he didn't want to work for free. Get it?
The problem is that pig latin is a natural language and therefore might not qualify as an encryption scheme. In fact, copyright holders are entitled to the sole right to translate their work. Hence, the RIAA could claim that the songs on AIMster are their song titles, translated into "pig latin" and demand that the pig latin translations of their song titles be blocked.
It would be funny to have the RIAA submit a list of songs to be blocked, in pig latin, though!
Lenny
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
They use big fancy lawyers and develop deceitful rules/laws for their own benefit. Nice to see them [corporations] getting a spoonful of the same crap they feed us! I'd be willing to bet that this is just the beginning of the 'Wording Games' and as more people understand the power of the laws they've helped to pass, we'll soon see them have no real impact on the way folks operate!
LFS. Have you built your system today?
Do the anti-circumvention clauses of the DCMA come into play when the AIMster people TLD everyone what the encryption was? I mean the RIAA doesn't actually have to "crack" the encryption, they just need to write an english to pig latin converter b/c they already know it is pig latin.
Why is everyone trying to circumvent goverment judicial actions and sanctions. We know how this encoder works. I don't need to reverse engineer it. It flips the word and puts the first letter of the word at the end, that was hard. The court can just rule this, "Block all file names of blah blah, including the pig latin encoded strings." There, it was beaten. Now go to the store and pay for your music.
I'm not sure what's getting filtered. I'm still registering a lot of hits when I search for copyright stuff.
Janimal
What they should do is write a napster client that allows you to search for the 'unencoded' name, and encode it before it sends the request to the napster server. Then when the song is found, it should take the encoded file and convert it's name back to the unencoded form.
:)
I'm sure a million people have thought and suggested this, so what's one more post?
o-wor-n-wor-e-wordip
Rich
Even with this solution, the RIAA still prevails. Their goal was to reduce the amount of illegal trading of music. They are well aware that there will still be a mere 1% or so that can find alternate solutions. But this is an insignificant impact. The few techie geeks (no insult implied here as I fall into this category as well) that go out of the way to get these files are having to resort back to the old days of trading (almost) newsgroups, irc, ratio ftp sites, etc. Or in this case multiple pieces of software that becomes time consuming to get what you want.
Is this a good thing?
Of course the point of this whole mess is to force the RIAA, MPAA, etc... into fighting the DMCA in court. Ironic yes, but I wonder if we're not actually starting to use the protections offered by the act they way they should be used.
Since Napster is no longer a suitable example, I'll refer to Gnutella. With a fairly simple layer of 'copy control' encryption layered on top of the file transfer protocol, it becomes illegal for the RIAA to try to stop users from trading files. It forces them to fight the DMCA, which they lobbied for, but at the same time, it protects individual's rights to do as they will with the stuff they have bought. I want to share all my Eminem CD's, which is legal under 'fair use' but will get me whipped with a garden-hose if the RIAA has their way? This scheme allows me to do so and makes it a crime for RIAA to try to figure out that I'm doing it.
Perhaps we should take this seriously, not to get rid of the DMCA, but to exploit the hell out of all the protections it offers to those who know how to use and abuse them while we still have the chance.
Aimster claims to do this with some pretty good encryption, but alas, it is entirely dependant on AIM, which, frankly, sucks donkey balls. I'd much rather see the OpenNap or Gnutella guys develop something similiar.
C'mon, Aimster. Let's see a non-AOL dependant version of your software!
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
This won't work with "Napster 2" either.
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This all sounds logical; if you can't defeat the enemy with conventional means, use their own nefarious ways against them.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Weakness of the system is not relevant under the DMCA. CSS could have been XOR 255 and DeCSS would be just as illegal. Judge Kaplan didn't say anything about CSS meeting any standard of being difficult to break as a part of why he convicted the defendants.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
All napster did was put the filter on the AUTHOR field, not the TITLE field. So you can still download all the metallica you want, without downloading any Etallicamay.
Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill them right back!
This particular approach is bogus, since as others have pointed out, the DMCA is not about methods of encryption but about methods of copy control.
This does raise an interesting question. How can we consumers use methods of copy control to prevent excessive and DMCA-illegal snooping by the new corporate thought police?
--LP
You hear that Jack Valenti?!?! *OINK! OINK! OINK!*
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer