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SSSCA Hearing
larsoncc writes: "According to this article on CNET, a Senate Bill will likely force the issue of adding copy protection to hardware. They are giving the industry 12 to 18 months to come up with a voluntary solution to the "problem" of copies, and if not... Well, you just have to read the article. Insane." Wired also has a story. The IP list published two interesting documents: an account of the hearing by an attendee, and a letter from Intel published immediately after the hearing. Read the letter carefully - note that the disagreement between the tech industry and Hollywood is not over whether or not copy protection will be implemented into every electronic device, but only whether or not this should be written into law. If the SSSCA isn't passed, Intel (and others) get a lot of leverage over Hollywood. If it is, Intel's leverage disappears. But since both sides want to build copy protection into everything, they only differ over the process, we're in trouble either way.
The laws have been in place. And every law has a loophole. It is illegal to murder, illegal to steal. nobody stops. This law will only make life of ordinary people hard, who wont be able to make copies even for personal use. The thieves will find a way.
IF the media thinks it can use laws to curb such things it is mistaken. In a democracy you cant always have what you want, compromises are necessary.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
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It appears that Hollywood and Congress in their ignorance are demanding solutions in the name of copy protection.
It also appears that they are shouting down anyone who objects as enabling criminal activities.
Tech Industry players don't want to be seen as supporting criminals, and don't have the guts to stand up for enabling the user (Other than Intel, who got beaten up for it)
So, in the name of not looking bad, and not getting more bad law, it is a foregone conclusion that we will have copy-protection- it's just a question of whether it will have force of industry, or force of law, behind it.
As much as I hate bought legislation, why didn't the Tech Industry buy off their own Congressmen to compete with this foolishness?
I know MS only started contributing to campaigns in the last presidential election, and they've already patented the DRM OS, and IBM stands on moral and ethical ground of not getting involved- Compaq and HP are too busy fighting to merge to get involved-
By the time they realize what they've lost it will be too late to turn the tide. At least Intel tried.
I'd expect that PC manufacturers will make this protection easy to disable, either by bypassing a chip or removing it, etc... A little solder and or ingenuity and PRESTO! we'll all be modding our PC's! "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." - Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless, 1992 -- The same thing applies to hackers and pirates. They will find a way.
Is that copyright is NOT there to guarantee that people make lots of money, copyright is there to guarantee that society has literature, art, and music, by making sure artists can earn money through creation.
Huge corporations stopping fair use and extending copyright limits for the length of several human lifetimes is unAmerican.
I'm all for REAL copyright that still provides for fair use. I don't trust these goddamn people to do it for me. If it was a legitimate matter of wanting to protect themselves, i'd be more sympathetic, but its not secret that they want to find more ways to fuck you out of your money.
Honestly, I don't particularly care if Windows gets built in DRM - unless somebody can convince me otherwise - because I don't use it.
But, see, the thing is, this mandates DRM - to Hollywood's specs - not only in Windows, but in Linux, *BSD, MacOS, PalmOS, and every single device I own. That's unreasonable.
If I'm told that I'm not allowed to use FreeBSD anymore because the TCP stack doesn't check incoming packets for copyrighted material, and because FFS lets me store mp3's, then I'm going to be really pissed. If I'm told that there are going to be some components that can no longer be 'open source' - or, more importantly, Free Software - I'm going to be really pissed. If every hard drive that I see in the store has built in DRM, I'm going to be even more pissed.
Well, guess what? That's what this bill says. My rights are getting pissed on by this bill, and it pisses me off. I'm calling my reps and telling them that if they vote for it I will not vote for them.
There is one important thing to remember here in this situation: Republicans are not a fan of Hollings. And that especially includes the President, who Hollings has been publically criticizing heavily for his involvement with Enron.
Sure, our government is largely corrupt, and IMHO, neither Hollings or Bush should be in office. But if Hollings does introduce this bill, and it passes through Congress, there would be a good chance of Bush vetoing it. Of course, since the Senate is so closely split with Republicans & Democrats, I'm hoping that with the right pressure placed by us geeks, this bill won't pass in the first place.
One of the quote of a content provider from the article says:
"The truth is, if you cannot protect what you own, you don't own anything."
Unfortunately for the consumer:
"The truth is, if you cannot do whatever to things you own, you don't own anything."
Good grief.. I think there's really 2 possible outcomes here. We can continue to wage the IP seller vs. consumer war or...
Pirates only pirate things when it's perceived as less convenient to purchase them. Today, it is more convenient for those so inclined to pirate something that costs $25 a copy and face the possible consequences than it is to pay the $25.
Now, if the same IP didn't come with 4 pounds of land-fillable packaging and permanently scribed onto its own read-only media and was made available online for say $5... then it might be more convenient for those same individuals to just chuck out the $5 and download the thing. Seems like a pretty simple solution to me.
Of course, you could fiddle with the other side and make the penalty for violating SSSCA (or any other copy prevention law) be instant death.. and what with the micro chip implants and all, that would be easily enforcable.
and for what it's worth: My "car" analogy on the SSSCA... Imagine what it would be like if it were illegal to build a car that could go more than 65 MPH? Good bye F1, Indy, CART, etc.
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
I don't understand how it would be possible to differentiate between content that was once DRM-controlled but no longer is, and content that was never DRM-controlled.
What if I write a story and distribute it? Of course it isn't going to have an appropriate digital signature on it. What am I supposed to do, go to some kind of appropriate authority and somehow publish it through them? What if I can't afford whatever fees they charge? Heck, paying for the right to publish? Talk about a prior restraint on free speech.
But then again, I forget, I'm not supposed to want to publish anything, and even if I do I'm not supposed to be able to do it. After all, the Internet is supposed to be just like television, right?
When electronics are outlawed, only outlaws will develop electronics.
I think we're on the verge of self-destructing our $1T technology industry goodbye for the $50M Hollyweird industry.
Right now, there's some geeky Chinese kid tinkering with a soldering iron. When he's in high school, he'll be playing around with FPGAs. When he goes to university, he'll meet another kid from India (he spent his childhood salvaging parts from our junked computers), and together, they'll develop a way to mass-produce quantum transistors.
Your kids, by government edict, won't have such advantages. Valenti, Eisner and Hollings would rather have the nation's kids watch The Lion King so Disney can make a 5-year profit projection.
25 years from now, your kids will be working in sweatshops assembling quantum computers. Because that Chinese kid and that Indian kid will form the next AT&T Labs. Your kid could have done the same in America, but his government destroyed his economic future for the sake of a fucking cartoon mouse.
On the other hand, the education budget can be cut - if SSSCA passes, all you'll need to prepare your kids for the future is a mop and a spatula. There'll still be some money for the gifted and talented ones -- they'll get squeegees.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
No amount of ranting on Slashdot is going to change the writing on the wall.
That much seems certain.
Besides, why shouldn't effective DRM exist?
The main reason is because it is impossible.
But ignoring that for the moment, DRM should not exist because I should not have to ask anyone for "permission" to do whatever I want with the property I have bought in the privacy of my own living room. Especially not Disney. That's the bottom line.
Monsanto, may I eat?
Coca Cola, may I drink?
American Standard, may I piss and shit?
Disney, may I forget, a little, my miserable existence for 90 minutes?
I don't want to live in that world.
Edith Keeler Must Die
I think we need to remind our congresscritters
Unfortunately, they aren't my congresscritters. I'm not a US citizen and don't live in the US either.
Unfortunately (and more and more unfortunate it is as time goes on) the US technology industry has a large effect on the technology industry worldwide and this sort of stupidity in the States will have at least some spill-over effect in other countries. Don't think for a second that the MPAA and so on won't be pushing everyone's local politicians in name-your-country to do the same thing because "it's good for the US, so it's good for you too."
And there doesn't seem to be any obvious way for a non-US citizen to get a voice in this until long after the fact and until it starts to "bite" at home.
Truly tragic.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Hollings isn't up until 2004, though, and I imagine he'll retire then.
I just want to write free software and give it to the world. I want the thrill of producing something with my peers that is as good or better as what the commercial world offers.
We're not interested in breaking copyrights; I don't even listen to any music from the last 30 years, and the only movies I watch are Star Wars. (Well, almost.)
The net effect of this is to reserve the privilege of publishing software to the elite few that can be certified as providing DRM. The Internet brought publishing to the masses -- now the big guys want to shut that off with trademark domain name rackets, etc. The free software revolution brought the art of producing software, the high art of hackery, to the masses. Now that's going to be shut off, too.
Fundamentally there's no difference between a gigantic big-city newspaper and a tiny neighborhood newsletter. Both should be accorded the same rights and protections. Well, fundamentally there's no difference between Microsoft and me, except Microsoft is big enough to be able to survive this DRM stuff. If it goes through, I won't be able to write software any more. Children won't be able to legally learn to program in the 4th grade like I did. Software will only come from crufty companies, and you can forget about free software (as in speech or as in beer, either one). There will be NO innovation anymore, and society will get what it justly deserves for passing such laws. I guess at that point only a revolution will bring back liberty.
Richard Stallman once wrote an essay dipicting a future of software controls and unreasonable DRM. In the story, debuggers had been declared illegal because their primary purpose was to subvert copyright protections. I laughed the first time I read it, thinking that was ludicrous.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Even assuming that copyright isn't extended indefinitely, which is a pretty big assumption, the SSSCA will effectively kill the public domain, and here's why.
Even when content comes out of copyright, how are you going to get access to it to use, modify and distribute it? Work through it with me. What you will have is (e.g.) a SSSCA-compliant DVD-2 disk containing an AV stream with a watermark that says "I belong to Disney" weaved in.
But it's out of copyright (let's ignore trademarks, although god knows that's a huge assumption), so now you can quite legally give a copy to your friends, or make your own edit of it, right?
Er, how?
You need to strip the watermark, or it will keep screaming that it belongs to Disney, and I very, very much doubt if any watermarks will have dates on them. No problem, you've got a quantum computer that can crack the pathetic 70 (90, 110, 130 or whatever it is by then) year old protection and remove it, right?
Not legally, you don't. You're allowed to do it, but you're not allowed the tools to do it. This is already the case under the DMCA. But the SSSCA just makes it worse because now you don't have (legal) access to any devices that will play any copied or modified versions unless you strip the watermark. Now you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
(Apologies for the re-use of the analogy, but it's a good one). The content is in a safe with a tiny window that means only you can view it. The clock has run out, and you're now legally allowed to open the safe and get access to the content. Only you don't know the combination. And you're not allowed to buy safe cracking tools, because the assumption is that you'll use them to crack open safes holding still copyrighted material.
One way or another, you have to break the law to create a copy or a modified version or to use such a copy, even though the act of making the copy is entirely legal. It's as simple as that.
Now consider that this also applies to fair use before the copyright expires. Bye bye using clips or images for parody, comment or review. Oh, you can copy the clip, it's just that owning anything that enables you to do so, or to view the copied clip, is illegal.
I do believe that the DMCA and the SSSCA are primarily about stopping piracy. There's no sinister long term motive to stop all fair use dead, or to extend copyright (or copy-prevention) indefinitely. No, those are just nice side effects that polarise society into two groups: licensed content creators, and consumers. Nothing in the middle. No independent multimedia artists or satirists, no amateur editors, no Project Guttenberg, no public domain libraries... no public domain. Just corporate producers, good little consumers... and criminals.
That's not a world I relish living in.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I'm no techno guru, so I can't say I understand all the issues involved in building 'secure' systems, but I dunno how they can stop the "laws of physics" (as some posters have put it), and prevent bits from being copied.
They can only make it harder to copy stuff, but then it only takes one person to crack it. They can make it illegal to distribute copies, but then we have huge illegal distribution networks in place. They can put people in jail for posession, but then they can't examine the contents of a CD found on your person without taking it to the lab. They can make a device report every single file you open to some central database or whatnot, but who the hell is going to track billions of needles in terabytes of haystacks?
Just what do they expect to be able to do? Frighten people? Make 'em think, "gee, this is illegal... I'd better not do it?" -- but music and films appeal to young people, the ones most likely to have less need of "respectability".
Is Dirty Data is going to become a new rhetoric, a sort of new morality, making people believe that data can be "filthy" and "rotten". Listen to a Bach copy and you'll be corrupted by those dirty nasty un-authenticated bits??
Is that all they hope to achieve? Get the tech industry to admit that it might be sort of maybe possible, (thus creating pretense that the law is enforceable), and then use the existence of the law to create a cultural notion that copying is bad and can damage your health and well being?
Silly, but I do wonder. Or perhaps they already realise that the game is up. Digital technology is to data what mass cheap produced energy available through a socket in your home is to the local cart and coal merchant. They know the game is up. Their distribution model is dead. And they're just buying themselves some time.
So long as they can maintain the illusion that they still have something to own and distribute (see, we prevent copies with DRM, and we sell online to new markets), then their credibility as a business will continue... just a little while longer. Maybe until they figure out what to really do, maybe just to milk the market until they retire.
Either way, when an empty shell of an industry only has it's image of power and worth left, then "The show must go on...."
This is obviously a bigger problem than cancer, AIDS, world hunger, or the state-sanctioned violence going on all over the world.
They say the SSSCA will "boost hardware sales." That is because you will have to dump the system you just bought and get a new one if you want to take advanage of all of the 'great new online content.'
I think the only solution is to boycott this crap when it comes out. Refuse to buy the new DRM 64GHz system. Waive your right to watch Madonna or Jurassic Park 47 online. Point out to these corrupt politicians that you are not stupid enough to let them obsolete a system that you bought last month.
It is annoying that we (taxpayers) and the hardware industry end up spending the time and money involved in implementing these systems for the entertainment industry, while they sit back and do nothing basking in the glow of the inconvenience that they have caused everyone.
On top of that, after we go through the expenditure and wast of accomodating these paranoid jerks, we inevitably find that it has basically zero effect (except the waste of time and money). How much time and effort was spent on the copy flags implemented on every CD you buy? Has it ever prevented you from doing anything you wanted to the contents of a CD? Have you ever seen a pirated copy of a CD on DAT tape? I haven't.
But still, this is the most pressing issue for human society to solve today.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
How about this?
The first rule covers the establishment of monopolies through legal means. The second rule covers monopolies that develop without legal support (i.e., natural monopolies).
Gentlemen, I am writing you today to voice grave objections to Senator Fritz Hollings and his stance on digital rights management via his SSSCA legislation.
The U.S. economy is in the midst of an amazing ascent from recession, having endured more than any of us might have imagined that it could survive.
The digital information infrastructure is in no small part responsible for our recovery. The ability of businesses to easily and quickly exchange large amounts of information is key to our ever-increasing productivity.
This infrastructure is made possible by a number of software applications that are made available for free, and these applications are maintained by organizations that derive their profits by charging for support.
Let us take, for example, the "sendmail" application supported by:
http://www.sendmail.org
It is both unfair and unreasonable to require this company, who gives their product away for free, and plays no direct role in piracy on the Internet, to shoulder the overhead of implementing digital rights management.
Furthermore, "sendmail" is such a widespread product that E-Mail on the Internet would effectively end if all copies of "sendmail" were
simultaneously disabled.
The SSSCA will take broad sectors of the IT market into violation of the law with the stroke of a pen. These sectors will include the entire free software movement, including one of my favorite companies, Red Hat Software (one of the most successful IPOs of 1999).
The damage to our information information infrastructure will be incalcuable should this legislation be enacted.
This legislation is a result of the lobbying efforts of the MPAA and the RIIA, who rightly desire some control over the perfusion of their digital content. Such content controls could easily be made voluntary by including a small message in an MP3 asking the user to purchase a legitimate copy of the work if a license key was not found in a local encyption key cache.
Instead, these media organizations wish to trample our constitutional protections on freedom of speech and fair use, and take the economy along with it.
Let there be no mistake; this legislation is a disaster. I urge you to vote against it.
So you are saying the ONLY reason someone would EVER want to create is to make a profit? No profit = nothing created??
Explain Linux then.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Interesting quote. Here's another one that's, I think, closely related:
Another that's been making the rounds lately:
All of these seem particularly apropos to what's been going on in the U.S. Congress lately. Crimeny if these hearings (along with the Enron fiasco) aren't reason enough to institute strict campaign contribution regulations then I don't know what is. One wonder what might have been had buggy whip manufacturers had deeper pockets...
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But ordinary people won't pay for the ``professional'' grade of equipment that will be mandatory if you're going to create content. And it surely won't be long before you'll need to have a license to distribute content. So you better just shut up and leave content creation to Disney and other people who know what's best for you.
I hear they're working making `possession of free will' a felony as well.
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