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Bruce Perens Plans On-Stage DMCA Violation
cyber_rigger writes: "From this
article at infoworld Bruce Perens said he plans to break the DMCA
during a presentation on digital rights management (DRM) Friday afternoon
at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diego. Technically, under the DMCA, Perens' explanation
of the technology makes him liable for a fine of US$500,000. You have to
admire his spirit."
I'd guess his demonstration won't be something on the order of breaking the encryption scheme on DVDs. It will be something so obvious, that people will wonder, "why is that illegal?". Just to so how silly the DMCA is.
Except that if most people started doing this and got arrested, their families would go hungry. It's perfect for someone like Bruce, who has a bit of recognition surrounding him to go out and do this. Most people don't care about computer people getting arrested for doing things that they couldn't figure out how to do. The average person thinks it "serves them computer hackers right trying to be above the law." They think the law is morally right and is to be followed without question, otherwise "why would it be the law?"
(The answer: Because the members of our lawmaking bodies are being bought left and right, with the notable exception of Rep. Boucher from Virginia)
<high-level position here>
<name of stupid small company here>
2. I am not a U.S. citizen, but am legally on U.S. soil
3. Announcing this publicly places me at significant risk for indefinite incarceration, if the DMCA and Patriot Act were interpreted in the extreme (I may be a technical terrorist, bent on creating economic mayhem in the U.S., by encouraging the use of technology to defeat DRM for purposes of traditional fair use).
Some of us do engage in civil disobedience, at some risk, though perhaps not as dramatically as Mr. Perens. But, laws like this can not ber permitted to go unchallenged.
You could've hired me.
Funny as it may be, I don't think that 'stupidity' accurately describes someone who takes a risk to defend a fundamental freedom. Sorry.
All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)
Taken to a larger scale, this is a classic tactic : flooding the oppressor with so many cases that enforcement of the law becomes impossible, provoking the oppressor into stupid actions. Trivial technical violations are to be favored over full scale confrontation because gradual erosion of the oppression in a non-violent way minimizes the likely damage to the parties. In the case of the DMCA, the battlefield is in the livingroom of the average consumer : the banalization of DMCA violations by consumers defending their right will be the turning point of the struggle. Until that point, open daylight is where everyone should stand to fight : a few activists are easy to control, tens of thousands of normal postings from perfectly legitimate sites all over the network are not. Keep posting comrades !
Hopefully they will arrest them....I know these days constitutional rights are not in style, but you would have to think a court would rule that an academic presentation is speech. How could they not?
But in this case, they're talking about a $500,000 fine. I'm not sure how something like that works out if you can't pay it -- whether they substitute jail time or what. But supposing this guy was fined, and paid it, is that really civil disobedience? Somehow writing the bad guys a check and saying "in your face, man!" lacks the punch of imprisonment.
My deviantArt site
If he gets arrested and then jailed nothing would have been accomplished
Uh... I think you miss the point.
He intends to be arrested. And jailed. And to fight the law in court, which is the only place it's ever going to be overturned.
If he doesn't get charged with a violation of the DMCA then nothing will have been accomplished -- failure to enforce a law does not invalidate the law (there are caveats, but a singlular failure does not do so).
I don't think he's looking for a loophole. I suspect he's planning to violate it in the most flagerant manner possible to ensure that he's charged with violation.
The tricky bit is to violate the DMCA and only the DMCA. You really don't want to violate the DMCA and half a dozen other laws -- even if you get the DMCA ruled unconstitutional you'll probably be celebrating in jail.
I favor marijuana legalization, but when I used to pass the pipe around in high school I was hardly engaging in civil disobedience. Nor is it civil disobedience to share mp3s on an anonymous P2P network.
Civil disobedience is a statement -- the action is secondary, a way of showing that you're serious. Unless you're prepared to notify all relevant authorities of just exactly which laws you're breaking and why, don't pretend to be doing it for the sake of freedom.
My deviantArt site
Thats a spirit... or is it? If he gets arrested and then jailed nothing would have been accomplished. Only if Lawyers can get him off the hook after he's done this, then it will be a victory.
It is called civil disobedience, and it is often the only way to get injustice corrected (and the DMCA is extremely unjust).
If enough people are arrested for outrageously stupid reasons, public awareness of what is happening will be raised. I remember telling a non-technical friend of mine, who is a pilot for a major airline and served in the airforce (and saw combat in Yugoslavia), about the arrest of Dmitry and he was outraged. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen him as angry as he was that day. He took that injustice very personally, as do most people who believe in the ideals of democracy and not the rule of corporate oligarchs, cartels, and monopolists.
The more lay people that are made aware of these injustices the better, and Perens is going a long way toward accomplishing this, whether or not he gets arrested. The excesses of copyright have only succeeded these last decades because the awareness of what has happened (chronic copyright extentions, and now fundamental changes in its nature from a civil to a criminal law, and from a largely commercial regulation to a profoundly invasive personal one) has been absent. Copyright law, in its current form, will likely not withstand public scruitiny very well, which is something that would be good for every one of us (returning it back to its pre-1970 duration, if not repealing the notion altogether and replacing it with a gentler, non-monopolistic regime for compensating authors and artists, but that is a discussion for another day).
Raising public awareness of these issues is probably one of the most important things we can be doing, and if we as technically knowledgable people do not do so, no one will. Bruce Perens should be applauded for stepping up to the plate and putting his personal liberty on the line for the greater public good.
If we had more people willing to do this sort of thing when the despots seize personal liberty after personal liberty we would live in a much better world. He is a man who clearly feels strongly enough about software freedom to risk jail time, up to 5 years, which is a hell of a lot more grave than the $500,000 fine mentioned in the article (I wonder why they played that down. That makes his actions even more impressive).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
DMCA is not a specific case, it's just a case that is very visible to us (nerds, geeks, techies, whatever).
The problem here is not about a single law, but it is about a whole system that is showing signs of unrealibility, the so called Democracy.
"From the people, by the people, to the people". DMCA is the proof that the organization that we call Democratic Government and the Representative System is not representing the people, but interests to big corporations.
We need to stop right now this kind of attitude! Our elected representatives are not representing our interests, lobbyists are convincing them to represent their interests. What about the people?
Of course that a healthy economy and low interest rates keeps people satisfied, but this is bread and circus, they keep people working and consuming and keep us happy.
Maybe we should review our concept of freedom, and mainly our concept of democratic government.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Well, free speech or not, the DMCA prohibits all devices (be it hardware or software) and services whose main purpose is the circumvention of access and/or copy restrictions (DRMs).
So unfortunately, the DMCA limits free speech. You can't give a presentation on how to make a DVD player zone free, or how to make truetype fonts embedded, or how to turn ebooks into PDF. Because the lawyers prosecuting you can label whatever you do as a "service".
OK, so what if you do it for free? Free services are services also. Mainly you need to watch what you discuss, not how you do it.
This is the real problem of the DMCA - it isn't enough that killing another human is illegal; we also prohibit knife sharpeners. What did we just accomplish? Killing a human is just as illegal as it was without this new law, but now nearly every household is also engaging in criminal activities when they use their knife sharpeners. And what is the point? Is it easier to catch the killers with this new law? What? What? What?!
--
Tarmo
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Remember that the prosecution has a huge incentive to keep the law on the books so it can be used to bludgeon people into submission. In a civil case, the plaintiff will of course be the content control people, while in a criminal case the prosecution will be the government. Since the government is basically the big corporations' bitch, it will do whatever the big corporations tell it to do. For brevity's sake, we'll roll the plaintiff and the prosecution into one, and call them the "bad guys".
So what does this mean in practice? It means that the bad guys will take the litigation as far as they can until they reach a point where a court ruling would set a precedent against their pet law.
Now, lower courts seem to be very reluctant to rule on Constitutional issues, so the only way you're going to get a lower court to rule against the DMCA is through more traditional means, like proof that the defendant didn't actually violate the DMCA. But that kind of argument is obviously counterproductive for the purposes of striking down the DMCA, so we'll have to assume that Perens' defense won't use it. So the lower courts will almost certainly rule against Perens.
So now it's on to the higher courts, at least at the district level. What I think will happen here is that the case will be litigated heavily, with the bad guys doing everything they can to extend the litigation. If it appears that there's a reasonable chance the judge will rule against the bad guys, then the bad guys will drop the charges right before the ruling. End result? No precedent set against use of the DMCA in that district, and maximal financial damage to the defendant.
I think this is exactly how it will play out in every case. It'll turn into a war of attrition, and the bad guys have many times the resources of the good guys, so the bad guys will win.
Most importantly, it will result in justice only for those with the cash to fight long enough to wind up in a court that would rule against the "bad guys". In other words, justice proportional to the amount of money one has, which seems to be the American Way.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
I'm an American. It bothered me.
If you mean that the media didn't give it the coverage it deserved, I'd agree with that. It's likely, however, that the stories they were allowed to cover did not include ones that weren't in the interests of the parent companies (AOL Time Warner for example).
--
The opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
OK, I suppose half a million of us will all have to chip in a buck to bail his arse out of Jug. So where do I send the dollar?
I'd rather my dollars go towards his legal defense rather than paying unjust fines.
If Americans don't stand up more forcefully, the US will either infect the whole world with their orwellian shite or (I sure hope this happens) they will at some point in the near future be ignored as something that a free country cannot follow without losing essential freedoms.
I agree with you. Americans are cowards. We fear going to prison, losing years, and facing the fact that for every job afterwards we'll have to explain why we committed a felony.
I think I'll stick to presuring my congressman. I'm sure that $500k fine could buy a ton of them.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
...to break unjust laws as often as possible, regardless of the consequences, until those laws become unenforceable and are repealed.
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
So do something about it. As many famous thinkers have pointed out; whoever wishes to change the world must start with themselves. I don't see you standing up and fighting for your rights. If you were, you'd be proclaiming it to the world and not posting as AC.
Until you have the balls to stand up and do something yourself, like Tom7, Bruce Perens, Felten, etc, you should shut the hell up.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
*siren goes off, lights spinning*
Cop:"Sir, can I see your license and registration?"
Driver:"Errr, why officer?"
Cop:""Step out of the car please, sir."
*car searched*
Cop:""A-ha. What's this? A CD-R of Metallica tunes? And just where did you get this from?"
Driver:""Er, I own the original... really."
Cop:""Oh? I just bet you do. Damn Napster pansy."
*insert cruel beating now*
Viva la Revolution!
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"