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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."
You have to admire his spirit.
Translation: I'm an armchair activist.
I think everyone should go out and opportunities post information about to break stuff like that "violates" the DMCA.. printing flyers.. posting them everywhere.. hehe even sticking batches of flyers next to dvd players in major stores would be a good start.
Spirit (noun)
The coming together of balls and stupidity.
Damn, Bruce, how do you walk with balls that big?
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
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.
Never mind the spirit. You have to admire his bank balance...
Cheers,
Ian
Disclaimer: I'm from the Netherlands, so the heat is still a few kms in front of me...
What I don't understand is that Bruce Perens is an exception to the rule. Whatever happened to civil disobedience as a way to make unambiguously clear that the government has gone too far and needs to rethink it's policies.
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.
Three cheers to Bruce Perens and anyone who follows his example!
Simon
He'll put on his Village People outfit and sing "It's fun to violate the D-M-C-A!".
Good luck. I hope he gets further than Sklyarov.
CLIT. Are you a memb
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?
It is true that Felton was threatened with a law suit if he were to present non-functional speech on weaknesses in SDMI, but the RIAA would have gotten no where with a law suit, because Felton's speech would not function on its own.
Sklyarov was not arrested for speaking at DefCon. He was arrested because his company sold a copy of its DMCA violating software in the United States, and because he held the copyright on that software.
You can read section 1201 for yourselves. It says:
By the same token, you can publish specs on how to circumvent macrovision. You just can't traffic in the device itself.
I am not a lawyer. If you plan on taking my advice, talk to a lawyer first.
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 !
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.
You go to a shop in almost any country in Europe, and buy a DVD player that has been hacked by the shop or the manufacturer. It can actually be quite difficult to find a DVD player that isn't region free, particularly at the cheap end of the market.
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
Bruce is merely region-unlocking. Its not even necessarily illegal, as it often involves simply hitting a few menu buttons. (Admittedly secret ones, so it COULD violate the DMCA) - Unfortunately, it's such a minor violation that the MPAA probably won't care - They're smart and most likely realize that trying to arrest Perens is silly and will just get their precious law overturned on them for... Nothing.
Now if he plays a DVD using one of the Linux DVD players - THAT is a different story, as all of them are illegal and based on DeCSS in some form. It should be clear that he is using the DVD EXACTLY as intended (Playing a Region 1 disc in Region 1), yet still breaking the law. Since it's based on DeCSS, it'll attract more attention from the MPAA since that's their pet peeve. Also, since he is using the disc exactly as intended, it makes his case that much stronger.
An interesting story: A friend of mine found a lawyer willing to help him with defense against an ITAR violation. (Read: Exporting strong encryption before the government eased up on regulations.) He then implemented RSA on his HP48 calculator. Calculator is now a munition. Justin lived in San Diego, so drove down to Tijuana. In the process of crossing the border, he carefully explained to the border guard/customs officer the exact manner in which he was breaking the law and should be arrested. Customs officer basically told him to fuck off, leave him alone, and go do his business in Tijuana.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
Why do I have a strong feeling he's just going to use a black marker on an audio cd?
I can just see it now ...
...
"Man arrested, jailed, charged for Posession of 6lbs of illegal DVD Player, street value $500,000 or more, as well as assorted paraphernalia"
sounds a bit dodgy to me
ìì!
What he thinks will happen...
1. He will be arrested in a massive arrest were he will be beat by the police for breaking the DMCA
2. We will become a political prisonor and the geeks of the worlds will unit in a rage.
3. In protest the IT workers of the world will stop doing thier jobs and start hacking the systems they work for crippling the systems of the world.
4. The world now in chaos from geek rage will fold to any and all of the silly geek deamdns including the head of Bill gates.
5. World Peace.
What will happen....
1. People will point at him and giggle.
Wouldn't it just be better to murder someone in front of all these witnesses? Less jail time, less of a fine.
Or he could embezzle a few billion from HP, and only have to spend 5 years in a white-collar resort prison.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I think others have touched on this, but I don't think I saw a reply that said simply: "you don't own commercial software".
You have a license agreement that allows you to use the software (with some restrictions). You don't own the software in the DVD player any more than you own your copy of Mac OS or Windows.
The hardware has patents to protect it. You can own it and do what you want with it in your own home, just don't try to use their ideas in your device. If you kill or blind yourself making your microwave into a DVD player, you agree not to sue them.
The software, however, is another thing. On a microwave, it's embedded enough to be considered "hardware". Sanyo isn't going to care (much) if an individual hacks their timer/power interface. However, a DVD player is a specialized computer system that reads and decodes information off supplied media so it can be muxed/demuxed off to a variety of data streams.
-- clvrmnky
Before you support Rep. Boucher, you should know he supported the DMCA in 1998.
"...I am pleased to rise today in support of the passage of H.R. 2281, which will extend new protections against the theft of their works to copyright owners."
Full text of his DMCA speech: To see the full text:
If you're going to use 'free speech' as a legal defense, why not turn it into performance art?
(Of course, if you can get {insert favorite attractive celebrity} to perform it, it would be an added bonus.)
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
So, if Mr. Perens is arrested, how many of you so-called geeks are going to boycott Hollywood movies, RIAA music, cancel your cable/dish TV, etc. I hope every single one of you--for anyone who does not is a flaming hypocrite. And you'd better spread the word to your neighbors as well. DMCA is no small violation of our basic freedoms and it needs fought tooth and nail.
And like any good boycott, you can help promote substitutes as well:
- off-air television (get yourself a Terk TV-55 or similar)
- local bands / unsigned online artists
- independent films
- trade existing movies with friends but don't buy into anything new
I did. http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~twm/embed/dmca.html
...to break unjust laws as often as possible, regardless of the consequences, until those laws become unenforceable and are repealed.
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
Everyone remember Edward Felton? The Princeton professor that was being threatened by RIAA/SDMI? They threatened to prosecute him for a DMCA violation, but backed down because they knew it wasn't a strong enough case for them. They'd be suing a professor for giving a lecture in an academic setting. That wouldn't go over well, and could end up weakening their position significantly. These organizations know which battles they should be fighting. They've done a good job so far of picking only the ones they are likely to win. I doubt they will go after Perens. It's just too risky. Of course it will probably become obvious at some point that your social standing has a lot to do with what you can get away with. When some dirty hacker does the same thing Bruce does and gets arrested, we'll see that quite clearly.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Imagine having to go door to door and explain that you're a registered sex offender and how you really just took a leak behind a tree and it's no big deal... how many people would believe that coming from a known sex offender?
Of course, public breast-feeding is an upheld right for mothers in many areas... it's a "natural bodily function".
The MPAA has a special email address for reporting "piracy" -- though I don't know of any planned piracy, it seems like the place that they would like to be told about violations of the DMCA as well, so I sent them this note:
5 6
- - - -
Dear Sirs:
I work for Slashdot (http://slashdot.org), a Web site concerned
primarily with free software, electronic freedoms, computer hardware and
other things of interest to computer enthusiasts, as well as to those
generally interested in online freedom. The DMCA (and the MPAA's
involvement in that and similar laws) are frequent subjects of the
postings and discussion at Slashdot.
I guess that someone at the MPAA is aware of Bruce Perens' demonstration
Friday afternoon of (mostly trivial) circumvention techniques which allow
consumers to view DVDs in contravention of the Digital Milenium Copyright
Act. If not, here is a URL which links to both a discussion of this
planned demonstration and an Infoworld article on it; several of the
comments made in this discussion come from Mr. Perens himself. (The text
of this note will be posted to the discussion as well, and you are invited
to respond to it there, if you woud like.)
URL: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/24/04152
Will the MPAA be pursuing action (filing a complaint) against Mr. Perens
for this public demonstration? If not, does this mean that other people
may also use similar techniques to enjoy their own DVDs without fear of
prosecution? I would also like to show people how to defeat annoying
region locks and encryption standards which make it dofficult to watch the
DVDs I have purchased.
I look forward to hearing from you; if the @hotline address is not the
right place to address this inquiry, I would appreciate hearing from you about where I should direct it instead.
Sincerely,
[signed, etc.]
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5