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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.
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!?
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!
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:
...to break unjust laws as often as possible, regardless of the consequences, until those laws become unenforceable and are repealed.
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
Bruce
Bruce Perens.