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MPAA Requests Immunity to Commit Cyber-Crimes
The news has been buzzing around for the last couple of days that Representative Berman, whose palm has been crossed with silver by the entertainment industry, would introduce a bill permitting copyright holders to hack or DoS people allegedly distributing their works without permission. Well, the bill has been introduced - read it and weep. Although the bill wouldn't allow copyright owners to alter or delete files on your machine, they would be allowed to DoS you in essentially any other way. Let me restate that: the MPAA and RIAA are asking that they be allowed to perform what would otherwise be federal and state criminal acts and civil torts, and you will have essentially no remedy against them under any laws of the United States.
If it applies only to big business (RIAA, MPAA, BSA), and not to joe sixpack, it's unconstitutional under the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Oh, and this post is Copyright (c) 2002, by me, "sconeu". I reserve the right to search any and all computers for unauthorized reproductions of this post.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The Canadian Private Copying Collective wants more of your money.
On top of raising existing levys, they want to tax any media that can store copyrighted material. This includes Hard drives and Flash media. While the MPAA is crashing your computer in the US the CPCC is robing you blind every time you buy recordable media.. And how much are the artists getting??? According to reports, after 2 years of the levy being collected NOTHING has been paied to ANY artist.. Theroy has it they are spending all the money lobying for higher levys.
http://www.sycorp.com/levy/index.htm
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Logically it seems impossible to me that they can do anything over the internet that cannot be said to cause economic loss to someone else. In other words, any traffic they put on the internet could be said to cause economic loss to someone, because ultimately someone is paying for that bandwidth.
This bill doesn't seem like a very solid piece of legislation, even for what they want it to allow them to do.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
"Notwithstanding" means that the other statutes are preempted and literally will not withstand conflict with the present statute.
Just do it, people. Don't be inflammatory, just ask whether or not they intend to support the bill (in its current form, or with modifications.)
http://www.house.gov/writerep/
Norm Dicks (Washington, 6th district) previously wrote back to one of my queries on the CBDTPA, with the response that he didn't support it. I'm hoping he's got similar views on this bill.
got standards? --- http://www.w3.org/
SubSection b.A states that only the file containing the copyrighted works can be affected. Any legitimate files must still be fully accessible and unaffected.
So following those lines share some random txt file you wrote. If they DDOS you sue them since the legitimate file was affected by their attack. You could probably even tip toe around the fact that you illegally had copyrighted works on your PC.
Of follow subsection b.C which states the file trader cannot sustain more than a $50.00 loss for any reason because of an attack.
They also have to notify the DOJ each time they want to do it. Now I'm going to be writing my representative tonight on this but realize that this is not an unrestricted license to hack by any means.
Notwithstanding
notwithstanding Pronunciation Key (ntwth-stndng, -wth-)
prep.
In spite of: The teams played on, notwithstanding the rain.
adv.
All the same; nevertheless: We proceeded, notwithstanding.
conj.
In spite of the fact that; although.
IN SPITE OF any other federal or state laws, they can do what they like.
Oh, and they can delete any file they want if it is "necessary" to prevent you from trading their copyrighted files.
Yes, it REALLY is that bad.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
GNUnet - Completely encrypted and completely anonymous file sharing. It's designed to be resistant to attack, let's see them go after that once it's up to a few million nodes. ;)
If you're using GNUnet they won't be able to determine who actually has the file(s) in question.
Once this network gets up to a significant size they would have to practically take down the entire internet to stop it.
Remember folks who are US citizens, Berman (D-CA) and Coble (R-NC) are up for election, as are the other 433 members of the House. Send a message if you're in their district. Berman, in particular, is owned by the entertainment industry, with over $100K from Disney, AOL-TW, Sony, DreamWorks, etc.
Coble, on the other hand, sold out for $5734 from the RIAA, according to www.opensecrets.org. I would've thought my rights would cost more than that.
Although the Register's take on this is amusing it is incorrect. This bill only allows technical messures to be used against "publicly accessible peer-to-peer file trading network". So, you couldn't go rifling through the MPAA's stuff looking for your files. You also have to give the DoJ seven days notice, and tell them what specific technical mesure you intend to use. Mind you, this bill is still stupid.
Having read through the bill, I'd like to make some observations.
The bill defines a peer-to-peer network as being:
two or more computers which are connected by computer software that (A) is primarily designed to (i) enable the connected computers to transmit files or data to other connected computers... (B) does not permanently route all file or data inquiries or searches through a designated, central computer located in the United States
This would seem to obviate any centralized file-trading system (like Napster). In fact, it would exclude any system not truly peer-to-peer. Odd.
The bill also includes provisions for suing the copyright holders if they cause at leaset "$50" in economic damages to you. However, it specifies "Monetary" damages. Does this mean hardware repair, as opposed to the less tangible lost bandwidth? If so, can we throw this back at their somewhat intangible "losses to piracy"?
They also must notify the Justice Department 7 days in advance, as I read it. Given the shitfting nature of the Internet, that seems useless to the **AA.
Okay, this bill sucks, but it doesn't seem nearly as dangerous (yet) as everyone makes it out to be.
~Chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.
"...but you should more or less expect that if you don't write a physical letter then you'll be ignored."
What you stated is a myth, perpetuated by people who would rather that the American public stay left behind when dealing with the government. Using the internet tools available between congress.gov, house.gov, and senate.gov, along with various online news sources, any American can easily get in touch with his elected officials, using offical and verifiable information, at a speed exceeding anything avavailable before. America's corrupt corporate power base that controls the media works to keep Americans from exploiting the excellent resource that is the internet, so that they can use their own connections (Lobbyists.) to outweigh public needs and desires.
Officials do read and consider electronic messages. I regularly communicate with my elected officials via the internet, and have recieved the same courtesy and responses that handwritten, mailed letters get; ranging from form letters, to letters from staff, to individual letters from the officials themselves.
Every time an official recieves an electronic message, the internet gains more political power. Eventually, people using the internet to deal with politicians immediately will be seen as the serious, influential voters, and those who pull out the personal letterhead and sign with MontBlanc pens will be the foolish old guard too unconcerned to actually keep up with politics.
So stop discouraging people. Encourage the use of the internet, and teach America to use online resources to keep our leaders in check.
If you're using Linux 2.4, you can configure iptables to cloak your site. Determine what netblocks the ??AAs are using and use something like this to drop inbound traffic:
iptables -A INPUT -s x.y.z.0/24 -j DROP
While they might still be able to chew up bandwidth by dumping a ton of bogus traffic on you, it's not too likely they'd do that without determining that you have moviez and/or mp3z on your system. Your machine won't respond to their pings...if they're smart, they'll assume that your system is offline and not bother. I suppose a search in $P2P_SOFTWARE would still list the files you're carrying, but their attempts to download from you would also be unsuccessful. If they're smart, they'll assume that it's old data that's still cached somewhere and move on.
(Note that I'm assuming a certain minimal level of intelligence on the part of the ??AAs. This may or may not be a valid assumption. Whether the assumption is valid is an exercise left to the reader.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
American corporations are strong legal entities only because the American public let them get that way. The beauty of the US Constitution is that whenver Americans truly want to exercise their rights, they can reign in powers that threaten to undermine our freedoms.
It's happened before. Look at the Robber Barrons. Their excesses spawned a raft of trustbusting legislation. Of course, that legislation didn't just create itself. Normal voters rose up and made their voices heard.
Talk of revolution is nifty, and we'd all doubtless love to engage in a Matrix-style rampage against corporatism. But the real solution isn't revolution, it's working within the political system we already have. The problem is, that requires.. shudder!... actual participation in the process. You can't just write a fucking email or hack your Playstation and get results in politics.
Revolt? Not likely, when Americans can't seem to use the power they already have.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
"if such impairment does not, without authorization, alter, 19 delete, or otherwise impair the integrity of any computer 20 file or data residing on the computer of a file trader."
From my limited personal experience with DoS attacks, I've found that a sizeable force attacking even a cable modem user can have unforeseen consequences.
I had a network admin friend of mine that worked for a DSL ISP shove a DS3 line full of packets directed straight at my cable modem one early morning. He performed a brutal DOS attack on me for about 20 seconds.
As soon as "Doing it... NOW" came across the IM, the lights on my modem fired up solid and my mouse quit working. The only remedy I had was to disconnect the cable modem, but it still had caused my system to become unstable to the point where the reset button was the only remedy - no mouse or keyboard response whatsoever. When I restarted, the Windows Scandisk message came up and, sure enough, it found problems with the file system... files lost.
The music industry is already using a company called NetPD to hunt down and kill copyrighted material. Unfortunately they don't just go for the files. They were interviewed for a 'cybercrime' documentary on the BBC recently and they explained they find out who is distributing the files (includes P2P clients as well as websites) and sends one of those we've-got-lawyers, your-customer-hasn't letters to your ISP.
(I'd LOVE to waste some of my spare bandwidth/cpucycles hammering the servers they use to search for files - but this would have to be done by a larger number of users than just me.)
insignificant sig
There is a catch in the bill, so that it would not have the undesired effect of granting equality under the law. You are only allowed to sabotage publicly available peer-to-peer systems. I doubt Big Business use those systems, so it will still be illegal for you to attack them even if this bill becomes law.
The MPAA and RIAA are composed of members who tend to be multinationals. All it takes is one of these organisations to attack a computer in the UK and the UKs Computer Misuse Act kicks in and their members can be tried in a criminal court in the UK, assuming that they have a presence here (they all do). Even better - if it's a .gov.uk machine that gets attacked then our anti-terrorism legislation kicks in and that is some nasty shit to have levelled at you.
I wonder how much trouble it will cause when Sony, Disney and AOL/TW suddenly get hauled into a UK court under the provisions of the Anti Terrorism Act and are effectively barred from trading in Europe - this may sting just a little more than the sales they lose through P2P sharing. What's more this can even be proved due to the UKs wonderful new RIP act. Lots of fun to be had in the near future when multinationals discover that the Internet is not just an American thing and get sued in courts all over the world that isn't the US. Fun Fun Fun
I am sure that if they recieved 100000+ messages through this system, not only would coldfusion throw a spaz attack but they might start getting the message. Slashdot is the best DDoS system I have ever seen. ;o)
I've essentially told them to think twice before going after everybody, or they will have trouble on their hands from nations who's premiers aren't president ("tatoo idiot on forehead now") Bush's lapdog. Companies never listen to complaints until you explain to them how their actions will lead to a decrease in profits for them. That's how I get £20 off my mobile phone bill some months...bad reception, I tell them about all the p**sed off people in the area who are thinking of leaving, I get £20 off and am happy until I have to complain again.
The RIAA and MPAA should realise that by walking down this very dangerous path, not only could they lose a lot of business, look bad, but also start an international incident that could have serious ramifications for years to come.
I mean, terrorists already get pissed off by the U.S.A.'s desire to control everything outside their borders...this just gives them more ammunition.
Good luck to the RIAA and MPAA, they're going to need it.
I am NaN
Of course, you could ignore those obligations, but then there's not much of a point in being connected to the network; kinda like going to a party just to sit in the corner.
Here's a hint; there are services you are obligated to offer when you send packet one; long before you've even figured out who your local gateway is.
A new kind of meat designed to appeal to vegetarians.
He gets all of his freakin money from the entertainment industry. Have a look: http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.asp ?CID=N00008094&cycle=2000
and:
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/indus.asp?C ID=N00008094&cycle=2000