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Sneaking DRM Amendments Through the Back Door
SiChemist writes: "Senator Joseph Biden has revised the 'Anticounterfeiting Amendments of 2002' to make it a felony to bypass certain DRM technologies. The bill has very broad senate support and is expected to pass overwhelmingly. Call your congresscritter! ZDNET story is here."
Biden said, "Every episode of "Seinfeld" is now available to download free to anyone with access to the Internet."
...and to anyone with a TV antenna.
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Forcing Digital Rights Management Up Your Backdoor
(2,3-Benzopyrrole)
What I find scary, is people are actually DOWNLOADING episodes of Seinfeld ;)
even in its thores of Death, ZDNet manages to deliver yet another story of interest to /.
ZDNet is dead. Long live ZDNet!
The trio I shall now start calling "See No Evil, Hear no Evil and Speak no Evil", or "Dumb, Dumb and Dumber"
....thanks to Sony.
And thanks to kuiken for the leads...
"Our Man In Redmond, you are under arrest for the future piracy of a copy of 'Dude, Where's My Car.'"
Someone you trust is one of us.
Quoting from a report in Biden's website:
...an individual can download a full-length feature movie in less than 15 minutes....
I'd really like to know where to get that kind of bandwidth, and how much it would be per month.
700MB / 15 min = 46.67MB / min = 777k/sec
Please God...hook me up to that pipe.
Why would I circumvent DRM? To steal? Maybe not, and let's take the T-shirt analogy further..
Yes, let's...
The new DRM T-Shirt has a small hologram on the corner. If this hologram is not present, the T-Shirt heats to a temperature of 160 degrees and the user is forced to take it off or suffer 2nd/3rd degree burns.
Obviously, this is a great way to keep the conterfeits off the street and out of the closets. So the TIAA (T-shirt Industry Ass. of America) pays for a few congressmen's whores, and we have a new law passed that ALL T-Shirts must be made of DRM cloth (the company that holds the HeatShield(tm) patent is incidentally quite pleased).
No one complains, except for a bunch of geeks that probably steal everything anyway (I hear some of them downloaded their operating systems without paying anybody a dime, what thieves!). A few small T-shirt makers also complain about the extra burden to their business and go out of business. Congress talks about how great this law is for "free" markets. Richard Stallman writes an essay from his undisclosed location (by this time, free software has long been outlawed).
The day after the law is passed, a 7-year old girl playing with her mom's sewing kit discovers that any HeatShield T-shirt can be turned off (that's "circumvented" to you lawyers out there) by sewing a piece of silk to the spot the hologram goes on.
She tells her parents, who say "that's nice dear, did you drink all your Coke(tm)?". Then she posts the story on her weblog and IM's her friends.
Somehow the story makes it to /. and the word gets out. Geeks everywhere laugh and the lawsuits start flying. Sweatshirts (T-shirts require the special cloth, remember) are printed with the words "sew a piece of silk here" and an arrow pointing to the hologram location.
T-Shirt counterfeiters in China who discovered the trick long ago chuckle to themselves: "actually you can do it with the right piece of tape, cheaper than silk".
At 5:56 AM exactly two days after the story hits the FBI breaks down the girl's front door. Luckily, the FBI had a full log of the girl's IM conversations (she had mentioned that she thought something was "the bomb", which triggered the 7-day automatic logging period). And luckily again, due to recent anti-terrorism legislation, the FBI didn't need to waste time with a judge.
The parents are charged with several counts of "hacking" (max. 20 years), several counts of "failing to prevent textile theft" (max. life), and several counts of "electronic fraud" (max. 10 years). The girl is placed in a juvenile prison. Her computer is seized. Slashdot and other websites are forced to sensor the posts and take down the articles.
The T-shirt lobbies for tougher legislation, siting this example. Pockets are lined, the law passes.........