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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."
Quick! Throw away all your markers!!
seriously tho, this is getting insane, soon you'll be forced to watermark your work, but inorder to watermark it you will be charged x amount of dollars, what would this do to the opensource community, expecially since opensource doesn't incorporate drm and I seriously doubt that it will be easy to come up with a standard to incorporate drm into linux without it being hacked to shreds.. We need to contact our senate, tell them this is a big no-no, and this really cound hurt innovation!!
~slak
Why Do they feel it's necessary to sneak in legislation? Surely you're bypassing due debate and democracy? Eventually you're going to get a government almost wholly controlled by these huge corporations with big pockets who just want to protect their own interests.
Just because consumers will be offered more and more copy-protection enabled hardware, this does not mean that consumers will buy more and more copy-protection enabled hardware. Why am I going to buy a new MP3 player that will only allow me to play mp3s with watermarks when my current 20 gig iPod will be sufficient enough for me to listen to music until it mechanically fails (which could be in 40 years)?
"Every episode of "Seinfeld" is now available to download free (from commercials) to anyone with access to the Internet."
But what about the methods? Would they restrict you from distributing a program that could add watermarks to your own music collection? This could be construed as 'trafficking' in which case there is a problem here.
we can rebuild this sig. we have the technology
Those bastards!
Why would I circumvent DRM? To steal? Maybe not, and let's take the T-shirt analogy further... suppose I buy some Disney T-shirt in the US, but Disney does not want me to wear the T-shirt in Europe. (Perhaps they've recruited the fashion police to check, or the God of Corporations will smite me with lightning if I do wear the T-shirt). Yet, I want to wear it so I fake a European Disney label and sew it in the T-shirt in place of the US one.
Clearly a crime worthy of a stiff penalty and a jail term
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The article gives the example of a garage band wanting to distribute their music via MP3 and having to fake a watermark to make it playable on certain MP3 players.
Suppose the RIAA actually got their act together with SDMI and forced hardware manufacturers to only allow SDMI-licensed material on their MP3 players (probably via more legislation knowing how the RIAA works). Now Garage Band #5 wants to distribute their songs, but they know they won't be able to be played if they aren't SDMI-licensed. Of course, doing this would cost a lot of $$$ (more than they can afford) but would be included in any standard record industry contract. So GB#5 now has three options:
1. Sign up with a major record label. Upside: Their MP3s can be played. Downside: They are now basically slaves to the RIAA.
2. "Fake" the licensing and distribute the MP3s on their own. Upside: Their MP3s can be played and they don't owe the RIAA money/songs. Downside: They can be arrested for illegally distributing their own music!
3. Forget about making music, split up the band, and do something else. Upside: They don't owe the RIAA anything and they stay out of jail. Downside: Another independent band squished by the RIAA.
If this passes, eventually it might be used by the RIAA (and other similar companies) to squash competition and independents.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Forced watermarking could be a very bad idea for all of us who produce music/movies/literature in our basements (or reasonable hand-drawn facsimiles). Where am I, a piker who puts together stuff with a PC and freeware, going to get expensive watermarking equipment?
Likewise, what would be the impact on those of us who don't live in the US, but might want to export our created media there (I have a lot of US friends and I like to share)?
What about independent record labels etc. within the US who don't particularly mind people sharing their music? I seem to remember one of the original Dead Kennedys albums came on one side of a cassette tape, with an inscription in the liner notes something like "Home-recorded cassettes are killing the music industry. Go and do your part."
Even though one poster had the valid point that this bill seems to be aimed at direct copyright infringement, where the MP/RIAA and friends are concerned, the definition of "copyright infringement" seems to be "any media transaction where we don't take a cut." We (here in Canada) already have levies on blank media (yeah, the equivalent to the MP/RIAA gets paid for every CD-ROM backup I make) -- what more could they want? Our first-born children? Our souls?
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
If it is illegal to circumvent DRM technologies, then what are the DRM techs there for in the first place? To prevent accidental copyright infringement?
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
This again has the same reasons as many other outrageous
copy-right laws that are being danced around. People simply
dont understand the technological details, and blind anologies
are made for the common public.
Take for instance:
> Gray believes that forging a digital watermark or signature
> should be just as unlawful as forging a physical watermark
> or signature. "It's like taking a T-shirt that you've put a
> design on and then attaching a Disney hologram or the NBA
> championship hologram, distributing it, and giving people
> the impression that it's an authorized apparel item from the
> NBA or Disney," Gray says. "That's a deceptive practice that
> we have a long history of banning."
But this is such a misleading statement. Consider the case where
you buy an expensive MP3 player from microsoft which plays only
digitally water-marked mp3 files. On the offset it may look like
this law is prohibiting me from playing a pirated song. But look
deeply. What its prohibiting is me playing _any_ songs which are
not water-marked by the some governing body. Which means that if
I make my own music (however cacofonic it might be) I will not
be able to play it unless I get it certified from this governing
body.
In light of this, it becomes clear that not only they are stopping
piracy,with this law, they are also giving themself absolute control
over what content can be played by people (even privately) and what
should not. How easy would it be for me to certify my own "music"
(or noise) by these governing bodies? Obviously I have to stand in
line along with the other members of RIAA and pay the prices that they
set. This is extremely dangerous situation, since the misleading phrasing
of the bill makes it impossible for ordinary senetors to understand the
ramifications and hence we could expect a wide spread floor-banging approval.
The very fact that this bill is set for fast track, scares me more
becasuse they precisely didnt want the time for people to let the real
meaning sink in.
DO NOT PANIC
One thought that just came to mind is that someone, somewhere is implimenting this software to create and propagate things like digital watermarks. Maybe it's time we as programmers to an equivalent to the 'hippocratic oath?' Swearing to do no harm by agreeing not to create the kind of nightmare software protections we see coming to be?
First do no DRM!
In order for these watermarks to have any effect, they need to convince or force hardmare manufacturers to make their hardware play only watermarked, approved media. They know this, and they are already actively trying to get the hardware manufacturers to do this. Without the requirement of a watermark to be present, i could simply strip the existing watermark out and play/redistribute as usual. I'm not creating a fake watermark and thus I am not breaking this law.
The result would be that older unwatermarked media you legally own, music produced by garage bands, and other legal but unwatermarked materials, will not play on a newer player that has DRM. This law makes it a felony to place fake or forged watermarks on such media, even if your sole intent is to allow the media to be played on newer DRM-enabled players.
This bill is a step towards forced DRM, and as such we should oppose it. The next step will be to require new hardware to support DRM.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Basically, if it does this, it should also require that "official" watermarks be available free-of-charge for any content-creator who asks for one.
That would be nice, even acceptable to me. The RIAA/MPAA would never stand for it though, when people downloaded official free-of-charge watermarks, and applied them to Seinfeld episodes.
You see, for it to work, things have to be restricted.
Note that we wouldn't need a new law to restrict the vendors of watermarks down to one or a handful of companies. If the DRM hardware or software requires a particular format, and if that format is protected by Big Company's copyright or -- more likely -- patent, then BigCo has a de facto monopoly on that media type. If hacking, faking, or reverse-engineering watermarks is made massively illegal, then that monopoly is cemented in place. And no law had to be passed specifically naming BigCo as the gateway through which creativity must pass.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
That all depends on what you're trying to generate buzz for. If you're one of those same Big Media corporations trying harness the Internet to generate artificial buzz, then you're right.
However, if you're an independent creator who just throws his stuff out there for everyone to enjoy, with no obsessions about profit margins or ROI, then you're wrong. The buzz will happen all on it's own.
A perfect example is Sluggy Freelance. It does almost no appreciable advertising -- and certainly less than MegaTokyo or Penny Arcade -- yet it is arguably one of the most popular and longest running comics on the Web.
How did it happen? Strictly word of mouth.
I think the corporate-driven hyperconsumerism of the last few decades has perverted our fundamental notions of just how the free market is supposed to work. The Internet is simply restoring the universality and equality that we used to enjoy in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, when anyone could buy an old printing press and call themselves a newspaper.
However, the trade-off is that we're now facing some devastating economic contraction. The dot.com bust, the slump in the media and advertising industries, the current financial scandals... they're all just symptoms of a larger problem: as the artificiality of hyperconsumerism is increasingly exposed and rejected, many modern corporations are discovering that they have no real reason to exist. They don't fulfill any real human needs. Their only products are novelty and convenience. Without a captive and ignorant audience, they're doomed.
The problem with this idea is that the average slashdot reader is not knowledgeable enough to express their own opinions on this. I've been guilty of it myself (though less and less). Sometimes I find myself telling about all the evils I read about on /. and then when someone challenges me, I realize that I don't really know anything about it.
What you propose is something simple. But being a responsible citizen is not simple because you have to be aware and savy. You said it only took you 5 min, but I don't think you would have been able to write that speech if you hadn't spent at least 30min researching and thinking about what the issues here are.
-Shaun
Of course this will do nothing to stop "piracy" (or at least the real piracy that is for money) since those people will easily be able to steal or manufacture a recording device and produce 10,000 disks. The hash also does not stop them because they are only interested in duplicating disks that have the already-hashed data.
What it will do is make it impossible for anybody to produce any kind of entertainment without buying a license from the MPAA/RIAA and submitting their data to be encoded. Thus all competition is eliminated.
By the time everybody realizes this they will be able to say "well, that's too bad, but it's just the price we have to pay to stop those horrible pirates".
All this stuff sounds more and more like a repeat of the American Revolution when a letter to Kinge George III was written in protest to the Stamp Act and others in which the Acts violated the colonists' civil rights.
Again, this all sounds like somebody wants control and have the little people pay the price. I'm not for it. I don't go to movies and I don't buy CDs. Any form of entertainment which relegates me to a simple consumer will not and has not receive any of my money.
BTW - the steps leading to the American Revolution can be found here.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
I never claimed it did... I pointed out that the next logical step after watermarks, would be mandatory DRM hardware. Why? Because watermarks are useless by themselves.
What is the point of watermarks in fighting piracy? You cannot use watermarks to track pirates unless you put individual watermarks on each media, and in that case the pirates will vertainly strip the watermark off. The only possible use I see is that the RIAA/MPAA can set up automatic sniffer bots, looking for files with their watermarks on Kazaa and other file sharing systems. They certainly don't need it to legally establish a certain work as their property, simply looking at or or listening to that will do the trick.
So... once all sanctioned media are properly watermarked, it will be a small step to DRM in our hardware. Illegal copies won't play. Oh, your DVD player will still play the holiday movies you made i.e. your own material, but what about taping shows from TV? You may one day find your VCR or DVD player refusing to record some TV shows or movies. You may find that your own recordings receive a "local" watermark that your equipment recognised, but your computer will not accept, and neither will the neighbors player.
That is what DRM potentially means. Farfetched? Far beyond the scope if this bill? Perhaps, but a complacent attitude by us the voters and comsumers will mean that the rights and possibilities we enjoy today, are eroded away a bill at a time. You can bet there'd be an outcry if DRM was to be implemented overnight, and the proponents of DRM know that full well. They will attempt to bring their ideas of DRM about, step by step, in vaguely or broadly worded bills, packaged together with a bunch of other laws perhaps.
My final piece of advice for when you make a judgement about any proposed bill or law: never assume that the lawmakers have our best intentions at heart. Always assume new laws, rules, and bills will be used to the furthest possible extend they will stretch, not just to the extend most people would deem reasonable. Demand narrowly defined laws.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...