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EFF Coordinates Fight Against DirecTV
wumarkus420 writes "In response to recent lawsuits filed by DirecTV against purchasers of smartcard equipment, the EFF and Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society have announced a new site devoted to the legal fight against DirecTV's aggressions. Hopefully, this new site will provide innocent consumers that have been threatened under the veil of the DMCA with professional legal advice and information."
3. If you currently subscribe to DirecTV, don't change a thing. A company official has testified that a sudden termination or change in service spells likely guilt in DirecTV's eyes, and a judge may see this logic.
omg what a great business model, sue people for cancelling service to prevent people who will quit because they don't like their business practices.
and wtf does "sudden" mean:
"hello I'd like to stop subscibing, please phase out all my channels over the next 2 years"
Forgive me if I'm off-topic. I'm glad the EFF has decided to fight this. I remember a while back there was some talk of donating money to the 4 kids involved in legal fights with the RIAA over enhancing the Windows sharing available on their campuses. While donating money to them to recoup their settlements was a novel idea, how about setting up a sort of legal defense fund for similarly accused students for the future. That way some of these cases may actually go to trial, and the absurdity of the DMCA can be tested. Think of it, 60 million ppl use peer to peer. We support artists, just not the cartels that house them now. (Hell, I haven't even used these networks in years, considering all the shit that's put out by the majors, I rely on CDbaby.com to find new music.)It's time to fix the broken state of the law to be more in line with serving the people it was created for.
A friend of mine has operated a website called www.afm.com for quite some time. "AFM" stands for American Flea Market. A little while ago the American Film Marketing Assocation disputed the domain, saying that he was cybersquatting on their trademark. Their complaint filled a four-inch binder. He's operated the domain for several years before hearing from these jokers.
They accused any of everything from kidnapping the Lindbergh baby to crashing those planes into the World Trade Center. Oh, yeah, and Andy had weapons of mass destruction.
My friend is no fool. He fought the dispute tooth and nail, without any legal representation - and won, he got to keep his domain. But not everyone has been so lucky.
Andy put up a site about it called www.ShameOnTheAFMA.com, which has some resources that others could use to defend their domains.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
In this case I can't buy the "substantial non-infringing use"
and there is a huge market for pirate video's too (as hilary rosen so vociferously predicted), should they have been made illegal too?
yes, there are alot of people who do use the cards to pirate signal, but there are also quite a few people who have legitimate uses for them and for drecttv to blanket sue *anyone* who has one is just plain wrong imho.
besides, there is a certain logic to say that the consumers are being sprayed with encrypted signal, why should someone else have a say in what they can do with the EM waves in their own property? if they can break the crypto, then perhaps directv should try making the technology better. after all, the consumers are passively receiving the signal, it's not like they are tapping into a private line.
dave
DirectTV Defense
And just in case you don't read the article here is a little quote:
I hope this cleared things up.
>In this case I can't buy the "substantial non->infringing use" argument, as having dabbled in >satellite technology for a while, I know how >huge the market is for pirate cards.
FWIW, it might be worth exploring the permissible uses before calling everyone thieves.
I recall seeing a mainboard with a pack-in feature that was a 'smart-card reader'. It didn't look like any type of flash-card slot I recognised-- perhaps those cards can be used for system-locking or login, or to store small amounts of valuable data (encryption keys?) in a conveinent formfactor.
I love how the answer is litigation though. Didn't Directv used to have a pretty respectable record for attacking this problem with TECHNICAL measures?
Technical approaches are the only sensible way to approach this sort of problem. You may be able to sue Craig and Amy Signal-Stealer, but will you find the 500,000 others doing the same?
Final Thought: If you want to ensure the distribution is controlled, stick to distribution that can be managed all the way to the set. (I'm thinking something like cable, but where they will actively pull up the wires from nonsubscribers)
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
Victor Hugo said, back in 1831/1832, that the printing press killed architecture, by taking away part of what architectural edifices were about (telling a story, imposing a theme, etc). Books lasted longer, could be more widely diffused, and were not subject to being rebuilt and demolished in the same ways (amongst other things, for more read "Ceci tuera cela" in "Notre Dame de Paris").
The Internet is now killing all other media, because it is at once all media, and is the same thing to all people, rather like the book was more accessible than the edifice as Victor Hugo observed had happened from the 15th century onwards*.
As has been mentioned elsewhere, ITV Digital went down due to piracy. Canal Horizons, the Moroccan digital TV unit, also went down due to piracy. Not that people were pirating their signal, they were pirating French digital TV instead ;-)
All this leads us to the logicial conclusion that paying for recorded content is going to be a harder and harder thing to enforce, whatever the medium. Which is great, in my opinion. It might bring back live entertainment, something which was originally killed by the recorded work. People moan about how piracy is killing CDs, DVDs and so on - but the real artists who could really perform live lost a livelihood to recorded works. Maybe they will see a renaissance, which would be much more democratic than some big-ass company making all the $$$ for a recording.
I can't help feeling that content is priced too high. Why should "Friends" actors make a million bucks an episode? Why should Arnold Schwarzenegger make so much? Careful editing and effects respectively make these two vehicles much more successful than the actual TALENT (or lack of) of the actors.
The re-democratisation of content is perhaps happening today. And live shows might perhaps make a comeback. I'd much rather hear a live show in a bar (sometimes for like $5 and maybe I'll leave a tip for the band or buy their self-marketed CD) than pay $15 for recorded works of some pimped singer who actually can't play an instrument or write anything, just has a nice voice _once it is processed_ ...
DirecTV, indeed TV in general, had it coming to them. Even their good content is becoming diluted by the sheer volume of crap out there, and indeed the success of mediocre vehicles like recent Friends, Simpsons and others just goes to show that the public is less and less able to find something good to watch (or listen to). People probably have a strong urge to pirate because it is quite frankly not worth the subscription fee most of the time. And, Internet is already giving us content on demand, including movies, on the wrong side of the law, while conventional media is actually playing catchup. Time to start seeing this for what it is, a paradigm shift for the 21st century.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
You obviously don't know much about the reason people are so annoyed by DirecTV's insipid legal wrangling about smartcard-related equipment. There have been several *documented* cases of programmers and engineers or just plain computer geeks who like to experiment buying these devices for 100% legitimate smartcard programming uses, some of whom have never even owned satellite equipment. Nevertheless, they have been contacted by lawyers for DirecTV and bullyed into forfeiting the equipment and paying a settlement fee, or facing lengthy and expensive legal battles to prove their innocence. That's legalistic extortion, not a valid way to protect your service.
/. before, so do a little reading. It is *clearly* a substantial non-infringing use when you don't even own satellite equipment and buy smartcard-related/"unlooper" equipment for completely unrelated purposes. It isn't like there aren't many, many uses for smartcard systems that don't involve DirecTV.
These cases have been documented and there have been articles about them on
> half the population of Scotland
A nation the English have treated very well in the last few centuries. No wonder they weren't paying for overpriced satellite services. People with a lower median income than their neighbours will naturally not be as willing to pay as often for disposable entertainment. Blame that for the collapse of ITV rather than the piracy itself. It's not like most of those people would have actually paid for the service even if the piracy weren't relatively easy.
That's the mistake of the content industry--they blame every problem on piracy. Instead of blaming $18 CD prices in a downturned economy for the decline in CD sales, they blame digital piracy. Instead of blaming $8.50 movie tickets and $5.00 drinks in a down economy for less-than-expected box office results, they blame piracy. Why not, it's easy, and it helps them eliminate a foe. But it's far from accurate.
Yet when a company starts extorting "settlement" money and equipment from people under the threat of expensive lawsuits, for buying equipment which has any number of geeky-goodness uses unrelated to DirecTV, that's unacceptable. I'm perfectly happy with my digital cable TV service, and yet I'm tempted to buy an "unlooper" and some legitimate smartcard equipment to play with just so I can get that letter from DirecTV. I have a feeling that this will end with DirecTV losing a class-action lawsuit brought by those wrongfully accused and extorted.
It is just unacceptably for a company to do what DirecTV is doing, or to do what the RIAA is doing by sending out DMCA letters based on strings within filenames, etc. Any time you condemn the innocent with the guilty, it is not justice, and it *cannot* be tolerated in our society.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
I agree
.SIG here, it is gone now...
Here in Spain, pirate smartcards were rampant until the main dish company changed the technology (changing their smartcards) and killed the market.
The same thing happened in France...
Werwerf
There was a
I bought a smart card programmer for a friend overseas and had it delivered to my fathers address. My dad was a huge fan of Direct TV (bunch of dishes, always paid his bill) until they started threatening him with a lawsuit.
Now he is a fan of Dish Network...
I don't know, when I drive by the IBM compound I am blasted with radiation. I guess if they wanted their information private they wouldn't use wireless phones and 802.11g connections.
I know you're being sarcastic, but why not consider it. they are broadcasting information, why shouldn't someone else listen. they don't have to break in or taps lines or lay bugs, all they are doing is sitting nearby. if two people are talking at normal volume in the library, are other ppl commiting crimes listening to them?
if ibm want to keep their info private then they should make sure it's encrypted to that others can't make any sense of the transmissions. thats alot more effective than trying to sue the listeners.
not that this idea is perfect, as it makes parabolic and laser mikes alot more acceptable, which I don't like. but I still think that if something is broadcast towards you, then you should not be made a criminal just by listening to it.
dave
DirecTV is suing Canadian citizens and attempting to disrupt information websites (presumably under the guise of the DMCA). What interesting about this is that DirecTV has no jurisdiction in Canada, as they have no presence there (they are not licensed to broadcast into Canada, which is what started this whole mess in the first place). Also, the DMCA does not apply to non-US citizens (although we've seen how well that's been applied in the Sklyarov case).
Right or wrong about the genesis of their actions (some folks really are intercepting DirecTV signal), DTV is just flat wrong about how they prosecute their case and need to be reigned back in.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Regardless of the "intended" market for card readers/writers, there are non-illegal uses for them. Do you blame non-DTV-hackers for buying a $50 T911 instead of a $500 card reader development kit? (yes, there are cheaper "non-hacker" card readers now, but there weren't a year ago; I looked for one)
They only sent letters to people who bought the readers that had been modified to write to directv's cards by circumventing their security measures. The readers were explicitly advertised for this use only.
Incorrect. They sell smartcard readers with un-programmed microcontrollers. Until you "flash the atmel", it's just a blank microcontroller connected to a DB9 and a SC slot. None of the units they sell are shipped "modified to write to directv's cards". They are a blank slate. Until you flash the microcontroller they do EXACTLY NOTHING. You can argue "intent", and "everyone knows..." all you want, but try winning a court case by saying "most people buy these for defrauding DTV". The charge is easily beaten by saying "I don't. I use them for (whatever)". The problem is that it takes many expen$ive lawyer-hours to get to that point, and DTV knows it. They're swatting flies with a 4X8 sheet of plywood here, and it's despicable.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Inventors for all practical purposes now means corporate entities, because if they can ban the tools required to investigate and experiment with technology, then the era of the individual inventor is over. The ability of corporations to stifle scientific investigation now rivals that of the Inquisition.
Now the question isn't "what can I invent?", but "can I afford a lawyer to defend my right to invent?"
I actually feel physically sick.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The web site mentions the rather strange fact that "intercepting satellite signals" is illegal. This may be a bit off topic, but it seems to me that this is very strange. Is it illegal to purchase or build your own radio receiver which will receive radio wave signals that are constantly broadcast into your home ? Of course not. Why then is it that when a satellite company broadcasts signals into my home, it is illegal for me to "intercept" those signals. Do they "own" the signal ? If so and if they don't want me to recieve their signal if I am not paying for it then why are they broadcasting it into my home? Can I sue them for invading my privacy by boradcasting signals into my home that I do not want to receive? I also find the use of the term "intercept" to be strange much the same way it is incorrect so say that making a copy of copyrighted software is "stealing". Just as copying software is not really "stealing" , it's "copying" so it is also true that when a satellite signal enters my home I am not "intercepting" it (because if I am , then who is it intended for ? As far as I know there is no one living underground below me), but rather I am "receiving" it, and it was the satellite company that sent it to me in the first place, even if I do not pay for it or ask for it. If I have the capability to build my own satellite reciever and decode the signals that are being sent into my home I see no reason why I should not be allowed to do so.
i had some problems with the link to my original post. . . so here it is . . . . . Yes, I have been served with papers, and trust me. . . this whole thing sucks. I was served at work, where i am a unofficial IT guy, with my fellow co-workers looking on as if i were a dangerous criminal. (Embarassing does not even begin to explain the feeling.) My first reaction was, WTF is this? I have never been sued before, i have never been in any kind of trouble before, hell, i have not had a speeding ticket in over 10 years. . . . but low and behold, here was a document stating that i am being sued for $120,000 by a company that i have been a long standing customer with for many years. As i read on, i found out that it was for a Smart Card Programmer. Once again that WTF feeling came back. . . . I purchased this equipment over 2 years ago for a security project that never got off of the ground. A company that i worked for wanted a better way to keep control over who used the company network, i found some info on smart cards, did a search for "smart card programmer" and purchased the cheapest unit i could find. (about $160 if memory serves me correctly), Only to find out that it would not work for what i wanted to do. And now im being sued! And as i said earlier, i am a DTV customer, have been for 6 years. If i were going to hack TV cards, you would think that i would do mine first! Just to make one thing clear, I am a poor guy, And as a poor guy, there are not many options for me to take. Anyway, i dont want to rant about this, however i believe that it is a great injustice. This is just extortion, plain and simple. I was told that i could settle for $4,500 before i went to court, or $10,000 after the court process had began. Alternatively, i could fight it, and the cheapest lawyer would be on the average of $15,000 by the time it is all over. Obviously, not a "poor boy" option. And since it is a civil case, i am not entitled to a court appointed lawyer. So the only option left for me is to fight it myself. Which, if any of you have ever looked into the paperwork involved in a Federal Civil Case, looks like i have just over a snowball's chance in hell. So if i go to court and loose, by law, they can take what little i have, and then some. One option that they could take is garnishment, and being that this is a Lawsuit for damages, they could take a chunk of my pay check for the next 25 years! I only make $12 an hour now, and have a wife and 2 kids, so this is not a good thing for a person who is just barely making it. This Lawsuit is designed to crush people like me so that people who have the money to pay the ransom, will do so.