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SunnComm Says Pointing to Shift Key 'Possible Felony'
The Importance of writes "A couple of weeks ago BMG released an audio CD with a new type of DRM. Earlier this week, a computer science graduate student at Princeton wrote a report showing the DRM was ineffective - it could easily be defeated by use of the 'shift' key. The stock of the DRM company (SunnComm) has since fallen by 20%. Now, SunnComm plans to sue the student under the DMCA and claim that SunnComm's reputation has been falsely damaged. According to SunnComm's CEO, 'No matter what their credentials or rationale, it is wrong to use one's knowledge and the cover of academia to facilitate piracy and theft of digital property.'"
They're just mad they were found out to be dummies with a broken product, and that their share price dropped 20% when Wall Streeties discovered they were dummies. Solution: sue the guy who said, "the Emperor has no clothes!"
Stop the ride. I want off.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
No matter what their credentials or rationale, it is wrong to use one's knowledge and the cover of academia to facilitate piracy and theft of digital property.
Magic markers and shift keys asside, I guess using a "slim-jim" to gain access to one's own car is wrong too. The car door was certianly never designed to allow entry using this method. Where's the DMCA when you really need it??
They obviously have no case, but is there a way for Hamilton to effectively defend himself in case it's allowed to go to trial?
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
But don't you think this is an attempt at intimidation rather than a real lawsuit? In otherwords, SunnComm knows they can't win, but it looks like they're defending themselves, plus it will prevent other people from even discussing SunnComm for fear of being sued.
I mean, a judge would have to be wacky to find for the SunnComm if only because:
1) Microsoft published these directions to bypass the SunnComm protection years ago
2) The publishing of opinions is generally considered freedom of the press isn't it?
My first reaction is that this is an April Fool's joke, except its the wrong time of year.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Welp, my letter to Hillary Clinton has already been fired off. Not that my letter alone will do anything, but it's time for people to at least do something, anything at all to try to put a stop to crap like this under the guise of the DMCA. Write to your congress-people, donate to the EFF and ACLU, vote for candidates based on their stances on technology issues rather than their standing in Hollywood... I mean whatever. Get the movement started, for god's sake. This is getting completely out of hand at this point. The USSR is alive and kicking when it's a "felony" to talk about using the shift key on your keyboard. (No Soviet Russia jokes please - I am being totally serious.)
No matter what their credentials or rationale, it is wrong to use one's knowledge and the cover of academia to facilitate piracy and theft of digital property."
No matter the organization or rationale, it is wrong to use purchased legislation and the cover of law to deprive people of their rights.
No matter the organization or rationale, it is wrong to use purchased legislation and the cover of law to hide the fact that your product is shoddy, and very likely will not work as advertised.
No matter the organization or rationale, it is wrong to use purchased legislation and the cover of law to exagerate the dammage caused by saying 'hold the shift key.'
But who's counting?
Thomas Galvin
No, I can believe it... 'Rediculous' would be a better word. Why don't they sue Microsoft for making the Shift key circumvent the auto-run feature to begin with?
In a sensable world, they would have to prove beyond all doubt that the student made the report with full intention to facilitate piracy, and not simply "Hey guys, this software is crap and here's why"
I hope they don't expect their stocks to go back up after filing this lawsuit!
=Smidge=
The moral of this bedtime story is that companies should spend as much on their research department as they do on their legal department.
Mother nature cannot be appealed (with apologies to Feynman).
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I have auto-run turned off. I did it with tweakui which microsoft provided. I assume this means the CD will always be easily copyable on my computer with the extra effort of holding down the shift key. It sure was nice of microsoft to provide me with this nifty circumvention.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
The CD that you buy is a music CD. Yet the protected CD actually installs a driver on the target computer without the user knowing - there is another type of program that behaves in this way. It's called a virus (ok, really a trojan) and generally the authors get jail terms. Let's try and do the same for these SunnComm people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here is something that a judge will actually understand: a graduate student publishing a plain-English report of research into DRM being sued (and bankrupted) under the DMCA for pointing out a shift key.
- No Eeeeeeevil "hackers" at 2600
- No that-can't-be-speech "code"
- No funny Commie (Russian) names
- Nothing for sale, even speculatively
This is the test case we've been waiting for.Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Since by pressing the shift key you keep autorun from installing an application, by NOT installing a piece of software on my computer, I am breaking the law?
This case will answer the question; if you uninstall something, or refuse to install something, does that constitute as a circumvention of the security of digital media (meaning, if you don't view it with a certain app), and hence, is it a felony? This could go as far as to say that by opening a Game cd with the explore function in windows that you are circunventing the copy protection schemes of the game by viewing the raw content, such as movies, without agreeing to the eula (generally, a 2nd time around thanks to package lisencing). Could Trillian be considered circumvention of MS's MSN messanger service? How rediculously far do they want to take this?
This case is different than skylov's case. Skylov went ahead and (I believe this is the one) broke Adobe's encryption schemes and published the weakness. This is a direct, purposful circumvention. Now we're extending the law to accidental and really nitpicky issues, and forcing the user to do certain things without even really telling them.
And just think of what corperations like microsoft will do with stuff like this. "Since they had linux installed and since linux ignores autorun, they circumvented the cd copy protection." Can we say "Fok me"? They're getting so far away from what people think is right and wrong. It's getting real ugly now, I'm curious if they'll set a precident for or against the people and how far they'll go with this before they start outright revoltes. Pretty soon cd's will have all kinds of protection schemes, and users won't buy them because they can't do what they want with them. They'll still go for the indie cd's and stuff their friends burn for em'. For those who aren't interent savvy, I hope they have internet savvy friends to teach them.
Remember this guys, help your buddies, get them setup with p2p apps and talk with them. Teach them how to use a computer.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Cdrom
Set the Autorun key to 0. Done. One of the first things I do on any machine I install or have to use. I absolutely hate Autorun and find it one of the most useless "innovations" of the last decade.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
They're saying that if he had read their stupid Whitepaper he would see that the incredibly obvious shift key workaround wouldn't really have been one? What are they smoking?
It's as if someone said you can secure your house by tying the door shut with a piece of twine in a bowknot. When people happen to notice you can bypass this fortification by tugging on the knot, the "knot idea" man tells you you'd see that conclusion is erroneous if you read the knots section of the Boy Scout Handbook.
What really boggles the mind is this:
Concluded Jacobs, "This cat-and-mouse game that hackers and others like to play with owners of digital property is over..."
Holding down SHIFT is HACKING? You can't even point out an obvious flaw anymore? "We want to make lame-ass, shitty software, and don't you DARE point that out!"
credentials
I just want to copy the CD I BOUGHT.
one's knowledge and the cover of academia
So becasue some grad student discovered this in "academica" it should have been kept as a secret?
cover of academia to facilitate piracy
Yes, we all belive that what he really wanted was to commit "piracy" not to expose some stupid non-working restrictions technology.
theft of digital property. For the umteenth time: Copyright infringement is not theft.
This must be The Most Erroneous and Counterfactual statement of the year.
Darl McBride had some nice rants but this is a masterpiece.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
If it does interefere with other programs that use the CD-ROM drive, can't the government prosecute them for terrorist activity now that hacking has been declared a terrorist activity? After all, they've created a program that tricks users into executing it and is designed to damage the computer's normal functions.
Sadly, research departments don't seem to be bringing in as much money as legal departments these days.
The ______ Agenda
What's really insane is that they are actually using the stock market to justify the damages they supposedly endured. Any judge with any ounce of sense will reject this as bullshit. The market is so damn volatile these days that you cannot use it as evidence unless it could be proven that the accused performed actions specifically to manipulate the market.
If the market did go down because of his actions, it was only because investors saw the company had a crappy product to begin with and it was only a matter of time anyway.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
But they can't have it both ways -- either pressing the shift key doesn't do a damn thing, in which case the student "falsely damaged" their reputation but did not violate the DMCA, or pressing the shift key breaks their 'copy protection' scheme, in which case he may have violated the DMCA but he did not damage their reputation, their lame product did. But not both.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
If anything should be illegal, it should be their shoddy technology. First, they create a CD that is obtensibly a music compact disc, but is in reality a CD-ROM that surreptitiously installs programs onto a user's computer without the computer owner's attempt, in a deliberate attempt to sabotage the functionality of the computer. This is what is known as a "virus"*.
Then they present this ill-concieved technology to their clients and shareholders as some sort of panacea, knowing all the while that it is utterly ineffective. This is what is known as "fraud".
To top off their audacity, they then threaten a lawsuit against the researcher who alerted the public to this fraud. This is completely ridiculous. What next, a medical researcher's tests prove that Quack Corp.'s Snake Oil does not really enlarge your penis, so the researcher is sent to prison?
This is a technology that is dependent on an unrealistic number of constraints. If the user of the CD is running Windows AND has autorun turned on AND doesn't press the shift key while putting the disc in AND allows the SunnComm virus to infect their computer AND leaves it running AND tries to copy the music, it won't work, otherwise it will. Oops I just pointed out how flawed their scheme is too, I guess that's a "possible felony"
.* To be pedantic it's more of a trojan than a virus because the malicious code does not self-replicate beyond installing from the disc, but you get the idea.
When you boil it all down, Sunncomm is dancing, but the RIAA are calling the tune. It is the RIAA and affiliated labels who need to be boycotted until they reform, or perish. Sunncomm will die on their own. Sunncomm alredy lost Sound Choice Karaoke as a customer. Using the previous DRM scheme, Mediacloq, caused a backlash that really hurt them, and karaoke is a niche market.
How ya like dat?
Its a clerical mistake. It happens all the time. The person who recorded the trade put the decimal in the wrong place, or ommited it entirely. Any time you see a spike like that on a pink sheet (OTC) chart its clerical error.
You've latched onto something important. Everybody is focusing on how idiotic suing someone over the shift key is, but they haven't read the original paper. The paper is chock full of an explanations about how to defeat the copy protection scheme. Prime fodder for trial by DMCA. However, since the copy-protection scheme relies on a mechanism within windows that has historically been frequently disabled by many users, the history of such may be used in defense of the author. The author did not actually do anything to disable the copy protection. He merely pointed out that protection method wouldn't work on a significant number of machines right out of the box.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Why don't you just sue Microsoft? They created Windows with this "don't load custom drivers" hole! Also, let's sue manual writers! I'm sure there has to be a manual somewhere which desctibes (IN DETAIL NO LESS) this method for circumventing CD security. And why don't we sue keyboard manufacturers, they're the ones who give users that fscking shift key IN THE FIRST PLACE!
This company is just pissed that their half-assed solution to a problem that cannot be fixed by means of a technological barrier was so easily defeated. One keystroke...jesus...and they actually went ahead and spent the money on the R&D for this? Is ANYONE awake over there?
They deserve what they got, and the RIAA should be pissed at them for pawning off this assinine scheme to them as a reasonable solution.
PS: This makes me realize exactly how bad a law the DMCA is; It is an attempt to, by law, enforce security through obscurity. If answers are outlawed, then only outlaws will have answers.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?