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The Argument for Crackable Media
rubberbando writes "Wired is running a story about how the US Copyright Office is looking for input about a law that will allow some media to be legally cracked. This is aimed at certain uses such as cracking an ebook so that a blind person can use reading software with it and older software that requires a hardware dongle that no longer works." From the article: "The DMCA forbids cracking of copy-protected or encrypted digital media, with certain exceptions. When the law was passed, Congress mandated the register of copyrights revisit the anti-circumvention section every three years to make sure consumers have proper access to materials they purchased -- even if content creators have them locked down. If the copyright office finds instances where copy protection prevents fair use of the work, then those copy protections can be legally circumvented." We reported on the other side of the coin yesterday.
So... making a backup copy for when my kids destroy the CD/DVD (or when my hard drive crashes) isn't fair use?
Agile Artisans
They should call it the Sega Act
so with all the failed attempts at bulletproof DRM and anticopying, is there actually any UNcrackable media?
Why not just add a law mandating documented file formats?
Even if your company goes bust, your customers data should remain accessible.
How the data is used privately should be up to the customer, and is not the concern of the producer. We will have laws soon telling us how to use toilet roll, and inspectors coming round arresting us for unlicensed operations.
Laws are already in place for improper sharing of copyrighted materials, so why on earth do we need anything else?
liqbase
Of course the market won't solve this.
Disabled people may be a very small minority, but through no fault of their own they are unable to experience the things we can.
We should do all we can to help them experience and enjoy life as we do, and throwing stupid laws in the way just makes it miserable.
You answer your own innate flame by pointing out the government shouldn't help them, your absolutely right but by the same tune, they shouldn't hinder them either.
Another point, why should they have to pay more for something that they will only get partial use out of, if anything, audio or visual only recordings of movies should be available - at around 1/2 the price of the dvd.
Will this have some effect on the abandonware issue? It's sad that companies can buy [comparatively unsuccessful] software for pennies on the dollar, only to bury it (to kill competition). More directly, there are a lot of old games that are unavailable, simply because their holding companies are waiting for someone to meet a "pie in the sky" bid to rerelease them.
Grrr...
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
Just don't get caught.
Seriously, less-broadly specified rights shall definitely trump precisely defined prohibitions. Like "fair-use", which is far more broadly defined than "thou shalt not circumvent © protections".
Or, put in other words, the exercise of a RIGHT cannot be prohibited to a given individual except by a court of law, the idea being to remove the law-making ability that has been put into private hands by the DMCA, for example.
Furthermore, more than ever, the Internet allows the "grass is greener" syndrome. The ability to send information instantaneously over great distances means that in any case, you'll always find a more favourable jurisdiction, rendering the prohibition moot.
For example, I live a day's drive away from the US federal capital, yet I can legally share music over the Internet, and nothing prevents me from running DeCSS on my computer, nor distributing crackster on my web server, things that would land me in jail if I had the foolish notion of embarking on a 30 minute drive (but fortunately, I don't have a car).
The DMCA is one of the worst laws enacted in history. The best and simplest solution that would benefit most would be to retract the DMCA. It could be replaced by laws that are less restrictive and exclusive rather than inclusive.
Is it just me, or has the end user become completely dieregarded in recent years?
Look at, for example, the DRM schemes of today: The end user can consume information he/she legally purchased from only one point, and is restricted in terms of where he/she can transport his/her media. Did we have such laws before? Was it possible to pass legislation, or release content for that matter, that would limit the end user's rights to consume it? Could Sony's label release a CD that would only play 3 times, or that would only play on PC's and Sony CD players, without causing a public outrage? I think not.
It is sad to see the consumer, who is essentially the sole reason these companies make money, reduced to a state where he/she is forced to swallow limitations on the media purchased, and risk legal prosecution by choosing to use that media for himself in a way that the content distributors never intended. It is even more sad to see users succumb to this.
Legislation like this is a good step in the right direction, but I, for one, will not purchase a single file or disc until I can use it any way I want. Until I can insert my newly bought CD/DVD into my computer and have the CD's software offer to make me as many backup copies as I want, as many "friend" copies as I want, and as many transfers to any other device I wish, I will not buy a CD.
It's not enough to place the responsibility for monitoring the validity of the DMCA on some obscure board that will review a couple of formats once every three years, I should have the right to demand that my media plays in the way legally intended by the DMCA, at least, and the burden for ensuring this should be placed on the people that release the media. I should be able to sue, and win the lawsuit automatically, if I cannot use my media in the way I am legally entitled to without resorting to third-party solutions on shady sites the average consumer has never heard of, and will never find out about. I shouldn't have to re-encode my audio files through three different formats and manually rename and reconstruct the ID3 tags so that I can properly use my media, I should be offered to have everything done in a clean, quick, and effortless way by the CD itself, or at the very least be forwarded by the CD to a reliable website with clearly labeled instructions on how I can easily and effortlessly do so. Until then, our rights as consumers are not being enforced, and nor are the labels' responsibilities.
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
If before we were able to crack a book open, how ebooks are different?
If the U.S. Copyright Office is soliciting ideas on this concept, a method exists to address accessibility for those disabled, and the "lost due to bankruptcy" sides. Two parts address each side.
Part 1: Copyright holders should be required to register each anti-circumvention method with the copyright office in exchange for which a number (which has no legal value) will be assigned to the method. IP firms which specialize in protection methods could register their methods as "base classes" for others. References to patent numbers might also be helpful.
Part 2: The holder then keeps a list available for public viewing which indicates the works and which copy protection methods they have employed. (Example: ebook "How To Be A Dummy," published 8Oct2005, document format: PRC, DRM method: 1,554,776 (Ref 334,665) ). Note that this is not registering your works. Ideally, this list should be notarized, either electronically or physically to prevent post-litigation tampering.
Part 1 takes the good old cryptography rule to heart, "The algorithm is never the secret. The input key is the secret." Two things happen here: bad protection is shamed away from being used, and the court system has a public notice of intent on the behalf of the holder requesting that the DMCA provide anti-circumvention enforcement. Then the U.S. Courts would only need to prove or disprove that the declared method was actually in use and attempting to protect the work in question. If expert commentary were recognized on at least "base class" methods, then prebuilt testimony could be used in courts to make enforcement of base-64 encoding methods an embarassment to the litigant.
Part 2 gives the courts the benefits of documentation regarding protected works. It also lets those who provide support to disabled individuals have a course of action with regard to legal circumvention. So it could, for example, allow someone who converts DRMed ebooks to audiobooks to become a limited, authorized agent to perform such action with nothing more than some paperwork from the copyright holder. If the copyright holder has disappeared (death or otherwise), then the method is publicly known and could be cracked within governed rules.
In short, there exists the potential to not take the teeth out of the DMCA while still executing it a more efficient way. Hopefully the methods described above represent ideas that tilt more power towards the public without actually removing any power of the copyright holder. Yes, many of us believe it should disappear, but the U.S. did sign an international treaty of which the DMCA is only a manifestation. Since the U.S. is a WTO member, it was a willing participant, although it could have fought back a little harder.
I'm not sure I understand....my girlfriend says a hardware dongle always works.
"My girlfriend's got sodium laureth sulfate hair."
http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2005/70fr57526.htm l
SUMMARY:
The Copyright Office of the Library of Congress is preparing to conduct proceedings in accordance with section 1201(a)(1) of the Copyright Act, which was added by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and which provides that the Librarian of Congress may exempt certain classes of works from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. The purpose of this rulemaking proceeding is to determine whether there are particular classes of works as to which users are, or are likely to be, adversely affected in their ability to make noninfringing uses due to the prohibition on circumvention. This notice requests written comments from all interested parties, including representatives of copyright owners, educational institutions, libraries and archives, scholars, researchers and members of the public, in order to elicit evidence on whether noninfringing uses of certain classes of works are, or are likely to be, adversely affected by this prohibition on the circumvention of measures that control access to copyrighted works. DATES: Written comments are due by December 1, 2005. Reply comments are due by February 2, 2006.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I just recieved a Las Vegas season 2 boxed set from overseas. (Original) Ep3 and Ep6 don't work, and Ep2 and Ep5 have skips (It's a double-sided disk, and there's obviously a load of bad sectors.) Sending it back is not really an option - two more lots of international postage will cost more than the boxed set did in the first place.
The point is, using a freely-available program I was able to extract all of side one to my hard drive and watch episode 3. Episode 6 is beyond saving, from the look of it, but I haven't given up yet.
I'm not copying disks to sell or pirating anything, all I'm doing is using a third party tool to watch something I paid for which is otherwise unwatchable.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Remember of course, that IANAL, but it seems to me that copyright law, especially that which upholds legal recourse for such small matters as fair-use is just not what the founders intended, nor is it in the best interest of the population.
I believe that copyright owners have a right to legal protection from those that would blatently copy their works and distribute for a profit. Anything that is no more damaging than a public library is fair game. That means it is not illegal for you to load a DVD to your friend before returning it to the rental place, nor is it illegal to 'loan' your copy to a friend.
Now making tons of copies and selling them at a local market... that's wrong, should be illegal.
Fair-use is not an illegal activity aimed at defauding the copyright owner, and any, *ANY* device or mechanism designed to prohibit your fair use of something you have paid to use is NOT the intent of copyright law.
What we have here is a need to re-educate and moderate the law.
Well, IMHO anyway
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Copyrights and patents exist in order that the holder may gain some period of commercial value - protected by the state, in return for which, the work returns to the public domain once that period has expired.
It's a reasonably fair trade.
The DMCA (and encryption in general) overturns that trade. It allows the owner the protection of the law - but it doesn't give the public their rights to eventual open use.
That's not fair.
IMHO, people who encrypt their products should be denied copyright protection - in just the way that people with technical innovation can choose to keep that innovation as a Trade Secret instead of getting Patent coverage.
In the absence of this, historians of the future are going to have a very hard time finding out about our society. If most or even all media of the next century ends up locked away behind almost unbreakable encryption - with DRM hardware locking that encryption to a particular computer - it may become impossible for someone a few hundred years from now to read our newspapers, books or watch our movies. That would be a terrible thing.
It's bad enough that we've been primarily responsible for screwing over the planet for our descendents - but now we're working hard towards denying them access to our greatest musicians, authors and other media?
Right now, it seems like a computer from a few hundred years into the future would be able to break any of our codes quite easily - but when Moores' Law runs out of steam, the most powerful encryption systems we have on that day will probably be *FOREVER* uncrackable.
www.sjbaker.org
Please note that while the copyright office can grant exemptions to allow the act of circumventing technical protection schemes, they cannot grant exemptions to allow the manufacture or trafficking in devices which can circumvent those measures. So even if your special pleadings get you an exemption, you can't legally make or purchase a device which can do the job.
From the previous article...
No sane business operator enters a contract in which one party has the right to disregard its terms at will, but that's what HR-1201 permits.
That's also what Congress did when it passed the Bono Act in 1998, which extended copyright terms for another 50 years and retroactively placed all audio recordings made before 1972 under copyright until the year 2067. Many of these works were already in the public domain. But even the wax cylinders recorded by Edison in the 1890s are now copyrighted until 2067 because of this law.
Copyright isn't a fact of nature or a divine right, it's a contract between copyright holders and the public. The public agrees to respect a copyright and pay taxes to enforce it for a specific number of years. At the end of that time the public expects the work to become public domain. Every time Congress extends copyrights it's like declaring that all 30-year mortgages are now 60-year mortgages. Or in some cases, giving the house back to the bank after it's been paid up. Great news if you're the bank, bad news if you're the one making the payments.
What sane person would enter into a contract that allows the other party to disregard its terms at will? The average American citizen. Oops, I mean "consumer."
what a TERRIBLE mischaracterization.
if you enter into a contract and you breach that contract, then you pay, weather the law allows fair use or not
what HR-1201 allows people to do is to develop their own media access/playback systems for DRM'ed media WITHOUT ENTERING INTO A CONTRACT AT ALL.. which is how the copyright system worked before 1998, and how the free market works everywhere else.
You don't see ford getting their own pet law which forces tire companies to sign a contract for the "priveledge" of making tires for fords, nor do you see honda getting a pet law which forces snapon tool company to sign a contract for the "priveledge" of making tools which work with honda engines. The same free market principles should apply to copyrighted works.
Copyright is the exclusive right to produce and distribute, not the exclusive right to determine access.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!