Slashdot Mirror
New AACS Crack Called "Undefeatable"
Tuoqui writes "With all the focus on the infamous hexadecimal number, people may be ignoring a bigger weakness in the AACS armor, which emerged two weeks ago. Some hackers have figured out how to crack AACS in a way that cannot be defeated, even by revoking all the keys in circulation."
I'm just enjoying my coffee, and suddenly I'm faced with an article about somebody's crack!
Oh I know, don't use HD-DVD...there...defeated.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Huh, looks like the new strategy is issuing DMCA Takedown orders against anyone who suggests that it is undefeatable...
Summation 2
"I reject your AACS crack and substitute my own"
.... Then maybe media companies will give up this DRM non-sense which does nothing but frustrate consumers and slow the adoption rate of digital media in the mass market.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Basically this crack relies on using a Microsoft HD-DVD drive for the XBox 360, with a special firmware patch (which requires you to remove the firmware chip, flash it, and then solder it back in). With a hacked drive, you can apparently get the Volume ID, which is one of the parameters used in the encryption, directly off of the disc. Normally the Volume ID isn't passed to the host computer, I think.
Anyway, in the bizarro-world that the people who write DRM systems inhabit, I think that this will probably just push them to make the drives harder to "tamper" with; I fully expect that they'll eventually just pot the circuit boards in epoxy or something, to keep you from desoldering the chips.
So if you're interested in this stuff, you might as well go out and get one of the MS drives or other first-gen drives, because I suspect the hacking possibilities may decrease over time; it's going to be these early drives which are the most hackable.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"No matter how many Private Host Keys they revoke we will still be able to get Volume IDs using patched xbox 360 HD DVD drives."
I hope the hacker isn't suggesting that this whole encryption key debackle is somehow Microsoft's fault, could you imagine the lawsuit?
Summation 2
I wanted to show a friend what happened on digg, and went back a few days and can barely find any of the hd dvd key stories. I know kevin rose posted that entry saying they basically give up, and the users have spoken kind of thing, but at the same time it seems all those additional stories are gone as well.
Punishing legitimate customers since it's inception. I got reminded of this again today after not being able to play a DVD in my Powerbook because of region encoding. Funny thing is, this DVD is only really of extreme local interest and any outside interest/sales are negligible - since it's only sold in one region so why do the authors enforce region encoding? Do they not know what it is?
Maybe it's better to pirate afterall. Less hassles that way.
All apologies to those who feel that DRM is still a relevant freedom related issue... But I honestly feel that discussing this is just a drain on resources that could be directed towards more fertile topics.
... we were getting so close to a breakthrough there, I don't know how we got off-track.
Yeah, like arguing the relative merits of Linux versus Windows, or Apple versus MS
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If they didn't learn anything from the countless other times this has happened to other forms of DRM, I don't know what makes you think they'll learn anything from this one.
I have to wonder if the huge amount of HD-DVD hack coverage lately is starting to make Sony wish that someone would spend more time hacking Blu-Ray. There's no such thing as bad press?
Erm, how is this undefetable? If they don't mind sacraficeing the 360, couldn't whoever manages these things revoke its keys and not issue new ones, so that it can't get the volume key, so it can't decrypt the disk?
I'm probably misunderstanding something, though
you are attempting to control the flow of ones and zeros in a world where an electronic communication system designed to withstand a nuclear attack is now ubiquitous
you should give up. you've lost, and will keep losing. it's just silly to keep going down this path. there is only more pain in store for you
people will still make movies. people will still make music. it's just that your particular pre-internet business model is now obsolete
go ask the aztecs or the incans if the appearance of new technology was fair to their empires
it wasn't. but it didn't stop technology in the form of gunpowder and sailing ships and metal armor from rendering them obsolete
so it is with you and the internet
sorry
reality is a bitch
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Keep your eyes to the sky.
But wouldn't that make it hard to fry eggs on your XBOX? I mean, who are you kidding?
Please stop stalking me, bro.
a fitting quote might be:-
"what physical science can devise and synthesize, physical science can analyse and duplicate" - e. e. doc smith (one of my favorite authors).
sorry almost forgot the obligatory 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0!
Ah yes. US politics is totally irrelevant. Ignoring the fact that this is a US centered site, I'll be sure to remind you of that when bush throws his "going away" bombing in your country.
While this scheme may not be defeated, I certainly can by strong armed legal tactics by the movie industry likely to stem from my using this approach.
-m
For a real laugh, check-out the formerly-known-as Secret Number as Photoshop art. My personal favorite is #12. The funniest part of all was as I went through the list, an animated ad for Blu-Ray high-definition movie playback popped in after image #9. It doesn't get better than that!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Did anyone notice that this article is nearly 3 weeks old? Really on the ball there, Slashdot.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
HandBrake is your friend.
With the size of today's hard drives, carrying around physical DVDs to watch on one's Powerbook just seems silly. Rip 'em (I personally think most movies look fine using MPEG-4 2-pass, target size of 700MB) and chuck 'em on your hard drive; uses a lot less battery power and it's one less thing to have to keep in your laptop bag.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You're missing the point here. Everybody doesn't have to do this. One person does this and posts Volume Keys for each new release, allowing everyone else to simply decode with the volume key. If this truly can't be revoked, then it doesn't matter it they make it inaccessible tomorrow. Not until every existing modded player breaks beyond repair would it be secure again.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Them: "Hey, want to buy a movie?"
You: "Sure, how much?"
Them: "$100,000,000.00."
You: "F*** off."
Them: "Sorry, that was the price to purchase all rights to the movie, including redistribution and royalties. Would you like to buy a subset of those rights instead?"
You: "Sure, like what?"
Them: "How about, the right to public exhibition, and reproduction of media for sale, but no royalties? That'll be just $5,000,000.00."
You: "No thanks, too much."
Them: "How about, the right to public exhibition? Just $500,000.00."
You: "Do I look like I'm made of money?"
Them: "Sorry. How about, the right to private exhibition? Only $5."
You: "Now you're talkin'!"
Them: "So we have a deal?"
You: "Yep." [you hand them a fiver, and they hand you a DVD.]
Them: "Have a nice day."
You: "Hey, wait, this DVD is copy-protected! I want to copy it!"
Them: "Yes, sorry, we didn't sell you the right to do that. If you have more money -- equal to the amount we'll lose on average for each copy-producing customer -- you can buy that right too."
You: "But I paid for this!" [you shake the DVD at them]
Them: "Do you understand that you paid for limited ownership, and that you consented to the limits stated and known to you at the time of sale?"
You: "No, I'm too dumb-stupid to grasp that. I can only handle concrete meanings of the idea of ownership."
Them: "Yeah, we figured. You probably also think HOAs are usurping your god-given right to paint your house pink, eh?"
Certainly the movie studios are obnoxiously attempting to prevent format-shifting, in order to sell you the same movie twice. But that doesn't mean they are violating any of your rights.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
If I want to pay somebody to chain me up and spank me that isn't a freedom related issue either.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Good, because now I don't have to admit I'm getting old and can't remember that 09 F-something something.
More Twoson than Cupertino
That's why I read Wonkette first, then Slashdot second!
At least at Wonkette the editors can distinguish between fact and fiction... and they understand simple English grammar.
Three Squirrels
Where is it appropriate to say 'let Hollywood take their ball and go home?'
Regards.
It took them that long to crack the encryption on it. ;)
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
i wonder why they didnt use a zero knowledge protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof to defend them disks, bundling the keys with the cds is only delaying the inevitable
Did anyone notice that this article is nearly 3 weeks old? Really on the ball there, Slashdot.
This is not a grouch, as I'm not particularly upset about this, but my submission on this topic was both timely and held pending for over a day before being rejected. I can never figure what makes the editors tick on this sort of thing.
I guess there is no news like old news.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
The big problem with DRM is the fact that one leak is all it takes. After one person successfully removes the DRM from the protected media, it can be copied endlessly. So sure, HD-DVD might get harder to crack through physical lock-downs on the devices, but we'll still be able to download the results from a successfully cracked movie.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/12/164 228
Because obnoxious fucking twat was not listed on the moderation options?
Developing an overblown DRM system: Millions of dollars.
Hiring consultants to tell you it'll really, really work this time after firing all the ones who informed you copy protection is a cryptographic impossibility: Thousands of dollars.
Paying lawyers to send cease-and-desist letters to thousands of websites after the key leaks: $500/hour.
Watching yet another DRM scheme go up in flames shortly after its release: Priceless.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
You are wrong, there are actually places where DRM works for the distributors: A couple of years ago it was possible to buy pirated cards for your satellite-TV receiver, so you could watch all channels for free. People had been doing this since the 80's. Every time the operators invented a new encryption, it was soon cracked and new pirated cards was out for sale. But this ended a couple of years ago, when the current encryption schemes (like Viaccess) was introduced. No one has been able to crack these schemes and most people has lost hope that they ever will be cracked. So the TV networks won in the end. But I guess now people download their their TV-shows with bit torrent instead.
The bad news is, once the media conglomerate PHB's stop taking meetings about next year's bonuses, they'll finally comprehend that storing private keys on the media they sell is a bad idea.
They'll force Trusted Platform Computing as a new and cheaper High Definition format. The private keys will then be stored on a smart card module. Smart cards run their own OS and are quite specifically designed to self-destruct in the event specific programmed communication protocols are not followed.
Bad guys just sniff the data channel then right? Well, the data channel will be encrypted (about version 3.0, but eventually) Then what? Then they you, your computer AND the media player device and your media are merely rented, just like cable TV with even more harm done to new/independent sources of media.
In the "ownership society" era we are in right now, the limits to your media will continue to expand. This is a perfect example of the consequences politically expedient "free market" and some Libertarian pablum. Those whacky Socialist/Communist ideas that Americans love to hate start looking pretty good. Of course, no American will admit it and call it something new, like "Consumer Friendly Media."
If you've read this far, then what are you going to do about it? Most likely just welcome our new media conglomerate overlords.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Wesley Willis' mother will be overjoyed!
Latewire
The article is a little old, the links to the doom9 forum go to posts from early last month. Within a few days of those posts, there was a link to xboxhackers where they were able to accomplish the same thing without having to patch the firmware, ie, no desoldering.
That's pretty interesting. (In TFA the [hack|crack]er is quoted as saying that one of their goals is to eventually be able to pull the Volume Unique Key from the drive without a hardware hack, but he made it seem pretty far off.) I didn't know they had gotten to that point already.
Slightly OT: I'm really hoping that someone will write up a good introduction to how AACS works, in semi-layman's terms. I've read the official AACS documentation (as much of it is public, anyway) and it's not the easiest thing in the world to get your head around, if it's not your field already. It's obvious these Doom9 guys know their shit, but it would be nice if somebody made some documentation just so the rest of us know what the hell is going on; AACS has so many keys and keyblocks and keys-within-keys-within-keys that I'm never quite clear what exactly they've cracked, or which key is required to read the actual content without any other intervention from the player.
It would really be good if Wikipedia handled that, but right now the AACS article is just a lot of news-bites about the progress of the hacking, and it's very light on the technical stuff (and it's currently locked due to some pissing contest or other).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
True, but they aren't really trying to protect their movies from being copied. If they really wanted, they could use 2048bits RSA keys to protect their content like MS DRMs 360 games. AACS was weak even before the first blu-ray or hd-dvd was released. The drm in the discs only serve as way0 for them to enforce DMCA. DRM+DMCA is somewhat good copyright protection.
you don't? good for you. but stop criticizing me. i bought my slaves fair and square
"Just because emancipation made some slaves free does not give anyone the right to ask that other slaves be set free. Many new territories out West are being opened up and work just fine without slaves and they produce good crops. Buy from them if you want to consume slavery-free agriculture. It is really that simple."
no, it's not that simple. when a change comes, it comes. it's not about choosing not to respect a law, it's about being unable to respect a law. the paradigm of looking at ones and zeros as freeflowing is not able to respect the world where ones and zeros could or should or would be somehow controlled. in a fundamental way the template doesn't fit the world anymore. speaking the language of copyright on the internet is like someone speaking quechua to someone who only understand spanish: there is no possibility of working together. copyright law was written in an age when only a handful of corporate players could distribute music. now any teenager in his basement can perform the same function an entire corporate behemoth was needed for in 1980. the previous world was easy to police. the new one is impossible to
but of course grumpy old men who don't understand what fundamental change means can still write all sorts of laws attempting to control the flow of bits
grumpy old men: meet poor, highly motivated, unimpressed with copyright, technologically literate teenagers
you tell me who prevails
i'm not asking you to tell me what SHOULD happen, i'm asking you to tell yourself what WILL happen
right and wrong is not the issue. how society understands how things work is the issue. and that has fundamentally changed, inexorably. is it wrong that the best archer in the english army, who has devoted his life to the pursuit of marksmanship, can be defeated by a machine gun in the hands of a blind drunk? is it unfair? yes, it is wrong, and yes, it is unfair. BUT IT IS ALSO JUST THE WAY IT IS. accpet it. move on. the era your mind clings and its legal structures is over, defeated, antiquated, dissolved
it's called "progress"
many an era in human history ends with a few old die hards bitter and clinging to the past and the way things used to work and the way things "should" work and the way things "always worked fine" and the way thing "by moral provenance is the only way to work"
blah blah blah
are you one of those fossils?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Or, there's always "Hey, I want to exercise my rights under fair use laws, which have always existed and which you don't have to pay a penny for." Or "Hey, I want to exercise my private-exhibition right (which I paid you for) on a platform of my choosing." Or "I want to make a backup of this, so I can continue to exercise that private-exhibition right (which, again, I paid you for) if my kids scratch the crap out of the original." It's not quite so black-and-white as you put it there.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Except for one thing... That's not what they're selling.
They are selling you an entire physical copy, which you can do whatever the hell you want, short of selling copies.
Look at their advertising. They don't say, "Purchase a license to private exhibition today!" They say, "Own it on HD-DVD, today!!!".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
There is a rule in security: "Don't Prohibit what you can't Prevent" [1]. The same rule applies to laws.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
I own 2 legitimately, untampered-with DVD players, several computers with DVD drives, and an old XBox. When I rent or purchase a DVD that I am unable to play on any of these devices, nothing makes me more livid (especially when I'm already moody because I'm hungry and planned to eat while watching the DVD). It's actually to the point now where I look at the back of the DVD to see who the publisher is before renting or purchasing it, because I've found my devices especially have trouble with Sony DVDs, of course. I've never even made a copy of a DVD or pirated any DVDs, but I can honestly say that as it becomes more painful for me to legitimately watch my DVDs, I will eventually be driven to circumvent their DRM entirely as that would be less painful of a process. It just pisses me off, but there are some movies I would really enjoy watching and owning a legitimate copy of, but I simply won't spend a penny of mine if Sony's name is on it. Furthermore, Sony's BS about hardware manufacturers needing to keep up-to-date with their latest DRM mechanisms doesn't bode well either - I'm not replacing any of these devices which work perfectly fine with the exception of their purposely fouled media.
Them: "Do you understand that you paid for limited ownership, and that you consented to the limits stated and known to you at the time of sale?"
No because it was never explained to anyone buying a DVD nor is it printed in legible and readable size fonts on the DVD. Also the Advertising done for said DVD is the reverse of that by proclaiming "OWN IT TODAY!"
therefore, your contract is null and void because it was not presented at the time of sale AND your advertising suggest the reverse of what you claim your contract to say.
I would give THEM the benefit of the doubt if they made that fact clear. They do not because they know for a fact it will significantly impact DVD sales in a bad way.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Wrong. See USC title 17 sections 107 thru 109.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Me: "Sure! Just show me that signed contract where I agreed that the DVD I just bought is different from the cordless drill and flashlight I bought at the same time, and that I can take those two pieces of my property apart but not your DVD. As soon as you can cough it up, I'll consider your point."
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
When will the media industry understand what this is about? Hackers are not working on breaking AACS so they can copy movies illegally, they are doing it because it is a challenge. Who in their right mind is going to spend hours downloading a 40GB HD movie from bit torrent? Most pirates would be perfectly happy with a divx or xvid rip which doesn't even need a high definition source. Thing is, there are certain people who have nothing better to do than sit at home all day and work on cracking *something*. These are the people who take no showers and eat only so they can shit on "The Man". Most of them probably don't even like watching movies to begin with. They are doing it simply to prove they can and all it takes is one greasy haired basement dwelling geek to crack it and the cat's out of the bag.
As a consumer, I find it ridiculous that I should pay $19.99 for a disk that I can't use as I please. I use Mythtv for my HTPC and as a result, I can't play HD-DVD disks in it (Linux doesn't support HDCP). If I want to play the content on my desktop computer, I will require a new video card and a new monitor. WTF? The hardware I have now is perfectly capable and I'm not going to purchase new hardware just to play a damn movie. I will not pay for something I can't use the way I see fit. If the MPAA (et. al.) doesn't get it by now, then I'll just spend my money on something else.
Maybe I'm not being a good consumer by spending money I don't have on stuff I don't need, but the only reason I'd bow down to corporate America would be to let it kiss my ass.
Them: "Btw, here our foot up your ass, hope you enjoy it"
You: "That's not possible, I already have a foot up my ass for the music"
Them: "If it doesn't stretch, it'll tear"
This means that person has to buy every single movie that is released. Not very feasible.
Certainly the movie studios are obnoxiously attempting to prevent format-shifting, in order to sell you the same movie twice. But that doesn't mean they are violating any of your rights.
And when I figure out how to format shift an item I paid for, exactly how am I violating their rights?
I have no desire to pirate anything. I want to be able to burn movies so that 1.) I don't have to pay another $20-$60 when my kid scratches them. 2.) I don't have to carry a bunch of dvds when I'm on a plane trip.
I guess you'd be okay with buying a car and having the manufacturer tell you what kind of wheels you could put on it?
Thank you for that. I'm surprised at how many Slashdotters have difficulty grasping the idea that the studios are simply trying to sell you a product for a price that allows them to turn a profit. A maximized profit, to be sure, but it's clear that one sale at $20 followed by an infinite number of copies is untenable.
It seems to be a conflict of basic rights: the fair use rights vs. the right to enforce the no-duplication contract. That contract is implicit, to be sure, but can you imagine the spaz attack Slashdot would throw if people were forced to sign an explicit "you will not give away/sell/etc copies of this disc" every time they went down to Best Buy?
Slashdot hits them both ways on it. When they try to make copying impossible, they'll de-solder chips from the boards to get around it and accuse the studios of treating them like criminals. When they sue those who actually are criminals, or even try to figure out the identities of people who appear to be criminals, Slashdot throws a different spaz attack.
I can't think of any way to resolve that conflict: anything that allowed you to make excerpts or backups or format-shift would also be used to make things freely available P2P. There are frequent calls for "a new business model", usually by non-musicians calling for musicians to give up on selling CDs as a way to make a living. And I can hardly imagine how that's supposed to apply to movie studios: will the next Indiana Jones movie come out in the form of Harrison Ford and Sean Connery dropping by the local playhouse in hopes of selling some Indiana Jones tee-shirts?
It doesn't help that the RIAA and MPAA are being incredibly ham-handed in their approaches, but I'm no more thrilled with the way J. Random Slashdotter insists on his rights with no thoughts about the rights of anybody else. I'd much rather see Slashdot debate a cogent solution than complain about their treatment under the current regime.
The sky above the port was the color of bittorrent, tuned to a dead tracker.
"It's not like I'm leeching," MPAAse heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of Reality. "It's like my body's developed this massive plot deficiency." It was a Slashdot voice and a Slashdot joke...
Apologies to Gibson.
That's fair to some extent. But remember:
1)Legally, you have a right to make fair-use excerpts. DRM prevents that.
2)Legally, everything goes into the public domain eventually. DRM prevents that.
3)DRM is an enabling technology for censorship (eg "un-leakable documents") Do we really want that?
Lastly, there is NO natural right to the so-called "intellectual property". Society grants a temporary monopoly to artists as a concession.
Somebody give this a "haha" tag....
Them: "Sorry. How about, the right to private exhibition? Only $5."
You: "Now you're talkin'!"
Them: "So we have a deal?"
You: "Yep." [you hand them a fiver, and they hand you a DVD.]
[...]
Certainly the movie studios are obnoxiously attempting to prevent format-shifting, in order to sell you the same movie twice. But that doesn't mean they are violating any of your rights. Format shifting is fair use. DRM prevents format shifting. DMCA prevents circumvention of DRM. So... Even though I've paid for the right of private exhibition, and am legally allowed to copy my new movie to my iPod or whatever, I can't because the DRM is restricting my exercising my fair use rights. Which is what the OP was saying. I've paid for something that the DRM prevents me from doing.
Me: Hey, guys, but paragraph $free.parNum point $free.ptNum of $free.lawname claims I am allowed to make copies of this for purpose of $free.fairUsePurpose and you're not allowed to stop me from doing that!
Them: Hard luck, kid. Crack it, we'll sue you and you try defending your ass out of court if you really believe you have a case. For now, GTFO, we got your $5 and you can stick your law up your ass.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
You aren't supposed to let them know we know.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
In the most pedantic sense, you're right. Nothing in copyright law dictates that the copyright owner make access to copyrighted works easy. Copyright law merely dictates that there are certain actions that an owner of a copy may not perform without the copyright owner's permission - namely distribution and public performance. The original intent was to insure that only the copyright owner could profit from distribution so that they'd be incented to create creative works.
The bit of the equation that violates my (and everyone else's rights) is the DMCA which says that it's illegal for the first guy to workaround the DRM to tell me and everybody else how he did it (remember, computer software is "speech" in the first ammendment sense). As soon as that law is properly neutered, then all will once again be right with the world.
Copyright law used to work just fine back in the days when making a copy of a copyrighted work was non-trivial. In the digital domain, because making a copy of a work is trivial, it is virtually impossible to police. As we have seen, DRM only makes it slightly more inconvenient for a little while.
Where this leads us, I don't know. The current system of copyrights is irreparably broken. Some new system based on the notion that copies are easy and trivial to create will need to replace it. But the problem there is that you need to compensate artists for their work. The Spiderman movie cost many hundreds of millions of dollars to create. If you want movies like that to be made in the future, then some way to gather those hundreds of millions to do it will need to be found. But there's more to copyright than huge Hollywood productions - it needs to work for the garage band selling CD-Rs at their concerts too.
Are you implying that ALL forms of DRM have been cracked? Care to back that up?
An epilogue...
You: "Cool, I found some software that undoes all of these restrictions."
Them: "Hey, that's not cool. You're violating us!"
You: "What? How am I violating you?"
Them: "You bought limited use rights to the movie."
You: "I'm too dumb-stupid to understand."
Them: "You paid $5 for private home viewings ONLY."
You: "Anyway, my friend wanted a copy so I burned him one. He liked it too. Say, got any other movies for sale?
Them: "You CAN'T do THAT."
You: "He's my friend, dude."
Them: "You're all going to jail."
You: "What?!"
It's extremely obnoxious to expect the bond someone formed with their content publisher to preclude a bond of friendship/kinship over something as trivial as making a copy of a disc. The fact that it feels nothing like theft (because the copy was so easy to make and involved no third parties) only leads to more confusion. That jail enters the picture over what are essentially complicated contracts far beyond the scope of anything the average person has had ever had to consider when buying a consumable object is outrageous.
Reading the slashdot summary, and even the article itself, you may not realize that the Volume ID is just one piece of the puzzle.
The Volume ID is a small bit of data that's stored partially in the lead-in section, and partially in some other non-data area physically on the disc (which I don't fully understand, and apparently isn't available in the public HD-DVD documentation and is only available under NDA). Compliant drives only read and provide the volume ID after completing a cryptographic handshake, which hasn't been broken yet. So now they've made a firmware patch so the drive reads the Volume ID without authorization, without going through the as-yet-uncracked crpyto authorization process.
The purpose of the Volume ID is to prevent copying a disc by simply copying all its data. Because the Volume ID isn't stored within the data sectors, it can't be read normally. Well, that is, without impersonating the software (which hasn't been accomplished yet), or without a modified drive that doesn't require the software to authenticate before reading and returning the data.
That's all. Just one piece, not a full crack of AACS.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
There is a distinct difference between redistributing and doing whatever you want with a product privately in your own home.
If I buy a car I am beyond my purchase if I duplicate that car and sell or redistribute my duplications. I should be well within my rights to hack it up into little pieces or turn the motor into a generator, or even if I want to duplicate the car so I can drive two around in my own yard.
The difference is the price of reproduction while it might cost a few thousand to duplicate a car it only cost a few cents to reproduce a disc.... How would things be different if you could duplicate a car for a few cents? How are the creative values of automotive design and engineering any different then that of a song or movie?
I also don't recall ever signing any contracts agreeing to how I would use and what I would do with a product within the privacy of my own home.
Collector's Edition
Them: "Hey, want to buy a movie?"
You: "No piss off"
Them: "Aw c'mon, it's got guns, and explosions, naked chicks, everything. It cost us $100,000,000 to make."
You: "That's your loss. Why would I want that? The world is a violent enough place thankyou. I don't wish to celebrate death and I am surrounded by free humanistic culture like music, wine and real women. Actually I thought I might take a stroll out in the sunshine today and spend a little time with the kids"
Them: "But we made it! It cost us $100,000,000 and artists need to paid you know. What would happen if nobody bought our substandard culture free rubbish?"
You: "You'd go out of business I guess"
Them: "We can *MAKE* you pay for it! You will reeespect my authorati!!!"
You: "Why don't you get a proper job you conceited arrogant talentless entitled little psychopath?"
Them " TERRORIST! ANTI-AMERICAN! Look, he's got a bomb, I'm sure I saw a wires, he's got a bomb!"
Certainly the movie studios are obnoxious. Period. This isn't about rights or legalities any longer and it's not amenable your kind of shallow economic logic. This has become a visceral and emotional reaction against bullying abuse, corruption and erosion of civil liberties by a mafia style organisation. I feel no shame speaking about it in emotional terms. I hope they go out of business, I hope they all go to prison, just becuase I don't like those sort of people. If I can do anything to speed the day when Hollywood vanishes up its own ass and the world starts to rediscover *real* art and culture then I will do it without hesitation. The battle lines have been drawn. It's the pushers vs the consumers and the consumers will win.
SOP in "the scene": they'd just find somebody who works for a video store, disc duplicator, or retailer (or anybody else with fast, privileged access to new media, and halfway decent broadband), send them a drive, and have them do the rips on the releases each week.
Here's the problem with your argument.
Once you move out of the rights given to you by copyright law (basically, the right to view for personal use, making fair use excerpts, and fair use copying -- backups and time shifting and format shifting and viewing, copyright expiration after a given time) you move into contract law supplemented by copyright law.
I don't sign contracts when I buy music or videos so your scenario doesn't apply. Here's a more accurate scenario:
Them: "Hey, want to buy a movie?"
You: "Sure, how much?"
Them: "$100,000,000.00. and we'll sign over all rights to the movie, including redistribution and royalties."
You: "I don't need all of that. Don't you have anything cheaper?"
Them: "Sure. We have a streaming version that allows you to watch it for 5 cents a minute, but you'll have to sign a contract stating you'll forgo your fair use rights."
You: "I just want a copy with all the freedom copyright law gives me."
Them: "$50"
You: "No thanks, too much."
Them: "Sorry. That's how much the market is willing to pay and we're here to make money. Are you sure you don't want the 5 cent a minute deal?"
You: "No thanks. I think I'll start looking for indie artists or wait for it to become less popular so I can get it on sale."
Them: "Okay. Unfortunately, we don't have any indie artists yet but we're working on it. As for the DVD, it's a very hot item so you'll have to wait a long time for a discount. But if you want to wait, we welcome your business. Be sure to come back to us when you do decide to buy. We might have a few indie artists by them you might be interested in."
That's the way it's supposed to work and how it was envisioned when copyright laws were created. It's just business, clean, simple, and efficient.
No confrontation, no hard feelings, no unfairness on either side, no teams of lawyers and copyright police hunting down 95 year old grand mothers because they *might* have possibly violated copyright law, and no hords of copyright violators who feel justified in ignoring copyright because they're treated like criminal scum even if they comply strictly with the law.
This means that person has to buy every single movie that is released. Not very feasible.
Or rents it, or borrows it from a library or friends, or works somewhere that they can get access to a large quantity of titles....
No. The problem is this: DRM prevents legitimate purchasers of digital media from excercising their fair-use right to listen to/watch the material as they wish. Why shouldn't I be able to make a "mix-tape" of music from CDs that I have legitimately purchased for use when I go to the gym? Why shouldn't I record a television show that comes on while I'm at work so I can watch it when I come home? Why shouldn't I be able to make a copy of a DVD of the Wizard of Oz that I legitmately purchased for use in the back-seat DVD player of the car, so I don't have to worry that the kids will ruin it? The answer to those questions is that there is no legal reason why I should not be able to do these things and therefore it is evil and unfair for the publishers of the media to prevent me from doing so with DRM. But if I am "Jill Soccer Mom" I might not have the technical savvy of many of the folks posting on Slashdot that would allow me to get around it and use my own property.
On the other hand, as we've all seen, DRM does NOTHING to stop people who are determined to distribute pirated material.
Bottom line: DRM doesn't work, and pisses off honest consumers. But that doesn't mean that it is right for people to download movies from bittorrent.
well, you could go hiking, or read a good book. perhaps you could have a good slice of pizza. maybe it does get better than that?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Sorry, but that's not true.
I'm not signing any contract. I'm not renting anything. I buy a DVD, it becomes my property. Usually I can do whatever I want with my property, but in this case the goverment has restricted what can I do with it. That's called "intellectual property", and it's actually a constraint on my property.
Hi. You're going to stop issuing DMCA takedown notices. You're going to publicly announce that DRM will never work. Or, these guys here are going to plaster your AACS Processing Key all over the Internet, Digg-style.
Look, the people you are after are your customers. We watch your movies, we listen to your music, we buy your merchandise. We pay you while you sleep.
Do not fuck with us.
:(){
When you have access to the replay hardware, no "encryption" can ever be secure.
So you are arguing that when you buy a physical media that happens to contain a movie, you are in fact just licensing the right to view it by some specific means dictated by the seller?
This issue has been debated to death. Go read past articles and their comments.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's about control, and who controls whom.
This isn't just about DRM, it's about dictating every part of your media playback system: no participation in creating content (home, low-budget & independent movies/music, etc.) nor in creating playback systems (no MythTV, homebrew playback hardware/software, etc.). It's about marginalizing everyone who does not fork over licensing cash - LOTS of it - to those holding the core IP rights. Don't pay? can't play.
From AACS to HDMI via DCMA, they want to own every bit - figurative and literal - of the entertainment center in every living room.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I quite enjoyed movies and music.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
"I can't think of any way to resolve that conflict: anything that allowed you to make excerpts or backups or format-shift would also be used to make things freely available P2P."
This is true, but it doesn't change anything to the rights consumers have. whatever the **AA's do, they should do it without trampling on our rights with the excuse that it might be abused. a car can be used for joyriding or for killing someone too, yet it does not mean carsellers can order us around how to use our wars and on which roads we can drive - I don't think even you would accept that.
You seem to be complaining about the irrational and inconsistent behaviour of slashdot(ers)...but in fact it's very rational and consistent, we (well, most slashdotters, that is) just take the rights of the consumers as our first focus, not the profits of companies. I doubt you would see many complain if **AAs would come up with something that safegards all our consumer-rights. The actions they've done thusfar, have often been done in total disregard of any of our rights, and this includes encryption and suing people without actually checking the facts (for instance; downloading on a P2P is not neceseraly illegal if you're not uploading).
The bottom line is, excerpts or backups or format-shift belong to our basic rights as consumers, and whether or not abuse is possible, that is not our concern, and can not be invoked as a reason to take away our rights. It's this slashdot is pointing out, and they *are* rather consistent in it.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
So, another DRM system devised with more complicated encryption, another DRM system cracked by even cleverer hardware hackers.
Yay.
I notice, however, that digital camcorder technology is quickly improving. How long will it be before a $1000 camcorder pointed at a television playing a HD-DVD will produce an image of decent quality? There will always be quality losses in analog transfer, but when those quality losses are no greater than those that you get from recompression to internet-friendly sizes, who cares?
Digital still cameras are also getting faster and more flexible with their timings. If a camera is capable of recording, say, 8-10fps at 1024 x whatever continuously, then all you have to do is sync the shutter trigger with every third frame retrace signal and you've pulled down every third frame of the movie. So, three trips through, and you've got a high-quality jpeg of every frame. Unfortunately all the timing data I can find is for dSLR's using ~10 megapixel images, but my three-year-old $200 camera using a slow card can do 4fps continuous at its 2000 x 1500 resolution... so a modern SLR set on the lowest resolution might be able to manage it.
This sounds like a pain, but so is soldering chips and whatnot. The point, as everyone knows, is that if one guy with $1000 of equipment can spend ten hours and pull a decent copy of the movie out of the analog hole, video DRM is dead.
The analog hole is sort of the death knell of audio DRM -- sound is easy to record. How long before video succumbs also?
I can devise two large prime numbers and synthesize a composite number by multiplying them. You can't analyse it and figure out the primes I used.
Me: "So, you know the only reason you can sell a limited license is that we-the-people decide that the existence and enforcement of copyright is in our interests, right? How about we... alter the rules slightly. We will keep enforcing copyrights for anyone who wants to pay fair, but anyone who uses technical measure to attempt to reduce fair-use rights automatically loses the our enforcement of their copyright?"
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I have mod points, but what the heck. The slashdot editors strike again - posting stories without checking their facts. I've been following this since the muslix64 hack, so I do know what I'm talking about. I'm quoting the 'hacker' (arnezami - great guy) mentioned in the Ars Technica article:
QUOTE - Original post
In order to decrypt a disc you need the keys the content is encrypted with. These we usually refer to as Volume Unique Keys (although technically VUKs give Title Keys which are used to decrypt the content but this amounts to the same thing). What is important is that VUKs cannot be revoked. In other words: once we have a VUK for a disc then the AACS decryption-protection is broken for that disc. AACS cannot undo this.
So how can we get VUKs?
There are several ways to get VUKs for discs. But none of them are permanent solutions for retrieving all VUKs for all discs (released in the future).
* Get the VUKs out of "old" versions of a Software Player * Get a Volume ID (unique per movie) and a Processing Key (unique per Media Key Block version) and calculate the VUK.
The first method will expire quickly: we can now use WinDVD to retrieve VUKs out of its memory. But when new discs come out they won't work with this old version of WinDVD so you would have to install a new version. Therefore making this method obsolete for new discs.
The second method requires not one piece of information (like taking a single VUK out of the memory of WinDVD) but two pieces of information. We have several techniques now for a drive to reveal the Volume ID of a disc. So this part of the method is permanent. However the Processing Key will change every time they change to a new MKB version. And since we also need this second piece of information to calculate a VUK for a disc we always need to get the new Processing Key out of some player (whether its a Software Player or a standalone). The Processing Key (or better a Device Key) is very powerful though: if found it makes it possible to decrypt all discs released so far (assuming we can also retrieve the Volume IDs of those discs).
UNQUOTE
Moral of the story: We still need the processing key and that can be changed by the AACS, or by the abuse of language, "revoked". So the new AACS Crack is not "Undefeatable".
The only development since the time this article was written is that the firmware doesn't need to be changed anymore for the drive to reveal the VolumeID. There are some standard commands which get the job done.
A dozen ACs have pointed this out, but...
Them: "Sorry. How about, the right to private exhibition? Only $5."
Movie commercials do not say "Buy the right to view this movie privately on Blu-Ray Disc today!" They say "Own it on Blu-Ray today!"
So the conversation actually goes:
Them: "Do you understand that you paid for limited ownership, and that you consented to the limits stated and known to you at the time of sale?"
You: "Do you understand that you never actually said that, that you are advertising the fact that I can "own this movie", and that the fact that you're telling me otherwise now is at best false advertising, and at worst a bait-and-switch tactic?"
Movie companies want to tell us we are purchasing the privilege (NOT the "right") to watch this movie? Fine. Say that, up front and clearly, in advertisements. Otherwise, when you say "own this movie on HD-DVD or BluRay TODAY!", you are falsely representing your product, and last I heard, that's illegal too.
I like this idea of being totally up-front in the advertisements, though. And hey, think, we could rename all the "Disc Replays" to "Exclusive Privileges To Listen To But Not Copy The Music Encoded On This Particular Medium Replay". "Blockbuster Video?" Heck no! How about "Blockbuster Time-Limited Cinematic Media Consumption Licenses?" Think how happy the general populace will be when they learn what the media companies are really selling us!
Forgive me for being totally clueless.... but can someone explain this to me? I never really understood why it was impossible to make a copy of a DVD (or some CDs) without cracking it. Or why you need a no-CD crack for game CDs. If the data on a CD or DVD is just 1s and 0s... why can't you just make an exact copy of the 1s and 0s onto the blank CD and why won't that work? Why do you even need to decrypt it? The only thing I can think of is that there's a physical difference between the original disks and the blank disks you buy at the store. Even encrypted and compressed data is just binary code... so why doesn't making an exact copy of it do the trick?
I would really appreciate any explanation- I've wondered this for years.
*confused*
Exactly!
Software has long been sold as a license transaction, not a physical item or intellectual property transaction.
Entertainment products are still treated as physical items, when really the manufacturer would prefer it be a license but without the right to back up the "software". By keeping the distinction fuzzy, the argument can be left unresolved.
Because of this, my biggest fear with all the fires stoked by the *AA orgs is not that they actually expect to be able stop casual or large-scale copying, but that they keep the argument alive long enough to scream that it can't be stopped. Then they say that because of that, they should be subsidized by taxes on blank media (like what happened with DAT or what happens now with blank discs in Canada). In essence, control the argument so that your point can't be refuted, then say the problem is endemic and find a "solution" that generates revenue but still leaves you with your original "problem" that can be trotted out anytime someone raises a valid point about your original argument.
I've got 1 word for you: NetFlix
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
Uh,
$5?
more like $19.99.
On a more serious note, Google "Doctrine of First Sale".
If you _buy_ something copyrighted, you're supposed to be able to do _anything_ you want to with it short of copying, and even some copying is allowed under fair use. DRM _circumvents_ your rights. Circumventing DRM restores the rights you should have anyway. And I've never signed a contract giving up those rights when I bought a DVD.
Because no one is forcing you to go out and buy this junk. If you don't like the deal, don't get the movie.
The 'hack' is actually just telling the chip that is responsible for decryption of the content to not look at the revoked key list (skipping the whole function that does that and automatically returning a boolean 1)
It's still the same problem as with any form of DRM: you have to give people the public key(s) for both parties, the private key(s) for both parties the encrypted content AND the code that says HOW to use those keys and encryption.
Security through obscurity at it's best.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
If it gets much more difficult to watch a movie I think independent web producers who do not use DRM are going to start making a killing.
I memorized the damn number over the past few days, and now I find out that it's unnecessary :( I guess it'll go in their with all those digits of pi as yet another useless geek skill...
C 5836327569502884881971693C0993751058
3.14109592F9653115802979D937423E3845B62D864413563
Just hope I don't get the two confused.
a dying dinosaur is still very dangerous to all around it. so just lay low until the mighty antediluvian beast stirs no more, extinct and dead, as it should be. we're just waiting out its death throes like little scurrying nocturnal mammals, ready and able to inherit the earth
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Unfortunatly for the Studios, progress isn't going to stop just for their convenience. Just ask the man who's house got bulldozed to make way for the freeway.
The reality is that copying is here to stay. The studios have to face this fact and adapt or die. Their was a time when recording music was impossible. Every musician's art was stolen by the wind once it was played. The audience (if there was one) might remember small parts of it, but most of the essence of the music was lost. Guess what? There still were musicians, and they got paid to do what they did.
Enter music recording. With the first recordings, no-one, not even the studio knew how to make a copy. Then someone figured out how to flatten the cylinders, make a master onto a metal disk and press plastic disks much cheaper than you could make one-off recordings. At this time, all this equipment was astoundingly expensive, most of if was invented by the studios themselves.
Now we are entering an age where anyone can make professional level recordings at home. (audio and video) The side effect is that anyone can copy audio and video at home as well.
You've asked about alternatives. I suspect the alternates are already out there, we just don't realize them yet. Just like the age of the great ocean liners have past, the age of the > $200,000,000 movie may be past. Just like ocean liners, there might come a time when only one giant movie is made and people go to a movie theater just once every year or so. The Axiom is that there won't be room for all the current players in the business, not the studios, not the stars. What's going to replace the 200 million dollar movie? YouTube, CGI films made directly on your computer, video games like 2nd Life or EverQuest or some killer app that will be released tomorrow. Don't forget all the movies that have already been made. There may come a time when a studio can make much more by translating its entire back library into Swedish than it can make by creating a new movie.
The message for the studios: The businesses that adapt will probably outlast those that fight. DRM and the DMCA are just busy work for the lawyers and only succeed in getting people mad at you.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
amen, glory be to god, god is great, etc.
you said the right thing, well, dead on the head
god bless!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I think I speak for the vast majority here when I say this.
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
Anything called "Undefeatable" or any "definitive terms", like "Unbreakable", "Definitive", "Ultimate", etc... are just marketing terms and must be taken as such. Technically speaking is very hard to believe that such thing exists.
It's the good ol' crackers x hackers conflict: you create a lock, they drill a hole, you fix the hole, they drill in a different location, and so on...
Maybe it's "Undefeatable" now, but just give the good guys some time =:cP
Er Galvão Abbott - IT Consultant and Developer
You don't have any of these "rights" you speak of except in your imagination. Fair use is a doctrine and a defense against copyright infringment suits. It's not some God Given Right like you seem to be convinced it is. You most certainly don't have any "platform" rights, that is just laughable. And I don't see how it's the studio's responsibility to protect something you purchase, though I'm a little more in agreement with you there.
Most musicians don't make a living on album sales anyway. Unless they're extremely successful and well promoted, most musicians tour to subsidize their album costs. Most of the revenue made from album sales is generated when you go to a show and buy it directly from the band. The musicians who suffer most are already extremely successful. Not that they don't deserve to continue earning, but it's certainly not even a small percentage of musicians who are affected. Mostly guys like Lars Ulrich who haven't had to struggle to turn a buck in a few decades.
However, the point about the music industry having to change their business plan still stands, but for slightly different music than IP theft. Before the days of digital music, the major labels did a number of things: Find promising artists who were previously unrecorded and finance the album production and distribution. Then, the labels provide financing and expertise for marketing/promotion. One of the most expensive parts of production, pricey studio time has been greatly reduced by the advent of cheap digital recording equipment. I've seen enthusiast digital recording studios scrapped together from used ebayed gear which would have made an old professional studio tech blush. The latter end of production/distribution is now extremely cheap (potentially) as well, since nobody has to pay to press discs and arrange distribution to vendor channels. This can be done via online music services now with very little up-front costs. In this new environment, the only thing that the big recording labels can bring to the table is the promotion, which they're very good at. Like it or not, to stay in business, their model is going to have to change. The power is in the hands of the musicians.
-Turkey
"The main issue is the cost of purchasing standalone high-def players by the hackers, but as prices for these come down, this problem will slowly go away. "
See! Sony had a good reason to over-price the PS3 all along.
The problem for the DMCA is that it has the potential to be a moderate inconvenience to a large number of people.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
What A Load Of Rubbish!
The author of the original article doesn't understand AACS.
The "Device ID" that they are so happy about being able to find is "in plaintext" .
What you actually need to play the content on the disc is the Media Key, which is what they will lose the ability
to compute once the device-key gets revoked.
--
The Insane Kobold
There are other ways, like signed firmware. That's kind of a recursive form of DRM; using DRM to protect DRM!
I suspect you're right. I can't imagine that copying is going away, though I also suspect that them suing the bejeezus out of people isn't going away, either. People are reluctant to leave their BitTorrent clients running forever because it makes them a target. That makes it harder to find movies to download, and that means at least some people decide that it's easier to buy it from Amazon or iTMS.
That's why they don't care how much they make from the lawsuits, or how much they spend. It's much more about frightening people than it is about getting revenue directly. And that's frightening people into obeying the law, so they don't even lose sleep over it. If a half-million people buy a disc at a $5 profit for them rather than download it via Bittorrent, that $2.5 million buys a lot of lawyer time to sue people with.
I'll be sad to see the summer blockbuster go away. Slashdotters are gearing up right now to see Spider-Man 3 tomorrow night, and that's the sort of movie that can't be made to be released on YouTube.
If it goes, it goes, like the buggy-whip makers. I'm sure that was an art form which some people missed, too.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This contract is the Constitution* for the United States of America*, which grants Congress* the power to restrict your rights. Some might argue that you agreed to it when you did not emigrate to Canada* given the chance.
* Or foreign counterparts.
are you saying making child porn is the same as pirating music?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
We should concentrate on the garage bands and videos. Let the studios wither and die. Power to the People!!! and all that crap.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I wonder why the HD-DVD people don't get together with the satellite people? Satellite TV is extremely secure and has never really been cracked successfully. Most cracks involve emulating a smartcard, which is easy since the smartcards still use early 80s technology. Even then, nobody has really done a crack that wasn't fixed within a week.
Satellite is providing a service. In other words, when you try to crack it, you are mucking with a transmission and the delivery of that (unpaid for) service can be detected.
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are, ostensibly, providing a product. Sure the discs are encrypted, but they are still a physical medium that you possess and they are, so far, usable without being connected to a network. Therefore the means to decrypt must exist within the disc and the drive, and without a network, there's no way to notify Big Brother if you retrieve the keys in an unauthorized manner.
Granted, some players are network connected, but I don't think the studios are eager to require an internet and/or cable tv connection just to play a movie.
I can see the above argument. Frankly, I don't care to publically exibit a work, or distribute it, I buy it so I can replay the media at home.
.. the year after that) or you can go on the internet and find a hack and in under an hour create a "drm-free" backup of the disk that will play in all your players just fine, just like the original should have.
Of course, then you get the media home (and your all excited cause you've been waiting to buy it), pop it into your player and it doesnt' work. You go around hte house and you try it in every player that you own, and nothing. After researching you find out that you need to buy a new player ($100+), because the CD/DVD that you just bought has some new "copy protection" on it that is preventing your player from playing it.
Oh and guess what... you can't return the media because they don't take returns at the store.
So instead of buying a movie or cd for 10 bucks or so... you realise that you've just been swindled into paying money for something that doesn't work... and more specifically something that was intentionally broken by the person selling it, the same person who is refusing to refund your money.
So now you can upgrade all the players in your house for thousands of dollars (this might be an option if there wasn't the threat that next year the same thing is going to happen, or
Problem is, you just broke the terms of some legislation called "DCMA" which prevents you from circumventing the thing that is keeping you from playing the media that you bought with a license to be able to view it privately.
Well... I'd like to say that this is all speculation but this is exactly what happened to me on several occasions.
The fact is that my rights are being violated. I have a right to expect that I recieve the item that I purchased as it was marketed. It's dishonest, misleading, and it should be prosecutable. In fact it should be prosecuted for every fraudulent sale that has been made.
Boo hoo that the RIAA lost a couple of dollars because someone downloaded a movie off the internet. I don't see how that gives them free reign to engage in fraudulent business activities or to act as a vigillante who runs all over the rule of law and individual rights in pursuit of copyright violators all the time spouting the rhetoric that "the DCMA said I could do it".
Thanks everyone- Now I get it! I feel so much better! ;)
History has shown that "Free markets" are temporary.
At some point, producers will do any number of things to capture a market like coordinate pricing or capture all suppliers or capture all distribution channels. It takes legislation to minimize these effects. Then the legislation has unintended effects on markets too.
The "free markets" you describe are academic standards that are impossible to meet.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
showing us the way to the future for the bertelsmanns of the world: promotional mouth pieces. evolve into that they must, or die
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"When did everyone become a comedian?"
There's this little thing called...unemployment. You may have heard about it?
You: why can't you @$$-holes use a creative commons license?
Them: well that would imply that we are about creativity...
You: your not?
Them: we're just in it for the money....
"Stallman says add to this code and you are one of us. Gates says use this code and you belong to us."
...put that shit back ;)
People like me and my wife should scare the studios far, far more than the pirates. We havn't seen a movie in a theater in 7 years. (We did take our daughter to a kid flick *once*) We don't download or copy movies, but we get all we can consume and more from broadcast TV, the library, yardsales and trades with other families. We just don't buy new movie stuff anymore.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Crack is wack!
How many movies are released per day, and how many per day can you get off NetFlix?
The parent isn't insightful at all. There's a lot of things that are prohibited but cannot be prevented, for example murder. It's pretty easy to kill someone, especially any random person, but it doesn't mean it shouldn't be prohibited!
What good does it do you if the warez scene does this, anyway? Are you going to google for keys every time you want to watch one of your movies, or what?
Them: "Yeah, we figured. You probably also think HOAs are usurping your god-given right to paint your house pink, eh?"
And yes, I do think that arbitrary HOA rules are completely wrong and shouldn't be allowed.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
The problem (for the media industries) with DRM is that, if you are going to allow non-profit fair use under copyright law (or for that matter format-shifitng, which is under even more attack by the corporations), it really cannot be done in such a way as to prevent misuse for for-profit piracy. Fair use is already an endangered species -- I fully expect this to eventually get into the legislature and an attempt made to severely restrict, if not eliminate, fair use.
This is part and parcel with the increasing attitude amongst politicos (and the cattle who elect them) that anything, ANYTHING that MIGHT be misused by ANYONE for criminal purposes must be severely restricted or criminalized. (Example: millions play violent video games with no ill effects; one deranged dude plays violent video games and then shoots up a university; therefore NO ONE should have the right to play violent video games.)
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Incorrect! Fair use was a common-law defense against copyright infringment suits until 1976. Not a God-given right but a right implied by the Constitution and respected by the courts.
For the past 30+ year, however, it has been actual law, and therefore it is, in fact, a right.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Let's say I make a sand sculpture on the beach. That's an artwork, covered by copyright. But I've got a feeling my sculpture isn't going to last long enough to enter the public domain.
Fair use means that if you happen to do something that would otherwise violate copyright, you're okay. It doesn't mean that the creator of a work has some sort of responsibility to guarantee your ability to do so.
No, whatever software you use for ripping the discs will just be able to automatically download new keys from some source in a country that won't go after such a server. People with the cracked drives will just upload new keys as they get them. There will probably be some forum for requesting keys as well. Kind of like FreeDB for AACS keys. There aren't that many titles out there on these new formats yet, so they'll probably be able to keep up with most of the new releases.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
You don't seem to get where this is heading. Once the Volume IDs are out they can freely be incorporated into new HDDVD decryption utilities with update capabilities. Oh, and if you're actually complaining about having to do a GOOGLE SEARCH then you're right, you are too lazy to rip your own movies.
What is this supposed to mean? There are even more people outside the warez scene who can also solder.
Sure, but why would they bother doing all that work for you?
That's the thing that is so wrong about the DMCA. It not only allows the distributors of the works to make it difficult for you to exercise your fair use rights (which doesn't really concern me), it also makes it trivial for them to make it ILLEGAL for you to exercise those rights. All they have to do is implement the most trivial of measures to protect the content and you're suddenly a criminal if you circumvent that protection to make a copy, even for purposes covered by fair use.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
No, whatever software you use for ripping the discs will just be able to automatically download new keys from some source in a country that won't go after such a server. People with the cracked drives will just upload new keys as they get them.
That's not how the warez scene works. It's all about taking credit and releasing before anyone else. Contributing to a common repository is likely not very interesting.
Setting up such a repository is certainly no simple task, either.
There aren't that many titles out there on these new formats yet, so they'll probably be able to keep up with most of the new releases.
And what about later, when there are actually a lot of titles out there?
I think I'm gonna squeeze that in my signature.
There is a rule in security: "Don't Prohibit what you can't Prevent" [1]. The same rule applies to laws.
Well, we'd better start installing that intrusive, all-locations monitoring system and instant police response (presumably via teleport) system then, because at the moment there is no crime we cannot prevent. All we can do is make it harder to do, and make it harder to get away with afterwards. Which is about what DRM systems achieve, too.
at the moment there is no crime we cannot prevent
s/cannot/can/
Note to self: Learn to proofread any sentences more complex than this one before pressing submit.
as it got crack, was, "Oh no, not again."
Satellite TV is extremely secure and has never really been cracked successfully
Crapola...
Soon as I get this confounded traktor beam to actually work in reverse, all your chip are belong to us
The interpretation is obviously wrong since it has led to laws which do not serve the original purpose. I can't help that. The US government has been infiltrated and overtaken by profiteers. What else is new?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
We have rights because we say we do.
From where else can rights come? Natural Law? Please! Not even life itself is a "natural" right: Murder is quite "natural," and it has been the common practice of man to conquer and kill, to rape and pillage, for most of recorded history (and certainly for what came before that too).
It is as we became more civilized that we gave those things up. We, generally, decided those things were wrong. Most of us homo sapiens decided life was a basic right of people. Some of us decided speech was too (but not all of us, for sure); some chose "religion" as well. There's some variety. And in each case, the key is this: We decided.
We humans create the world we inhabit for ourselves. Chalk it up to our opposable thumbs. And the world we inhabit, thanks to our largish frontal cortex, is not just a world of physical stuff, but of ideas, abstractions. The idea of "rights" is an abstraction we built. And we can do whatever we want with it.
So, what do you think your rights should be?
I think that one of mine -- a lesser one, for sure, but still something I'd like -- should be that I can move data around how I want. Not a big deal, and also, I think, not too much to ask. Whether they understand it or not, I'm not in the studios' way. I think they should stay out of mine.
I really tought I'd have a lot of fun, whatching the keys of hardware players being revocated, one after the other...
And then a bunch of harkers break the system for good, and destroy all possibilities.
Rethinking email
Contracts are not one-sided. They don't state any deal up front when you buy a DVD. They say "own it on DVD". So making it illegal for me to make use of copyrighted material in a way that is consistent with the law regarding fair use isn't something that should just be understood or accepted. That's why the DMCA is just bad law.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Let's say I make a sand sculpture on the beach. That's an artwork, covered by copyright.
Copyright only applies to works of art that can be copied. Now, maybe you take a picture of the sand sculpture. That picture is covered by copyright. You have the right to control who makes copies of that picture until copyright expires. After that point, you no longer have right. Anybody can make as many copies as they want.
There was a time when it was required to submit a copy of any copyrighted work to the Library of Congress. When copyright expired, anyone could then obtain a copy. I don't believe this is true now, but it should be.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
But this time the cartel wrote the law. Would anyone living in his district be sure to thank US Congressman Howard Coble at the next election? Coble was the guy that introduced the DMCA into Congress. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Coble
There's no sales tax on licenses. When you purchace movies and software, the government charges sales tax. Therefore, you are not purchasing a license. QED.
Cracking digital satellite encryption is lame, something only pirates would do. Cracking AACS is merited, something people with non-HDCP monitors, non-HDCP video cards, or Linux would do.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
The parent IS insightful. His rule applies to security perfectly. It's partially applicable to law, but I suppose there it should be modified to say "Don't prohibit what you can't prosecute."
Laws that aren't enforceable promote disrespect for the law. These are usually morality laws and not ethical laws -- because it's easy to know when a murder happens because friends and family call you up to tell you when someone's missing or dead. When people are engaging in an 'immoral' act like say, drug use or unpopular sex practices, nobody involved calls the police to report themselves. This means such people begin to feel the police are their enemy, and they lose respect for other laws. Worse, other people can be lured in by the glamour of a dangerous activity (that's not really dangerous if you don't do it out in the open) and will be attracted to the 'forbidden fruit' knowing full well they'll almost certainly never be caught.
Of course arguing against bad laws (especially blue-nosed morality-based bad laws) is a tough gig no matter how harmful they are to society, because the nannys always assume you must be 'one of THEM." I mean, by now I think I must be a pot-smoking, homosexual, heroin-addicted, prostitute-enjoying, abortion-providing, child-molesting, cigarette-smoking, bestiality-practicing, wife-beating, tax-evading, quack-medicine-practicing basketcase. 'Cause I think I've argued against bad laws around all those things, so you know.. Heh.
Too damn many laws. If it's not hurting someone who doesn't want to be hurt (hello S&M folks!) it shouldn't be against the law, PERIOD. Even if it IS hurting someone against their will, you still need to make sure it's a good, enforceable law with no significant side-effects or worse, counter-intuitive drawbacks. (The War on Drugs fails both -- it's a consensual activity to poison yourself, and the laws only serve to exacerbate the problem making it far, far worse.)
This could already be done by having a few community-trusted people keep a compromised device key secret and continuously use it to decrypt and publish volume keys. In both cases, revocation is not possible/relevant and the flaw is on a per-release basis with the people exploiting the flaw having to stay on top of every new release. Leaking a device key semi-periodically does more damage as it exposes every movie up until that point.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
> didn't learn anything from the countless other times this has happened to other forms
> of DRM, I don't know what makes you think they'll learn anything from this one.
They'll ram DRM down our throats or die trying.
Me: "No, I didn't get that either, because when I went in that store over there and paid a substantial amount of legal tender to purchase a DVD the clerk at the checkout counter said that once it's paid for I would own it, just like all the books, VHS cassette tapes, vinyl records, audio CDs and audio cassette tapes they still sell. He said that under US copyright law I have the right of first sale, the right to take excerpts for fair use purposes, the right to make one archival backup in case of damage or loss of the original media, and of course that I could only view or use the copyrighted item for private, non-commercial purposes. I understand that there are laws that would impose large fines and possible prison time if I attempt to use copyrighted media for commercial purposes."
Them: "Well, yeah..."
Me: "Funny, I didn't hear you explaining to my friend here in clear terms before the sale that he was paying for limited ownership, nor did I see any contract being presented, read, understood and signed by my friend before the sale. This isn't a movie rental shop, so we certainly didn't just pay for the temporary use of a DVD belonging to someone else. Therefore what you just said to my friend was nonsense, because other than the standard assumed limitations under copyright law there were no additional terms presented in any legally binding manner. So, your DRM-laden DVD, while not actually doing anything to prevent commercial piracy which is the usual reason given for the use of this technology, is instead just going to keep my friend here from exercising the aforementioned rights under US copyright law. How and why is this legal, again?"
Them: "Umm, OH! Look at the time. Gotta run! kthxbye."
Certainly you've accepted the content industry's absurdist spin on "the idea of ownership", and you are obnoxiously self-assured in your ignorance of why this is a problem. But that doesn't mean their New Speak twisted definition is in any way correct, or legal, or doesn't violate your rights under copyright law and do damage to our society and culture by attempting to degrade us all to "limited ownership" and block important rights like fair use. You know, the thing that lets reviewers, journalists, bloggers, teachers and everyone else use quotes, frame grabs, clips, sound samples and other types of excerpts in order to enrich our culture, improve the education of our children, use actual examples in discussions of copyrighted works, so on and so forth. Silly stuff like that. I'm sure we'll do fine without the ability to actually exercise fair use. If Suzy Schoolteacher gets arrested for a DMCA violation for decrypting a DRMed text file in order to hand out copies of the lyrics to "Happy Birthday" to her kindergarten class, well, that's her problem, isn't it? She shouldn't have assumed that her fair use rights would trump a law that makes it illegal to "circumvent a copyright protection mechanism", like the DRM on that DVD.
Thanks for being part of the probl
Because that takes zero effort, and because it is viewed as being for good cause. Also because it has rankings.
None of those are really true in this case, although I guess you could implement rankings if you really wanted to.
There are significant differences between cars and digital information. The fact that information by its nature can be duplicated indefinitely at no cost makes the idea of making backups a sound one. That someone should artificially restrict the possibility of making backups is just stupid.
Cars, on the other hand, like any physical products, cannot be effortlessly duplicated, but has a material cost for each instance. Supplying a free replacement car would be a cost to the car manufacturer/dealership, but allowing customers to backup their digital movies incurs no costs to the movies companies.
I believe that it's a damn shame that so many engineer-hours are spent and so much money is spent on product features that actively restrict consumers. That when we buy things our money funds these limitations on us. And likewise what you said with profit buying lawyers, although I don't feel as strongly about that; it's not directly productive, but I don't feel it's as counter-productive because copyright infringement still is illegal, and for good reason (which is not to say that all copyright laws are good, but most file sharing would violate my idea of reasonable minimal copyright laws).
From a similar line of reasoning, I would think it a damn shame if art forms disappeared because they were too easy to steal. If we lost deep and complex forms of expression not because people didn't want them or value them, not because something that people liked better came along, but because they found ways not to pay for them.
Buggy whips fell out of favor because people found something they liked better. It would really suck if the survival of art depended upon it lacking any permanent interest, such that nobody would bother pirating it.
0 = 5 times
8 888999") = "13256278887989457651018865901401704640"
1 = 5 times
2 = 2 times
3 = 1 once
4 = 4 times
5 = 4 times
6 = 4 times
7 = 4 times
8 = 6 times
9 = 3 times
The least is 3 and the most is 8.
rand_permutation("0000011111223444455556666777788
Is it prohibited?
mod parent up please
Sigh. Fallible = Infallible We need point no further than their acceptance of slavery (at least tacitly) in one or the other Articles in the Constitution as evidence of this. To Further Expound: When I referred to "the best, market-based way of compensating", the only other alternative I can think of that could even approach a market-based way of compensation would be Government subsidization. This has flaws of its own (such as who defines what work is worth pursuing or compensating artists and other thinkers for, etc, etc), and, in my opinion, is nowhere near as good a solution as the current short term method of content reproduction and distribution monopolization. If you (or anyone else) has any other ideas, please, by all means, enlighten me.
I didn't say it was the studio's responsibility. (Were that so, they'd be responsible to make you a backup and give it to you.) However, if I purchase a car, which periodically needs the oil changed in order to keep running properly, I expect the oil system not to be hermetically sealed. I don't expect the manufacturer to send out a team with oil and filter in hand, granted. The maintenance is not their responsibility. But I do expect them not to actively interfere with me doing it. As to fair use, dead wrong, those are legal rights, and you in fact have them even if you never purchase the media at all. (I'm not sure how that changes of anything, of course fair use is a defense to the copyright law, just like free speech is a defense to the latest he-said-a-bad-word law. That in no way indicates free speech is not a right!) As to "platform rights", again, I don't necessarily expect help playing on a platform of my choosing-they don't have to come code the player for me. But again, if I can do it, or someone else can, I do expect not to be actively interfered with or have to technically "break the law" just to use something I paid for (and even paid for those specific rights for, private viewing).
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Not quite. If we really must have the car analogy here, it would be more like "I have the technical skill to build my own backup Ford with equipment and parts I already have. I'll do that in case my kids crash the crap out of the original." However, you've unwittingly provided a tremendously good demonstration of why physical property and "intellectual property" aren't the same thing, so let's take that opportunity for illustration!
When I pay the local Ford dealer for a car, I'm paying him for complete ownership of the physical product. I'm not paying him for authorization to use it, as a matter of fact, he's not even legally authorized to grant that. I'm paying him for legal, physical possession of a single object. But once I do have it, it is mine. If I want to share it with a friend to carpool to work or school, the dealer can't come after me for "losing him a sale"-even if doing so really does! It's my car now, I can share it, loan it, sell it, even give it away. And the moment the last payment is made (or immediately, if I pay in full up front), that dealer has no more right or interest in that car at all.
On the other hand, when I purchase a CD, I'm told I'm not purchasing the rights to do whatever I want with that CD. I'm not, in other words, being granted full ownership of the physical property. I am, on the other hand, being sold a license to exercise certain rights (in this case, the right to private, personal enjoyment of what's on that CD.) Yet, in that case, there's nothing wrong with making a backup in case the original is damaged. You told me you were selling me rights rather than goods. Alright. But now I already bought those rights (which incidentally came with a good). There's no need for me to go purchase another, identical good. Why would I need to purchase those rights twice?
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
All that "law" means is that you can do it and they can't punish you. They don't have to _enable_ you do exercice fair use, meaning it's not some "right".
N0w get the T-Shirt
https://www.spreadshirt.com/shop.php?sid=114635
This isn't like cracking really. There's no real challenge to it. I still suspect that it will get done, simply because people want it, and there are people that can do it. They'll find ways to get their name attached to it, they always do. It's not easy to set it up, but that probably won't matter, as there will be real demand for it, even by the people that have the drives capable of ripping the movies. As for keeping up, they'll get the stuff that most people want, and nobody will care about the rest.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Repeat after me. THIS IS NOT A PROCESSING KEY.
Sure being able to obtain a volume id is important, but the processing key we already know has been revoked, and we have no way to obtain another without debugging the next version of a software player.
While I realise that debugging the process may be relatively easy, and someone may have already done it. As far as I know, no new processing key has been released.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
This happens even if the phone line is disconnected. It does not require anyone from DISH showing up to do updates. I certainly believe that the satellite connection is two-way, though they do seem to prefer a phone connection over satellite up-link.
Erm, no.
The satellite connection (for satellite TV, not internet) is definitely not two-way. If it was, you'd have to have all sorts of warnings all over your satellite dish, telling people not to step in front of it, or stare directly into the feedhorn, etc., because of the EM radiation hazard. Plus, you'd have to have a fairly big amplifier somewhere, and a much better feedline than most people's satellite dishes use. And you'd have to aim the dishes a lot more carefully.
What's happening is that the upstream communication is all done over the phone line, but downstream is done via the satellite. You don't need to have an upstream connection to get software updates -- it's a "push" technology, not "pull" like apt-get. They can beam down a software update whenever they want, and unless you have hacked the receiver to somehow ignore the update, it will download and install it (hopefully checking it against some sort of cryptographic signature or key that's delivered once in a while via telephone).
Back a while ago, there was a big sting operation where the satellite companies, one of them anyway, worked with the Feds and sent out bad firmware (over the satellite downlink, not over the telephone or anything) that bricked all the cracked smartcards that some people were using. It was actually a fairly interesting trick on their part; they crafted a logic bomb and forced people to install it into their smartcards over a period of years (by commanding the STBs to only work with cards that had been updated), byte by byte, until the whole thing was there, waiting, and then they pulled the trigger and created an irrecoverable race condition. Story here.
Anyway, I think the whole thing is bullshit, and I think the laws that protect satellite TV broadcasters were the beginning of a very bad chapter in U.S. jurisprudence, although I doubt I'll live long enough to see it rectified. Any person ought to have the right to set up whatever type of circuitry they want to, and do whatever they want with the signals on the public airwaves that arrive on their property, so long as what they're doing doesn't generate interference that extends off of their property. There was no reason to give the satellite TV providers the protection they got; having satellite TV isn't enough of a public benefit to make it worth trampling on almost 100 years of communications law. If the market really wanted satellite TV, then it would have happened without such protection -- just like regular terrestrial TV and radio happened without draconian laws being specially crafted to make the signals only receivable on special sets. (And yes, I know, satellites are expensive, but I bet that the very first terrestrial TV stations, for their time, were just as expensive and risky as launching a bird is today.) In short, the legislators back in the '80s wanted to rush things, and thought they would jump-start "progress" through legislation. The DMCA and the whole doctrine of "anti-circumvention" are the direct result.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Interesting post, but you made a fundamental error: the ability to "own" intellectual property is a function of the law, not a basic moral premise (eg: the concept didn't even exist until modern times, while even animals understand stealing physical items).
As such, that "right" is limited only to what the law allows it and no more.
And while I'm not going to argue if fair use allows or doesn't allow cracking a DVD, I will say that for people to argue the law is wrong does not make them "dumb-stupid"!
It merely means they don't agree with the law, and are engaging in civil disobedience.
You are taking the existence of intellectual property as a given without even realizing you are doing so (if you even realized it's possible for it not to exist you would not a written what you did). So perhaps you should label yourself as a "dumb-stupid".
Remember: just because someone said "I reserve the right to blah blah blah" doesn't mean they actually have that right! Either I have to _give_ them that right, or the law does.
Just as an example: I often see products that say: not for sale in "geographic location", or similar such phrases - they could say it until they are blue in the face, but I have no intention of obeying, they are merely imagining that they have the right to restrict things in that fashion (with exception of products that the local gov has restricted of course, but that's rare, usually they are trying to divide the market).
-Ariel
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
800 - three - three - three - F - S - C - K !! </headbang>
Bent Mind writes: Copyright only applies to works of art that can be copied . . .
No, it applies to works "fixed in a tangible medium." A sand sculpture is covered by copyright. A photograph of the sand sculpture is a derivative work, and ALSO is covered by copyright.
And there is still a "deposit copy" requirement when registering a copyright with the Library of Congress. In the case of a sculpture, you would send a picture of the sculpure, not a duplicate of the sculpture itself, so registering the original sand sculpture is quite possible.
And yes, when copyright expires, everyone has the right to copy the work previously protected by the copyright monopoly. But the Library doesn't send you a copy for free.
IIRC, copyright was originally set up roughly along the same lines as patents, i.e. 17 years from initial publishing. So what's this "modern" BS about so many years from death of the publisher? Why in the devil's briefcase has this been allowed in the ostensible public good?
Perhaps that's one more thing that should be taught more in schools, the original terms and thinking behind copyrights. How many bets any effort to do so is squashed under metric kilo-buttloads of self-serving corporate effluvium...
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
at the moment there is no crime we cannot prevent.
In principle, most real crime is preventable with enough preparation (safes, self defense training, etc.), law enforcement (active prevention), disincentives (passive prevention), education, hindsight, etc. Effective DRM is not achievable, even in principle. This is the difference.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Well, you start with the "natural" right to copy any damn thing you can get your hands on. A law limits this is some way. This law is in turn limited to allow for "fair use". You never, therefore, gave up your "natural right" to copy stuff in these circumstances. Therefore, if you believe in the "social contract" theory of rights and laws, fair use *is* a right by virtue of the fact you never gave it up to join society - but like most philosophical arguments, it's really just semantics.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.