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Three Arrested For Conspiring To Violate the DMCA
jtcm writes "Three men have been charged with conspiring to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act after federal investigators found that they allegedly offered a cracker more than $250,000 to assist with breaking Dish Network's satellite TV encryption scheme: '[Jung] Kwak had two co-conspirators secure the services of a cracker and allegedly reimbursed the unidentified person about $8,500 to buy a specialized and expensive microscope used for reverse engineering smart cards.
He also allegedly offered the cracker more than $250,000 if he successfully secured a Nagra card's EPROM (eraseable programmable read-only memory), the guts of the chip that is needed to reverse-engineer Dish Network's encryption.' Kwak owns a company known as Viewtech, which imports and sells Viewsat satellite receiver boxes. Dish Network's latest encryption scheme, dubbed Nagra 3, has not yet been cracked by satellite TV pirates."
I had a friend who claimed that he had found a way to pirate DirecTV's service. He only stopped doing so when he realized there was still nothing worth watching. Eventually he opened his own business. He named the company after a component that was essential to the process. I remember when I helped out we'd get about one call a week from people trying to ask not in so-many words if we could help them with their "DirecTV stuff". (It was my first call on it that caused me to mention it to my friend, who then told me what the company name actually meant.)
He pirated the service for about two years. Funny thing was, about a year after he stopped he got hit with a lawsuit. He transferred as much stuff as he could out of his own name and braced for the inevitable. He only got away because he had a friend who knew some influential people. Incidentally, my friend his now his friend's personal no-cost 24/7 concierge tech support.
Anyway, he'd get these calls from people and he'd try to deny that he knew what to do. If someone pressed the issue (usually it was his friends or old co-workers telling others who could help) he tried to do the "scared straight" thing. Funny thing is, some of them would get mad at him for not helping. So many people are willing to throw away financial security just so they don't have to pay for the NFL Channel.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Although it was eliminated by dubious judicial means shortly after becoming law, the DMCA allows for reverse-engineering for the purposes of interoperability. The entire market for these devices is based on non-interoperability. Because if the CAM became truly portable and emulated fully in software, it's a tiny step to a digital video recorder that is completely under user control receiving HDTV. Which is actually the main selling point here. They took our VCRs away, and now we're attacking people who want to get them back the only way possible; At this point it doesn't matter whether his intent was to sell descrambler boxes or not, or anyone's, because that's the only way you're getting that functionality. An irony, really, that you could be paying the same fees as someone with an "approved" box, accessing the same content, and yet wind up in jail because your equipment wasn't up to the provider's specifications... Namely, that you wanted to "time shift" the content.
Damn criminals, flaunting their freedoms in front of us... They get what they deserve, eh?
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These days, the model is very much based on some really funky group keying and key revocation, which allows the sattelite provider to revoke individual keys because each receiver has a unique key rather than a group sharing a common key.
Among other things, this makes piracy MUCH harder, because the sattelite providers can buy pirated receivers, take them to the lab, find out the key used, and revoke it, disabling that entire batch of pirated receivers without affecting normal customers.
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When I was arrested as a juvenile and got charged with 2 moderately serious charges, I had 2 counts of conspiracy, which were also felonies, added for "thinking" about doing it before I actually did it.
Apparently in our justice system unless you just spontaneously do a crime with no premeditation whatsoever you are gonna get slapped with a charge for thinking about it on top of the charge itself. To this day I don't understand it.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be. -PF
Uhhmm...Your analogy isn't really "analogous" to the situation.
If you came and parked your car in my front yard, am I at fault if I figure out how to drive it, and do so? Dish network is pumping signal into everybody's house, it isn't as if these people are breaking into their building or something.
I agree that they should be punished, what they were attempting to do was wrong, I just don't think that your analogy holds together.
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Bad analogy.
Here's a better one:
If you own a drive in theater, and I live nearby with a direct line of site of the theater, and someone sells me a radio that I use to receive the audio from the movie, and I sit on my porch every night and enjoy a different movie, all for free.... Is this a crime?
Effectively, they are blanketing the country with their signal, and someone else is providing me a tool that allows me to watch and hear this signal. It's not my fault that the drive-in, in this example, doesn't shield their picture or opt to hard wire their speakers so that I cannot watch the movie, and even if they did do these measures, it would not be illegal for me to strategically place mirrors in my yard and use a directional mic to pick up sound from someone's car in order to continue to watch the movie.
So, really, the only issue at stake is the DMCA itself (the breaking of the encryption), and I, for one, do not agree with the premise behind this law.
If you want your content to be unwatchable by others, secure it properly. If others figure out a way to watch it anyways, that's your problem, not the laws (or at least I wish it were this way!).
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