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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'm not a lawyer, so this confuses me. This isn't a civil case? it's a criminal case?
Why aren't downloaders put in jail then?
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
So am I supposed to be outraged just because the DMCA was involved?
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
what a racist article...
weinersmith
I mean, really... That's like awarding a Nobel Prize for *Attempted* Chemistry!
...that (a) this is a good thing (commercial operation) but that (b) the DMCA wasn't necessary at all. Aren't there theft of service laws already on the books for receiving private/pay TV services without paying for them? And, since this isn't actually a DMCA violation case, but rather a conspiracy to violate the DMCA, wouldn't it be just as much a conspiracy to illegally receive service?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Depends on the algorithm involved. Often one way algorithms rely on certain actions being computably inconvenient, not impossible. ElGamel and RSA basically break down to the idea that it's easier to multiply really big primes, than it is to factor the resulting really big composite. But in an embedded situation like a dish network box, they might not have the computational power to outrun a hacker with a desktop, so a bit of obscurity helps in slowing down any attacks. There's a strong chance that it'll be hacked at some point, as witnessed by the fact that they're on Nagra 3, not Nagra 1, but the hope is to hold off any attacks as possible, and make attacks prohibitively expensive.
<Sideshow_Bob>Conspiring to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act... Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel Prize for conspiracy chemistry?</Sideshow_Bob>
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
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.
Serves them right, while I'm against the DMCA trying to profit off of someone else's work is not right. They deserve what they get
Sounds like entrapment to me.
(I posted this link because it sounds like the Feds did to the cracker the same thing they did to Mr. DeLorean)
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm (very) rarely a fan of the DMCA but, in my opinion, this is a good example of why it was set up - to stop commercial abuse of IP. These guys were knowingly circumventing copyright protection methods in an effort to make a profit. These exact situations are what needs to be stopped, not the teenager posting a mashup on youtube...
It's fun to violate the DMCA
It's fun to violate the DMCA
I consider the DMCA to be one of the most unjust and cruel laws the USA has. I sympathize with the people doing this to the following limited extent: If you are a subscriber to a service, you should be able to use any compatible QAM enabled equipment you wish.
This is a little different because people who violate the DMCA like this usually are doing so to secure their fair use rights. These people just wanted to outright steal the service. So thats bad. However, two things.
Why are police involved in this sort of thing? Well, really, although in theory, violating the DMCA is a civil action, but around 2003, the government decided that all copyright infringement was criminal. Because the Intellectual property 'scam' is all that the US has against the Chinese, the US has decided to criminalize copyright infringement to create laws to fight the Chinese with.
The DMCA needs to be repealed, but I don't see that happening unless there are large demonstrations. People are generally too stupid to care. (I really would like to see anti-DMCA slogans with people marching by the millions.)
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?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I don't remember in my lifetime watching a video tape that didn't include the FBI copyright warning about this
Clearly you got your video tapes out of the trunk of a car on a different corner than my parents did.
Never let a mediocre career stand in the way of a good time
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.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I get it, so it's about how they secure the key, not really about the algorithm used.
A satellite broadcaster has, for the most part, a one-way stream. If the encryption was completely open, all you would need to do to pirate the signal is to share a valid key with as many people as you'd like.
Paying customers need to be able to decrypt the stream, but they are not trustworthy credential holders.
It could be that the proprietary algorithm makes things weaker(certainly wouldn't be the first time); but it is also possible that the algorithm wasn't the issue. Any DRM system, no matter the algorithm, consists of giving the device the key(so that actual subscribers can play whatever the material is) while ordering the hardware to keep the key away from them. This is true whether the key is to some crap proprietary algorithm, or the finest in vetted standards. If you attack the hardware cleverly enough, you can get the key from a given piece of hardware. (whether or not a single key is of much use is another question, and does come back to the quality of the design)
Where's the entrapment?
I'm thinking that if a security researcher had done the same thing, he would not be in jail. Nor would a large corporation.
But a set top box importer does it, and suddenly it's a federal crime.
The most troublesome part about this is that engineers routinely reverse engineer the work of others for the sake of creating compatible products - an exemption the DMCA explicitly allows. Perhaps the company wanted to offer a cheaper STB to Dish, and undercut the competition. Or perhaps they planned to sell directly to the black market, engaging in fraud. The act of reverse engineering a component tells us nothing about the company's intentions.
I mention this because this very thing was done to Lexmark printers a few years ago. Instead of getting arrested, the manufacturer of competing cartridges was sued under the DMCA; the case went all the way to the SCOTUS, and Lexmark lost. It would appear this would set precedent regarding the legality of reverse engineering for the sake of creating interoperable products, but strangely, the FBI seems not to follow precedent. I find it odd that an activity which was legal and sanctioned by the DMCA - and even supported by the Supreme Court, is now interpreted as being illegal according to the very same law.
If anything, this shows the illegality of an action depends more upon who you are than what you do. Best not to offend our corporate overlords, lest they have the FBI arrest you.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I know they are generally poor countries and the military advantage of nukes must seem appealing, but they could create WAY, WAY more nuisance for Americans if they would devote those resources to basically Pirate Bay-ing everything copy protected. It'd be hilarious if within hours of a new you-can't-copy-it scheme came out if pirated versions were available along with free tools and FAQs for making your own copies or subversion devices.
IIRC, this idea was also (better?) expressed in some science fiction novel I can't remember -- although it was China that basically ruined IP protections.
Oh my bad... Kwak was the one offering the money and not the other way around.
Apparently my dyslexia is bad right now.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
My bad. I read the summary backwards. It sounded like the FBI offered Kwak the money.
But I got modded up so I guess other people read it wrong too.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Breaking encryption should never be a crime.
The satellite companies ahve a very weak business model. It involves sending information into everyoens house. If consumers find another way to view the data in their house, then tough tits for the satellite company.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The sole purpose of the DMCA Act and its friends was to protect certain particular corporate interests. While you may say that copyright infringers "deserve what they get", the fact is that there are perfeclty legal uses for a device that unscrambles encrypted signals... like time-shifting, for example. Why should you be forced to buy or lease a "DirecTV-approved" DVR, for example, when they would be cheaper on a competitive market?
When you have competitive markets, you see lower costs, and improved technology. Sure, it leads to companies having their encryption broken, and being forced to re-invent the wheel... which they should be doing anyway. In the long run, it drives improvements in the market and technology.
The DMCA is detrimental to the economy. The DMCA works to stifle innovation, in AMERICAN markets and for AMERICAN products.
Protectionist policies, like this one, are seldom a good idea. The free market always did better.
I am not blaming enforcement for enforcing the law, but it's a bad law. A very bad law.
If businesses then go and market that way in the form of hacked decoder boxes... still 'tough tits' for the satellite company? In your legal frame of mind, I mean; it's obviously 'tough tits' for them in practice anyway and they have to introduce the next generation of encoding (or a different key.. whatever).
So by your thinking, it's "tough tits" for the cable company if I steal cable from my neighbor? If I find a way to hack cellular communication and use it for free calling? If I hack into a company that uses wifi?
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
>And if I find a way to get into your car that you parked on a public street and drive it away, tough tits for you.
What if I find a way to make use of the constant stream of cars that you put in my living room?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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. If I take his car that he parked on a public street, he is out a car. If I decode the signal broadcast into my house and view it, the satellite provider still has just as much signal as before, and their paying customers are not out anything. (I could argue that because I could then join in on water-cooler discussions on our favourite TV shows that it increases the value of the product they're marketing, but that's an extremely weak argument which I won't actually make.)
If you send out floppies with your software to everyone in a neighbourhood, and I reformat my floppy and use it for other purposes, that's tough tits for you. If you send out fliers that I subsequently rip up and make paper mache from, that's tough tits for you. If you broadcast something into my home uninvited, and I find a way to make use of that broadcast, that's tough tits for you.
There has to be a working business model here somewhere. I just don't think the current one is the right one. After all, it's far more trivial for the user to buy the official equipment than to build it themselves. And that's been true for many things: radios, TVs, computers, CB radios, HAM radios (I think - never looked into these). Still is true. Those who want to do it themselves? Cost of doing business, my friend. Compete with them like a grown capitalist.
There are rumors out there that Nagra3 has already been hacked, though not confirmed to my knowledge. Back in the Nagra2 days, N2 had been hacked for years and it was a boon for pirates. Dish recently switched all it's channels to Nagra3 and pretty much overnight, all the pirates TV's went blank. Currently, the only 'solution' that exists for the pirates is via card sharing schemes where an actual subscriber(s) shares their card keys via an Internet Key Sharing (IKS) service. Though not technically a hack, IKS allows for the same capability. And so the cat and mouse continues.... Don't ask me how I know all this.
If businesses then go and market that way in the form of hacked decoder boxes... still 'tough tits' for the satellite company?
Yeah, unless the sat companies can figure out how to quit irradiated me with their signals, 'tough tits' to them for me using something they forced in against my will. I'd consider it reimbursement for my increased risk of cancer from sat signals. Thou I don't watch any TV, so I wouldn't do this anyway.
The summary was ambiguous, I had to read the actual article to tell what happened.
If businesses then go and market that way in the form of hacked decoder boxes... still 'tough tits' for the satellite company? In your legal frame of mind, I mean; it's obviously 'tough tits' for them in practice anyway and they have to introduce the next generation of encoding (or a different key.. whatever).
It took me a while to understand how the whole business works, but that's basically the way things work now.
Essentially the way you buy a 3rd party satellite receiver out of the box, it can only receive unencrypted satellite streams. But the decoder box manufacturers pay groups of coders to surreptitiously create and release software which allows the box to decrypt encrypted streams. For the last couple years, DirecTV has been on the as of yet uncracked N3, while Dish and Bellvue (Canada's main provider, with a signal that you can get throughout the US) have been on the cracked N2. A few months ago Bellvue switched to N3, and a week or so ago Dish completed its switch to N3.
In the meantime, a couple companies have implemented something they're calling Internet Key Sharing for their receivers - a system that shares decryption information from a paid subscription with that company's unauthorized receivers. I'm not sure of the technical details, but apparently this doesn't work as well as a true crack - and of course requires an internet connection to receive the frequently chancing keys.
Viewsat, who Kwak represents, doesn't currently have an Internet Key Sharing program, so, unless they can get someone to crack N3 - nobody's going to be buying their receivers.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
To make the first PC clones, Compaq publicly hired 30 systems engineers to reverse engineer the IBM BIOS chip... so what was that, high treason compared to this?
Agreed.
Then what could be a stronger business model that delivers information (television signal, both satellite and non-satellite) into homes in a manner that is cheaper than competitors which doesn't involve encryption so that people cannot receive their service for free and offer their service to consumers as a competitor just as (or only a little more than) free?
I'm think'n the chip inside the receiver needs to be covered in epoxy, like the Nintendo game cubes used to to. You're not breaking the law trying to decrypt the chip, but you are breaking the chip - which simply prevents people from stealing the service and making it extremely difficult to decrypt the signal by any other means (which is the whole point of selling the receiver with encryption in the first place). What's your idea? Other than to let all delivery of TV signals slip into an unsustainable business model of "free for all" ideology, of course.
Sorry, I don't see anything in the article summary saying that at all. They were simply attempting to reverse-engineer a way to receive and decrypt DishTV's signals, and presumably to sell equipment to do this to other people.
So first, no one is "stealing" anything, as stealing means to deprive someone of something by theft. People watching DishTV aren't stealing anything, though they are violating the DMCA law.
And second, there's no proof these men were going to watch unpaid-for programming themselves; they were going to sell the means of doing so to other people.
So your BS headline is much like saying radar detector companies are conspiring to exceed speed limits. It really doesn't make much sense.
What's your idea? Other than to let all delivery of TV signals slip into an unsustainable business model of "free for all" ideology, of course.
The right to do math is much more important than the privilege of watching TV. If preserving that right means the death of satellite TV, oh well.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That would be true, if they were an idiot. Fortunately I don't think the grandparent poster is an idiot.
Hacking into a wifi signal goes beyond decrypting a data stream. You are at that point sending data with the intention of having a remote computer (for the access point is indeed a little computer) and having it do work for you. You are now making use of someone else's property without their permission. Worse, if they're using even a lame 64-bit WEP, they have clearly indicated that you are not welcome to us it, a sort of digital "No Trespassing" sign, so you can't claim it was accidental.
Cell phones are similar, although with an interesting twist: you're not going to be able to make a phone call without some phone's identity. And whoever paid for that phone's identity is going to get hit with the charges for your calls. In essence, you're engaging in fraud against someone else, making charges in their name. We don't need special phone crime laws to deal with this, basic fraud (specifically identity "theft") covers it fine.
Now, this does suggest that you're free to quietly snoop on other people's wifi and cell phones. One can take an ethical stand that puts the onus of securing one's wireless communications on the transmitter and receiver, not the government and third parties. Or put another way, one might say, "Feel free to snoop on my wifi. I use a secure VPN."
Splicing into the cable companies lines is a different case. If the cable doesn't enter your property, you've engaged in trespass and tampering with someone else's property. But we'll be generous and assume the cable crosses your property; it's common enough. While the land is yours, the physical cable itself is not. In much the same way that if I park in my local grocery store's lot, they have no right to siphon some gas out of my tank, you have no right to cut or otherwise modify their cable.
Now, if you were to engage in some cleverness to read the signal off the cable without harming the cable, I think you'd see some support from those arguing the "tough tits" case.
(In all of these cases I'm ignoring what is actually legal, since I believe the point is to argue what is ethical, and thus what the law should be, not what it is today.)
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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!).
Before commenting on the Bible, please read it first
So when does a thought experiment/research into something that would be illegal to do become a crime?
When it involves children.
Wait wait wait...can someone please explain how the first post to the article was modded redundant? That just doesn't make sense to me...
Redundant means "information was already there", not "post has already been made".
I'm not saying I agree with the moderation, I'm just answering your question as to how a first post can be 'redundant'.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The implications of this arrest on the numerical system as it applies to mathematics, physics, and other scientific and engineering disciplines cannot be overstated - especially in light of the recent arrest of seven, for the murder and subsequent cannibalization of nine...
For instance, even prior to this arrest, the speed of light (as measured in meters per second) couldn't be represented comfortably in decimal, but it could be rounded up with relatively little precision loss... That is now not possible... The gravitational constant was already problematic due to the arrest of seven - now with the arrest of three, the use of cubic meters is no longer viable, so the gravitational constant is at best represented as 6.66 (rounding down, here) * 10^-8 L / (kg * s^2).
Prior to the arrest of three, pi could still be represented to six digits (in decimal) - but now decimal representations of pi, pi/2, and pi/4 are all compromised... The natural exponent (e), of course, has suffered greatly from the loss of seven - and other numbers such as the Elementary Electric Charge (in Coulombs) and Avogadro's Constant have had to be changed to unconventional representations in scientific notation...
All of this has really made mathematics of any sort a real problem. The scientific community is trying to address this by advocating the use of different numerical bases and a new system of units: but adoption has been slow and difficult. So far, a clear solution has not yet emerged.
Bow-ties are cool.
Must suck for people who streets don't have cable or who aren't close enough to over-the-air broadcast
That's unfortunate, but living in remote areas is a choice that comes with a lot of benefits of its own. If they really need TV, they can move somewhere where they can get OTA broadcasts. I am not willing to give up my right to do math to enable their lifestyle choice.
things they want to pay for just so you can precede their right to buy a service
Buying a service is hardly a right. Companies go in and out of business all the time, services are offered and dropped all the time. The privilege of buying a service depends on a sustainable business model, and it's important that that business model not infringe on anyone's rights. Math on the other hand is fundamental and universal. It's the most important tool we have for understanding the universe. I don't see how you can't consider this a right.
I should point out that no one is suggesting any sort of force or coercion stopping people from paying for any service they want. All I ask is that I be left alone if I should wish to receive EM radiation passing through my house and process it. These companies however are quite aggressively using force against others. If you care about freedom, it seems obvious that you should choose the path of least coercion.
You call that a privilege, fine, but it's just as much a privilege as paying for delivery of boxes of goods instead of driving to the manufacture to get them into my house.
Yes, I agree. If UPS couldn't make a profit without infringing on people's rights we wouldn't have that luxury. Fortunately, that's not the case.
You're saying DishTV doesn't have the right to deliver content because you have the right to monkey with their equipment?!?!?
Oh, not at all. DishTV of course has a right to deliver content. And I have no right to monkey with their equipment. I do however have a right to monkey with my own equipment, and perform math on any signals I receive.
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Wait a minute here. You just gave a pretty good argument for why anyone is justified in decoding satellite signals. Then you go and say something completely inconsistent, "I agree that they should be punished, what they were attempting to do was wrong". If you know that a person decrypting a satellite signal is not at fault because the signal is in his house, on what basis do you call that action "wrong"? These are two mutually exclusive positions.
It also depends on the scope of the benefit and harm, respectively. If I decrypt the Pornographic Bodybuilding Channel that's already streaming into my living room, it's tough tits for both me and the satellite company. But if I publish the key on the internet, then tough tits for everyone!
"If you broadcast something into my home uninvited, and I find a way to make use of that broadcast, that's tough tits for you."
No - by living where you do you accept the law - if you don't you can get out of the country, or they'll throw the book at you - and then its tough tits for you in jail.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The point is that criminal enforcement of a copyright law is not a new thing. The DMCA is, by the way, so unrelated to copyright law that only 25% of its letters stand for the word "copyright."
If you want to steal satellite, you find a way to completely decrypt all channels being broadcast. If you simply want to access channels you have already paid for, you do something like the R5000 guys do that taps the unencrypted stream coming out of the CAM.
A poor, white, rural American FINALLY gets a job in this terrible economy, and we lock him up. A word of warning to all your crackers out there, give up hope now.
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--
If you want to steal satellite, you'll have to build a spaceship first.
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