Some years ago, it was the "Information Superhighway"; now it's "E-commerce". The Internet, as the public uses it, is becoming another home shopping network. Once 99.9% of people only connect to corporate servers, that becomes standard practice, and it becomes easier to crack down on deviant uses, such as connecting to other users' machines. Or even connecting untrusted clients to the Internet.
A SSL connection from a dial-up/cable machine to a well-known server on a high-bandwidth line is one thing. A SSL connection from one home user to another could be considered suspicious. Indeed, it is easy to imagine the courts ruling that consumers have no more legitimate reason to transfer large amounts of data from each others' machines than they do to decrypt DVDs (and in the latter case, there were "fair use" arguments for being able to extract DVD content, but they were struck down).
The US legal system operates on the auction principle, where the favourable ruling goes to the highest bidder. And the RIAA can outbid consumers, the EFF, and those pinko librarians and academics.
Large (>1mb) low-entropy data transfers originating from a dial-up/cable subscriber box, could raise a red flag. Other red flags could be whether the box receives much port 80 traffic, whether traffic patterns from it are typical of a server or a consumer box (they could possibly even have neural networks trained to detect these things), and so on.
After meeting with "industry representatives", President Bush signs an executive order banning the use of taxpayer funds for open-source software projects; justifies it as defending America's software industry and its right to innovate.
The RIAA's next tack will be to sue those writing, releasing and hosting software designed to evade enforcement of copyrights. Which happens to coincide with software designed to enforce other restrictions. And with the DMCA in place, and their legal resources, they can win this one.
Imagine a world where ISPs, to avoid liability, install "indemnity boxes" on their connections. These detect and block P2P file transfers, are updated frequently, and can check their own integrity. By the time the average user has heard of a P2P program, the indemnity boxes block it. ISPs who do not install the box become liable for contributory copyright infringement; after one lawsuit agaunst such an ISP has been won, with ruinous damages awarded, everybody else quietly folded.
Meanwhile, P2P software has been ruled to be every bit as much a "digital crowbar" as DeCSS. You can find it, but it is deep underground.
The RIAA have the means to achieve this; they have billions of dollars to spend on winning court cases and buying legislators. The very survival of artificial scarcity as the foundation of information-age corporate capitalism depends on them winning.
Of course, if the measures prove to be ineffective, they will do what is always done: increase the penalties. Instead of blocking file-sharing software, they will switch to tracking users and making examples of them, with high-profile prosecutions. After a few pimply-faced teenagers get jail sentences for criminal conspiracy, people will be a lot more afraid to use this software. It will become a high-risk activity, much like the illegal drug trade.
Its not a question of international treaties I would imagine that Australian law also bans expropriation. It would be queer indeed if banning restrictive trade practices was considered expropriation!
Australian law does, but could be changed. Normally, a country's government could pass laws to punitively tax multinationals, or nationalise their assets (as either India or Pakistan did some decades ago), and since that is the law of the land, the corporations would have no recourse other than withdrawing or lobbying their governments to apply diplomatic pressure.
However, there are now international treaties which allow corporations to have such laws struck down by bodies such as the World Trade Organisation. This essentially removes parts of national sovereignty, placing the power in the hands of an undemocratic body with a history of siding with the multinationals. Moreover, the treaties are often so broad that any laws that impair profitability of local operations may be overturned. The NAFTA agreement has
such provisions (which have been used, for instance, to force Mexican local governments to put up with polluting, environmental regulation-flouting multinational operations), and various other multinational treaties have been proposed applying such arbitration on a wider scale. Whether or not Australia has signed any of them, and whether they could be used by Hollywood studios to force the Australian government to overrule the ACCC, is the $64,000 question.
Is Australia signatory to any international treaties that automatically strike down laws that expropriate multinational corporations? If so, would not such treaties overrule any ACCC decision on zoning that threatens the studios?
They are, but the same people (i.e. Bronfman et al.) as before are in charge of the Universal Music Group; since the Vivendi acquisition, UMG have been hawkish about music distribution (their handling of mp3.com, &c, going beyond the call of due diligence to shareholders). And they're still screwing artists (witness Courtney Love's lawsuit). (Then again, Polydor have been fucking artists over for decades, to name one label.)
Come on... Universal are the Nike of the music industry, the dominant brand of evil and bastardry. Let's see...
They are the largest of the recording companies (with about 30% of the market)
They have a history of fucking over artists. Their name comes up disproportionately frequently in stories of artists getting the short end of the stick.
The artists who make it on their labels (now including the likes of Island, Def Jam, Polydor, &c) tend not to stick around once the initial contract expires, as they would otherwise be pressured into doing what they don't want to. All part and parcel of dealing with the largest recording company in the world.
On another note, Universal, along with Sony, have taken the hardest line against the MP3 format, online distribution and so on. Witness Edgar Bronfman Jr.'s speech about why anonymity on the Internet must be outlawed to save free enterprise. (Incidentally, Bronfman is still running the Universal Music Group.)
I don't know about Universal Studios, Canal+, Connex, Vivendi or any other companies they run, but the Universal Music Group is about as evil as recording companies have gotten at this stage of their evolution. So much so that I actively avoid buying CDs from them (well, them and Sony).
Emusic.com hasn't been changed yet, not by the new owners. The site says nothing about it being part of Universal, for example. If a change happened, it had been in the pipeline before the deal.
Once the deal is finalised, expect the MP3s to go byebye, replaced by auto-expiring SDMI downloads like on Duet. Or expect emusic.com to just redirect you to the Duet subscription page.
Anyone who has watched Vivendi Universal for a while will know that they are mortally opposed to "insecure", nonproprietary audio formats, including MP3. Vivendi would be more than happy if MP3 was wiped off the face of the Earth.
Expect mp3.com to change its name and abandon unencrypted MP3s, either reencoding in a proprietary format, or wrapping all downloads in Universal/InterTrust's BlueMatter rights-management layer.
Wouldn't all of this directly contradict the European Union Directive on Copyright, which is like the DMCA only much more restrictive? Would the Danish parliament be obliged to weaken or repeal this law to bring it inline with the directive, or weaken the directive? The way I understand it, European member states are expected to pass laws implementing Directives pretty much as they are.
It may be precisely Sony's plan to use this as a test case for the GPL, and to throw enough star lawyers at it to outbid the FSF and win a ruling that invalidates or weakens the GPL to the point of uselessness. Sony is a company committed to a proprietarian model of intellectual property (i.e. trusted client systems, "secure" copy control systems), something that the GPL is at odds with.
If the GPL was invalidated by a court ruling, it would open the gates to Sony making proprietary forks of Linux containing copy-control mechanisms (perhaps similar to MS's Secure Audio Path) at the kernel level, without the threat of being forced to reveal their secrets.
Are there any types of research which are recognised (by statute of law or legal precedent) to not be legitimately publishable, for whatever reasons (national security, public endangerment, or whatever)? Any categories which are automatically classified or whose distribution is restricted by law? If so, the RIAA could claim that as a precedent. After all, their argument is, the future of the U.S. economy depends on the DMCA.
Unless you live in Afghanistan next door to Osama Bin Laden or someone, they can get you. You just have to stick your head up enough to present a good target.
The EU just passed a directive on copyright that is at least as draconian as the DMCA. It's very unlikely that this paper would be legal under it.
The UK hasn't passed it into local laws, but will in time. (Given that it's an EU directive, it would take much more than a noise from a few academics, penguinheads and Napatistas to derail the process.) The Reg is in the UK. Thus don't expect this paper to stick around forever.
Didn't the RIAA demand that Felten et al. turn over all copies of notes related to the paper for destruction? Did Felten et al. comply with this demand, did the RIAA back down, or are they pushing ahead?
Out of purely academic interest, how much care has been taken to ensure the integrity of the Macrovision module? Anyone know whether it is possible to recompile the kernel in question and get the binary driver to work with it, optionally hacking the driver? Does the Macrovision module have any sort of cryptographic integrity checking mechanism? How hard would it be for a rogue user to (a) replace it with a dummy module, or (b) interpose a "man in the middle" module which loads it and tricks it into disabling Macrovision?
The intersection between "trusted client" security (as demanded by the MPAA/RIAA) and open source OSes should be interesting to watch.
Apparently subtitles work on graphics cards whose XFree86 driver supports the Xv extension.
Which, unfortunately, doesn't include the NVidia Riva TNT2 I picked up recently.
Hopefully, either (a) Xv support will be extended to other cards, or (b) xine will get the ability to do subtitles in software without special drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
Some years ago, it was the "Information Superhighway"; now it's "E-commerce". The Internet, as the public uses it, is becoming another home shopping network. Once 99.9% of people only connect to corporate servers, that becomes standard practice, and it becomes easier to crack down on deviant uses, such as connecting to other users' machines. Or even connecting untrusted clients to the Internet.
A SSL connection from a dial-up/cable machine to a well-known server on a high-bandwidth line is one thing. A SSL connection from one home user to another could be considered suspicious. Indeed, it is easy to imagine the courts ruling that consumers have no more legitimate reason to transfer large amounts of data from each others' machines than they do to decrypt DVDs (and in the latter case, there were "fair use" arguments for being able to extract DVD content, but they were struck down).
The US legal system operates on the auction principle, where the favourable ruling goes to the highest bidder. And the RIAA can outbid consumers, the EFF, and those pinko librarians and academics.
Large (>1mb) low-entropy data transfers originating from a dial-up/cable subscriber box, could raise a red flag. Other red flags could be whether the box receives much port 80 traffic, whether traffic patterns from it are typical of a server or a consumer box (they could possibly even have neural networks trained to detect these things), and so on.
After meeting with "industry representatives", President Bush signs an executive order banning the use of taxpayer funds for open-source software projects; justifies it as defending America's software industry and its right to innovate.
The RIAA's next tack will be to sue those writing, releasing and hosting software designed to evade enforcement of copyrights. Which happens to coincide with software designed to enforce other restrictions. And with the DMCA in place, and their legal resources, they can win this one.
Imagine a world where ISPs, to avoid liability, install "indemnity boxes" on their connections. These detect and block P2P file transfers, are updated frequently, and can check their own integrity. By the time the average user has heard of a P2P program, the indemnity boxes block it. ISPs who do not install the box become liable for contributory copyright infringement; after one lawsuit agaunst such an ISP has been won, with ruinous damages awarded, everybody else quietly folded.
Meanwhile, P2P software has been ruled to be every bit as much a "digital crowbar" as DeCSS. You can find it, but it is deep underground.
The RIAA have the means to achieve this; they have billions of dollars to spend on winning court cases and buying legislators. The very survival of artificial scarcity as the foundation of information-age corporate capitalism depends on them winning.
Of course, if the measures prove to be ineffective, they will do what is always done: increase the penalties. Instead of blocking file-sharing software, they will switch to tracking users and making examples of them, with high-profile prosecutions. After a few pimply-faced teenagers get jail sentences for criminal conspiracy, people will be a lot more afraid to use this software. It will become a high-risk activity, much like the illegal drug trade.
Its not a question of international treaties I would imagine that Australian law also bans expropriation. It would be queer indeed if banning restrictive trade practices was considered expropriation!
Australian law does, but could be changed. Normally, a country's government could pass laws to punitively tax multinationals, or nationalise their assets (as either India or Pakistan did some decades ago), and since that is the law of the land, the corporations would have no recourse other than withdrawing or lobbying their governments to apply diplomatic pressure.
However, there are now international treaties which allow corporations to have such laws struck down by bodies such as the World Trade Organisation. This essentially removes parts of national sovereignty, placing the power in the hands of an undemocratic body with a history of siding with the multinationals. Moreover, the treaties are often so broad that any laws that impair profitability of local operations may be overturned. The NAFTA agreement has
such provisions (which have been used, for instance, to force Mexican local governments to put up with polluting, environmental regulation-flouting multinational operations), and various other multinational treaties have been proposed applying such arbitration on a wider scale. Whether or not Australia has signed any of them, and whether they could be used by Hollywood studios to force the Australian government to overrule the ACCC, is the $64,000 question.
Is Australia signatory to any international treaties that automatically strike down laws that expropriate multinational corporations? If so, would not such treaties overrule any ACCC decision on zoning that threatens the studios?
They are, but the same people (i.e. Bronfman et al.) as before are in charge of the Universal Music Group; since the Vivendi acquisition, UMG have been hawkish about music distribution (their handling of mp3.com, &c, going beyond the call of due diligence to shareholders). And they're still screwing artists (witness Courtney Love's lawsuit). (Then again, Polydor have been fucking artists over for decades, to name one label.)
- They are the largest of the recording companies (with about 30% of the market)
- They have a history of fucking over artists. Their name comes up disproportionately frequently in stories of artists getting the short end of the stick.
- The artists who make it on their labels (now including the likes of Island, Def Jam, Polydor, &c) tend not to stick around once the initial contract expires, as they would otherwise be pressured into doing what they don't want to. All part and parcel of dealing with the largest recording company in the world.
- On another note, Universal, along with Sony, have taken the hardest line against the MP3 format, online distribution and so on. Witness Edgar Bronfman Jr.'s speech about why anonymity on the Internet must be outlawed to save free enterprise. (Incidentally, Bronfman is still running the Universal Music Group.)
I don't know about Universal Studios, Canal+, Connex, Vivendi or any other companies they run, but the Universal Music Group is about as evil as recording companies have gotten at this stage of their evolution. So much so that I actively avoid buying CDs from them (well, them and Sony).Or at least they were this afternoon...
Emusic.com hasn't been changed yet, not by the new owners. The site says nothing about it being part of Universal, for example. If a change happened, it had been in the pipeline before the deal.
Once the deal is finalised, expect the MP3s to go byebye, replaced by auto-expiring SDMI downloads like on Duet. Or expect emusic.com to just redirect you to the Duet subscription page.
Well, there's iuma.com. Not as slick, but it'll do the job.
And a few others.
Unprotected MP3s from Universal?
Wake up and smell the burning corpses of your dreams.
Anyone who has watched Vivendi Universal for a while will know that they are mortally opposed to "insecure", nonproprietary audio formats, including MP3. Vivendi would be more than happy if MP3 was wiped off the face of the Earth.
Expect mp3.com to change its name and abandon unencrypted MP3s, either reencoding in a proprietary format, or wrapping all downloads in Universal/InterTrust's BlueMatter rights-management layer.
Wouldn't all of this directly contradict the European Union Directive on Copyright, which is like the DMCA only much more restrictive? Would the Danish parliament be obliged to weaken or repeal this law to bring it inline with the directive, or weaken the directive? The way I understand it, European member states are expected to pass laws implementing Directives pretty much as they are.
Any experts on European politics care to explain?
It may be precisely Sony's plan to use this as a test case for the GPL, and to throw enough star lawyers at it to outbid the FSF and win a ruling that invalidates or weakens the GPL to the point of uselessness. Sony is a company committed to a proprietarian model of intellectual property (i.e. trusted client systems, "secure" copy control systems), something that the GPL is at odds with.
If the GPL was invalidated by a court ruling, it would open the gates to Sony making proprietary forks of Linux containing copy-control mechanisms (perhaps similar to MS's Secure Audio Path) at the kernel level, without the threat of being forced to reveal their secrets.
Are there any types of research which are recognised (by statute of law or legal precedent) to not be legitimately publishable, for whatever reasons (national security, public endangerment, or whatever)? Any categories which are automatically classified or whose distribution is restricted by law? If so, the RIAA could claim that as a precedent. After all, their argument is, the future of the U.S. economy depends on the DMCA.
And he still hasn't got his computer back.
Unless you live in Afghanistan next door to Osama Bin Laden or someone, they can get you. You just have to stick your head up enough to present a good target.
The EU just passed a directive on copyright that is at least as draconian as the DMCA. It's very unlikely that this paper would be legal under it.
The UK hasn't passed it into local laws, but will in time. (Given that it's an EU directive, it would take much more than a noise from a few academics, penguinheads and Napatistas to derail the process.) The Reg is in the UK. Thus don't expect this paper to stick around forever.
Didn't the RIAA demand that Felten et al. turn over all copies of notes related to the paper for destruction? Did Felten et al. comply with this demand, did the RIAA back down, or are they pushing ahead?
Out of purely academic interest, how much care has been taken to ensure the integrity of the Macrovision module? Anyone know whether it is possible to recompile the kernel in question and get the binary driver to work with it, optionally hacking the driver? Does the Macrovision module have any sort of cryptographic integrity checking mechanism? How hard would it be for a rogue user to (a) replace it with a dummy module, or (b) interpose a "man in the middle" module which loads it and tricks it into disabling Macrovision?
The intersection between "trusted client" security (as demanded by the MPAA/RIAA) and open source OSes should be interesting to watch.
Apparently subtitles work on graphics cards whose XFree86 driver supports the Xv extension.
Which, unfortunately, doesn't include the NVidia Riva TNT2 I picked up recently.
Hopefully, either (a) Xv support will be extended to other cards, or (b) xine will get the ability to do subtitles in software without special drivers.
Except for the fact that it takes up a lot more space than it should in this case, suggesting that there is something else hidden there.
Once the low-level format is gone, the drive is a paperweight.
That is assuming that the magnetic field penetrates the metal shell of the drive, of course.