Well, I've seen one guy defend the DMCA on the grounds that it keeps uppity phreaks and crackers in their place. Oops, not his exact words, which I believe were "reign in overzealous programmers" (but he used "phreaks and crackers" too). Not sure if he stood to benefit by it financially.
Also note that Declan is referring to DMCA 1201 here. The guilty-until-proven-innocent takedowns have largely been on the basis of DMCA 512, a different bad section of this bad law.
One: He quotes one Orin Kerr as saying "The risk that a researcher could go to jail for giving a speech at an academic conference is essentially zero". This is true, but not because the risk of that researcher having violated the DMCA is essentially zero. It's true only because no prosecutor wants the political consequences of such an action coming down upon his head. Arrest a Russian at a hacker conference? No problem, comrade. Arrest a researcher at an academic conference, even if they give chapter and verse of how to decrypt DVDs (including a key)? Not going to happen.
Yet, in the right hands, such a speech could be seen as a service that is primarily designed to circumvent copy-protection technology. Or, it could be seen as, not a crime in itself, but evidence that the researcher has been manufacturing or trafficking in prohibited devices. And researchers know this. And while they may realize it's highly unlikely they'll be arrested, the possibility still creates that wonderful chilling effect.
Two: The so-called "exceptions" for encryption research and reverse engineering are so narrow as to be worthless, as McCullagh has himself reported on in the past. And their very existence gives lie to the idea that the DMCA does _NOT_ prohibit such research, by the rule of "exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis" -- that is, you wouldn't NEED an exception if these activities weren't otherwise prohibited.
Three: The Justice Department's legal opinion in the Felten case was a masterpiece of legal footwork. In the main text of the opinion, they opined that Felten hadn't violated the DMCA. In the footnotes, they reserved the right to prosecute in the future. That shouldn't make anyone feel any warm-and-fuzzies about the DMCA.
Four: "Any type of publishing carries risks, including possible suits for libel, copyright infringement or invasion of privacy" -- I see your libel suit (typically limited to actual damages), Declan, and raise you 5 years in prison plus $50k of fines and statutory damages. That's per act (except that for second and subsequent offenses, the numbers double) -- and each sale of the proscribed material counts as an act. That's without adding on conspiracy charges. The DMCA risks are over and above those most publishers and writers face, by far.
Quite likely nobody knows which fiber is the one you need. As I understand it, after a break and splice, the fibers may be scrambled -- so the receivers on either end go through a discovery process to figure out how things are hooked up now.
However, tapping a fiber isn't that difficult in principle -- you bend it just enough so some light escapes.
I sent $100 to the EFF last year. This year, $0.
Why? They surrendered the DMCA battle. If they're going to surrender, I'm better off keeping my money for my own eventual legal defense. See you on D Block.
1) Code in such a way to make Hollywood proposals irrelevant
2) Go To Jail.
Sure, I'd love to just code and ignore the political arena. But the politicans have an answer for that, and it's one which can't be answered by coding. Trying to fight the expansion of copyright law with code is like trying to fight censorship with more speech.
As the article notes, this isn't a new attack; Schneir and Katz had a paper on the general principle two years ago; it has been up on the Counterpane Labs site for some time now.
BTW, you don't get S, the session key. You get a new message, P which is related to M in a manner you chose.
Easy example (not real life): Suppose the message C is encrypted using any algorithm in Electronic Code Book mode. To sucker the user into decrypting that, I send him a message C' which includes all the ciphertext blocks which were in the original message C (but not in the same order). He decrypts that (giving P) and quotes it back to me as a garbled message. I now build a codebook with P and C', and use that to decrypt C.
If another mode is used, as in PGP, a more complicated method of constructing C' is required (and is given in the paper), but it still works.
It goes even further than the US DMCA, in that it EXPLICITLY makes publishing information (not just code) for circumventing copy protection illegal. Guess without a 1st amendment, they didn't have to pussyfoot around.
When I learned C, I also learned that it could over write the operating system. Whereas Fortran is a straight number cruncher.
<cough> EQUIVALENCE <cough>
(ok, so unrestricted equivalence disappeared circa Fortran '77. But yes, there were people who played equivalence games to mess with the OS. Fortran hackers... a scary thought).
Fine, then don't use my software. Want a warranty? The price won't be $0. It won't even be $50. It'll be based on the cost of providing support for that product over the warranty period. That's going to be really high.
Of course, this won't apply to the major software vendors -- they'll just stick something in the click-wrap which says you get no warantee.
Oh, and if my free software causes cancer in anyone, you shouldn't have used it in that X-ray control software without checking it out thoroughly: I certainly can't afford to certify it for life-critical systems.
UCITA is like bad meat. Just trimming off the green and fuzzy parts might get some suckers to buy it, but it's still going to make you ill if you swallow it. It needs to be scrapped entirely, not modified.
In other words, in order to challenge the law, you have to openly and notoriously violate it, and be prosecuted, and not make any deals.
If you win, great. If you lose, your life is over -- you spend 5+ years in a Federal prison and end up with a felony conviction on your record. Even assuming you survive prison, with a felony conviction you won't even be able to find a job where you can say "Would you like fries with that?". The govt has found a great way to prevent both civil disobedience and test cases: just raise the stakes (for the other side only) through the roof.
This patent boils down to a modification of run length encoding, and a very slight one at that.
Consider a data stream like 00000000001000000100000010000020000001000001 000040 000400001000000300001
Ordinary null suppression gives you a code like R10 L1 R6 L1 R6 L1 R5 L2 R6 L1 R5 L1 R4 L4 R4 L1 R6 L3 R4 L1
Their "invention" is to use a different sort of encoding when a run is followed by the next-most-frequent character:
R10 R6 R6 R'5 L2 R6 R5 R'4 L4 R4 R'6 L3 R4
Note the "L1s" have disappeared, but I've introduced another symbol "R'".
This is a trivial modification, the sort of thing people interested in compression play with all the time (there's something analagous in currently-popular MTF schemes), and almost certainly something that was used before the filing of the patent. Of course, that can be hard to prove.
(all the other stuff with DCTs and the like appears to be DCTs PLUS this one "innovation")
So what? The patent system is supposed to cover _inventions_, not discoveries. No matter how hard the discovery is. Synthesize a gene which cures anemia? Patent that. Find one in nature? That's clever, but not patentworthy.
Nothing. Actually, they already did (Microsoft FrontPage at one time contained (and may still contain) a nondisparagement clause.
Besides the whole "contract of adhesion" thing, the big problem of EULAs is there's no real agreement. The companies publish terms they know no one would agree to, and people click OK anyway because they know that 99.9999% of the time, the company won't try to enforce them.
They're pretending to bind the user, and the user is pretending to be bound. That's not a contract.
Already taken into account -- it's 1.17 times (or 3.01 times) the LENGTH of the integer, not its value. If it had been 3.01, it would have been a big deal.
The most important part of the abstract is the finding that "for a given cost, the new method can factor integers that are 1.17 times larger (rather than 3.01)." This means that even if the new factoring method scales to "small" numbers of bits like 1024, a 1024 bit key is only reduced to the security of an 875 bit key, not a 342 bit key. This is a big difference! It goes from "uh oh, better revoke all my keys right now" to "Hmm, might want to think about increasing them in the future".
The appeals court decision would have impacted legitimate patentholders who had to make minor adjustments during the process. It would have had no impact on the legions of junk patents which are apparently granted by patent examiners borrowing Lady Justice's blindfold.
The problem is that it is impractical for an individual to defend against lawsuits in foreign (whether outside his state or his country) jurisdictions. Therefore if I write an article, I have the choice, under your system, of either being open to lawsuits from people from California, Alabama, Australia, or wherever, or somehow technically restricting my publication to my home state of PA. That's a rather severe restriction on freedom of speech. Libel lawsuits in foreign jurisdictions can be filed under "chilling effects".
No, not really. The question of confusion comes up only if the trademark is valid in the first place. If the trademark isn't valid, you can create as much confusion as you like.
The judge in this case seems to think the DMCA is "content neutral" and therefore provokes only intermediate scrutiny. This is nonsense, as the only thing that distinguishes non-violating programs from violating ones is their content.
The usual content-neutral restrictions are "time, place, and manner". Judge Whyte has added "function". But the function of computer code is inextricably tied to its content: the content defines the function.
I have posted a fuller version of this argument with source code examples at my site. I also address the "conduct" argument.
If Felton couldn't get a declaratory judgement on the DMCA with that "smoking gun" letter, from the DVD-CCA, these guys certainly aren't going to succeed in getting one either. Case dismissed for lack of 'case or controversy'. They must know this.
No, Blizzard has a whole lot of claims. Among them:
The bnetd developers stole some code to do authentication
Bnetd enables infringing public performances of Blizzard games
Internet Gateway, by running bnetd, is a direct and contributory infringer.
Internet Gateway is infringing by having screenshots from Blizzard games.
The term Bnetd infringes on the battle.net trademark.
A bunch of EULA claims.
Most are total nonsense, but Vivendi knows that if they get all these claims in front of a jury and throw around a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo, the jury will bite on at least one, and they only have to win on one. (well, maybe more than one, if one is the 'screenshot' one)
Also Vivendi buys time, because they have their no-judge-required DMCA-created ersatz "preliminary injunction". So if they just drag the case out indefinitely, bnetd.org never goes back up. Unless Internet Gateway (which is being sued anyway) decides to abandon their safe harbor, at which point you should check for flying pigs and lawyers.
Creating and using software to crack copyright protections for research purposes may be legal, but only if you don't talk about the methods used in doing so. That is an infringement on free speech, even accepting arguendo that a prohibition on creating the software in the first place is not.
This is a real problem with the encryption research exemption 17 USC 1201(g); it makes one of the factors in whether the encryption research is legal whether or not the findings were distributed. (17 USC 1201(g)(3)(A))
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I've seen one guy defend the DMCA on the grounds that it keeps uppity phreaks and crackers in their place. Oops, not his exact words, which I believe were "reign in overzealous programmers" (but he used "phreaks and crackers" too). Not sure if he stood to benefit by it financially. Also note that Declan is referring to DMCA 1201 here. The guilty-until-proven-innocent takedowns have largely been on the basis of DMCA 512, a different bad section of this bad law.
One: He quotes one Orin Kerr as saying "The risk that a researcher could go to jail for giving a speech at an academic conference is essentially zero". This is true, but not because the risk of that researcher having violated the DMCA is essentially zero. It's true only because no prosecutor wants the political consequences of such an action coming down upon his head. Arrest a Russian at a hacker conference? No problem, comrade. Arrest a researcher at an academic conference, even if they give chapter and verse of how to decrypt DVDs (including a key)? Not going to happen.
Yet, in the right hands, such a speech could be seen as a service that is primarily designed to circumvent copy-protection technology. Or, it could be seen as, not a crime in itself, but evidence that the researcher has been manufacturing or trafficking in prohibited devices. And researchers know this. And while they may realize it's highly unlikely they'll be arrested, the possibility still creates that wonderful chilling effect.
Two: The so-called "exceptions" for encryption research and reverse engineering are so narrow as to be worthless, as McCullagh has himself reported on in the past. And their very existence gives lie to the idea that the DMCA does _NOT_ prohibit such research, by the rule of "exceptio probat regulam in casibus non
exceptis" -- that is, you wouldn't NEED an exception if these activities weren't otherwise prohibited.
Three: The Justice Department's legal opinion in the Felten case was a masterpiece of legal footwork. In the main text of the opinion, they opined that Felten hadn't violated the DMCA. In the footnotes, they reserved the right to prosecute in the future. That shouldn't make anyone feel any warm-and-fuzzies about the DMCA.
Four: "Any type of publishing carries risks, including possible suits for libel, copyright infringement or invasion of privacy" -- I see your libel suit (typically limited to actual damages), Declan, and raise you 5 years in prison plus $50k of fines and statutory damages. That's per act (except that for second and subsequent offenses, the numbers double) -- and each sale of the proscribed material counts as an act. That's without adding on conspiracy charges. The DMCA risks are over and above those most publishers and writers face, by far.
Quite likely nobody knows which fiber is the one you need. As I understand it, after a break and splice, the fibers may be scrambled -- so the receivers on either end go through a discovery process to figure out how things are hooked up now.
However, tapping a fiber isn't that difficult in principle -- you bend it just enough so some light escapes.
I sent $100 to the EFF last year. This year, $0. Why? They surrendered the DMCA battle. If they're going to surrender, I'm better off keeping my money for my own eventual legal defense. See you on D Block.
I like the last picture on the Len Adleman page. On the blackboard between Adleman and Rivest is "therefore P = NP".
1) Code in such a way to make Hollywood proposals irrelevant 2) Go To Jail. Sure, I'd love to just code and ignore the political arena. But the politicans have an answer for that, and it's one which can't be answered by coding. Trying to fight the expansion of copyright law with code is like trying to fight censorship with more speech.
As the article notes, this isn't a new attack; Schneir and Katz had a paper on the general principle two years ago; it has been up on the Counterpane Labs site for some time now.
BTW, you don't get S, the session key. You get a new message, P which is related to M in a manner you chose.
Easy example (not real life): Suppose the message C is encrypted using any algorithm in Electronic Code Book mode. To sucker the user into decrypting that, I send him a message C' which includes all the ciphertext blocks which were in the original message C (but not in the same order). He decrypts that (giving P) and quotes it back to me as a garbled message. I now build a codebook with P and C', and use that to decrypt C.
If another mode is used, as in PGP, a more complicated method of constructing C' is required (and is given in the paper), but it still works.
It goes even further than the US DMCA, in that it EXPLICITLY makes publishing information (not just code) for circumventing copy protection illegal. Guess without a 1st amendment, they didn't have to pussyfoot around.
When I learned C, I also learned that it could over write the operating system. Whereas Fortran is a straight number cruncher.
<cough> EQUIVALENCE <cough>
(ok, so unrestricted equivalence disappeared circa Fortran '77. But yes, there were people who played equivalence games to mess with the OS. Fortran hackers... a scary thought).
Fine, then don't use my software. Want a warranty? The price won't be $0. It won't even be $50. It'll be based on the cost of providing support for that product over the warranty period. That's going to be really high. Of course, this won't apply to the major software vendors -- they'll just stick something in the click-wrap which says you get no warantee. Oh, and if my free software causes cancer in anyone, you shouldn't have used it in that X-ray control software without checking it out thoroughly: I certainly can't afford to certify it for life-critical systems.
UCITA is like bad meat. Just trimming off the green and fuzzy parts might get some suckers to buy it, but it's still going to make you ill if you swallow it. It needs to be scrapped entirely, not modified.
In other words, in order to challenge the law, you have to openly and notoriously violate it, and be prosecuted, and not make any deals. If you win, great. If you lose, your life is over -- you spend 5+ years in a Federal prison and end up with a felony conviction on your record. Even assuming you survive prison, with a felony conviction you won't even be able to find a job where you can say "Would you like fries with that?". The govt has found a great way to prevent both civil disobedience and test cases: just raise the stakes (for the other side only) through the roof.
This patent boils down to a modification of run length encoding, and a very slight one at that.
1 000040 000400001000000300001
Consider a data stream like
0000000000100000010000001000002000000100000
Ordinary null suppression gives you a code like
R10 L1 R6 L1 R6 L1 R5 L2 R6 L1 R5 L1 R4 L4 R4 L1 R6 L3 R4 L1
Their "invention" is to use a different sort of encoding when a run is followed by the next-most-frequent character:
R10 R6 R6 R'5 L2 R6 R5 R'4 L4 R4 R'6 L3 R4
Note the "L1s" have disappeared, but I've introduced another symbol "R'".
This is a trivial modification, the sort of thing people interested in compression play with all the time (there's something analagous in currently-popular MTF schemes), and almost certainly something that was used before the filing of the patent. Of course, that can be hard to prove.
(all the other stuff with DCTs and the like appears to be DCTs PLUS this one "innovation")
So what? The patent system is supposed to cover _inventions_, not discoveries. No matter how hard the discovery is. Synthesize a gene which cures anemia? Patent that. Find one in nature? That's clever, but not patentworthy.
Nothing. Actually, they already did (Microsoft FrontPage at one time contained (and may still contain) a nondisparagement clause.
Besides the whole "contract of adhesion" thing, the big problem of EULAs is there's no real agreement. The companies publish terms they know no one would agree to, and people click OK anyway because they know that 99.9999% of the time, the company won't try to enforce them.
They're pretending to bind the user, and the user is pretending to be bound. That's not a contract.
You can run a low speed (dialup, even) or metered line for your interactive needs, plus a satellite connection for your bandwidth-sucking pleasure.
You can move for less than $200K. Hell, I moved and bought a house starting from renting for less than $200K.
You can get IDSL. Sure, the bandwidth and the price aren't great, but it's better than nothing.
Already taken into account -- it's 1.17 times (or 3.01 times) the LENGTH of the integer, not its value. If it had been 3.01, it would have been a big deal.
The most important part of the abstract is the finding that "for a given cost, the new method can factor integers that are 1.17 times larger (rather than 3.01)." This means that even if the new factoring method scales to "small" numbers of bits like 1024, a 1024 bit key is only reduced to the security of an 875 bit key, not a 342 bit key. This is a big difference! It goes from "uh oh, better revoke all my keys right now" to "Hmm, might want to think about increasing them in the future".
The appeals court decision would have impacted legitimate patentholders who had to make minor adjustments during the process. It would have had no impact on the legions of junk patents which are apparently granted by patent examiners borrowing Lady Justice's blindfold.
The problem is that it is impractical for an individual to defend against lawsuits in foreign (whether outside his state or his country) jurisdictions. Therefore if I write an article, I have the choice, under your system, of either being open to lawsuits from people from California, Alabama, Australia, or wherever, or somehow technically restricting my publication to my home state of PA. That's a rather severe restriction on freedom of speech. Libel lawsuits in foreign jurisdictions can be filed under "chilling effects".
No, not really. The question of confusion comes up only if the trademark is valid in the first place. If the trademark isn't valid, you can create as much confusion as you like.
The usual content-neutral restrictions are "time, place, and manner". Judge Whyte has added "function". But the function of computer code is inextricably tied to its content: the content defines the function.
I have posted a fuller version of this argument with source code examples at my site. I also address the "conduct" argument.
If Felton couldn't get a declaratory judgement on the DMCA with that "smoking gun" letter, from the DVD-CCA, these guys certainly aren't going to succeed in getting one either. Case dismissed for lack of 'case or controversy'. They must know this.
No, Blizzard has a whole lot of claims. Among them:
The bnetd developers stole some code to do authentication
Bnetd enables infringing public performances of Blizzard games
Internet Gateway, by running bnetd, is a direct and contributory infringer.
Internet Gateway is infringing by having screenshots from Blizzard games.
The term Bnetd infringes on the battle.net trademark.
A bunch of EULA claims.
Most are total nonsense, but Vivendi knows that if they get all these claims in front of a jury and throw around a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo, the jury will bite on at least one, and they only have to win on one. (well, maybe more than one, if one is the 'screenshot' one)
Also Vivendi buys time, because they have their no-judge-required DMCA-created ersatz "preliminary injunction". So if they just drag the case out indefinitely, bnetd.org never goes back up. Unless Internet Gateway (which is being sued anyway) decides to abandon their safe harbor, at which point you should check for flying pigs and lawyers.
Creating and using software to crack copyright protections for research purposes may be legal, but only if you don't talk about the methods used in doing so. That is an infringement on free speech, even accepting arguendo that a prohibition on creating the software in the first place is not.
This is a real problem with the encryption research exemption 17 USC 1201(g); it makes one of the factors in whether the encryption research is legal whether or not the findings were distributed. (17 USC 1201(g)(3)(A))