The recent Michigan law is primarily against the "concealment of the source or destination of any communication".
Changing your "hosts" file is strictly a local effect, which alters the URLs your computer downloads, and doesn't conceal anything from the ISP. So the "super-DMCA" laws don't apply.
However:
Nytimes.com uses their dual subscriber/public multiple URL system to control access to their copyrighted content. Circumventing that access control mechanism is illegal by the normal DMCA. You won't have to travel to Michigan to get arrested for this.
For one thing, an X-Box isn't all that expensive to build. It's not like you get a $600 PC for $150. Buying a PC with similar capabilities today is just around $250, and by mass-producing specially designed hardware, Microsoft can easily overcome that price difference. Yes, the work to design the boards and set up the factories meant it was very expensive in the beginning, but today, X-Boxes are built cheap enough that MS breaks even on a few games. Microsoft originally spent ~$360 per X-Box. Today it's half that.
If amateurs were allowed to make custom software, most people would still buy the professional stuff (which is faster and more impressive technically because it has the backing of Microsoft. Without support from the hardware developer, you can't make a quality game on sub-standard hardware). That would be especially true for the first 2-3 years of the product's life, when the amateur developers were just getting up to speed. By then, the manufacturer should have a better system in the pipeline to replace it.
This wonderful example shows how even hardware-enforced media protection schemes aren't going to work,
It only shows that the schemes won't work by merely technical means, and that they'll need the help of laws to make hardware media protection work.
Legal methods alone won't work, because people will ignore laws that are totally easy to break. And it's impossible to arrest/intimidate millions of people for a non-sexual, non-violent, drug-free, victimless crime.
Hardware methods alone won't work, because as soon as one smart guy deciphers the hardware, he'll spread his workaround to the entire world.
The combination of hardware and legal protections can work. If there are laws allowing for severe punishments to the handful of hackers who create the workarounds, and moderate punishment to people who distribute them, it'll be quiet possible to keep 99.99% of people unable to break their hardware "trust" protection. And then the "trusted" code side will have won.
Given that MS has a hard time keeping its HTTP server secure, I don't think buffer overflows will be too hard to find in typical razzle-dazzle media player programs:)
That assumption is shortsighted. Maybe it's true today, but it won't stay true. Microsoft currently has many buffer overflows in its software, for 2 reasons.
They have no financial benefit to secure code. People still buy their software (even HTTP servers), regardless of occasional vulnerabilities. BUT, in the future, on devices like the X-Box, they will have more and more incentive to secure the code, and they might start to move security up their priority list.
PCs and servers with Microsoft Windows are currently general-purpose computers, which the end-user sysadmins can and do install unpredictable combinations of their own software on. In an unpredictable, dynamic environment, it's hard to keep things secure. BUT, X-Boxes (and similar hardware offerings) don't need to allow users to continually change and update the software. The routines that do things like unpack disk and network information are unchanging targets. Given time, Microsoft can progressively discover and eliminate any overflow. Then, they will make it impossible for game developers to write their own code for these things, and only allow them to use approved APIs for dangerous situations.
the alwsn says: "i want to make some electronic equipment i own do something it was never intended to do without opening the case, changing anything, and i want it to work flawlessly every time."
ALL RIDICULOUS.
One of those things is not like the others- one of those things does not belong!
The 4 examples you give are examples of equipment that is impossible because it violates the laws of physics. The last example is a violation of the will of Microsoft- which is a much softer target to attack.
The X-Box is a stored-program computer. It loads programs and runs them. Since it can load software that wasn't conceived back when the hardware was built, it's what is called a "general purpose computer".
The manufacturer has attempted to cripple the device- to take away a capability it naturally had- in order to earn themselves some more cash. It was intended first to run programs, then as an afterthought, made to only run a tiny fraction of the many possible programs for marketing reasons.
It's not ridiculous at all to think that the code-signing restriction can be lifted from the XBox, without changing the hardware. Bill Gates could accomplish this in 30 seconds if he wished. US normal people might take longer, and it might be "illegal", but the probablities aren't so low as to be humorous.
(Unless someone imagines they'll brute-force the encryption, which is just funny)
We can imagine that of course, but it implies that the spaceship designers are intentionally crippling their manuverablility by emulating the restraints of aerial flight. That's a heavy price to pay just to give the human pilots a feeling of intuitive control.
On a related note, though, one could claim that the preferred way for a human to detect an attacker behind him is by sound. So speakers could be placed inside the cockpit to create audio effects when gunfire or engine thrusters pass close by... thus explaining how they can hear explosions in space.
I think Sony's lawyers fully expect to use that argument against anyone who tries to build a Playstation emulation product. Supposedly the DMCA will allow some exceptions for software compatibility, but I bet that'd be a hard case to make.
we have a country of criminals now.
Don't be silly. Well under 2% of US citizens have ever been convicted of a felony.
Why on earth would you ever write a server app in Java?
This is very popular because it's cheaper. Java programmers are more common and less expensive to hire than C++ coders or almost any other kind of software developer (Visual Basic a possible exception). Partly, this may be because Java is an easier language to learn- or partly because Sun successfully promoted Java as the next big thing.
Java, as a language and an execution environment, has a few benefits for creating server applications. Many custom corporate applications are "business logic", which is often not computationally expensive (it spends more time waiting for data to save/load than actually working on it), so that C++'s potential speed improvements don't help. It may be that "low-load apps" are more common than you think. What does help, though, is the ease-of-development Java brings to their programmer.
For tasks like that, Java has the advantages of being easier to code (especially without introducing segfaults from minor logic errors), more comprehensible when runtime errors occur, and binary-compatible between the big server machine and whatever kind of desktop workstation the programmer has. Also, the portability of Java bytecodes means that the corporation can more easily exchange their large servers for another vendor's model without breaking all their software. That "*never* migrate to another platform" becomes "*maybe*", and it gives the company the opportunity to shop around and pick the best vendor for the new boxes, without being locked into a single architecture.
Al of those things contribute to lower programming & maintenance costs for the company, in exchange for a slightly reduced runtime speed that they probably didn't need anyhow.
"A or otherwise B" means "A or any thing else that contributes to doing B". It does imply that the speaker believes A contributes to B, but if that is not the case, he has still explicitly forbidden A.
"You may not drive in excess of 100 mph, or otherwise endanger the lives of other motorists" Even if he's alone on the road and can handle 100mph perfectly safely, a driver has disobeyed this instruction if he exceeds the stated speed limit.
Yes, English is my first language. Many years ago I took an "SAT language" test, which was simple to pass with no wrong answers.
Besides, legalese is not English. Your rules don't all apply there. "Manufacture or otherwise traffic" means that the lawmakers have decided that "manufacture" is tantamount to "traffic", and just as illegal. Looking at drug statutes will show you that legislators are quite able to insert "with intent to distribute" if that's what they really mean. Minus such a condition, it means that manufacture for strictly personal use is still a violation.
If you joined the "Shared Source" program last year, the agreement said "GPL or similar viral license", meaning that Microsoft has decided the GPL is viral. This is naturally untrue by the definitions of "viral" used by biologists, computer programmers, or the general public. But, for purposes of abiding by that license agreement, signees must act as if those misused terms were correct.
The bottom line is that if one person writes a computer program to view even a trivially encrypted file without permission from the copyright holder, he has "manufactured a circumvention device" and is a criminal. If you don't believe me, fine. The law text says it clearly, but you could also ask any lawyer, or any DMCA pundit (either pro or anti), and they'll tell you the same.
"Product" implies that which is made to be sold to a market,
product
1. the result of multipling two numbers 2. something created by intellectual or physical effort
There is nothing in the definition of "product" relating to sale, marketing, or trafficing. If you think the original or modern English use of "product" implies intent to sell, you're incorrect. And if you think federal prosecutors would restrain themselves by that implication, you're doubly incorrect. They would quote your new sig and say "Any inferences you make are probably wrong"
And if it's said A, B, C, or otherwise D, that means that A, B, and C are forms of D and the D is there as a catch-all.
Right. So when the law says "A or otherwise B", it means that for purposes of the law, A is a kind of B, even if that definition flies in the face of conventional usage.
Sorry, try again. It was often copyright infringment, but it was legal too. Read the AC reply- it's correct. Here's some background: A paper summarizing a few of the court judgements finding that reverse engineering is a "fair use" which copyright holders have no authority to forbid. There was a more recent judgement too.
The court has ruled against decrypting copyrighted material in order to accomplish reverse engineering.
Yes they have, and that is bad.
The particular court ruling in this article isn't especially applicable (since the judge was simply deciding a particular case was outside his authority).
However, the general character of the DMCA, and the rulings that have followed it, is strongly against reverse engineering!
US citizens were allowed to reproduce copyrighted works when it's necessary or very helpful to use the work in the normally legal way. For example, you can copy software from a CD to your computer's internal memory. This is technically "duplication of a copyrighted work", and is in violation of copyright laws, but we've been given an exception in this area.
However, the DMCA is undoing that. Reverse engineering was also a legal activity, and you could violate copyright in pursuit of it. The Sony vs Connectix case shows this very clearly. Connectix was accused of breaking copyright when the loaded Playstation code into alternative hardware to study what it does. But because they weren't distributing it, or using the work more than once at a time, the case was thrown out, as their right to reverse-engineer was stronger than Sony's right to a strict application of copyright. It was a fair-use!
However, today, if Sony had placed a "circumvention prevention device" on their code, that reverse-engineering would be illegal.
Our right to reverse engineer has been greatly reduced, along with all fair-use rights, which can now be selectively removed by publishers.
There is a delicate balance at many points in the Constitution,
Many points? Aside from the number of Senators a state gets, what else is there? (Prehaps you mean the very existence of dual congressional houses?)
The political pressure for having each state represented the same is far far less than it was during the first century of this country's existence.
Of course, it was only needed to entice low-population states to join up. There no more need for that now. And, one of the specific national laws low-population states had feared was the abolition of slavery...
far bigger is how the states have decided to make their College votes all or nothing
Well, a problem like that isn't something one can hope the states to solve on their own. To voluntarily give up winner-takes-all electoral assignment can reduce a state's power in 2 ways. Symbolically, the presidential election becomes closer to a real national vote, instead of a "vote of state's votes". And more importantly, candidates would be rewarded less for adjusting their popularity a small amount in a state.
For example, it's barely possible for a Republican to win California, yet they always campaign there (and adjust platforms to attract those voters), because if they did increase just by 3 percentage points, the 54 electoral votes would be decisive. But if California switched to mixed assignment, then getting that same number of voters to switch would gain the Republican only 2 more electoral votes. He'd be better off spending his time, money, and promises on states where a few percentage points still makes a big difference.
Conversely, a few states, like Massachusetts and Mississippi, only ever vote for presidents of a certain party. They would find their national influence somewhat increased by allowing divided votes, as today candidates have no motivation to contest it. (The opposing party will usually hold a single rally, to exhibit confidence to voters in surrounding states, and then give it up for lost)
Hey, if you do wind up quiting (or otherwise no longer employed by them), please submit the names of the involved products (to AskSlashdot, if you can somehow formulate a question).
It sounds like an amusing situation- the question of "How can you detect reverse engineering, without performing reverse engineering yourself?" is a tricky one!
That was the assumption explicitly stated by DunbarTheInept when he presented this hypothetical situation. He claimed that any rationally greedy private company would wish to keep the new protocol secret. Evidence suggests he is right, as it took the government to make TCP/IP an open standard (even back when reverse engineering was more permitted).
The DMCA is just one of the legal tools that would help a company profit from behaving this way, instead of creating a "proper" open standard.
The DMCA doesn't come in to play.
Everything on this page is involved with the DMCA. It and related laws are the background of everything being discussed.
PS. A tip for happier Slashdot use: when someone responds a post in a way you feel totally misses the point you were raising, or takes you out of context, don't reply and try to show each of the side-notations from 3 levels up that demonstrate how you were misinterpreted. Just assume "That doesn't resemble my position- he must be talking to someone else", and let it slide (making a mental note on how to write more clearly in the future). If the respondent was truly wrong, then this fact will be obvious to the viewing audience, and he won't need your help to look like a fool. To repeatedly protest such things creates an impression of being a defensive nitpicker, and distracts from whatever point you had wanted to make.
You please go read it. "Trafficing" is not required to violate the law. 1201.2.A.
"No person shall manufacture... any technology that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure"
Building something alone in your basement is manufacture. The DMCA text states that manufacture is a form of trafficing, which is an obvious violation of the English language, but now it's the law.
(Just because a law abuses the English definition of a term doesn't protect the public. People have been convicted of "wiretapping" without ever tapping a wire)
Mr Patron, I'd like a prime rib, but since I don't know how good your food is, I'd rather not pay for it this time... By the way, I've heard that your salad dressing is excellent, but I'll need instructions so I can make it at home.. errr, make sure I will like it.
None of the examples of that form are valid. Nobody is requesting a recipe. They merely want to look at what they bought, and figure out what they think the recipe is, without having firearms pointed at them.
How do you think a market functions?
Customers share information about vendors, so that buyers can choose the best products. Its not based on each individual buyer performing his own experiments, but by sharing the work of doing the evaluation.
But, the combination of the DMCA and EULA enforcability will make dispersing evaluations of product effectiveness illegal and difficult.
Our popular vote is deliberately irrelevant for the presidential election; this is to prevent a few populous states from running off with the election.
A "few populous states"? That's the public. I'll paraphrase: "this is to prevent most of the people from having most of the power"
More specifically, the electoral college serves to make a vote in Montana count more than one in New York.
Even though 47 out of 50 states prefer B, A has a significant chance of winning.
If those 3 states are so much more populated than the others, then this guy deserves it.
Another problem with the Electoral College is that it breaks even worse if there are more than 2 serious contenders. It helps prevent 3rd parties from being viable (instead of just "spoilers").
If you like hypothetical examples, consider this: Candiate A has 40% of the vote in each state. B has 60% in states west of the Mississipi, and C has the rest. That means A has 57% of the popular vote, with B and C in the 40% range. Yet A gets 0% of the Electoral votes, and the race is between B & C.
Yes? So? And for anybody to use it, they'd have to know how to decrypt it. In fact precisely how to do that would be in the RFC. Hence, it wouldn't violate the DMCA.
There would be no RFC. For anyone to use it, they'd have to download a signed driver from the inventor, and examining this software to learn how it decrypts would be a DMCA crime.
What I wrote was only and narrowly tailored
You shouldn't really defend something in a single, narrow instance if, by it's nature, the subject has no reason to be restrained to the situation you find it positive. This can be called "donning blinders".
if the thing he figured out how to do wasn't designed specifically to prevent unauthorized copying.
Internet filtering software was not specifically designed to prevent unauthorized copying.
The DMCA does nothing to prevent you from doing anything you want with anything you own. It comes into play only if (a) what you did circumvented a copy protection scheme and (b) you publish your findings.
No. Step (a) is illegal by itself. The DMCA outlaws even the creation of tools that might be used to circumvent those things. No individual needs to publish the tools or results of circumvention to be arrestable.
Realistically, if you never publish anything, the chance of being caught is low. But you've still broken the law.
there are abuses and misinterpretations of the DMCA doesn't mean that the DMCA is bad.
If a law is written unclearly, so that it can be misinterpreted and cause harm, then it is a bad law.
However, I don't think the DMCA is being misinterpreted in these cases. I think that the interpretation we saw from this judge is just what was intended.
And, before somebody (mis)infers that I support the NRA, no, I don't.
Interesting. Without guessing if you are pro or anti DMCA, I will mention that the same arguments which support personal gun ownership also support the right to reverse engineer software. Both are about giving power to individual citizens, so they can resist efforts of large organizations to control their lives.
He didn't say "Coco Cola and competitors". He said "and counterfeiters".
There's a big difference. Competitors advertise their own products- counterfeiters violate trademarks to leech off of someone else's advertising. Counterfeiting is obviously illegal under longstanding laws, and nothing new like the DMCA is needed to prevent it.
Coca-Cola (and Pepsi) profit from selling image, not soda. Plenty of small-time sodas taste as good or better than Coke. They stay small time not for lack of a formula, but If I wanted to join the soda business, buying some recipes is not the barrier- creating a memorable marketing campaign is the real obstacle. The idea that Coke's formula has some amazing value is a myth promulgated by Coca-Cola as a clever part of their marketing.
A "trade secret" like the Coca-Cola formula or the Bess ban-list is not protectable by copyright, patent, or tradmark law. That is the very definition of "trade secret". So laws like DMCA, which is supposedly meant to protect copyrights, shouldn't apply at all.
they discovered that fact by empiral observation alone and didn't need to reverse engineer anything.
Semantically, that is reverse engineering.
Engineering is turning specifications into products. Reverse engineering is deriving a specification from the product- how this happens is irrelevant.
Engineering can be accomplished analytically or experimentally. Both are valid approaches, varying in time, cost, and accuracy. Reverse engineering, too, can happen either way.
However, depending on the nature of the product, one of those approaches might not work. In particular, if the vendor makes negative claims ("no legitimate websites are blocked"), then we all know that empircal proof of a negative is impossible. It can only be shown by analysis.
About that computerized car example: if Ford claimed "we have no secret backdoors that the police can use to override your steering", then you sure can't prove that by testing!
Slashdot Mirror
The recent Michigan law is primarily against the "concealment of the source or destination of any communication".
Changing your "hosts" file is strictly a local effect, which alters the URLs your computer downloads, and doesn't conceal anything from the ISP. So the "super-DMCA" laws don't apply.
However:
Nytimes.com uses their dual subscriber/public multiple URL system to control access to their copyrighted content. Circumventing that access control mechanism is illegal by the normal DMCA. You won't have to travel to Michigan to get arrested for this.
No, "MORE CASH" is right.
For one thing, an X-Box isn't all that expensive to build. It's not like you get a $600 PC for $150. Buying a PC with similar capabilities today is just around $250, and by mass-producing specially designed hardware, Microsoft can easily overcome that price difference. Yes, the work to design the boards and set up the factories meant it was very expensive in the beginning, but today, X-Boxes are built cheap enough that MS breaks even on a few games. Microsoft originally spent ~$360 per X-Box. Today it's half that.
If amateurs were allowed to make custom software, most people would still buy the professional stuff (which is faster and more impressive technically because it has the backing of Microsoft. Without support from the hardware developer, you can't make a quality game on sub-standard hardware). That would be especially true for the first 2-3 years of the product's life, when the amateur developers were just getting up to speed. By then, the manufacturer should have a better system in the pipeline to replace it.
And, I think that's "LOSER".
It only shows that the schemes won't work by merely technical means, and that they'll need the help of laws to make hardware media protection work.
Legal methods alone won't work, because people will ignore laws that are totally easy to break. And it's impossible to arrest/intimidate millions of people for a non-sexual, non-violent, drug-free, victimless crime.
Hardware methods alone won't work, because as soon as one smart guy deciphers the hardware, he'll spread his workaround to the entire world.
The combination of hardware and legal protections can work. If there are laws allowing for severe punishments to the handful of hackers who create the workarounds, and moderate punishment to people who distribute them, it'll be quiet possible to keep 99.99% of people unable to break their hardware "trust" protection. And then the "trusted" code side will have won.
Given that MS has a hard time keeping its HTTP server secure, I don't think buffer overflows will be too hard to find in typical razzle-dazzle media player programs
That assumption is shortsighted. Maybe it's true today, but it won't stay true. Microsoft currently has many buffer overflows in its software, for 2 reasons.
Because the game wasn't designed with the intent of circumventing protection.
The BIOS flasher software that these hackers are loading onto the savegame, though, is a circumvention device, and illegal as per DMCA.
the alwsn says: "i want to make some electronic equipment i own do something it was never intended to do without opening the case, changing anything, and i want it to work flawlessly every time."
ALL RIDICULOUS.
One of those things is not like the others- one of those things does not belong!
The 4 examples you give are examples of equipment that is impossible because it violates the laws of physics. The last example is a violation of the will of Microsoft- which is a much softer target to attack.
The X-Box is a stored-program computer. It loads programs and runs them. Since it can load software that wasn't conceived back when the hardware was built, it's what is called a "general purpose computer".
The manufacturer has attempted to cripple the device- to take away a capability it naturally had- in order to earn themselves some more cash. It was intended first to run programs, then as an afterthought, made to only run a tiny fraction of the many possible programs for marketing reasons.
It's not ridiculous at all to think that the code-signing restriction can be lifted from the XBox, without changing the hardware. Bill Gates could accomplish this in 30 seconds if he wished. US normal people might take longer, and it might be "illegal", but the probablities aren't so low as to be humorous.
(Unless someone imagines they'll brute-force the encryption, which is just funny)
Hello? True masters? It's called a Dyson Sphere. 5 little planets don't even compare to a ball the size of a star system.
Why, even the puppeteers knew that Ringworld outclassed them...
We can imagine that of course, but it implies that the spaceship designers are intentionally crippling their manuverablility by emulating the restraints of aerial flight. That's a heavy price to pay just to give the human pilots a feeling of intuitive control.
On a related note, though, one could claim that the preferred way for a human to detect an attacker behind him is by sound. So speakers could be placed inside the cockpit to create audio effects when gunfire or engine thrusters pass close by... thus explaining how they can hear explosions in space.
I think Sony's lawyers fully expect to use that argument against anyone who tries to build a Playstation emulation product. Supposedly the DMCA will allow some exceptions for software compatibility, but I bet that'd be a hard case to make.
we have a country of criminals now.
Don't be silly. Well under 2% of US citizens have ever been convicted of a felony.
Why on earth would you ever write a server app in Java?
This is very popular because it's cheaper. Java programmers are more common and less expensive to hire than C++ coders or almost any other kind of software developer (Visual Basic a possible exception). Partly, this may be because Java is an easier language to learn- or partly because Sun successfully promoted Java as the next big thing.
Java, as a language and an execution environment, has a few benefits for creating server applications. Many custom corporate applications are "business logic", which is often not computationally expensive (it spends more time waiting for data to save/load than actually working on it), so that C++'s potential speed improvements don't help. It may be that "low-load apps" are more common than you think. What does help, though, is the ease-of-development Java brings to their programmer.
For tasks like that, Java has the advantages of being easier to code (especially without introducing segfaults from minor logic errors), more comprehensible when runtime errors occur, and binary-compatible between the big server machine and whatever kind of desktop workstation the programmer has. Also, the portability of Java bytecodes means that the corporation can more easily exchange their large servers for another vendor's model without breaking all their software. That "*never* migrate to another platform" becomes "*maybe*", and it gives the company the opportunity to shop around and pick the best vendor for the new boxes, without being locked into a single architecture.
Al of those things contribute to lower programming & maintenance costs for the company, in exchange for a slightly reduced runtime speed that they probably didn't need anyhow.
"A or otherwise B" means "A or any thing else that contributes to doing B". It does imply that the speaker believes A contributes to B, but if that is not the case, he has still explicitly forbidden A.
"You may not drive in excess of 100 mph, or otherwise endanger the lives of other motorists" Even if he's alone on the road and can handle 100mph perfectly safely, a driver has disobeyed this instruction if he exceeds the stated speed limit.
Yes, English is my first language. Many years ago I took an "SAT language" test, which was simple to pass with no wrong answers.
Besides, legalese is not English. Your rules don't all apply there. "Manufacture or otherwise traffic" means that the lawmakers have decided that "manufacture" is tantamount to "traffic", and just as illegal. Looking at drug statutes will show you that legislators are quite able to insert "with intent to distribute" if that's what they really mean. Minus such a condition, it means that manufacture for strictly personal use is still a violation.
If you joined the "Shared Source" program last year, the agreement said "GPL or similar viral license", meaning that Microsoft has decided the GPL is viral. This is naturally untrue by the definitions of "viral" used by biologists, computer programmers, or the general public. But, for purposes of abiding by that license agreement, signees must act as if those misused terms were correct.
The bottom line is that if one person writes a computer program to view even a trivially encrypted file without permission from the copyright holder, he has "manufactured a circumvention device" and is a criminal. If you don't believe me, fine. The law text says it clearly, but you could also ask any lawyer, or any DMCA pundit (either pro or anti), and they'll tell you the same.
product
1. the result of multipling two numbers
2. something created by intellectual or physical effort
There is nothing in the definition of "product" relating to sale, marketing, or trafficing. If you think the original or modern English use of "product" implies intent to sell, you're incorrect. And if you think federal prosecutors would restrain themselves by that implication, you're doubly incorrect. They would quote your new sig and say "Any inferences you make are probably wrong"
And if it's said A, B, C, or otherwise D, that means that A, B, and C are forms of D and the D is there as a catch-all.
Right. So when the law says "A or otherwise B", it means that for purposes of the law, A is a kind of B, even if that definition flies in the face of conventional usage.
Sorry, try again. It was often copyright infringment, but it was legal too. Read the AC reply- it's correct. Here's some background:
A paper summarizing a few of the court judgements finding that reverse engineering is a "fair use" which copyright holders have no authority to forbid. There was a more recent judgement too.
That's my interpretation. I'm entitled to have it. You're entitled to have yours.
Fine, you can keep your wrong interpretation then. Ask any lawyer however- if "A or B" is illegal, it absolutely means that A by itself is illegal!
The court has ruled against decrypting copyrighted material in order to accomplish reverse engineering.
Yes they have, and that is bad.
The particular court ruling in this article isn't especially applicable (since the judge was simply deciding a particular case was outside his authority).
However, the general character of the DMCA, and the rulings that have followed it, is strongly against reverse engineering!
US citizens were allowed to reproduce copyrighted works when it's necessary or very helpful to use the work in the normally legal way. For example, you can copy software from a CD to your computer's internal memory. This is technically "duplication of a copyrighted work", and is in violation of copyright laws, but we've been given an exception in this area.
However, the DMCA is undoing that. Reverse engineering was also a legal activity, and you could violate copyright in pursuit of it. The Sony vs Connectix case shows this very clearly. Connectix was accused of breaking copyright when the loaded Playstation code into alternative hardware to study what it does. But because they weren't distributing it, or using the work more than once at a time, the case was thrown out, as their right to reverse-engineer was stronger than Sony's right to a strict application of copyright. It was a fair-use!
However, today, if Sony had placed a "circumvention prevention device" on their code, that reverse-engineering would be illegal.
Our right to reverse engineer has been greatly reduced, along with all fair-use rights, which can now be selectively removed by publishers.
There is a delicate balance at many points in the Constitution,
Many points? Aside from the number of Senators a state gets, what else is there? (Prehaps you mean the very existence of dual congressional houses?)
The political pressure for having each state represented the same is far far less than it was during the first century of this country's existence.
Of course, it was only needed to entice low-population states to join up. There no more need for that now. And, one of the specific national laws low-population states had feared was the abolition of slavery...
far bigger is how the states have decided to make their College votes all or nothing
Well, a problem like that isn't something one can hope the states to solve on their own. To voluntarily give up winner-takes-all electoral assignment can reduce a state's power in 2 ways. Symbolically, the presidential election becomes closer to a real national vote, instead of a "vote of state's votes". And more importantly, candidates would be rewarded less for adjusting their popularity a small amount in a state.
For example, it's barely possible for a Republican to win California, yet they always campaign there (and adjust platforms to attract those voters), because if they did increase just by 3 percentage points, the 54 electoral votes would be decisive. But if California switched to mixed assignment, then getting that same number of voters to switch would gain the Republican only 2 more electoral votes. He'd be better off spending his time, money, and promises on states where a few percentage points still makes a big difference.
Conversely, a few states, like Massachusetts and Mississippi, only ever vote for presidents of a certain party. They would find their national influence somewhat increased by allowing divided votes, as today candidates have no motivation to contest it. (The opposing party will usually hold a single rally, to exhibit confidence to voters in surrounding states, and then give it up for lost)
Hey, if you do wind up quiting (or otherwise no longer employed by them), please submit the names of the involved products (to AskSlashdot, if you can somehow formulate a question).
It sounds like an amusing situation- the question of "How can you detect reverse engineering, without performing reverse engineering yourself?" is a tricky one!
That was the assumption explicitly stated by DunbarTheInept when he presented this hypothetical situation. He claimed that any rationally greedy private company would wish to keep the new protocol secret. Evidence suggests he is right, as it took the government to make TCP/IP an open standard (even back when reverse engineering was more permitted).
The DMCA is just one of the legal tools that would help a company profit from behaving this way, instead of creating a "proper" open standard.
The DMCA doesn't come in to play.
Everything on this page is involved with the DMCA. It and related laws are the background of everything being discussed.
PS. A tip for happier Slashdot use: when someone responds a post in a way you feel totally misses the point you were raising, or takes you out of context, don't reply and try to show each of the side-notations from 3 levels up that demonstrate how you were misinterpreted. Just assume "That doesn't resemble my position- he must be talking to someone else", and let it slide (making a mental note on how to write more clearly in the future).
If the respondent was truly wrong, then this fact will be obvious to the viewing audience, and he won't need your help to look like a fool.
To repeatedly protest such things creates an impression of being a defensive nitpicker, and distracts from whatever point you had wanted to make.
You please go read it. "Trafficing" is not required to violate the law. 1201.2.A.
... any technology that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure"
"No person shall manufacture
Building something alone in your basement is manufacture. The DMCA text states that manufacture is a form of trafficing, which is an obvious violation of the English language, but now it's the law.
(Just because a law abuses the English definition of a term doesn't protect the public. People have been convicted of "wiretapping" without ever tapping a wire)
Mr Patron, I'd like a prime rib, but since I don't know how good your food is, I'd rather not pay for it this time... By the way, I've heard that your salad dressing is excellent, but I'll need instructions so I can make it at home.. errr, make sure I will like it.
None of the examples of that form are valid. Nobody is requesting a recipe. They merely want to look at what they bought, and figure out what they think the recipe is, without having firearms pointed at them.
How do you think a market functions?
Customers share information about vendors, so that buyers can choose the best products. Its not based on each individual buyer performing his own experiments, but by sharing the work of doing the evaluation.
But, the combination of the DMCA and EULA enforcability will make dispersing evaluations of product effectiveness illegal and difficult.
Our popular vote is deliberately irrelevant for the presidential election; this is to prevent a few populous states from running off with the election.
A "few populous states"? That's the public.
I'll paraphrase: "this is to prevent most of the people from having most of the power"
More specifically, the electoral college serves to make a vote in Montana count more than one in New York.
Even though 47 out of 50 states prefer B, A has a significant chance of winning.
If those 3 states are so much more populated than the others, then this guy deserves it.
Another problem with the Electoral College is that it breaks even worse if there are more than 2 serious contenders. It helps prevent 3rd parties from being viable (instead of just "spoilers").
If you like hypothetical examples, consider this:
Candiate A has 40% of the vote in each state. B has 60% in states west of the Mississipi, and C has the rest. That means A has 57% of the popular vote, with B and C in the 40% range. Yet A gets 0% of the Electoral votes, and the race is between B & C.
Yes? So? And for anybody to use it, they'd have to know how to decrypt it. In fact precisely how to do that would be in the RFC. Hence, it wouldn't violate the DMCA.
There would be no RFC. For anyone to use it, they'd have to download a signed driver from the inventor, and examining this software to learn how it decrypts would be a DMCA crime.
What I wrote was only and narrowly tailored
You shouldn't really defend something in a single, narrow instance if, by it's nature, the subject has no reason to be restrained to the situation you find it positive. This can be called "donning blinders".
if the thing he figured out how to do wasn't designed specifically to prevent unauthorized copying.
Internet filtering software was not specifically designed to prevent unauthorized copying.
The DMCA does nothing to prevent you from doing anything you want with anything you own. It comes into play only if (a) what you did circumvented a copy protection scheme and (b) you publish your findings.
No. Step (a) is illegal by itself. The DMCA outlaws even the creation of tools that might be used to circumvent those things. No individual needs to publish the tools or results of circumvention to be arrestable.
Realistically, if you never publish anything, the chance of being caught is low. But you've still broken the law.
there are abuses and misinterpretations of the DMCA doesn't mean that the DMCA is bad.
If a law is written unclearly, so that it can be misinterpreted and cause harm, then it is a bad law.
However, I don't think the DMCA is being misinterpreted in these cases. I think that the interpretation we saw from this judge is just what was intended.
And, before somebody (mis)infers that I support the NRA, no, I don't.
Interesting. Without guessing if you are pro or anti DMCA, I will mention that the same arguments which support personal gun ownership also support the right to reverse engineer software. Both are about giving power to individual citizens, so they can resist efforts of large organizations to control their lives.
He didn't say "Coco Cola and competitors". He said "and counterfeiters".
There's a big difference. Competitors advertise their own products- counterfeiters violate trademarks to leech off of someone else's advertising. Counterfeiting is obviously illegal under longstanding laws, and nothing new like the DMCA is needed to prevent it.
Coca-Cola (and Pepsi) profit from selling image, not soda. Plenty of small-time sodas taste as good or better than Coke. They stay small time not for lack of a formula, but If I wanted to join the soda business, buying some recipes is not the barrier- creating a memorable marketing campaign is the real obstacle. The idea that Coke's formula has some amazing value is a myth promulgated by Coca-Cola as a clever part of their marketing.
A "trade secret" like the Coca-Cola formula or the Bess ban-list is not protectable by copyright, patent, or tradmark law. That is the very definition of "trade secret". So laws like DMCA, which is supposedly meant to protect copyrights, shouldn't apply at all.
they discovered that fact by empiral observation alone and didn't need to reverse engineer anything.
Semantically, that is reverse engineering.
Engineering is turning specifications into products. Reverse engineering is deriving a specification from the product- how this happens is irrelevant.
Engineering can be accomplished analytically or experimentally. Both are valid approaches, varying in time, cost, and accuracy. Reverse engineering, too, can happen either way.
However, depending on the nature of the product, one of those approaches might not work. In particular, if the vendor makes negative claims ("no legitimate websites are blocked"), then we all know that empircal proof of a negative is impossible. It can only be shown by analysis.
About that computerized car example: if Ford claimed "we have no secret backdoors that the police can use to override your steering", then you sure can't prove that by testing!
Understanding software and protocols can and does advance science.
A list of "bad" websites is neither software nor a protocol.