[sdiy] WTO + WIPO = DMCA (fwd)

[CHoaglin at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/12/02 4:48:34 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
atom at suspicious.org writes:


> 
> this has to do with music (and video, and software...) and copyright, so
> it's not too far off-topic....
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> 
> http://www.petitiononline.com/nixdmca/
> 
> http://www.anti-dmca.org/
> 
> the real aim of the DMCA is to control what, where and how people can
> enjoy content (music, video, software, etc). among other things, this
> could soon lead to a CD player that only plays "authorized" CDs.
> 
> so, if the 'hopeless dregs of humanity' are not "authorized" to be played,
> you can't listen to their new CD.
> 
> i dunno how many linux users are on this list, but the sequal to the DMCA
> (SSSCA) could outlaw open-source OSes.
> 
> 
> 

Oh boy....I've been following this nonsense for a few years now. I was in 
vegas at Defcon when Dimitri Skylarov presented his paper on cracking Adobe's 
e-book "encryption", right before he was arrested, and almost stayed an extra 
day in NYC after the H2K convention to go to the DeCSS trial except I was too 
tired. I've stopped by a couple anti-DMCA protests here in boston, as well.

Here's a summary, just off the top of my head:

The idea of the DMCA is really simple: Big business and the entertainment 
industry want to have complete control over all content from end to end of 
the chain of distribution, and bend the consumer over for whatever money they 
can at every step along the way. They also want to be able to use shoddy 
protection schemes to control their content and be protected from people 
figuring out just how much those protection schemes really suck. They've 
gotten injuctions, thrown one person in jail for a couple months, and gone so 
far as to use the threat of criminal prosecution to bully people in academia 
conducting security research into not publishing their findings. They've 
tried building end-to-end control into content before (remember the DIVX 
service sold through circuit city a couple years ago where you had to buy a 
disc and then pay to rent each viewing, and have the player dial up to a 
central server to authorize each viewing and charge it to the subscriber's 
account) The market, of course, said "like hell we will" and DIVX went 
bankrupt in no time. So now they're trying to work toward the point where 
consumers won't have any choice about how to view their content and they're 
prohibited by law from doing anything about it.

There are already schemes being implemented along the lines of "authorized" 
CD's. There's the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), of which I don't 
recall all the details, but it involves hardware refusing to make copies of a 
digital copy if I recall correctly, among other things. There's also 
MediaCloq, a system applied to CD's to make audio-ripping programs fail when 
trying to rip music from CD to wav for encoding into MP3 format. This is 
nothing more than annoying (it makes it difficult to get a CD-ROM drive to 
play the audio CD's properly) and has already been cracked, all this really 
does is label the audio tracks on the CD as data, I think. A sufficiently 
intelligent ripping program can get around this when configured with the 
proper options. Any system that verifies that CD's are "authorized" to be 
played is probably vulnerable on either of two fronts: the authorization 
process, and at the hardware level, device by device, depending on how it's 
designed. If it can be done, it can almost certainly be undone. The record 
industry's been trying to pull strings to mess with peer-to-peer networks as 
well, searching for songs, grabbing the IP address of the person sharing 
them, then calling their ISP to try to get their account shut off, and 
threatening legal action if they don't. The industry uses legal threats like 
a club to keep people in line, basically under the premise that they can 
bankrupt any small outfit they like by furiously filing lawsuits until the 
legal bills from defending them overwhelm them

Then there's WIPO...World Intellectual Property Organization...WIPO is just 
fvcked up... Supposedly protecting intellectual property interests in names 
and trademarks on the web, primarily in domain names. A valid thing to do, 
but a complete lack of accountability to anybody and very little recourse 
against their decisions, since they're binding and they can instruct 
ICANN-accredited domain registrars to hand over and transfer domain names. 
They don't really answer to any country either, as far as I know, so you 
can't really sue them to appeal things...and they do some pretty dumb stuff, 
one case comes to mind of a site with the name "FORD" in it, possibly even 
FORD.COM. It was owned by a guy by the last name of Ford, it was his personal 
website, I believe. Ford Motors filed a complaint alleging trademark 
infringement and got the domain turned over to them by WIPO. There was 
another case involving FEARFACTORY.NET, an unofficial fan site for Fear 
Factory. Roadrunner Records filed a complaint and got that taken away, even 
though it was clearly an unofficial site and they already owned 
FEARFACTORY.COM, the official Fear Factory site.

I haven't read a whole lot about the SSSCA, but I might as well state the 
obvious: Outlaw open source, and well....nobody will give a damn. The very 
idea that source code isn't being considered as obviously being speech under 
the 1st amendment is alarming though.
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