[sdiy] TCPA / Palladium -- more trouble for DIYers & hardware hackers

[Machinerygod]

If you want to stay strictly on-topic, delete now.

Okay...I just read Batz's rant, which like everything else Batz posts
here is an entertaining read and absolutely dead-on-target.

But it's late so, I'm going not going to respond to it bit by bit in
the interest of brevity (and I'll probably fail in this goal
anyhow..ok, not probably..definitely)

Just before I go into this at length, a quick note on an event coming
up concerning fair use. The H2K2 hacker convention will be occurring
july 12th, 13th, and 14th at the hotel pennsylvania in new york city.
full info on panels and presentations can be found at www.H2K2.net I
highly recommend this convention to anybody interested in DRM,
content-control, privacy, or any similar matters who are anywhere near
NYC. These issues will be extremely hot topics at the convention.
There will likely be electronic acts performing as well.
I went 2 years ago, and you won't regret going, believe me. I'm
coming all the way from Boston to attend.

There will be a panel hosted by one of the members of Negativland
concerning fair use aspects they've had to deal with, along with the
topic in general. Other panels will deal with similar issues, see the
site for info.

I follow the
DRM/Corporate-America-bending-consumers-over-and-fvcking-them-you-know-where/anti-competitive stuff rather closely.

Some would say that this whole deal is off-topic. No offense to
anybody intended, but frankly, I don't give a fuck. When my rights to
fair use and ease of use are at stake, and yours too, NOTHING is OT.
Use your rights or LOSE THEM..Once they're gone, they're NOT going to
give them back. If you don't believe it, look at the years of progress
in various aspects of personal freedom that are being wiped away in the
stroke of a pen or a voice vote to avoid accountabilty. The DMCA was
passed in a late night session with no written vote record. It's
taken 4 years of court fights to even start to make progress on
throwing it out. IS THIS DEMOCRACY IN ACTION?? (and please no cracks
about it being a republic, that's not the point here)

I am in my early 20's, rather young compared to a lot of folks around here... and I am
becoming painfully aware that undoing the damage that is being
done by self-serving and usually clueless politicians and big-business
may take much of my lifetime. And I am absolutely fucking enraged at
the thought of that scenario, because it means that I will have to
spend much of my life putting up with the shit these people and
companies are putting into effect, paid for by my tax dollars in many
instances. Some of it is being done in the name of terrorism, that
lovely "T" word that everyone loves so much these days and they're
trying to find a way to construe anything they can as. Some of it is
being done in the name of DRM. I guess "end-to-end content control"
or "screwing you and taking even more of your money with no added
value delivered" just don't have that same ring to them.


It all comes down to greed. The entertainment industry wants to make a
buck, which also rhymes with what they don't give when it comes to
your rights of fair use of material. The software industry behemoths seem to be
the same way. It's being done with digital everything: TV, movies,
music, you name it. If they can encrypt it and control your use of it
from one end of the distribution chain to the other while they try to
find the maximum way to jack their profits doing so, they're doing it.

There is a basic economic issue here too: growth. The entertainment
folks want to keep their profits going up and up at a steady rate, or
even better if possible. The easiest way for them do that is of
course to jack up whatever they're charging you, and then sell your
personal data on top of it. In their ideal scenario, your PC restricts
you from doing anything they don't want you to with material, forces
you to buy their slop, and keeps a steady stream of customer data
going back to them for their sale to the highest bidder.

DRM used to be just a better-mousetrap game played between the
industry and consumers who wanted to trade content with others or
expose them to it. Somebody builds a copy-protection scheme to keep
out the idiots, and pretty soon a more-advanced idiot comes along.
Where this changes though is the addition of criminal prosecution to
the tools of keeping users in check. There's always been criminal
liability for pirates. Mass piracy is illegal and always has been. Now
things have changed, and you can be put in jail for simply
publishing a paper or software on circumventing something. Dimitri
Skylarov was put in jail for 2 months by the FBI for writing an app to
convert E-books to PDF files to make them more portable, a clear
matter of fair use. Somebody finds a way around TCPA when it becomes
widespread, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happens.
They'll put people in jail for anything these days..Even being arab.
One activist here in boston who had fliers for a permitted
demonstration was taken into custody without charges and interrogated
in regards to "terrorism". He was also tortured, 4 of his teeth were
pulled with a pair of pliers. I am not making this up.... nor does it have
any direct bearing on the DRM discussion, but just to give people an
idea of the political climate we're living in here, at least in the
US. But when the government is fighting a borderless war
against an enemy they can't find, with no territory at stake, and
suspending civil liberties like crazy in the process, the last thing
on their mind is getting it right when it comes to consumer rights.
GWB will spend all his time on news denouncing big-business for
accounting scandals, but don't think he believes it, he's in their
pockets. If he wanted to do something about big business and their
evil ways, he could start by slitting his own wrists.(remember
dubya, slash vertically not horizontally..) He doesn't care about any
of this fair use stuff, and neither does anybody else in the executive
branch. Most of the legislative branch also either doesn't understand
the issues, or is in the pockets of the lobbies and doesn't care.

It's often easy to find a workaround, but there's no guarantee that's
going to save the day in this case. If all the motherboard
manufacturers start making boards with this technology embedded, what
can you do? You can't build a DIY motherboard...a small company can't
easily design one either to fill a niche market of people who are
informed enough to want a non-crippled motherboard, mobo's are very
complex systems requiring major resources to design. And the big guys
will of course go with whatever the other big guys (MPAA and
RIAA and friends) want them to do, partly for lack of wishing for
lawsuits once something like the CBDTPA in passed.

Sure, I'm certain somebody will figure out how to disable the TCPA
using software early on if possible, but then we get back to the whole
design a circumvention device=go to jail thing. And who knows how much
longer putting servers outside the US is going to be effective for
getting around the US's DRM laws? US influence is very strong all over
the world, and after all Bush just declared that we'll essentially
preemptively attack anybody we want to for any reason we like. even a
couple years ago, it was sufficiently great to get the Norwegian
police to raid the home of the guy who wrote DeCSS (Jon Johansen), even though he was
WAY the #%#^ out of US jurisdiction. If America is going to be the
bully and enforcer of the world, who is going to want to risk
sanctions, blockades, and possible branding as a terrorist nation by
defying US interests? I know this seems a little overblown for
something as mundane as circumvention devices (it's not quite on par
with running an al-qaida network in your country), but who is going to
risk the wrath of a country that's already steamrolling others
interests just for the sake of fair use. Most other leaders don't care
any more about fair use rights than the ones here, I suspect.

All these dirty little laws and proposals are really part of a much larger and more
grim picture. Multinational corporations are in control, with only the almighty
dollar leading them. The legislative decision-makers are a wholly
owned subsidiary for the most part. Consumers are the sheep, and it works because 99%
of them are unfortunately stupid or uninformed about what's
going on. Executives must think they're even stupider than I do (which
I didn't know was possible), seeing as the guy from Turner publicly
equated skipping commercials to stealing.

And as sad as it is, people like those on this list are
unfortunately very much in the informed minority.

Many of the things going on may not seem to have anything to
do with each other, but remember, all things are connected.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

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1010011010==_MACHINERYGOD_!=111101001101001
"He who wonders discovers that this in itself is a wonder."  -M. C. Escher
"Dave, put down those windows disks, Dave, Dave ...." - HAL

"We're the only church that admits we're in it for the hate -- pure hate,"
"What will be coming out of my mouth will be wild and crazy enough," 
-Rev. Ivan Stang, Church of the Subgenius

"My brand of Satanism is the ultimate conscious alternative to herd
mentality and institutionalized thought. It is a studied, contrived
set of principles and exercises designed to prevent and liberate from
the contagion of mindlessness which destroys innovation."
-Anton LaVey
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