response 85 of 219:

Feb 27 17:44 UTC 2002

(I speak as someone who does not buy CDs except directly from the artists 
-- with very rare exception -- and who actually might buy them if their 
pricing was reasonable.)

response 87 of 219:

Feb 27 19:05 UTC 2002

A number of sources report that Senator Hollings opens hearing on the 
SSSCA proposal, which would criminalize the further production of 
every computer ever made to date, on Thursday.  The Valenti piece in the 
Washington Post (resp:81) is apparently a warmup pitch.

response 89 of 219:

Feb 27 19:56 UTC 2002

        The proposal isn't viable.  There's just no way to make it work with
something truly programmable, and even if it becomes a severe felony to
manufacture software to bypass copy protection, it won't affect Europe and
Asia's manufacture.

response 91 of 219:

Mar 1 18:16 UTC 2002

News reports are flying everywhere about Sen. Hollings' hearings 
on the SSSCA proposal.  Essentially it was arranged to be a lynching of 
the Intel executive, who was the only tech industry representative 
there; contrary to what was reported to be the usual protocol, the 
witnesses from the copyright industry were allowed plenty of scope to 
attack the witness from Intel.  Democratic senators are lined up 
solidly with the copyright industry.  
 
Slashdot's story has links which cover most of the ground.
     http://slashdot.org/articles/02/03/01/1423248.shtml?tid=103
 
The CBS Marketwatch coverage stressed Sen. Hollings' insistance 
that the proposal to disable copying in all PCs *will* be implemented.

http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid=%7BCC92A3EB%2DB59F%2D41F6%2D
840C%2D4D224E765A2E%7D&siteid=mktw

A discouraging mailing list item written by Mike Godwin, who was 
at the hearing:
     http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200202/msg00273.html

> I was in the hearing room, and I thought Vadasz's testimony made
> important points. But the senators were not terribly receptive to his
> arguments, and in fact came close to (effectively) ordering the IT
> industry simply to comply with Hollywood's demands (or else they'd be
> forced to by legislation). It was clear to me and to other
> technically knowledgeable people in the room that neither the
> senators nor most of the copyright-company witnesses grasped the
> scope of what Disney's Eisner and others were asking for.

> The IT community has a formidable task ahead of it when it comes to
> educating policymakers about the problems and costs of proposals like
> the one Senator Hollings floated prior to this hearing. Because a
> central goal of Hollywood's lobbying effort this time is to prevent
> unencrypted and unwatermarked content from being circulated on the
> Net, and the only kinds of measures that could do this require
> top-to-bottom rearchitecting of every aspect of the digital world.
> This rearchitecting would, among other things, require first the
> labelling of all coprighted content and secondly a redesign of all
> digital tools (from PCs to OSs to routers to everything else) to look
> for the labels and permit or deny copying accordingly. But few
> speakers at the hearing seemed to be aware of this.

response 93 of 219:

Mar 1 20:54 UTC 2002

Well, folks, it sounds like it's time to put your money where your mouths are.
Here's Hollings number: 202-224-6121. I just spent about 15 minutes talking
to his staff and the staff of the committee. I made it clear how I felt,
including not trying to hide the anger in my voice. And I promised to
contribute to his Republican opponent's campaign if he doesn't step back and
reevaluate the deep flaws in his approach. I also told them my prefered
solution would be a tax on all digital storage media similar to the blank tape
tax. If you have your own alternatives, it would be far better to mention them
to his staff than here.

response 95 of 219:

Mar 2 00:22 UTC 2002

Odd things happening over in Morpheus/Kazaa land...  the following is 
pieced together from stories from Cnet, Slashdot, Infoanarchy, and 
probably a few other places, plus the musiccity.com and kazaa.com 
sites.
 
To start things off, I need to lay out a diagram:

        Morpheus/MusicCity                   KaZaa
               |                               |
               ----------Fast Track Network-----

Morpheus and Kazaa are the user clients, and they interoperate
using the FastTrack network to share files.   Kazaa and FastTrack
had common ownership.

Kazaa (which was recently sold to new owners, possibly in Australia,
while under orders from a court in the Netherlands to shut down)
took its users through a software upgrade a few weeks ago.  
Early this week, it appears that the KaZaa/FastTrack group 
decided to wipe out Morpheus and grab its user base.
All of a sudden all Morpheus users received a message that they 
could not connect to the network any more.  

   (This will be most interesting to the court currently hearing
    the suit by the RIAA against MusicCity, the company supplying
    the Morpheus software, because in their filings, and in the 
    argument the EFF just filed, it was asserted that the network
    design was such that it could not be shut down.  
    Yet that has now plainly been done.   It seems likely that 
    the Morpheus group had no idea this could be done to them; 
    they were just licensees of the Fast Track protocol.)

Reportedly MusicCity is going to abandon FastTrack (probably they 
have no choice) and rush out a Gnutella-based client.  
Meanwhile, Kazaa.com has a big welcome mat rolled out for former
Morpheus/MusicCity users.  Infoanarchy.org reports that the new
version of KaZaa is loaded with spyware.

Hopefully I haven't mangled things too badly.  It took several days 
for a coherent picture to emerge.  There is still no news on the 
reaction of the Dutch court to KaZaa having fled its jurisdiction.

response 97 of 219:

Mar 4 20:23 UTC 2002

http://www.theregus.com/content/54/24195.html

Senator brutalizes Intel rep for resisting CPRM
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 03/01/2002 at 09:45 EST


Entertainment industry lapdog Senator Fritz Hollings (Democrat, South 
Carolina) lashed out at Intel executive VP Leslie Vadasz who warned 
that the copy-protected PCs Hollings is obediantly promoting on behalf 
of his MPAA and RIAA handlers would stifle growth in the marketplace. 

"We do not need to neuter the personal computer to be nothing more than 
a videocassette recorder," Vadasz said in testimony before the Senate 
Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation Thursday. 

An obedient Hollings tore into the witness, calling his 
testimony "nonsense". 

"Now where do you get all this nonsense about how we're going to have 
irreparable damage?" Hollings demanded. "We don't want to legislate. We 
want to give you time to develop technology." 

The "we" he mentions, it's quite obvious, refers to the entertainment 
industry flacks and lobbyists who wrote Hollings' pet bill, the 
Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), which would 
require hard drives to fail to load 'insecure' applications, and 
perhaps even operating systems at some point in future. Tinkering with 
one's own personal property to defeat this Orwellian innovation would 
be criminally punishable. 

This is of course the entertainment industry's dream, as it seeks to 
hobble all equipment so that it can determine when, where and how its 
content can be enjoyed by consumers. Copying any content from one 
medium to another could be blocked on the pretext of piracy prevention, 
so it's entirely possible that one would have to purchase two CDs with 
the same content -- one for the computer and one for the stereo, say. 
It's this sort of extortion the industry has relentlessly lobbied 
Congress to enshrine in law. 

Defeating piracy is the pretext; but obliterating the consumer's right 
to fair use is the true goal. But because Congress can't quite bring 
itself to eliminate fair use directly and up-front, a series of laws 
like the DMCA and SSSCA have been devised to eliminate it practically, 
or 'incidentally'. 

Naturally, the hardware industry is going to resist any law which 
forces it to break its products. It understands that consumers will be 
disappointed by equipment which fails to let them enjoy content which 
they've purchased. They see a slump in sales in the SSSCA. And they're 
probably right. 

The hearing was a typical Congressional dog-and-pony show designed to 
stroke Hollywood fat cats like Michael Eisner and Jack Valenti pursuing 
the Holy Grail of pay-per-use technology. No critics were invited to 
speak, and no harsh criticism was expected. 

So when Intel's Vadasz showed the spine to blast the entertainment 
industry's pet scheme, he had to be beaten down, and Hollings was of 
course eager to please his masters. 

Eisner and Valenti also testified, exhibiting their profound ignorance 
of technology and their sneering contempt for the rights of consumers, 
under Hollings' admiring gaze. Hollings, apparently, is an 'honest 
politician' according to Brendan Behan's formula: when he's bought, he 
stays bought. 

Hollings has also adopted the industry's basic stance, that copying is 
primarily about piracy and only rarely about honest fair use, at one 
point calling the Internet "a haven for thievery." But the best 
expression of this comes from Recording Industry Ass. of America 
President Hillary Rosen, who wrote yesterday that, "surely, no one can 
expect copyright owners to ignore what is happening in the marketplace 
and fail to protect their creative works because some people engage in 
copying just for their personal use." 

The 'some people' says it all. Most people are criminals, and only a 
tiny minority are honest and decent, Rosen assumes. This is also the 
official perspective of Hollywood -- of Eisner, and Valenti, and 
Hollings. It is a perspective natural to a certain class of person. 
Consider that we all imagine others to be more or less like ourselves. 
Decent people expect others to be decent, just like themselves. 
Criminals expect others to be criminals, just like themselves. When 
Eisner and Rosen and Valenti and Hollings see a world populated by 
cheats and frauds and freeloading scum, what does that say about them?

response 99 of 219:

Mar 5 18:46 UTC 2002

Excerpt from http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50797,00.html

SAN JOSE -- The Russian company that created software to circumvent 
Adobe's e-book format argued on Monday that its conduct -- which caused 
the arrest and detainment of programmer Dmitri Sklyarov in a high-
profile case last summer -- was not illegal. 

Elcomsoft, the Moscow-based software firm, claimed that because it 
offered the encryption-breaking software on the Internet, the company 
was not subject to U.S. copyright law. 

Joseph Burton, Elcomsoft's attorney, told U.S. District Judge Ronald 
Whyte that Elcomsoft's actions "occurred in Russia or on the Internet, 
and we take the position that the Internet is a place" outside of U.S. 
jurisdiction. 

Burton said the company was not specifically "targeting" the software 
to Americans, but that the software was instead available to anyone on 
the Internet, regardless of residence. 

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Frewing dismissed those claims, 
arguing that the Internet is a "physical presence" made up of many 
computers in America, and that "the U.S. has every right to stop 
contraband" on those machines. 

He added that Elcomsoft maintained a Web server in Chicago, that it 
hired a U.S. billing service, that it made no effort to prevent 
Americans from accessing its site, and that it sent e-mail messages to 
customers it knew were Americans. 

After the 40 minutes of arguments, Judge Whyte issued no immediate 
decision, and both sides said that they could not predict when a 
decision would come. 

---

Sounds like a pretty weak argument to me, but of course in legal 
defenses a lot of times you just throw things at the wall and see what 
sticks.

response 101 of 219:

Mar 6 03:55 UTC 2002

the ebook encryption was ROT13, right?  thats some funny shit.
you can run !rot13 on grex and break ebook encryption.

response 103 of 219:

Mar 6 13:50 UTC 2002

I don't think it was actually ROT13, but it was apparently nearly as 
simple.  I haven't seen it actually explained (presumably that'd be 
illegal) but from some of the comments I've seen I suspect it may have 
been just a substitution cipher.  Hey, if the law says no one can try 
to break your code, why bother making it strong?

response 105 of 219:

Mar 11 15:45 UTC 2002

Newsweek offers an entertaining rant on the overall state of the 
music industry:  "Looking Grim at the Grammys"
 
http://www.msnbc.com/news/718662.asp?cp1=1

The artistic state of popular music is described as "an esthetic 
national emergency."  :)
 
We haven't really touched on the Grammy speech by Michael Greene, 
chairman of the NARAS, the group which gives out the Grammy awards.

response 107 of 219:

Mar 12 07:00 UTC 2002

Michael Greene, the chairman of the National Association of 
Recording Arts & Sciences, used his Grammy Awards 
speech to launch an attack on the 
downloading of music, referring to "this World Wide Web of 
theft and indifference."   He urged people to "support our artistic
community by only downloading your music from legal web sites.
That will ensure that our artists reach even higher and, deservedly,
get paid for their inspired work."

(Of course the legal music download systems have met with near-total
consumer rejection and unanimously hostile reviews, and they don't 
pay the artists significantly more than KaZaa...)

The text of his speech is at:  http://grammy.aol.com/features/speech.html

Most reaction to the speech was deeply negative.  To paraphrase 
one analyst, the industry is in a pretty bad position when it believes
it has to lecture its customers.  One overview piece came from 
The Washington Post "Newsbytes" imprint:

http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/174868.html
"Music Fans Hear Grammys Night Anti-Piracy Screed"
 
Or, as the title of Steven Levy's essay ran:  "The Customer Is Always Wrong."

response 109 of 219:

Mar 12 14:52 UTC 2002

#107> The industry wasn't lecturing its customers. It was lecturing its
shoplifters.