[Again, a few SSSCA/CBDTPA threats catenated. See also: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=cbdtpa and http://www.politechbot.com/docs/cbdtpa/ --Declan]
--- From: Glenn Reynolds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: FYI To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 09:10:21 -0500 You may find my column at TechCentralStation - on Democrats and copy protection -- interesting: http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051-032702A --- Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 18:22:35 -0800 From: Andrew Nuttall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Great Article off Slashdot To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hey Declan, I'm sure you've already seen this article (http://www.farces.com/stories/storyReader$414), but its a great overview of the semi-recent entertainment & technology industry battle over intellectual and copy rights. (Found off Slashdot, http://slashdot.org/articles/02/03/28/1915212.shtml?tid=166) Cheers, longtime politechbot reader Andrew |-----------------------------------------| | Andrew Nuttall | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | www.anjohn.ca/nuttman | |-----------------------------------------| --- Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 07:57:41 -0500 From: "J.D. Abolins" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: FC: Essay on CBDTPA: "Hollings, Valenti, and the American Techniban" To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thank you for sharing the essay. >Hollings, Valenti, and the American Techniban > Richard Forno > 25 March 2002 <snip> > not be a worthwhile product. Unfortunately, many folks are of the belief > that since we don't require such 'security' measures for handguns > (something that can kill people) so why have such measures on electronic > media which educates and entertains them? For what it's worth, New Jersey legislature does have a bill that will require all handguns sold in NJ to be "smart guns" three years after any such firearms are available for sale to the public. Police are exempt from this restriction. "Smart guns" are firearms that use biometrics, tokens (such as a ring), codes, or some other method to restricting the ability to fire to specific person(s). The "smart gun" push has been simmering for several years in NJ. There are have been also several bills in NJ seeking to fund research into developing "smart guns". See: http://www.nj.com/news/times/mercer/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1017136808142476.xml (online for a few more days) and http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/ for further info. (Somehow, the phrase "smart gun" make think of the phrase: "Smart guns, dumb people."<g>) I wonder if the CBDTPA supporters will use the NJ bills to offset the argument that "interactive devices" are being required to build-in restrictions while firearms aren't. Not that would help the situation. The CBDTPA is still a bad law. > Simply put, CBDTPA outlaws the sale or distribution of nearly any electronic > device and computer operating system unless it includes government-mandated > copy-prevention restrictions. The implications for programmers and open source software fans are quite nasty. As I look at some of the CBDTPA provisions,the law would require operating systems offered in the USA --and, by various extensions, in the world-- to incorporate USA-mandated digital rights management code. This would apply to non-USA distributors such as SuSE. Nastier yet, the law could be interpreted as prohibiting releasing source code to the public if that might allow somebody to bypass the digital rights enforcement routines. Linux and any other open source operating system could become "criminal tools". But this is not limited to operating systems. Compilers, assemblers, dissemblers, etc. could tun afoul of the CBDTPA.. So legally safe "programming tools" might become limited to high level languages and scripting languages where the tools themselves enforce digital right protections on behalf of third-parties. It will be as though programmers will need a "security clearance" from the entertainment/publishing industry to access the internal coding of their own computers. Oh, by the way, teaching certain programming techniques could be spun to be contributing to infringement. J.D. Abolins --- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: FC: Essay on CBDTPA: "Hollings, Valenti, and the American Techniban" To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Mailer: Lotus Notes Release 5.07a May 14, 2001 Just a brief comment: I really think that anyone who labels fellow Americans with an allusion to Taliban should be dismissed out-of-hand, regardless of their arguments or their positions. It's a cheap rhetorical device, akin to associating someone with Hitler or Nazism. It completely clouds an issue and chokes it with emotion. It ought to be beyond-the-pale. I personally have low regard for Sen. Hollings, but he should not be denigrated with a label that is clearly a takeoff on Taliban. -------------------------- Tom Giovanetti President Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) www.ipi.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- From: "Sutha Kamal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: RE: CBDTPA bans everything from two-line BASIC programs to PCs Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 11:52:51 -0500 Declan, It seems to me, there's an even more silly part about the entire discussion, which is whether or not it's really possible to copy protect media in any form. The CBDTPA lightly touches on the topic, and Jack Valenti refers to it at - I believe - the Analog Hole. This is to say that - short of connecting electrodes that go straight to the brain and carry a signal only a brain could decypher - for us to percieve any media (audio or video), it has to be presented to us as some sort analog signal. Additionally, it commonly accepted that anything analog can be represented digitally. Is it just me , or is it blatantly obvious that at a fundamental, theoretical level, it's entirely impossible to prevent media from being re-encoded so long as it's at least played once on an "approved" player? To add insult to injury (and this is what REALLY scares me). It seems that an all-to-easy way to prevent media from being stolen (and yes, there are ways around this too) is to force players to only play media that's encryped or signed by some trusted key. This means that the recording and film studios can sign/encrypt their content, so an "authorized" player would recognize this key and play the media. Also, someone that re-recorded the media (i.e. redigitized an analog playback) would not be able to re-encrypt or re-sign the media with the appropriate key, and so the device would not play this new re-recorded version of the media. The obvious problem with this, however, is that people would no longer be able to burn their own CDs with compilations (or music they themselves perform), or burn DVDs of their family, etc. To prevent this, then, we'd need to introduce additional support for personally-generated media... but where would this lead? Obviously we wouldn't want to allow an "authorized" dvd authoring program (e.g. iMovie) to reproduce a copyrighted DVD. So then we'd need systems to determine if the SOURCE content (in a audio/video editing program) was a protected work. Okay, so that PROBABLY means that all "protected" media will also have to incorporate some sort of digital watermark (like the SDMI tried/is trying), and that all applications that use media not only have to look for a "copyright bit" but infact wil have to inspect the stream for a watermark that may or may not be there. And of course, further exploration of this topic leads to more and more problems which I need not discuss here. In summary, though, my point is simple: The nature of any perceptible phenomenon implies that it can be represented digitally. This means that re-digitization is typically a trivial matter. Given that simple re-digitization is trivial, one must devise a mechanism which survives the digital-to-analog gap, which at the moment is watermarking. Then all devices that manipulate, copy, exchange (etc....), such media don't have to simply recognize this ludicrous notion of a "copyright bit", but instead must inspect the media for such a watermark. The notion that Outlook, or my PDA would have to inspect any file I wanted to transfer, looking for either a signature, watermark or "copyright bit" is ludicrous. The level of complexity here is quite daunting, and one is often left with the feeling that this is infact an exercise in futility. Is it an important problem? Sure. Is it soluble? I'm not convinced that it is. -Sutha - - - - Sutha Kamal ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Politech dinner in SF on 4/16: http://www.politechbot.com/events/cfp2002/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
