Problem: we can't make cryptography exports (software exports) illegal
-> what actually IS illegal to export?
-> munitions!
-> let's just declare that cryptography is "munitions"
-> problem solved
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
If it is a munition the US government has limitations on it's actions controlling it covered under the 2nd amendment to the constitution.
In reality it nor the first amendment(freedom of speech) hack probably would not work. The limitation was on exporting strong crypto, not using or importing it. It was stupid and impossible to control. But I would guess any charges would be espionage(illegal speech) and smuggling(illegal goods). regardless of how you packaged it.
Anyway I'm not surprised. This kind of pedantry is what lawyers do for a living.
All I am saying is that I am not sure it's so simple: sure, if everyone had them, the risk that there is some lunatic crazy enough to actually put them to use rises; but it also potentially stops a bunch of wars, especially bigger countries going after smaller ones.
The doctrine has never been tested in court as no case involving it has gone to trail.
That's a rather facetious interpretation. You're complaining that there was no law preventing software being distributed, and as there was a need to prevent that then lawmakers fixed that problem. That's hardly surprising, isn't it?
You also seem surprised that including cryptography software in existing lists designed to prevent export of military and/or dual-use technology is also surprising, unexpected, or outlandish. If you actually think about it, is it really?
If you go by the common interpretation of "munitions" and by and large the contents of that list, then it clearly does was not intended to include mathematics.
I think you are trying very hard to imagine inconsistencies where there are none. Not only are you trying to argue that cryptographical software is not relevant to military uses, which is an absurd argument to make, but you are also trying to argue that managing what items feature in an export control list is not the responsibility of an executive branch.
The only requirement to export-control something is that the item features in an export-control list. You're complaining that a specific type of software was added to such a list. Tell me exactly what part you don't, can't, or refuse to understand.
> they made it against the law to even tell anyone.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
The law says “no person shall circumvent” DRM, and later prohibits the distribution of “technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof” to break DRM. It’s worded pretty carefully to avoid prohibiting more traditional forms of speech like this post, and as far as I’m aware has never been used in the manner you suggest.
I'll do you one better: 2600 Magazine was prohibited from saying which website hosted DRM-circumvention code:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v...
They were legally prohibited from saying, on their own website, words like "You can get DeCSS from http://lemuria.org/~tom/DeCSS/" and nothing else. Criminalised speech.
http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/
DeCSS was also available in DNS txt records for a while circa 2000.
But yes, obviously serious threats of violence are not protected speech.
The fact that your statement is becoming more and more true in the United States is an indictment.
Dispute that this should constitute a crime as much as you want (and please, do. Take it to court, get the laws changed, go into politics, get the US fixed, this is bullshit) but for as long as it is: being charged with a crime for "doing crime and teaching others to do the same crime" is not a first amendment violation.
The current regime (before it was a regime) got away with a lot of very bad speech because "the first amendment says all speech is allowed, no matter what" and should be made to hold everyone to the same standard they hold themselves to.
I think this is a weaker example.
Judge Kaplan very likely went beyond what the law allows, in issuing the injunction against Eric Corley for even _adding a hyperlink_ to the DeCSS code on his website.
However, we don't know this for sure, because Corley did not take this to the Supreme Court. There is a chance that the SCOTUS would have accepted the case, and found that neither a hyperlink to computer source code, nor computer source code itself, constitutes "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof"... but at the same time, maybe they wouldn't accept it, and maybe they would but it'd cost a lot of money Corley didn't have to see the case through. So who knows? Corley seemed satisfied enough that, even though he was personally enjoined from linking to DeCSS, it nonetheless spread like wildfire all over the world, and DVDs were effectively copyable from that day forward.
Found not guilty, but he was charged and tried.
Not necessarily. A cynical modern legal strategy is to bombard people with frivolous legal actions that only the well-heeled can afford. Defendants can argue that claims are baseless or frivolous, but to make that argument, they must hire a lawyer and appear in court.
To see my point, look at the number of frivolous prosecutions now being launched by ... ah, never mind, I don't want to get political.
But individuals have been successfully prosecuted for "aiding and abetting" violations of the DMCA, where speech was a material element of the proscribed behavior. Oh, and -- IANAL.
Why only describe them and not go for the easiest example: Nintendo.
Not necessarily. Being found not guilty just means that the facts of that specific case, as determined by the jury, did not fit a guilty verdict. It doesn't mean that someone who did a similar or analogous thing couldn't be prosecuted under the same law and found guilty.
These sorts of code are usually pretty short, right? It isn’t as if it needs to be maintainable or have a nice GUI.
Reality is moving away from states, and is now moving faster than legacy "laws" can ever hope to catch up.
That's a big part of what's fueling the wave of abandonment of DRM. I mostly play bluegrass - and given the lineal connection between traditional music and internet freedom, it probably comes as no surprise - but every serious bluegrass album is DRM-free now. Every grammy winner in the bluegrass and americana categories since at least 2020 has been DRM-free.
> Defendants then linked their site to those "mirror" sites, after first checking to ensure that the mirror sites in fact were posting DeCSS or something that looked like it, and proclaimed on their own site that DeCSS could be had by clicking on the hyperlinks on defendants' site. By doing so, they offered, provided or otherwise trafficked in DeCSS.
The appeal was mostly about whether the DMCA and/or the specific injunction in question violated the First Amendment, and the court found that it didn't.
(Universal City Studios vs. Reimerdes at the district court level, Universal City Studios v. Corley at the circuit)
There used to be some debate about whether a prose description is equivalent to computer code even though there are proofs in information theory that they are. English and C are just two different languages in which you can encode the same information.
But we don't even have to go there anymore. LLMs mean there are now machines that can execute a prose description. Code is speech and speech is code.
REDACTED
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1
!copy !save
The plan was to render notepad.exe and thus whole windows an illegal software because it allows to circumvent the existing DRM. Of course this would make illegal also less and vim, therefore I got scared of the power that lay in my hands, and cease to hit the atomic button.
_____
(1) I've noticed that I recently started to use "I remember" more and more on the hackernews. I'm getting old.
The Serial Copy Management System (SCMS)[1] is a DRM standard built into digital audio tech like DAT, MiniDisc, DCC, and consumer audio CD recorders. It works by adding just 2 bits — but no encryption or obfuscation whatsoever — to the digital audio signal that tell the recorder if further digital copying is allowed. Importantly, SCMS only ever blocked making a digital copy of a copy — you could always make a first-generation copy from an original, but not chain further digital copies. The requirement was pushed by copyright holders: in the US, consumer devices had to implement SCMS to ensure you couldn’t endlessly duplicate perfect digital recordings, but pro studio gear was exempt. SCMS doesn’t restrict analog copying, just digital serial copying. Most people found it annoying rather than effective.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System
Even accidentally releasing a demo or preview with DRM should invalidate copyright on that software/movie/book/whatever.
This doesn't make for a good anti-DRM argument because the concern can simply be addressed by requiring a DRM-free copy to be deposited at the library of congress (or similar[1]) so it can be released in 150 years (or whatever) it actually becomes public domain.
Moreover how would you even define what "DRM" is? Is spotify refusing to provide a .mp3 file download for their streaming service a "DRM"? What if they implement streaming via webrtc, to make it extra-annoying to manually download? For games, is it "DRM" to add mandatory online requirements even for single player? What if there's an ostensible reason for the online requirement, like if the gameplay is computed server-side a-la world of warcraft?
Then do that. It's not my job to try to argue your side of things. No one does that, as you well know, so my argument not only stands, but wins.
>Moreover how would you even define what "DRM" is?
Anything that interferes with copying the work in question.
>Is spotify refusing to provide a .mp3 file download for their streaming service a "DRM"?
Yes. This is an obnoxiously juvenile question. The nature of streaming services is that they send the media to the node (on demand). If that is done in a way that makes it difficult to play it a second time except to "stream" it again, you can hardly claim this is incidental. They go to great lengths to prevent it.
>For games, is it "DRM" to add mandatory online requirements even for single player?
Again, yes. There is no other purpose to such a requirement, and no one makes it a secret that this is done specifically to thwart so-called "piracy" attempts.
>What if there's an ostensible reason for the online requirement, like if the gameplay is computed server-side a-la world of warcraft?
You mean like with Blizzard, where they sued the programmers who did bnetd and prevented people from connecting to third party servers which computed gameplay? That wasn't even done to further piracy, by the way, they were just being dicks.
This is a nonsensical complaint, because the actually existing DMCA already conditions legal consequences on whether DRM is present.
Fair use exists for both people and corporations. Just because a corporation copies something in a way that is fre use, that doesn't mean that people should be able to freely copy it.
Equally cynically, it's fair use because if it isn't, the entire economy collapses overnight.
> Equally cynically, it's fair use because if it isn't, the entire economy collapses overnight.
Sounds about right. If they had the moral fortitude to apply the laws as they were supposed to, they'd do the right thing and if it collapses the economy then so be it. The fact they didn't reveals political calculation in their judgements.
When laws are stripped of their moral advantage, resistance to laws, courts and authorities becomes civil disobedience and a moral imperative of citizens. We cannot have mutually exclusive ideas existing simultaneously. That's how we get distortions like "you citizen must pay outta the nose for everything but the elite corporations can do whatever they want with complete impunity". The only acceptable way for them to resolve their conundrum is to either hold corporations accountable for their copyright infringement or abolish copyright for all. Anything else can and should cause civil unrest.
[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt
"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title [...]"
(A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
(B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
I'm less sure about (B), not being a lawyer, but I think it's so generic that it does apply: the "ordinary course of [...] operation" of reading the book requires running the apps provided by Amazon. This seems to fit "requires the application of [...] a process [...] with the authority of the copyright owner".
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...
Not a civil issue, like libel or fraud, but the sort of talk that can get a policeman to come and drag you off to jail. If you've ever wondered why DRM is so roundly hated by engineers of a certain age, it's because not only it dumb makework that they are required to implement, not only is it extremely irritating to discover it interfering with your own computer, but if you do effectively point out how dumb, irritating, and eminently circumventable it is, they made it against the law to even tell anyone.
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/licensing-scheme-fair-use...