It’s always amazing to see what intellectual contortions people can go through to distort facts. What Felten and Halderman have done is a technical and economic analysis of a DRM system. It is strictly factual. Your post is ideological, theirs is not.

Saying that exposing the truth about DRM is “hating copyright” is like the preposterous fascist claim that criticizing U. S. government policy means “hating America”. It is a mendacious rhetorical conceit that has nothing to do with reality.

I suppose you mean that objections to DRM, or maybe the whole p2p culture is “hating copyright”. In fact, what we have in the USA today is a pathological form of copyright. It has been grossly expanded beyond its legitimate purposes to become an avaricious protectionist racket for an industry of middle-men. Their useful contributions – production support, distribution and promotion – were never enough to justify the degree of their exploitation of artists on the one side and fans on the other side. Now as the need for them declines they are intent on seizing even more of a death-grip on the popular arts under the pretext of copyright.

DRM is not a protection of copyright. It is a land-grab attempt to claim a degree of control far beyond what any reasonable form of copyright can justify. It is always too broad and indiscriminate, interfering with legitimate uses and owners’ control of their own equipment, while failing to really restrain copyright violations. Yes, the study of DRM is a demonology, but it is defenders of DRM who are the hateful ones, and artists and their would-be patrons are the victims.

– jen_eric999

I don’t think it’s fair to criticize F & H for not analyzing other systems just because they chose to focus on this one. I’m sure other DRM purveyors and procurers are equally sociopathic and other DRM systems are equally defective and equally harmful to end-users. Felten and Halderman probably just haven’t gotten around to the other ones yet. All deserve the F & H treatment equally.

– jen_eric999

The courts have made exceptions to the 1st Amendment for various reasons. To mention an example other than the usual, obvious ones, and a little more analogous to the DMCA situation, revealing trade secrets is not protected free speech, according to the courts in USA. (To be clear, there is not a trade secrets case with F&H; nor, as you observe above, with DVD Jon. I’m just pointing out that in US law, there can be exceptions to freedom of speech in favor of commercial interests.)

I agree (TG) that your legal analysis above is what ought to prevail. However, it is not certain that the courts would rule that F & H are protected by the 1st Amendment. I believe there are still injunctions in place against publication of the Decss code.

Besides, the possibility of the courts ruling for free speech in an “exposure of DRM” case will not prevent a lawsuit. And suits or even mere threats can effectively silence anyone who can’t afford a defense, regardless of the merits.

BTW, the supposed shift-key case was mis-reported. What the company was threatening to sue over was not the information about preventing autorun. Rather, it was the student’s revealing the names of the DRM files that would run on the system. It was perceived as a shift-key case and that was making bad publicity for the DRM vendor, and that may have been at least part of the reason they backed off. They might also have lost on the “exposure of DRM tech” issue, but it was not litigated so we don’t know.

– jen_eric999

There is NO DMCA issue with this paper. Period. The First Amendment trumps the DMCA as far as the written or spoken word goes. Informing an unspecified audience, through expressive activity, as to how to consummate an act that’s potentially in violation of the law is perfectly legal as long as the expression does not cross the line of actively encouraging such an act to be committed. A prime example of this would be “The Anarchist’s Handbook”. The book is a vertible cornucopia of ideas and techniques to cause all manner of mayhem. It’s now on it’s 4th or 5th revision and it’s umpteenth printing.

A more germain example from the copyright realm is DVD Jon’s publication of the source code for DeCSS. The courts (both in the US and Norway) ruled that source code is an expressive activity. In the US that would entitle the activity to protection under the First Amendment, which precludes prior restraint on publication except in the most dire of circumstances or if what is to be published is patently false. Hollywood tried to claim that a trade secret had been compromised. Unfortunately for Hollywood, Jon neither was privvy to nor worked with anyone with access to the inner workings of CSS. More importantly his algorithm for DeCSS wasn’t merely the converse of CSS. It was manifestly dissimilar. Just as there are multiple ways to perform a task that achieves the same result, there are multiple ways to undo them.

In it’s ruling the US courts relied on earlier rulings that had been made during a long running battle with the Commerce Department, DoD, DoJ, and State Department regarding cryptography. Cryptographic devices were classified under the Export Control Act as a ‘munition’ and thus subject to export restrictions. The Government attempted to extend the restrictions to computer source code that implemented cryptographic algorithms. The final ruling was that source code was an expressive activity and therefore not subject to export control. Object code (that could be loaded into a machine and used operationally) would remain subject to control.

Big Content and their Technolackies have a habit of imputing things into the DMCA to arrive at conclusions that can only possibly be of benefit to them and then repeatedly making authoritative pronouncements about such dubious conclusions to browbeat the public into believing them.

We can see an example of that from the original post. Recall if you will, the revelation that holding down the shift key while mounting an optical disk preventing a certain company’s DRM from engaging. A student (at Princeton, I believe) discovered this and also the name of the file containing the DRM driver, along with where it resided on a machine so that it could be permanently rendered ineffective by deletion. A certain executive from this company threatened the student with the DMCA for disclosing this information. This information was easily obtained by setting the Windows Installer logging parameters to maximal verbosity, thereby providing a convenient record of every file and registry key manipulatuion performed as the DRM was installed. There was a concerted effort to spew out scads of “student threatened with DMCA lawsuit” press releases at the outset of this controversy, but no follow-up when it turned out the threats were all hot air.

Even the most capable DRM that can be created by human beings can be circumvented by placing the CD in your ‘dumb’ CD player, connecting it’s stereo outputs to the analog inputs on your computer’s sound card, and playing the CD into the computer while running a recorder program. If your machine has enough horsepower, you can encode to mp3 or ogg on the fly. If not, grab the PCM .wav file and encode it later.

Those with more advanced skills could create a driver for the computer’s CD drive to make it behave as though it were a ‘dumb’ walkman-type CD player, thus precluding the DRM from engaging.

The recording industry could be using their energy and resources to develop a business model that will be appropriate for and rewarding in the digital age, but instead they choose to invest in schemes to annoy and alienate their customers.

–TurboGeek

It’s possible there may be a DMCA issue in this publication. If so, it is all the more admirable for Felten and Halderman to reveal this information. It only shows again what an unjust law the DMCA is. Truth and standards of fair dealing must sooner or later be given priority over commercial interests if a society is to survive.

– jen_eric999

“Building in a sunset after (say) three years would protect against many safety problems; and it would have little effect on the record label’s business model, as we would expect nearly all revenue from monetizing new uses of the music to have been extracted within the first three years after the disc is pressed. If a customer is ever going to pay for iPod downloading, she is likely to do so within the first three years after the CD is pressed.”

Long tail analysis suggests this is anything but true.