Hollywood heads up anti-piracy charge
Posted on 07/23/2002 11:22:46 AM PDT by mhking
Hollywood heads up anti-piracy charge
On Monday, a lawyer for the Motion Picture Association of America said to expect new bills soon to assail illicit peer-to-peer file trading and curtail the piracy of digital TV broadcasts.
Fritz Attaway, the MPAA's senior vice president for government relations, told an intellectual property conference that his group would, with the help of its powerful congressional allies, attempt a three-pronged approach this fall.
Because Congress only has about five work weeks left before it is scheduled to adjourn for the year, the movie studios' effort has limited hopes of success until 2003. But it will highlight Hollywood's legal attempts to permit the intentional disruption of peer-to-peer networks and limit the unauthorized copying and conversion of digital TV signals.
"This is a legislative objective of ours that I know you will be hearing more about really soon," Attaway told more than 100 congressional aides attending a conference organized by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Policy Innovation.
Both are free-market groups generally skeptical of government regulation. They convened for the half-day event, featuring speakers from Microsoft, Eli Lilly, and the Association for Competitive Technology, to argue that intellectual property rights should be defended as fiercely as traditional property rights.
"We're here to defend intellectual property," said Jim DeLong, an economist at CEI. "If you want balance, go to another session."
Last month, Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., said he was writing a bill that would allow aggrieved content owners to launch technological attacks against file-swapping networks where their wares are traded.
"No one in the motion picture industry has any interest in invading your computer or doing anything malicious with your files," said the MPAA's Attaway. "The idea is to make unauthorized file sharing sufficiently inconvenient or at least unsuccessful."
Berman has not introduced his bill yet, but his description says that it will immunize copyright holders from civil and criminal liability who use technological methods such as hacking to "prevent the unauthorized distribution of their copyrighted works via P2P networks."
The MPAA's other two proposals likely will seek to limit piracy by outlawing future components that receive digital TV broadcasts unless they follow anti-copying standards. Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America endorsed a similar "broadcast flag" approach for digital radio broadcasts.
The idea is straightforward: Future hardware and software would treat digital television differently if it were designated as copy-protected, preventing people from saving multiple copies or uploading it. Another standard would, in industry jargon, "plug the analog hole" by embedding watermarks in broadcasts and limiting the redistribution of broadcasts with those hidden watermarks.
But because people might not use these new kinds of devices if given a choice, new federal laws likely would be necessary to compel software and hardware manufacturers to abide by the flag or watermark. Senate Commerce Chairman Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., has introduced a related bill that would restrict hardware and software that doesn't adhere to government-approved "standard security technologies."
Attaway said, "To implement the (broadcast) flag, there has to be legislation." The MPAA's Web site echoes the sentiment, saying that "implementation is expected to require a legislative and/or regulatory mandate."
None of the speakers at the conference, including representatives from Intel and Microsoft, attacked the idea.
Susan Mann, a federal affairs manager at Microsoft, said "we applaud" Berman's considered approach. But, Mann said, "we have to look at it very carefully."
Mann said that Microsoft has undertaken aggressive anti-piracy efforts by relying on technology instead of the law. "We do that without having asked anyone for legislation to implement those technological protection tools...Piracy is a problem that we view as primarily our own," she said.
Intel attorney Jeffrey Lawrence, who specializes in content protection, reeled off a history of how his company has worked to devise standards for digital rights management.
Lawrence said that Hollings' plan to forcibly implant copy-protection technology in consumer devices has disrupted negotiations between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. It's "changed not just the stakes, but an ongoing dialogue that has been going on for many, many years," he said.
This is in line with Jaime Kellner and others over the last few weeks insisting that when you record programs and skip the commercials, you are "stealing" the programming from them.
The RIAA and the MPAA are outdated union-type organizations that exist on subsidies that they have been able to demand like blood money (in the form of surcharges on products) from consumers and producers for years.
Now that the technology exists permitting consumers to bypass vehicles that the MPAA and RIAA used to gain their blood money, they are crying foul. "It's for the artists," they loudly proclaim, while they go out of their way to extort additional monies on the backs of new technologies.
They are sucking the Feds in by insisting that national security could be at risk if they don't implement these measures, and the folks on the Hill, ignorant they be of things technological, follow lock-step; especially since both the RIAA and the MPAA drop tons of money into the coffers of politicans on the Hill.
And if they get their way, TIVO and UltimateTV will both go by the wayside. Why? Because you won't be allowed to record programming off the air. You will only be able to watch what they want you to watch, when they allow you to watch it. Just as they are in the process of doing with music programming on radio.
"They came for the Napster crowd, but I said nothing...then they came for the internet radio hobbyists and fans, but I said nothing...then they came for the TIVO folks, but I said nothing...then they came for the rest of the internet...and there was no one left..."
The MPAA and the RIAA will have opened up a whole new can of worms if they try to "hack" anyone. The minute the crackers (not the slang for "white people", but the computer whiz kids who break into "secure" government servers for fun) see an assault on anyone they feel a kinship with, their sights will have a laser focus on the entertainment industry and their purpose won't be just for fun anymore.
Record company exec: How were you able to tell? Oh never mind. Just make the CDs and put a little more cleavage on the cover than usual.
FMCDH
I believe you mean "hacker." A cracker is someone who hacks for malicious purposes. Hacking is usually done for purposes of informing administrators about vulnerabilities. IBM has a team of professional hackers it hires out to anyone who wants to test their security.
Such a law would be in violation of the USSC's Betamax decision, as well as the "fair use" exemption of current copyright law.
But to put it in plain English, it is NONE of the MPAA's damned business what I tape off the air for my personal use. Period.
The GOP needs to grow a brain and a spine, and let the Hollyweird crowd deal with the consequences of sharing a bed with the 'Rats.
Nope, I meant cracker.
A hacker is someone who is intensely interested in the arcane and recondite workings of a computer operating system. They probe systems for holes in software and snags in logic. The intentions are never malicious.
A cracker is someone who breaks into or otherwise violates the system integrity of remote machines. The intent is usually malicious, but isn't necessarily so.
Many hackers look down on crackers, but crackers are often hackers in their own right.
This is a case of their hackers working as crackers.
"Oh, a wise guy, eh?"
cracker n.
One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of hacker (q.v., sense 8). An earlier attempt to establish `worm' in this sense around 1981-82 on Usenet was largely a failure.
Use of both these neologisms reflects a strong revulsion against the theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. The neologism "cracker" in this sense may have been influenced not so much by the term "safe-cracker" as by the non-jargon term "cracker", which in Middle English meant an obnoxious person (e.g., "What cracker is this same that deafs our ears / With this abundance of superfluous breath?" - Shakespeare's King John, Act II, Scene I) and in modern colloquial American English survives as a barely gentler synonym for "white trash".
While it is expected that any real hacker will have done some playful cracking and knows many of the basic techniques, anyone past larval stage is expected to have outgrown the desire to do so except for immediate, benign, practical reasons (for example, if it's necessary to get around some security in order to get some work done).
Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom than the mundane reader misled by sensationalistic journalism might expect. Crackers tend to gather in small, tight-knit, very secretive groups that have little overlap with the huge, open poly-culture this lexicon describes; though crackers often like to describe themselves as hackers, most true hackers consider them a separate and lower form of life.
Ethical considerations aside, hackers figure that anyone who can't imagine a more interesting way to play with their computers than breaking into someone else's has to be pretty losing. Some other reasons crackers are looked down on are discussed in the entries on cracking and phreaking. See also samurai, dark-side hacker, and hacker ethic. For a portrait of the typical teenage cracker, see warez d00dz.
Instead of making billions and billions of dollars, they are only making billions and millions of dollars. < /Sarcasm >
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