jtcm writes "Three men have been charged with conspiring to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act after federal investigators found that they allegedly offered a cracker more than $250,000 to assist with breaking Dish Network's satellite TV encryption scheme: '[Jung] Kwak had two co-conspirators secure the services of a cracker and allegedly reimbursed the unidentified person about $8,500 to buy a specialized and expensive microscope used for reverse engineering smart cards.
He also allegedly offered the cracker more than $250,000 if he successfully secured a Nagra card's EPROM (eraseable programmable read-only memory), the guts of the chip that is needed to reverse-engineer Dish Network's encryption.' Kwak owns a company known as Viewtech, which imports and sells Viewsat satellite receiver boxes. Dish Network's latest encryption scheme, dubbed Nagra 3, has not yet been cracked by satellite TV pirates."
US copyright law provides for both civil remedies, such as a copyright holder suing infringers, and criminal remedies, where the government can fine or imprison an infringer. I don't remember in my lifetime watching a video tape that didn't include the FBI copyright warning about this, so it's definitely not a new thing. Whether right or wrong to do so, it has long been the case that federal law can lock you up for copyright infringement.
The point is that criminal enforcement of a copyright law is not a new thing. The DMCA is, by the way, so unrelated to copyright law that only 25% of its letters stand for the word "copyright."
Most of the time, copyright owners are left to fend for themselves in court by bringing civil suits. That is why you typically only see civil suits against small-time copyright infingers such as serial uploaders, etc.
But apparently when you get into the high-end satellite decoder cracking business, you get on the DOJ radar. That is when you go to jail.
Now you may have noticed that the actual charge is "conspiracy to violate the DMCA" and the actual statute on the face of the indictment is 18 USC 371. (http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/371.html). This statute is used to prosecute conspiracy to commit a federal crime (i.e. violation of title 17).
This statute is used to prosecute conspiracy to commit a federal crime
I know this has been used to put serious criminals away, and is probably a great tool in preventing crime, but prosecuting for conspiracy is still a nasty idea. I think that if I had to describe the boundary between acceptable government behavior and police state, it would be right after this.
When I was arrested as a juvenile and got charged with 2 moderately serious charges, I had 2 counts of conspiracy, which were also felonies, added for "thinking" about doing it before I actually did it.
Apparently in our justice system unless you just spontaneously do a crime with no premeditation whatsoever you are gonna get slapped with a charge for thinking about it on top of the charge itself. To this day I don't understand it.
No, that's like awarding a sentence for "attempted" murder.
Or should we always wait until irreversible damage is done before we prosecute criminals? You'll find that every legal jurisdiction in the world has some concept of conspiracy culpability.
...that (a) this is a good thing (commercial operation) but that (b) the DMCA wasn't necessary at all. Aren't there theft of service laws already on the books for receiving private/pay TV services without paying for them? And, since this isn't actually a DMCA violation case, but rather a conspiracy to violate the DMCA, wouldn't it be just as much a conspiracy to illegally receive service?
<Sideshow_Bob>Conspiring to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act... Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel Prize for conspiracy chemistry?</Sideshow_Bob>
I had a friend who claimed that he had found a way to pirate DirecTV's service. He only stopped doing so when he realized there was still nothing worth watching. Eventually he opened his own business. He named the company after a component that was essential to the process. I remember when I helped out we'd get about one call a week from people trying to ask not in so-many words if we could help them with their "DirecTV stuff". (It was my first call on it that caused me to mention it to my friend, who then told me what the company name actually meant.)
He pirated the service for about two years. Funny thing was, about a year after he stopped he got hit with a lawsuit. He transferred as much stuff as he could out of his own name and braced for the inevitable. He only got away because he had a friend who knew some influential people. Incidentally, my friend his now his friend's personal no-cost 24/7 concierge tech support.
Anyway, he'd get these calls from people and he'd try to deny that he knew what to do. If someone pressed the issue (usually it was his friends or old co-workers telling others who could help) he tried to do the "scared straight" thing. Funny thing is, some of them would get mad at him for not helping. So many people are willing to throw away financial security just so they don't have to pay for the NFL Channel.
I'm (very) rarely a fan of the DMCA but, in my opinion, this is a good example of why it was set up - to stop commercial abuse of IP. These guys were knowingly circumventing copyright protection methods in an effort to make a profit. These exact situations are what needs to be stopped, not the teenager posting a mashup on youtube...
I would argue that making personal receivers shouldn't be a crime, nor should breaking encryption. Making it a crime to prop up a bad business model isn't a good reason.
I consider the DMCA to be one of the most unjust and cruel laws the USA has. I sympathize with the people doing this to the following limited extent: If you are a subscriber to a service, you should be able to use any compatible QAM enabled equipment you wish.
This is a little different because people who violate the DMCA like this usually are doing so to secure their fair use rights. These people just wanted to outright steal the service. So thats bad. However, two things.
Why are police involved in this sort of thing? Well, really, although in theory, violating the DMCA is a civil action, but around 2003, the government decided that all copyright infringement was criminal. Because the Intellectual property 'scam' is all that the US has against the Chinese, the US has decided to criminalize copyright infringement to create laws to fight the Chinese with.
The DMCA needs to be repealed, but I don't see that happening unless there are large demonstrations. People are generally too stupid to care. (I really would like to see anti-DMCA slogans with people marching by the millions.)
Insightful? Sorry, copyright infringement was made criminal more than 30 years ago. In the 70s, at least. Which if you check your history, was when China was undergoing the Cultural Revolution, persecuting the intellectuals and idolizing the peasant lifestyle.
So yeah, I don't think it was China that inspired criminalizing copyright infringement.
I don't know why it posted the previous comment anonymously. Here it is again, under my name...
Although it was eliminated by dubious judicial means shortly after becoming law, the DMCA allows for reverse-engineering for the purposes of interoperability. The entire market for these devices is based on non-interoperability. Because if the CAM became truly portable and emulated fully in software, it's a tiny step to a digital video recorder that is completely under user control receiving HDTV. Which is actually the main selling point here. They took our VCRs away, and now we're attacking people who want to get them back the only way possible; At this point it doesn't matter whether his intent was to sell descrambler boxes or not, or anyone's, because that's the only way you're getting that functionality. An irony, really, that you could be paying the same fees as someone with an "approved" box, accessing the same content, and yet wind up in jail because your equipment wasn't up to the provider's specifications... Namely, that you wanted to "time shift" the content.
Damn criminals, flaunting their freedoms in front of us... They get what they deserve, eh?
This is not for interoperability. The goal of this operation was to create smart cards that allowed people to view channels they did not pay for and to allow people who do not have an account to view the channels. The goal was to facilitate theft of service, not interoperability.
You can still get "Tunerless" VCRs and DVD Burners. They take Component and Composite inputs and will record whatever they see onto DVD. But they really aren't able to control the box any.
Component and composite outputs on the back of every descrambler out there will spit it out in standard definition. You can't record HD signals out of them -- many won't even downgrade the signal, it'll just be dead. Getting high definition on any of those requires an HDMI hookup, which is encrypted, and therefore "tunerless" VCRs and DVD burners can't be used. Even getting signals OTA (not scrambled) doesn't do you much good because the tuners are usually integrated into the television. I haven't tuners be
Component and composite outputs on the back of every descrambler out there will spit it out in standard definition. You can't record HD signals out of them -- many won't even downgrade the signal, it'll just be dead. Getting high definition on any of those requires an HDMI hookup, which is encrypted, and therefore "tunerless" VCRs and DVD burners can't be used. Even getting signals OTA (not scrambled) doesn't do you much good because the tuners are usually integrated into the television. I haven't tuners being sold separately with HD outputs that can be sent to any COTS recording equipment. This is intentional, purposeful, and frankly conspiratorial on the part of the manufacturers.
Piracy is the only way the market for HD video recordings will survive.
Funny thing is, you can record high-def quite easily, you just need to purchase two legal products.
First, you buy a Hauppage HD-PVR [hauppage.com], about the only consumer-level high-def recording box that handles up to 1080i via component inputs. Hey look, Myth supports it!
Now, for pesky HDMI... you buy a HD Fury 2 [hdfury2.com], which takes HDMI (including HDCP!) and converts it to either RGB or Component outputs, and while it handles 1080p, the HD-PVR only has 1080i.
Now you have a high-def PVR solution, MythTV compatible.
Alternate methods is if your cablebox supports Firewire, and can output the high-def content over it (I've seen 'em where the SD content is output over Firewire, but the HD content isn't), but most satellite boxes don't have this, unfortunately.
These days, the model is very much based on some really funky group keying and key revocation, which allows the sattelite provider to revoke individual keys because each receiver has a unique key rather than a group sharing a common key.
Among other things, this makes piracy MUCH harder, because the sattelite providers can buy pirated receivers, take them to the lab, find out the key used, and revoke it, disabling that entire batch of pirated receivers without affecting normal customers.
Among other things, this makes piracy MUCH harder, because the sattelite providers can buy pirated receivers, take them to the lab, find out the key used, and revoke it, disabling that entire batch of pirated receivers without affecting normal customers.
Ah, but isn't said reverse engineering a violation of the DMCA itself? The pirate recievers are electronic gadgets, built by proprietary companies. If the law doesn't cut both ways, it's a bad law and needs to go.
I'm thinking that if a security researcher had done the same thing, he would not be in jail. Nor would a large corporation.
But a set top box importer does it, and suddenly it's a federal crime.
The most troublesome part about this is that engineers routinely reverse engineer the work of others for the sake of creating compatible products - an exemption the DMCA explicitly allows. Perhaps the company wanted to offer a cheaper STB to Dish, and undercut the competition. Or perhaps they planned to sell directly to the black market, engaging in fraud. The act of reverse engineering a component tells us nothing about the company's intentions.
I mention this because this very thing was done to Lexmark printers a few years ago. Instead of getting arrested, the manufacturer of competing cartridges was sued under the DMCA; the case went all the way to the SCOTUS, and Lexmark lost. It would appear this would set precedent regarding the legality of reverse engineering for the sake of creating interoperable products, but strangely, the FBI seems not to follow precedent. I find it odd that an activity which was legal and sanctioned by the DMCA - and even supported by the Supreme Court, is now interpreted as being illegal according to the very same law.
If anything, this shows the illegality of an action depends more upon who you are than what you do. Best not to offend our corporate overlords, lest they have the FBI arrest you.
I know they are generally poor countries and the military advantage of nukes must seem appealing, but they could create WAY, WAY more nuisance for Americans if they would devote those resources to basically Pirate Bay-ing everything copy protected. It'd be hilarious if within hours of a new you-can't-copy-it scheme came out if pirated versions were available along with free tools and FAQs for making your own copies or subversion devices.
IIRC, this idea was also (better?) expressed in some science fiction novel I can't remember -- although it was China that basically ruined IP protections.
There are rumors out there that Nagra3 has already been hacked, though not confirmed to my knowledge. Back in the Nagra2 days, N2 had been hacked for years and it was a boon for pirates. Dish recently switched all it's channels to Nagra3 and pretty much overnight, all the pirates TV's went blank. Currently, the only 'solution' that exists for the pirates is via card sharing schemes where an actual subscriber(s) shares their card keys via an Internet Key Sharing (IKS) service. Though not technically a hack, IKS allows for the same capability. And so the cat and mouse continues.... Don't ask me how I know all this.
Depends on the algorithm involved. Often one way algorithms rely on certain actions being computably inconvenient, not impossible. ElGamel and RSA basically break down to the idea that it's easier to multiply really big primes, than it is to factor the resulting really big composite. But in an embedded situation like a dish network box, they might not have the computational power to outrun a hacker with a desktop, so a bit of obscurity helps in slowing down any attacks. There's a strong chance that it'll be hacked at some point, as witnessed by the fact that they're on Nagra 3, not Nagra 1, but the hope is to hold off any attacks as possible, and make attacks prohibitively expensive.
A satellite broadcaster has, for the most part, a one-way stream. If the encryption was completely open, all you would need to do to pirate the signal is to share a valid key with as many people as you'd like.
Paying customers need to be able to decrypt the stream, but they are not trustworthy credential holders.
It could be that the proprietary algorithm makes things weaker(certainly wouldn't be the first time); but it is also possible that the algorithm wasn't the issue. Any DRM system, no matter the algorithm, consists of giving the device the key(so that actual subscribers can play whatever the material is) while ordering the hardware to keep the key away from them. This is true whether the key is to some crap proprietary algorithm, or the finest in vetted standards. If you attack the hardware cleverly enough, you can get the key from a given piece of hardware. (whether or not a single key is of much use is another question, and does come back to the quality of the design)
The satellite companies ahve a very weak business model. It involves sending information into everyoens house. If consumers find another way to view the data in their house, then tough tits for the satellite company.
If consumers find another way to view the data in their house, then tough tits for the satellite company.
If businesses then go and market that way in the form of hacked decoder boxes... still 'tough tits' for the satellite company? In your legal frame of mind, I mean; it's obviously 'tough tits' for them in practice anyway and they have to introduce the next generation of encoding (or a different key.. whatever).
If businesses then go and market that way in the form of hacked decoder boxes... still 'tough tits' for the satellite company? In your legal frame of mind, I mean; it's obviously 'tough tits' for them in practice anyway and they have to introduce the next generation of encoding (or a different key.. whatever).
It took me a while to understand how the whole business works, but that's basically the way things work now.
Essentially the way you buy a 3rd party satellite receiver out of the box, it can only receive unencrypted satellite streams. But the decoder box manufacturers pay groups of coders to surreptitiously create and release software which allows the box to decrypt encrypted streams. For the last couple years, DirecTV has been on the as of yet uncracked N3, while Dish and Bellvue (Canada's main provider, with a signal that you can get throughout the US) have been on the cracked N2. A few months ago Bellvue switched to N3, and a week or so ago Dish completed its switch to N3.
In the meantime, a couple companies have implemented something they're calling Internet Key Sharing for their receivers - a system that shares decryption information from a paid subscription with that company's unauthorized receivers. I'm not sure of the technical details, but apparently this doesn't work as well as a true crack - and of course requires an internet connection to receive the frequently chancing keys.
Viewsat, who Kwak represents, doesn't currently have an Internet Key Sharing program, so, unless they can get someone to crack N3 - nobody's going to be buying their receivers.
So by your thinking, it's "tough tits" for the cable company if I steal cable from my neighbor? If I find a way to hack cellular communication and use it for free calling? If I hack into a company that uses wifi?
That would be true, if they were an idiot. Fortunately I don't think the grandparent poster is an idiot.
Hacking into a wifi signal goes beyond decrypting a data stream. You are at that point sending data with the intention of having a remote computer (for the access point is indeed a little computer) and having it do work for you. You are now making use of someone else's property without their permission. Worse, if they're using even a lame 64-bit WEP, they have clearly indicated that you are not welcome to us it, a sort of digital "No Trespassing" sign, so you can't claim it was accidental.
Cell phones are similar, although with an interesting twist: you're not going to be able to make a phone call without some phone's identity. And whoever paid for that phone's identity is going to get hit with the charges for your calls. In essence, you're engaging in fraud against someone else, making charges in their name. We don't need special phone crime laws to deal with this, basic fraud (specifically identity "theft") covers it fine.
Now, this does suggest that you're free to quietly snoop on other people's wifi and cell phones. One can take an ethical stand that puts the onus of securing one's wireless communications on the transmitter and receiver, not the government and third parties. Or put another way, one might say, "Feel free to snoop on my wifi. I use a secure VPN."
Splicing into the cable companies lines is a different case. If the cable doesn't enter your property, you've engaged in trespass and tampering with someone else's property. But we'll be generous and assume the cable crosses your property; it's common enough. While the land is yours, the physical cable itself is not. In much the same way that if I park in my local grocery store's lot, they have no right to siphon some gas out of my tank, you have no right to cut or otherwise modify their cable.
Now, if you were to engage in some cleverness to read the signal off the cable without harming the cable, I think you'd see some support from those arguing the "tough tits" case.
(In all of these cases I'm ignoring what is actually legal, since I believe the point is to argue what is ethical, and thus what the law should be, not what it is today.)
Uhhmm...Your analogy isn't really "analogous" to the situation.
If you came and parked your car in my front yard, am I at fault if I figure out how to drive it, and do so? Dish network is pumping signal into everybody's house, it isn't as if these people are breaking into their building or something.
I agree that they should be punished, what they were attempting to do was wrong, I just don't think that your analogy holds together.
Bad analogy. If I take his car that he parked on a public street, he is out a car. If I decode the signal broadcast into my house and view it, the satellite provider still has just as much signal as before, and their paying customers are not out anything. (I could argue that because I could then join in on water-cooler discussions on our favourite TV shows that it increases the value of the product they're marketing, but that's an extremely weak argument which I won't actually make.)
If you send out floppies with your software to everyone in a neighbourhood, and I reformat my floppy and use it for other purposes, that's tough tits for you. If you send out fliers that I subsequently rip up and make paper mache from, that's tough tits for you. If you broadcast something into my home uninvited, and I find a way to make use of that broadcast, that's tough tits for you.
There has to be a working business model here somewhere. I just don't think the current one is the right one. After all, it's far more trivial for the user to buy the official equipment than to build it themselves. And that's been true for many things: radios, TVs, computers, CB radios, HAM radios (I think - never looked into these). Still is true. Those who want to do it themselves? Cost of doing business, my friend. Compete with them like a grown capitalist.
Here's a better one:
If you own a drive in theater, and I live nearby with a direct line of site of the theater, and someone sells me a radio that I use to receive the audio from the movie, and I sit on my porch every night and enjoy a different movie, all for free.... Is this a crime?
Effectively, they are blanketing the country with their signal, and someone else is providing me a tool that allows me to watch and hear this signal. It's not my fault that the drive-in, in this example, doesn't shield their picture or opt to hard wire their speakers so that I cannot watch the movie, and even if they did do these measures, it would not be illegal for me to strategically place mirrors in my yard and use a directional mic to pick up sound from someone's car in order to continue to watch the movie.
So, really, the only issue at stake is the DMCA itself (the breaking of the encryption), and I, for one, do not agree with the premise behind this law.
If you want your content to be unwatchable by others, secure it properly. If others figure out a way to watch it anyways, that's your problem, not the laws (or at least I wish it were this way!).
The sole purpose of the DMCA Act and its friends was to protect certain particular corporate interests. While you may say that copyright infringers "deserve what they get", the fact is that there are perfeclty legal uses for a device that unscrambles encrypted signals... like time-shifting, for example. Why should you be forced to buy or lease a "DirecTV-approved" DVR, for example, when they would be cheaper on a competitive market?
When you have competitive markets, you see lower costs, and improved technology. Sure, it leads to companies having their encryption broken, and being forced to re-invent the wheel... which they should be doing anyway. In the long run, it drives improvements in the market and technology.
The DMCA is detrimental to the economy. The DMCA works to stifle innovation, in AMERICAN markets and for AMERICAN products.
Protectionist policies, like this one, are seldom a good idea. The free market always did better.
I am not blaming enforcement for enforcing the law, but it's a bad law. A very bad law.
The free market had nothing to do with 1929. You're ignoring the massive government intervention in multiple areas of the market which built and extended an unsustainable boom period leading (inevitably) to the crash, not to mention the continuation of those same policies after the crash, on a grander scale, which ultimately made the correction as long and difficult as it was.
That is to say, of course I agree that satellite makes good competition for cable, especially in the rural areas. What I don't agree on is whether the DMCA is or was necessary to keep the satellite companies around.
Back in the day, not so long ago, when it was not very difficult to bypass the scrambling of a satellite signal, only a small fraction of customers were actually doing so. There were even articles in mainstream electronics magazines on how to unscramble satellite... yet the number of people doing it remained at a tiny percentage. Yet even that small percentage made the satellite companies furious.
Yet they continued to grow and be very profitable. Unscrambling did not stop them or even slow them down. Dishes and receivers continued to get cheaper. And satellite programming slowly but steadily continued to get more expensive (just like cable).
I am not convinced that unscramblers harmed the satellite companies in any significant way. Now, they did have to do research... I remember for example when the Videocypher systems were replaced with Videocypher IIs. The satellite companies were trying to beat those darned hackers. And for the most part they kept ahead of the game. The number of people cracking the system were kept small, the satellite companies still continued to profit and grow, and satellite programs still slowly but steadily continued to get more expensive...
Personally, I believe that the reverse-engineers kept the industry on its toes, and HELPED, rather than hindered, its progress.
What has the DMCA done for the consumer? It is just as illegal to unscramble a cable signal as it is to unscramble a satellite signal. Now you are forced to buy equipment that is all "compatible" with a particular version of the satellite company's hardware (your DVR, for instance). You have to pay their prices for it. You do NOT have a choice. Today you can't for example, just get one kind of DVR and use it with either cable or satellite... you need a different one for each. You can't use one kind of unscrambler (adapter box) with either cable or satellite... you should be able to use a satellite receiver, and a separate decoder for both. But no. Duplication of hardware, and replication of similar technologies, all the way around.
How is this efficient? How has that kept prices down? Hint: it hasn't.
So now we have had some perfectly legal and very educational hobbies (building descrambler projects for fun) turned into crimes... and our prices are NOT lower, our products are NOT cheaper, our products do NOT interoperate...
You clearly have no idea how heavily regulated the banking/finance sector is. The problem is more like the unregulated tidbits swimming among the sea of regulation. Of COURSE those tidbits will get the focus of greedy market manipulators.
The finance sector, if it was actually unregulated, should not be lawless either. Introducing general laws around open disclosure, honest accounting, direct responsibility, etc. would go much further towards fixing out financial system. Unfortunately that means companies would have to be more honest and THAT means less profit. Less profit means shareholders suffer - not the 'i have 50k or 250k invested' people but the 'my 3 portfolios total 350million or we manage 20billion in portfolios' who have direct lines to politicians, lawmakers, judges and so on. It's not tin-hat conspiracy, it's people using the means available to protect their own and not caring who else it hurts.
Wait (Score:3, Interesting)
Why aren't downloaders put in jail then?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What FBI Warning? (Score:3, Funny)
I don't remember in my lifetime watching a video tape that didn't include the FBI copyright warning about this
Clearly you got your video tapes out of the trunk of a car on a different corner than my parents did.
Re:Not wrong, but sloppy with "copyright" word (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Wait (Score:5, Informative)
Title 17 (AKA the copyright chapter of the U.S. federal statutes) provides for both civil and criminal penalties for infringement/circumvention.
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html [copyright.gov]
See section 506 for criminal penalties.
Most of the time, copyright owners are left to fend for themselves in court by bringing civil suits. That is why you typically only see civil suits against small-time copyright infingers such as serial uploaders, etc.
But apparently when you get into the high-end satellite decoder cracking business, you get on the DOJ radar. That is when you go to jail.
Now you may have noticed that the actual charge is "conspiracy to violate the DMCA" and the actual statute on the face of the indictment is 18 USC 371.
(http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/371.html). This statute is used to prosecute conspiracy to commit a federal crime (i.e. violation of title 17).
Hope that clears that up.
Parent
Re:Wait (Score:4, Insightful)
I know this has been used to put serious criminals away, and is probably a great tool in preventing crime, but prosecuting for conspiracy is still a nasty idea. I think that if I had to describe the boundary between acceptable government behavior and police state, it would be right after this.
Parent
cracker? (Score:5, Funny)
CONSPIRACY to violate a law? (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, really... That's like awarding a Nobel Prize for *Attempted* Chemistry!
Re:CONSPIRACY to violate a law? (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was arrested as a juvenile and got charged with 2 moderately serious charges, I had 2 counts of conspiracy, which were also felonies, added for "thinking" about doing it before I actually did it.
Apparently in our justice system unless you just spontaneously do a crime with no premeditation whatsoever you are gonna get slapped with a charge for thinking about it on top of the charge itself. To this day I don't understand it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, that's like awarding a sentence for "attempted" murder.
Or should we always wait until irreversible damage is done before we prosecute criminals? You'll find that every legal jurisdiction in the world has some concept of conspiracy culpability.
I'm thinking... (Score:3, Informative)
...that (a) this is a good thing (commercial operation) but that (b) the DMCA wasn't necessary at all. Aren't there theft of service laws already on the books for receiving private/pay TV services without paying for them? And, since this isn't actually a DMCA violation case, but rather a conspiracy to violate the DMCA, wouldn't it be just as much a conspiracy to illegally receive service?
Oblig, (Score:4, Funny)
<Sideshow_Bob>Conspiring to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act... Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel Prize for conspiracy chemistry?</Sideshow_Bob>
Sounds like my friend (Score:4, Interesting)
He pirated the service for about two years. Funny thing was, about a year after he stopped he got hit with a lawsuit. He transferred as much stuff as he could out of his own name and braced for the inevitable. He only got away because he had a friend who knew some influential people. Incidentally, my friend his now his friend's personal no-cost 24/7 concierge tech support.
Anyway, he'd get these calls from people and he'd try to deny that he knew what to do. If someone pressed the issue (usually it was his friends or old co-workers telling others who could help) he tried to do the "scared straight" thing. Funny thing is, some of them would get mad at him for not helping. So many people are willing to throw away financial security just so they don't have to pay for the NFL Channel.
Good (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I would argue that making personal receivers shouldn't be a crime, nor should breaking encryption. Making it a crime to prop up a bad business model isn't a good reason.
I have mixed feelings about this. (Score:4, Insightful)
I consider the DMCA to be one of the most unjust and cruel laws the USA has. I sympathize with the people doing this to the following limited extent: If you are a subscriber to a service, you should be able to use any compatible QAM enabled equipment you wish.
This is a little different because people who violate the DMCA like this usually are doing so to secure their fair use rights. These people just wanted to outright steal the service. So thats bad. However, two things.
Why are police involved in this sort of thing? Well, really, although in theory, violating the DMCA is a civil action, but around 2003, the government decided that all copyright infringement was criminal. Because the Intellectual property 'scam' is all that the US has against the Chinese, the US has decided to criminalize copyright infringement to create laws to fight the Chinese with.
The DMCA needs to be repealed, but I don't see that happening unless there are large demonstrations. People are generally too stupid to care. (I really would like to see anti-DMCA slogans with people marching by the millions.)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Insightful? Sorry, copyright infringement was made criminal more than 30 years ago. In the 70s, at least. Which if you check your history, was when China was undergoing the Cultural Revolution, persecuting the intellectuals and idolizing the peasant lifestyle.
So yeah, I don't think it was China that inspired criminalizing copyright infringement.
I don't know why it posted the previous comment anonymously. Here it is again, under my name...
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot... (Score:5, Interesting)
Although it was eliminated by dubious judicial means shortly after becoming law, the DMCA allows for reverse-engineering for the purposes of interoperability. The entire market for these devices is based on non-interoperability. Because if the CAM became truly portable and emulated fully in software, it's a tiny step to a digital video recorder that is completely under user control receiving HDTV. Which is actually the main selling point here. They took our VCRs away, and now we're attacking people who want to get them back the only way possible; At this point it doesn't matter whether his intent was to sell descrambler boxes or not, or anyone's, because that's the only way you're getting that functionality. An irony, really, that you could be paying the same fees as someone with an "approved" box, accessing the same content, and yet wind up in jail because your equipment wasn't up to the provider's specifications... Namely, that you wanted to "time shift" the content.
Damn criminals, flaunting their freedoms in front of us... They get what they deserve, eh?
Re:Whiskey Tango Foxtrot... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not for interoperability. The goal of this operation was to create smart cards that allowed people to view channels they did not pay for and to allow people who do not have an account to view the channels. The goal was to facilitate theft of service, not interoperability.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You can still get "Tunerless" VCRs and DVD Burners. They take Component and Composite inputs and will record whatever they see onto DVD. But they really aren't able to control the box any.
Component and composite outputs on the back of every descrambler out there will spit it out in standard definition. You can't record HD signals out of them -- many won't even downgrade the signal, it'll just be dead. Getting high definition on any of those requires an HDMI hookup, which is encrypted, and therefore "tunerless" VCRs and DVD burners can't be used. Even getting signals OTA (not scrambled) doesn't do you much good because the tuners are usually integrated into the television. I haven't tuners be
Re:Whiskey Tango Foxtrot... (Score:5, Informative)
Funny thing is, you can record high-def quite easily, you just need to purchase two legal products.
First, you buy a Hauppage HD-PVR [hauppage.com], about the only consumer-level high-def recording box that handles up to 1080i via component inputs. Hey look, Myth supports it!
Now, for pesky HDMI... you buy a HD Fury 2 [hdfury2.com], which takes HDMI (including HDCP!) and converts it to either RGB or Component outputs, and while it handles 1080p, the HD-PVR only has 1080i.
Now you have a high-def PVR solution, MythTV compatible.
Alternate methods is if your cablebox supports Firewire, and can output the high-def content over it (I've seen 'em where the SD content is output over Firewire, but the HD content isn't), but most satellite boxes don't have this, unfortunately.
Parent
Group keying and revocation... (Score:5, Interesting)
These days, the model is very much based on some really funky group keying and key revocation, which allows the sattelite provider to revoke individual keys because each receiver has a unique key rather than a group sharing a common key.
Among other things, this makes piracy MUCH harder, because the sattelite providers can buy pirated receivers, take them to the lab, find out the key used, and revoke it, disabling that entire batch of pirated receivers without affecting normal customers.
Re:Group keying and revocation... (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, but isn't said reverse engineering a violation of the DMCA itself? The pirate recievers are electronic gadgets, built by proprietary companies. If the law doesn't cut both ways, it's a bad law and needs to go.
Parent
Crime depends on who you are... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm thinking that if a security researcher had done the same thing, he would not be in jail. Nor would a large corporation.
But a set top box importer does it, and suddenly it's a federal crime.
The most troublesome part about this is that engineers routinely reverse engineer the work of others for the sake of creating compatible products - an exemption the DMCA explicitly allows. Perhaps the company wanted to offer a cheaper STB to Dish, and undercut the competition. Or perhaps they planned to sell directly to the black market, engaging in fraud. The act of reverse engineering a component tells us nothing about the company's intentions.
I mention this because this very thing was done to Lexmark printers a few years ago. Instead of getting arrested, the manufacturer of competing cartridges was sued under the DMCA; the case went all the way to the SCOTUS, and Lexmark lost. It would appear this would set precedent regarding the legality of reverse engineering for the sake of creating interoperable products, but strangely, the FBI seems not to follow precedent. I find it odd that an activity which was legal and sanctioned by the DMCA - and even supported by the Supreme Court, is now interpreted as being illegal according to the very same law.
If anything, this shows the illegality of an action depends more upon who you are than what you do. Best not to offend our corporate overlords, lest they have the FBI arrest you.
Why don't the North Koreans and Iranians do this? (Score:3, Interesting)
I know they are generally poor countries and the military advantage of nukes must seem appealing, but they could create WAY, WAY more nuisance for Americans if they would devote those resources to basically Pirate Bay-ing everything copy protected. It'd be hilarious if within hours of a new you-can't-copy-it scheme came out if pirated versions were available along with free tools and FAQs for making your own copies or subversion devices.
IIRC, this idea was also (better?) expressed in some science fiction novel I can't remember -- although it was China that basically ruined IP protections.
FTA (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Proprietary algorithms (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A satellite broadcaster has, for the most part, a one-way stream. If the encryption was completely open, all you would need to do to pirate the signal is to share a valid key with as many people as you'd like.
Paying customers need to be able to decrypt the stream, but they are not trustworthy credential holders.
Re:Proprietary algorithms (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I get it, so it's about how they secure the key, not really about the algorithm used.
Re:I agree with the feds on this one (Score:4, Insightful)
Serves them right, while I'm against the DMCA trying to profit off of someone else's work is not right. They deserve what they get
Sounds like entrapment to me [wikipedia.org].
(I posted this link because it sounds like the Feds did to the cracker the same thing they did to Mr. DeLorean)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Oh my bad... Kwak was the one offering the money and not the other way around.
Apparently my dyslexia is bad right now.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My bad. I read the summary backwards. It sounded like the FBI offered Kwak the money.
But I got modded up so I guess other people read it wrong too.
Re:I agree with the feds on this one (Score:5, Insightful)
Breaking encryption should never be a crime.
The satellite companies ahve a very weak business model. It involves sending information into everyoens house. If consumers find another way to view the data in their house, then tough tits for the satellite company.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If businesses then go and market that way in the form of hacked decoder boxes... still 'tough tits' for the satellite company? In your legal frame of mind, I mean; it's obviously 'tough tits' for them in practice anyway and they have to introduce the next generation of encoding (or a different key.. whatever).
Re:I agree with the feds on this one (Score:4, Informative)
If businesses then go and market that way in the form of hacked decoder boxes... still 'tough tits' for the satellite company? In your legal frame of mind, I mean; it's obviously 'tough tits' for them in practice anyway and they have to introduce the next generation of encoding (or a different key.. whatever).
It took me a while to understand how the whole business works, but that's basically the way things work now.
Essentially the way you buy a 3rd party satellite receiver out of the box, it can only receive unencrypted satellite streams. But the decoder box manufacturers pay groups of coders to surreptitiously create and release software which allows the box to decrypt encrypted streams. For the last couple years, DirecTV has been on the as of yet uncracked N3, while Dish and Bellvue (Canada's main provider, with a signal that you can get throughout the US) have been on the cracked N2. A few months ago Bellvue switched to N3, and a week or so ago Dish completed its switch to N3.
In the meantime, a couple companies have implemented something they're calling Internet Key Sharing for their receivers - a system that shares decryption information from a paid subscription with that company's unauthorized receivers. I'm not sure of the technical details, but apparently this doesn't work as well as a true crack - and of course requires an internet connection to receive the frequently chancing keys.
Viewsat, who Kwak represents, doesn't currently have an Internet Key Sharing program, so, unless they can get someone to crack N3 - nobody's going to be buying their receivers.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I agree with the feds on this one (Score:4, Insightful)
That would be true, if they were an idiot. Fortunately I don't think the grandparent poster is an idiot.
Hacking into a wifi signal goes beyond decrypting a data stream. You are at that point sending data with the intention of having a remote computer (for the access point is indeed a little computer) and having it do work for you. You are now making use of someone else's property without their permission. Worse, if they're using even a lame 64-bit WEP, they have clearly indicated that you are not welcome to us it, a sort of digital "No Trespassing" sign, so you can't claim it was accidental.
Cell phones are similar, although with an interesting twist: you're not going to be able to make a phone call without some phone's identity. And whoever paid for that phone's identity is going to get hit with the charges for your calls. In essence, you're engaging in fraud against someone else, making charges in their name. We don't need special phone crime laws to deal with this, basic fraud (specifically identity "theft") covers it fine.
Now, this does suggest that you're free to quietly snoop on other people's wifi and cell phones. One can take an ethical stand that puts the onus of securing one's wireless communications on the transmitter and receiver, not the government and third parties. Or put another way, one might say, "Feel free to snoop on my wifi. I use a secure VPN."
Splicing into the cable companies lines is a different case. If the cable doesn't enter your property, you've engaged in trespass and tampering with someone else's property. But we'll be generous and assume the cable crosses your property; it's common enough. While the land is yours, the physical cable itself is not. In much the same way that if I park in my local grocery store's lot, they have no right to siphon some gas out of my tank, you have no right to cut or otherwise modify their cable.
Now, if you were to engage in some cleverness to read the signal off the cable without harming the cable, I think you'd see some support from those arguing the "tough tits" case.
(In all of these cases I'm ignoring what is actually legal, since I believe the point is to argue what is ethical, and thus what the law should be, not what it is today.)
Parent
Re:I agree with the feds on this one (Score:5, Insightful)
>And if I find a way to get into your car that you parked on a public street and drive it away, tough tits for you.
What if I find a way to make use of the constant stream of cars that you put in my living room?
Parent
Re:I agree with the feds on this one (Score:4, Interesting)
Uhhmm...Your analogy isn't really "analogous" to the situation.
If you came and parked your car in my front yard, am I at fault if I figure out how to drive it, and do so? Dish network is pumping signal into everybody's house, it isn't as if these people are breaking into their building or something.
I agree that they should be punished, what they were attempting to do was wrong, I just don't think that your analogy holds together.
Parent
Re:I agree with the feds on this one (Score:4, Insightful)
Bad analogy. If I take his car that he parked on a public street, he is out a car. If I decode the signal broadcast into my house and view it, the satellite provider still has just as much signal as before, and their paying customers are not out anything. (I could argue that because I could then join in on water-cooler discussions on our favourite TV shows that it increases the value of the product they're marketing, but that's an extremely weak argument which I won't actually make.)
If you send out floppies with your software to everyone in a neighbourhood, and I reformat my floppy and use it for other purposes, that's tough tits for you. If you send out fliers that I subsequently rip up and make paper mache from, that's tough tits for you. If you broadcast something into my home uninvited, and I find a way to make use of that broadcast, that's tough tits for you.
There has to be a working business model here somewhere. I just don't think the current one is the right one. After all, it's far more trivial for the user to buy the official equipment than to build it themselves. And that's been true for many things: radios, TVs, computers, CB radios, HAM radios (I think - never looked into these). Still is true. Those who want to do it themselves? Cost of doing business, my friend. Compete with them like a grown capitalist.
Parent
Re:I agree with the feds on this one (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's a better one:
If you own a drive in theater, and I live nearby with a direct line of site of the theater, and someone sells me a radio that I use to receive the audio from the movie, and I sit on my porch every night and enjoy a different movie, all for free.... Is this a crime?
Effectively, they are blanketing the country with their signal, and someone else is providing me a tool that allows me to watch and hear this signal. It's not my fault that the drive-in, in this example, doesn't shield their picture or opt to hard wire their speakers so that I cannot watch the movie, and even if they did do these measures, it would not be illegal for me to strategically place mirrors in my yard and use a directional mic to pick up sound from someone's car in order to continue to watch the movie.
So, really, the only issue at stake is the DMCA itself (the breaking of the encryption), and I, for one, do not agree with the premise behind this law.
If you want your content to be unwatchable by others, secure it properly. If others figure out a way to watch it anyways, that's your problem, not the laws (or at least I wish it were this way!).
Parent
Re:I agree with the feds on this one (Score:5, Informative)
What's your idea? Other than to let all delivery of TV signals slip into an unsustainable business model of "free for all" ideology, of course.
The right to do math is much more important than the privilege of watching TV. If preserving that right means the death of satellite TV, oh well.
Parent
I disagree with the Feds on this one, 100% (Score:5, Insightful)
When you have competitive markets, you see lower costs, and improved technology. Sure, it leads to companies having their encryption broken, and being forced to re-invent the wheel... which they should be doing anyway. In the long run, it drives improvements in the market and technology.
The DMCA is detrimental to the economy. The DMCA works to stifle innovation, in AMERICAN markets and for AMERICAN products.
Protectionist policies, like this one, are seldom a good idea. The free market always did better.
I am not blaming enforcement for enforcing the law, but it's a bad law. A very bad law.
Parent
Re:I disagree with the Feds on this one, 100% (Score:4, Insightful)
Ummm... 1929? Market failure in farmland ownership/food growth, massive bank failures due to poor loans?
Parent
Re:I disagree with the Feds on this one, 100% (Score:5, Informative)
The free market had nothing to do with 1929. You're ignoring the massive government intervention in multiple areas of the market which built and extended an unsustainable boom period leading (inevitably) to the crash, not to mention the continuation of those same policies after the crash, on a grander scale, which ultimately made the correction as long and difficult as it was.
Parent
Re:I disagree with the Feds on this one, 100% (Score:5, Insightful)
That is to say, of course I agree that satellite makes good competition for cable, especially in the rural areas. What I don't agree on is whether the DMCA is or was necessary to keep the satellite companies around.
Back in the day, not so long ago, when it was not very difficult to bypass the scrambling of a satellite signal, only a small fraction of customers were actually doing so. There were even articles in mainstream electronics magazines on how to unscramble satellite... yet the number of people doing it remained at a tiny percentage. Yet even that small percentage made the satellite companies furious.
Yet they continued to grow and be very profitable. Unscrambling did not stop them or even slow them down. Dishes and receivers continued to get cheaper. And satellite programming slowly but steadily continued to get more expensive (just like cable).
I am not convinced that unscramblers harmed the satellite companies in any significant way. Now, they did have to do research... I remember for example when the Videocypher systems were replaced with Videocypher IIs. The satellite companies were trying to beat those darned hackers. And for the most part they kept ahead of the game. The number of people cracking the system were kept small, the satellite companies still continued to profit and grow, and satellite programs still slowly but steadily continued to get more expensive...
Personally, I believe that the reverse-engineers kept the industry on its toes, and HELPED, rather than hindered, its progress.
What has the DMCA done for the consumer? It is just as illegal to unscramble a cable signal as it is to unscramble a satellite signal. Now you are forced to buy equipment that is all "compatible" with a particular version of the satellite company's hardware (your DVR, for instance). You have to pay their prices for it. You do NOT have a choice. Today you can't for example, just get one kind of DVR and use it with either cable or satellite... you need a different one for each. You can't use one kind of unscrambler (adapter box) with either cable or satellite... you should be able to use a satellite receiver, and a separate decoder for both. But no. Duplication of hardware, and replication of similar technologies, all the way around.
How is this efficient? How has that kept prices down? Hint: it hasn't.
So now we have had some perfectly legal and very educational hobbies (building descrambler projects for fun) turned into crimes... and our prices are NOT lower, our products are NOT cheaper, our products do NOT interoperate...
The free market did it better.
Parent
Re:I disagree with the Feds on this one, 100% (Score:4, Insightful)
You clearly have no idea how heavily regulated the banking/finance sector is. The problem is more like the unregulated tidbits swimming among the sea of regulation. Of COURSE those tidbits will get the focus of greedy market manipulators.
The finance sector, if it was actually unregulated, should not be lawless either. Introducing general laws around open disclosure, honest accounting, direct responsibility, etc. would go much further towards fixing out financial system. Unfortunately that means companies would have to be more honest and THAT means less profit. Less profit means shareholders suffer - not the 'i have 50k or 250k invested' people but the 'my 3 portfolios total 350million or we manage 20billion in portfolios' who have direct lines to politicians, lawmakers, judges and so on. It's not tin-hat conspiracy, it's people using the means available to protect their own and not caring who else it hurts.
Parent
Re:Three arrested for conspiring to steal cable (Score:4, Informative)
Wait wait wait...can someone please explain how the first post to the article was modded redundant? That just doesn't make sense to me...
Redundant means "information was already there", not "post has already been made".
I'm not saying I agree with the moderation, I'm just answering your question as to how a first post can be 'redundant'.
Parent
Re:Three arrested for conspiring to steal cable (Score:4, Funny)
If you want to steal satellite, you'll have to build a spaceship first.
Parent