10 ms·
Fun fact: this is one of the few situations in the US where a prosecutor could claim that this is criminal speech (though I hope and trust they would not, and
by dannyobrien 1y ago
Fun fact: this is one of the few situations in the US where a prosecutor could claim that this is criminal speech (though I hope and trust they would not, and if it did it would get thrown out by any court respecting the First Amendment).
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-uses-and-other-speech-violates-first-amendment-eff-argues https://www.eff.org/press/releases/licensing-scheme-fair-use...
- semiquaver 1y ago> they made it against the law to even tell anyone. I’m no fan of the DMCA, but I am pretty skeptical of your apparent claim that this post itself is a potential violation of 17 USC § 1201. Obviously the act of circumvention itself qualifies, as does the code in the GitHub repository the post links to, but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually making code available)? https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 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.
- bee_rider 1y agoI wonder how that will if/when LLMs get to the point where they can turn a blog post about a DRM liberation into code. (Are they there already?) These sorts of code are usually pretty short, right? It isn’t as if it needs to be maintainable or have a nice GUI.
- semiquaver 1y agoI was thinking along the same lines. One of the many places that laws are going to have to catch up to reality. I’m 90% sure that current frontier models could turn this post into a working implementation with a good feedback loop.
- jMyles 1y ago> that laws are going to have to catch up to reality 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. https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free
- SanjayMehta 1y agoI tried this and got plausible looking python code based on just the web page link. Can't test it as I'm travelling without my laptop.
- qingcharles 1y agoThey are there. Don't wanna say too much because of the DMCA. Worked on some ebook stuff recently. I even had some ebooks that had unknown encryption passwords on them. Claude came up with a 137-step plan to figure out the passwords and after about 50 different combinations of data it found the matching one.
- LoganDark 1y agoThe post includes a link to a GitHub repository containing code to circumvent the DRM, which probably counts as "technology" and "component".
- semiquaver 1y agoI covered that in my comment. It’s likely the code violates § 1201 but I doubt the post does. And linking to infringing content is not legally the same thing as publishing it.
- zerocrates 1y ago2600 got enjoined from linking to DeCSS and that got upheld on appeal, on the basis that linking violated the DMCA's anti-trafficking provisions. From the district court case: > 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)
- pm2r 1y agoI think that the link is already gone
- chatmasta 1y agoWhere’s the link? Did he remove it, or am I missing some clever obfuscation of his own? (I’m on mobile so maybe the link isn’t obvious.)
- LoganDark 1y agoYes, looks like it's been removed. It used to be at https://github.com/PixelMelt/amazon_book_downloader https://github.com/PixelMelt/amazon_book_downloader
- conception 1y agoI see you don’t remember the dvd decryption key ordeal.
- semiquaver 1y agoI remember it well. DeCSS was code, not prose. I maintain that an English description of the decryption process without the key would not be liable.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- MengerSponge 1y ago09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 BF REDACTED 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
- dbdr 1y agoEven more obvious in decimal: 13256278887989457651018865901401704639 REDACTED 13256278887989457651018865901401704641
- dylan604 1y agobeen there, done that, got the t-shirt
- robinsonb5 1y agoDownvotes from people who've never seen a DeCSS T-shirt?
- sroussey 1y agoIt does prevent linking to code though.
- Manuel_D 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd. Found not guilty, but he was charged and tried.
- semiquaver 1y agoBeing found not guilty supports my contention. But that case was about distributing circumvention software, not traditional speech. Obviously distributing software that bypasses DRM is directly addressed by the law.
- amake 1y agoThe Process is the Punishment
- chimeracoder 1y ago> Being found not guilty supports my contention. 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.
- lutusp 1y ago> Being found not guilty supports my contention. 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.
- braiamp 1y ago> A cynical modern legal strategy is to bombard people with frivolous legal actions that only the well-heeled can afford Why only describe them and not go for the easiest example: Nintendo.
- amiga386 1y ago> but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually making code available)? 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._Corley 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/ http://lemuria.org/~tom/DeCSS/" and nothing else. Criminalised speech.
- immibis 1y agoThe USA has a lot of criminalised speech, despite the 1A. The most obvious historical example is "I am going to assassinate the president tomorrow at noon", but recently there have been a lot more things you can't say, such as "Fuck Donald Trump" which got someone arrested and deported.
- chrisco255 1y agoOne can have a visa revoked for any arbitrary reason, as they are a guest in the country and not a citizen. But yes, obviously serious threats of violence are not protected speech.
- mycall 1y agoI wouldn't be surprised if publishing circumvention code would be argued in court to be violence against earning money for political oriented books (spending money is a necessary and inseparable part of political communication).
- ranger_danger 1y agorelevant article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
- Sammi 1y ago
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago> Obviously the act of circumvention itself qualifies, as does the code in the GitHub repository the post links to, but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually making code available)? 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoThat law should be changed. If you distribute your intellectual property with DRM, that work should forever be exempt from copyright protection. You get to choose one or the other, but never both, because DRM effectively removes the work from the public domain in perpetuity. Even accidentally releasing a demo or preview with DRM should invalidate copyright on that software/movie/book/whatever.
- matheusmoreira 1y agoNot extreme enough. Copyright itself should be abolished straight up. It's the information age, the AI age. Artificial limitations nonsense like copyright does nothing but hold us back. Even the corporations think so: they violate copyright at massive scales on a daily basis just to train their AI models. Why rules for us but not for them? That particular hipocrisy should have caused the elimination of copyright worldwide.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago> Copyright itself should be abolished straight up. I wouldn't go that far. 18 months is long enough though.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- charcircuit 1y ago>Why rules for us but not for them? 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.
- matheusmoreira 1y agoHow could training of AI models possibly be considered fair use?
- mNovak 1y agoTangentially related to the question of legality of prose describing otherwise illegal instructions, I'm reminded of the epic DeCSS haiku [1]. (CSS here being 90's era DVD DRM). [1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt
- dylan604 1y agoContent Scrambling System vs Cascading Style Sheets I do remember trying to learn CSS for web definitely made me feel like it was a Cascading Style Scrambling
- theandrewbailey 1y agoLayout engines back then were pretty bad, and often resulted in scrambled web pages.
- prmoustache 1y agoOTOH this is not DRM nor copy protection. It is just obfuscation.
- stavros 1y agoAnd that can be your legal argument while you await sentencing!
- juvoly 1y agoIndeed. If DRM had the technical merits to protect against copying, why would we need a (law like DMCA) against tinkering with that technology?
- moefh 1y agoEh, I wouldn't be so sure. Reading the DMCA, their code does seem to do what the law says you can't do[1]: "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title [...]" with these definitions[2]: (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 think (A) pretty clearly applies: the glyphs being randomized in each request obviously counts as being "scrambled", the method used by the author with the hashes clearly descrambles them by matching the provided SVG images to the letters rendered with the book's font. 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 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840&height=800&iframe=true&def_id=17-USC-1838631189-2041315756&term_occur=999&term_src=title:17:chapter:12:section:1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...
- 1y ago
- fainpul 1y agoRemember when it was illegal to export strong cryptography from the US? There was no law to restrict that, so they just made something up. It basically went like this: 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_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
- lostlogin 1y agoOn the upside, when my Dad bought a G4 Mac, the brief block on exporting it due to its dangerous power was maximum nerd points.
- 0xEF 1y agoNot that I agree with it, but I do see the logic. The word "munitions" can be replaced with "materials," since it literally refers to materials used for warfare. That isn't necessarily limited to things that shoot or explode. It's a brilliant bit of pedantry if you step back and think about it.
- amelius 1y agoSo it can refer to people and what is in their minds too? Anyway I'm not surprised. This kind of pedantry is what lawyers do for a living.
- p0w3n3d 1y agoI wonder when/where did they make it against the law to even tell anyone. I remember(1) time when law guys made illegal (in US i believe? or EU?) creating software that circumvents certain DRMs, so I made plans to create a txt DRM that would rely on having a preambule like this : !copy !save if there is a !copy the text editor would not allow you to copy the text (like the acrobat reader does), and !save would not allow saving locally (this is even stupider) 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.
- acka 1y agoYour idea has a precedent. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- p0w3n3d 1y agoYeah, I think this or another similar "copy protection" was my inspiration...