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> 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 potenti
by 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]