~ Some Shit That Should Piss You Off~
7/25/01

Similar to my laundry list of hate, this is my catalog of bullshit perpetrated by companies, governments, and others in positions of power and influence.

A few recent developments that should piss you off:

1. The Motion Picture Association of America is suing a small independent magazine because they posted computer code on the Internet. The code was written by a 15 year old Norwegian boy to enable him to play a DVD on a computer running Linux. (Linux is a free operating system that is often used as an alternative to Microsoft Windows.)

The MPAA sued the magazine under a law enacted by Congress in 1998 that forbids anyone to distribute any type of "circumvention device." The law, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), if applied in this manner essentially robs individuals of "fair use" of products they have lawfully purchased. The "fair use" doctrine of copyright generally offers you a few protections: if you bought it lawfully, you can use it how you want (ie, you can make a tape from your CD so you can play it in the car.), if you are an academic or someone performing research, you can take it apart, reverse engineer, or otherwise inspect the item in question (ie, you could set up a computer at your lab and hack into it to determine the weaknesses in the operating systems and then publish the details to further knowledge in the community anout potential weaknesses in the OS.) Anyway, without going to in depth, the MPAA has taken to strong-arming anyone who publishes the code and has been fairly successful. Most site operators or publishers just dropped the code and acquiesced under the threat of lawsuits. Luckily, 2600.com stood their ground and issued a big "Fuck Off" to the MPAA.

The case is plodding through the court system and their have been developments both pro and con. Get more info about the case, the DMCA, and the ramifications of this terrible law at 2600.com, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Wired.com.

2. More DMCA Lawsuits and Arrests
This is even better than the 2600 case. In a nutshell, a Russian programmer developed a software application while lawfully employed by a software company in Russia. The program decrypts Adobe's E-Books so that they can be played on the Linux OS. (There are obviously other applications both encompassing fair use and malicious but I have not the time to discuss them here.) The programmer came to th US to speak at a convention in Las Vegas describing the technology for decrypting the E-Book. Following the convention he was promptly arrested by the USDOJ and jailed under section 1201 of the DMCA. Pressure originally was brought on the DOJ by Adobe but the have since rescinded their support of the prosecution. (Likely realizing what a huge PR flaw it is to jail a computer programmer when you sell the bulk of your software to computer programmers.)

Anyway, the crux of the story is that the US government has no business arresting a Russian citizen for doing something that is 100% legal in his country just because he enters the states and it may be a crime here. Can you imagine the outrage if a US citizen was arrested abroad for creating a legal website or program here? Maybe you publish an off-color online 'zine like this that is deemed obscene by authorities in the Czech Republic. Upon landing you are jailed for your blasphemous thoughts and subverting the Chechan government. What?!? Could you imagine this? The US government would demand justice and state without question that because what I did was protected in the US and the activity was conducted in the US that the Chechans have no right to hold me. But we do the same thing.

Simply the DMCA has to go. There is no worse law than this on the books at this writing.