Draft of Rep. Berman's bill authorizes anti-P2P hacking

Daniel Golding dgolding at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 26 14:23:49 UTC 2002


I wouldn't bet on these guys holding off for "liability" reasons. They have
vast legions of lawyers, and a shortage of good sense, as well as a very
loose grasp of the technology.

Also, in the case of the Satellite TV Cards, it is a much clearer thing. You
attach unauthorized equipment to a utility of some type, and you run the
risk of damaging your equipment. The Satellite companies can realistically
get away with this because they are really limiting the amount of damage
they are doing, and because they have an extremely high accuracy rate. And
even if they screw up, and zap a real subscriber's card, they can make them
whole through a usage credit - no permanent harm. If they were causing
people's TV's to implode, they wouldn't be able to get away with it.

This sort of heavy-handed action by the anti-p2p folks will backfire in the
end. The folks we should be saving our indignation for are the congressmen
who have sold themselves to the RIAA/MPAA/BSA - Hollings, Berman, etc. These
guys are pretty close to wholly owned subsidiaries of their respective
patron industries.

- Daniel Golding

> Richard A Steenbergen Said....
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 02:37:15PM -0700, Rowland, Alan  D wrote:
> >
> > I fully agree this is Not Good (TM), hence the BAD in my
> response. Having
> > said that, satellite providers periodically 'kill' hacked
> access cards on
> > equipment in the user's home with no legal ramifications. How
> would this be
> > significantly different?  Waiving the fourth amendment flag is
> just FUD in
> > this case.
>
> Satellite access cards are technically the property of the individual
> companies and are not allowed to be sold, so if they want to send down
> some code which disables your access to their system they are allowed.
> Causing damage to someone's receiver on the other hand, would be bad mojo.
>
> However, someone's computer is NOT their property, nothing on it belongs
> to them (except maybe the copyrighted material of the clients they
> represent :P), not even a service you are getting from them.
>
> I can't imagine they would actually follow through with this though, all
> it takes is one incident where they cause financial harm to someone with
> an mp3 they misidentify and their highground is gone. Then again, I can't
> imagine congress being so massively stupid either, so I suppose anything
> is possible.
>
> --
> Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
> PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177  (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA  B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)
>




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