Posted on 06/17/2003 2:54:06 PM PDT by Jean S
WASHINGTON (AP) - The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday he favors developing new technology to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet.
The surprise remarks by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, during a hearing on copyright abuses represent a dramatic escalation in the frustrating battle by industry executives and lawmakers in Washington against illegal music downloads.
During a discussion on methods to frustrate computer users who illegally exchange music and movie files over the Internet, Hatch asked technology executives about ways to damage computers involved in such file trading. Legal experts have said any such attack would violate federal anti-hacking laws.
"No one is interested in destroying anyone's computer," replied Randy Saaf of MediaDefender Inc., a secretive Los Angeles company that builds technology to disrupt music downloads. One technique deliberately downloads pirated material very slowly so other users can't.
"I'm interested," Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."
The senator acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."
"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions, he said.
"There's no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws," Hatch said.
Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., who has been active in copyright debates in Washington, urged Hatch to reconsider. Boucher described Hatch's role as chairman of the Judiciary Committee as "a very important position, so when Senator Hatch indicates his views with regard to a particular subject, we all take those views very seriously."
Some legal experts suggested Hatch's provocative remarks were more likely intended to compel technology and music executives to work faster toward ways to protect copyrights online than to signal forthcoming legislation.
"It's just the frustration of those who are looking at enforcing laws that are proving very hard to enforce," said Orin Kerr, a former Justice Department cybercrimes prosecutor and associate professor at George Washington University law school.
The entertainment industry has gradually escalated its fight against Internet file-traders, targeting the most egregious pirates with civil lawsuits. The Recording Industry Association of America recently won a federal court decision making it significantly easier to identify and track consumers - even those hiding behind aliases - using popular Internet file-sharing software.
Kerr predicted it was "extremely unlikely" for Congress to approve a hacking exemption for copyright owners, partly because of risks of collateral damage when innocent users might be wrongly targeted.
"It wouldn't work," Kerr said. "There's no way of limiting the damage."
Last year, Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., ignited a firestorm across the Internet over a proposal to give the entertainment industry new powers to disrupt downloads of pirated music and movies. It would have lifted civil and criminal penalties against entertainment companies for disabling, diverting or blocking the trading of pirated songs and movies on the Internet.
But Berman, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary panel on the Internet and intellectual property, always has maintained that his proposal wouldn't permit hacker-style attacks by the industry on Internet users.
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On the Net: Sen. Hatch: http://hatch.senate.gov
AP-ES-06-17-03 1716EDT
Then flash the bad BIOS chip in the new motherboard.
This will work if you've got a system that has a removable BIOS chip, but most system boards today don't have that an an option, especially the clones. Thankfully, Compaq workstations have been out for a while with a firmware flash capability that can't be disabled (probably because of too many flashes that went bad, requiring the MB to be sent back.) And their servers actually have redundant CMOS ROM that doesn't activate to new version until it's passed the CRC check. Actually, you don't even need to have an identical motherboard to do it: Just need a little toy, and the proper size replacement chip, as long as you've got the microcode.
Again, if you've got a CMOS ROM chip that's surface mounted to the system board (which is the case with an awful lot of clones today, as well as name brand systems) you're out of luck.
Mark
IMO, they're just getting the government to protect them so they can continue to overcharge for what I don't want.
Sometimes they remind me of the airline companies. Some of the music companies "get it" (the ones going through Apple's music store) just as some of the airline companies "get it" (Southwest Airlines), and others don't.
They know if they don't do something, they will start losing money. The times, they are a changing. If the music companies, just like the airlines, aren't willing to change, they deserve to go under, and it's capitalism at it's finest.
Just like the airlines, they goto the government saying "protect us, bail us out, prop us up", and like good little bought-and-sold politicians, our government will use our tax money to bail these companies out.
The fact that the airlines were losing money before 9/11, or that the American public was getting tired of the crap that passes for music, is information they want you to forget.
Let's take this idea and have some fun with it. If the 'over-due for retirement' senator wants to make it legal for the record companies and their lawyers to hack into and destroy our computers, then if they REALLY want to level the playing field, make it legal for those attacked to retaliate in kind (and no, this would not mean that the RIAA could hire goon squads to do home invasions of let the script kiddies take up sniping or explosive ordinance. It's confined to cyberspace). Would this be anarchy? Perhaps...or maybe there are times when the Big Brother needs to step back and let us kids fight it out and settle it amongst ourselves instead of catering to the lawyers. On a true level playing field, you couldn't get me to bet on the RIAA winning this fight, not even on a dare!
That is why you shouldn't buy proprietary garbage (HP, Compaq, eMachine, and looking like Dell and Gateway are getting that way too). Build it if possible, and if not, buy it specialty...not too expensive if you look around.
These are the guys that led the charge against Napster. Now you can't see the music files on the CD. I do not do file swapping, but would extract music onto my computer to listen to it...haven't tried this CD yet, but I don't think normal methods will work.
What line of work are you in? "Proprietary garbage?" Have you ever worked on "real" Compaqs, HPs, IBMs, or Dells? I'm not talking about their consumer products, like the Prosignia, Prolinea, Pavilions, Dimensions, etc... I'm talking about the business class systems. I have never seen any clone systems that can supply large companies who must rely on their systems with the level of reliability or the quick resolution of failures that the major manufacturers can provide. When we sell Dell Optiplex systems, it's not unusual for some of our clients to buy 200 at a time. And we've never had problems getting parts in a timely manner, usually next day, unlike trying to get replacement parts from major distributers. Warranty is a nightmare with clone systems: With the majors, no problem at all.
And that's just with the workstations. For servers, there's NO comparison. IMHO, the best server around is the Compaq (now HP) Proliant. You simply get very good performance, terrific managability, and superp service. Again, this is something that you don't get with clone systems.
Mark
I think what you're talking about is the new "copy resistant CD techonology". Actually it's just a cheap hack from the crappy record companies. There are error detection bits on CDs. Computers pay attention to them to make sure data is ok. Most CD players ignore them. The music fascists decided it would be cool to write a bunch of garbage on these bits, to make it hard to play them on computers.
End result: some high quality CD players and most CD drives on computers consider the disk full of errors and won't play them.
What they're doing is breaking the original specification of CD.
What can you do as a consumer:
1) Break down and buy a new CD drive/player - New CD drives can ignore the bits too.
2) Play it on one device and copy it to your computer. This is 100% legal "fair use".
3) Download the music. It's legal if you bought a copy (fair use), but I recomend not buying the music. We shouldn't be rewarding such consumer hostile activities.
Yes that does fall under fair use. I think it's considered ok as long as a complete work isn't used. I think there are some issues with profs coping material for courses. Generally you the press is free to quote things too, even if they're copyrighted. I think I've heard that parody laws allow you to use up to 90% of a movie. There are a bunch of fun things that fall under fair use.
The original point of copyright was to prevent one party from profitting off replicating some other parties ideas. Selling a book without giving the author money for it was called piracy. Giving it away or reading it out loud wasn't. Filesharing isn't piracy under this definition.
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