Posted on 02/12/2003 12:23:33 PM PST by RCW2001
LOS ANGELES Feb. 12 —
A federal grand jury has indicted 17 people who authorities say hacked into satellite television transmissions, causing millions of dollars in losses to DirecTV and Dish Network, the U.S. Attorney's office said.
Six of the defendants were charged with violating the anti-encryption provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The other charges involved conspiracy or manufacturing a device for the purpose of stealing satellite signals. All three counts carry a maximum prison sentence of five years.
The indictments were returned last month and unsealed Tuesday.
Ten defendants already have agreed to plead guilty, authorities said, including a 43-year-old West Los Angeles man who has acknowledged causing $14.8 million in losses to satellite TV companies.
The investigation was aimed at people who develop software and hardware devices that crack the scrambled signals designed to limit satellite TV services to paying customers. DirecTV, for instances, uses "smart cards" as part of their set-top boxes that descramble satellite signals.
The defendants named Tuesday are charged with thwarting that security, often meeting in secret online chat rooms to exchange data and techniques and using such nicknames as "FreeTV," authorities said.
The defendants range in age from 19 to 52. Most live in California, although some are from Kentucky, North Carolina, Texas, Indiana, Florida and Ohio.
"This case demonstrates our commitment to identifying and prosecuting sophisticated computer hackers who steal the intellectual property of others for their own economic benefit," U.S. Attorney Debra Yang said.
Not at all -- my position is consistent with the court decisions on this matter, which is more than I can say for yours.
If you put something on my property without my permission and leave it there, and as I have suggested I ask you to remove it, by simple act of negligence it passes into my possession.
Ah, now you add further conditions to your original overly simplistic statement. So you *have* done some work on it as I suggested. Good for you.
Unfortunately, it still fails to meet the giggle test.
Are you suggesting that the satellite companies are "leaving" the signals for, say, last Tuesday's shows lying around on your lawn like litter?
No -- they are transient signals, which you wouldn't even know were present unless you went out of your way to build or buy a suitable receiver and acquired the means to break the encryption on the signal that was specifically placed there to *prevent* you from accessing copyrighted information which you haven't paid for.
Your quaint ideas about treating constitutionally copyrighted material as if it were a baseball left on your lawn are ridiculous, not to mention an empty selfish rationalization for breaking the law.
If you left it there, it's mine, Sparky.
You keep telling yourself that as the courts rule against you, maybe it'll bring you some type of comfort as you pay your fines.
Not if it's copyrighted, it isn't.
The Constitution empowers Congress to make laws regarding copyrights. Congress has done so. It's illegal for you to decrypt encoded copyrighted material even if it *does* pass through your "domain".
Deal with it, and drop the "it's mine, waaaaaa!" amateur lawyering.
Thievery and its concomitant whiney liberal excuses are hardly conservative values, eh?
"You have it.
I want it.
Therefore it's okay to take it."
A bunch of Henry David Thoreau's they ain't.
No, because you criminalize recieving a broadcast signal.
It is up to DirecTV to limit the ability to extract information from the signal to paying customers. Just because they have proved inept at doing so does not mean that, for example, disseminating a crack should be criminalized.
The problem with such laws is that they are thought-crime laws. If I said, for example, that you could defeat copy protection on a program by inserting a JMP instruction at a certain location, and that became a criminal act, my brain (and yours, if your read what I posted) just became "burglarious tools" and should be confiscated.
So unless you want the intellectual property cops to start collecting brains in jars, you have to set the bar pretty high for what is criminal, and leave conveyors and/or owners of intellectual property to either secure it or pursue piracy as a tort (or, as I suggested, reformulate their products so theft is less attractive). In general, bad things happen when you start making private and hard-to-detect behavior criminal just in order to make life easier for a commercial pursuit.
Yes I could scan it.
No, I could not publish it for profit - that is the essence of copyright.
Yes, I could even profitlessly give away quite a lot of it before it crossed the threshold into criminality.
I do appreciate your cogent, and respectful, communications.
Regards, Glenn
to answer this ...
Unless you're sitting outside typing, no it is not. DBS signals won't even pass through glass.
WRONG AGAIN ... now please tell this 25 year ... advanced degreed electrical engineer ... who has worked with these signal for a multitude of years that I am wrong.
Lastly ... the eeprom that is on the smart card is publically and readily available from Motorola and MANY other smaller companies. Programming it is easy and is done for a million other reasons than DAVE (Digital Audio Video Entertainment). These guys were selling equipment that could be used to decode satellite signals. BUT they could be purchased for other reasons. I happen to work in the industry. what i object to is the passing of BAD LAWS just so some company can make a buck.
What if ABC decided to become "pay per view". Then sent out a letter to all addresses in an area stating that since they are now PPV "Pay Per View" that nho one could watch channel 7 without subscribing. Granted you have equipment that can pickup channel 7 BUT by law you can't turn your dial to channel 7 unless you subscribe. How many people do you think would watch channel 7 anyway. AND would they be thieves. Well decoding satellite signals is as easy for the technically astute as it is for the layman to flip to channel 7.
Lastly is it theft just because a company says so ... is my neighbor stealing my music because he's listening to my very loud stereo at his house. I don't think so ... nor do I believe decoding a signal that is in my house for my own non profit use is theft either.
You are being grossly unfair.
Disney/RIAA/MPAA paid gobs of money to buy legislation like DMCA, so, in effect, that law is Disney and freinds' property. You should not be discussing this law at all without their permission. They even own the legislators, so kindly shut the hell up about this law.
Your disrespect for the entertainment industry's property disturbs me, which is, I'm sure, probable cause under the DMCA.
Assume the position, peasant!
But the idea of theft is what we are debating. If I play music on my home stereo, and you hear it; did you steal it? If there is an outdoor concert, and you sit in your car and listen to it, are you a theif? If the concert uses radio to transmit the singer's voice to the mixer, and you hear it on your car radio; have you stolen it? Several of us say, quite emphatically 'No'.
If it's copyrighted, I may not sell it, or charge admission to view it; as that is theft. However, the activity of looking at encrypted material is not wrong. Illictly selling the encrypted material is. For example, listening to a MP3 file is not a crime. Selling them is (unless you are the artist or copyright holder).
The security built into the card is in an ASIC not an EEPROM. That is certainly not publically available.
Sure it is -- didn't you read the original article?
Six of the defendants were charged with violating the anti-encryption provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The other charges involved conspiracy or manufacturing a device for the purpose of stealing satellite signals. All three counts carry a maximum prison sentence of five years.It's inarguably illegal.
And don't try to weasel about it not being "wrong" in a moral sense either -- picking the lock on your sister's diary and reading it is wrong too, even though it's not illegal.
BTW view my profile
Yep, I’d agree with that.
I don’t understand much about satellite TV. I’m sure it’s expensive to lease satellites, or position the satellites themselves, or whatever they do. I’m sure they have a lot of people they have to answer to when the subscriber numbers start to slip and there are reports about information on how to get around subscribing. They have families they support based on the viability of their company.
My point was that if they had kept their mouth shut and kept a low profile, nobody would care if a dozen or so people got free service. They DO care when you start making their product available to everyone else for free. That’s guaranteed.
The telco’s were famous for that. You could get “free” service for years if you kept your mouth shut - too much trouble to go after you. Write an article encouraging it or market a device that enabled it and they would hit you hard. They had no choice.
You have come to what is to me, the crux of this matter.
Lets us suppose that it is 1965, and a broadcaster has teamed up with a manufacturer and has determined that by shifting to a lower part of the AM Band, they can sell their brand of radios that will be the only ones to pick up a certain station that is particularly inviting.
This modification is a simple one, but the partners determine that they can make a mint on it.
Hobbiests and others figure out a way to cheaply and easily convert a standard radio to be able to listen to the station also. Eventually, almost anyone with moderate soldering skills can do it.
Leaving behind the FCC regulations this would break, I have to ask the question...
Are all these people Criminals?
Nice to see you as always, I look forward to seeing you at the Doins.
Cheers,
knews hound
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