IP: EU plans decryption ban

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Govrtnments are determined to kill the golden goose. They paint pictures of
the importance of the network to the future economy and then with vigor
attempt to regulate it into TV land


Dave




Date: Mon, 09 Mar 1998 23:26:15 +0000
From: Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn () cl cam ac uk>




After government attempts to ban unrestricted encryption, we are
now facing a decryption ban


Industry lobbyist groups have managed to persuade the European
Commission to introduce rather radical new legislation for protecting
pay-TV broadcasters against unauthorized reception by consumers. Not
only the commercial advertising and sale of pirate devices is to be
prohibited (this has already been the case in a number of member
countries and is perfectly acceptable), but also the private possession or
use of clone decoders as well as any private exchange of information about
the security properties of pay-TV encryption systems will become illegal
and punishable under the planned EU conditional access directive. 


This constitutes a serious cut in the existing right of for example German
consumers to handle satellite radio signals received on their premises in
any way they want. It would also ban the use of non-commercial software
currently available freely on the Internet to receive say UK TV programs
in Central Europe for which a normal subscription is not at all available
outside the UK. It also denies security experts and hobby electronic fans to
experiment with access control systems and discuss their results publicly.
Existing Internet Web pages and discussion groups would suddenly become
criminal offenses and industry would have managed to legally ban public
discussion of weaknesses in their systems. The conditional access industry
will use your tax money and the legal system to compensate the technical
flaws in the designs of their security hardware. I feel this is a highly
concerning development of how industry consortias are gaining power over
consumer rights and I ask my representatives in the European and
German parliaments not to pass this EU directive. 


Commercial TV broadcasters and multimedia service providers should use
the available highly effective technical means to protect their revenue
and not the legal system. The proposed legal protection is unproportional
and unnecessary. It is also counterproductive for the further technical
advance of secure communication systems.


For more information, read


  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ca-law/


Markus



-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK
email: mkuhn at acm.org,  home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>