FC: Niels Ferguson on DMCA, Intel, and breaking digital video scheme

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Previous Politech message:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-02401.html

BTW I'm told by someone in the know that HDCP uses just 56-bit keys 
(http://www.politechbot.com/p-02393.html) because of hardware constraints.

-Declan

*******

Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2001 22:41:50 +0200
To: "Trei, Peter" <ptrei () rsasecurity com>,
        "'declan () well com'" <declan () well com>
From: Niels Ferguson <niels () ferguson net>
Subject: RE: More on DMCA and Dutch crypto whiz breaking Intel dig-vid
  scheme

I'm pleased that Intel has stated that they do not object to me publishing
my HDCP paper. Apart from the DoJ, the movie industry could also sue me
because they are the copyright holders that will be 'harmed' by me
exercising my free speech rights.

Regards,

Niels

At 16:12 16/08/01 -0400, Trei, Peter wrote:
>Declan:
>
>IANAL (don't you just hate having to put that in all the time), but I
>think there is a reasonable interpretation which is a little kinder
>towards Intel than Kettman's article seems to be.
>
>Sklyarov is being prosecuted under *criminal* provisions of the DMCA.
>This does not require a complaint from a person claiming they were
>wronged - all it requires is an ambitious prosecutor. Note that Sklyarov
>is still in trouble even though Adobe has withdrawn it's complaint under
>public pressure.
>
>Even if Intel, with complete and total sincerity, promised not to sue
>Ferguson, and said so in a legally binding agreement, that would not
>necessarily keep him out of trouble, since the DOJ may decide to
>prosecute him anyway.
>
>Intel's remarks seem to be making this point; it's not Intel that's the
>bad guy here; it's a government which passes unconstitutional laws
>which chill speech and supress research.
>
>[I note the use of the phrase "we'd have no control of what other
>> government authorities would decide" Does this mean (a) a
>poorly worded statement, (b) that Intel now regards itself as
>a 'government authority', or (c) that the government is
>now a subsiduary of Intel? ]
>
>Peter Trei
>----------------------------

*********

Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2001 17:21:01 -0400
To: declan () well com, politech () politechbot com
From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah () shipwright com>
Subject: Re: FC: More on DMCA and Dutch crypto whiz breaking Intel dig-vid
   scheme
Cc: niels () ferguson net

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

At 3:10 PM -0400 on 8/16/01, Declan McCullagh forwarded a quote from
Intel:


> "Even if Intel entered into an agreement (not to
>>sue), we'd have no control of what other government authorities
>>would  decide. It's hard for us to tell what the legal
>>ramifications (were of  publishing)."

And thus, boys and girls, Intel transfer-prices the actual *control*
of their "property rights" to their friendly local force-monopoly,
because they can't control their "property" themselves.

As Milton Freidman liked to say, regulations invariably benefit the
regulated, and almost certainly never the consumer.


It's simple force-monopoly economics, really. At some point point in
the calculus, blood equals treasure.  You pay the bandit-designated
technology monopolist money now, or you pay the bandit himself, in
blood, later. It was ever thus, back unto the days of the sale of
indulgences -- and the inquisition that ultimately followed the
repudiation of those transactions.

The very kind of thing that created the modern Dutch nation, if I
recall the expulsion of the Spanish from Holland correctly.  A
splendid irony, that is, I think.


The only way to win at this game is to create a new game, and that,
of course, is what technological progress, financial or otherwise,
:-), is for: to make more new stuff, increasingly cheaper, as time
goes on.

Put more succinctly, until we figure out a way to sell innovation
without law, we're going to be cursed with the legal restriction of
innovation.

Substitute "religion" for "law" in that sentence, and you'll see that
the problem is completely soluble, just as it was solved in the past,
with technological -- and scientific -- progress. The gospel
according to Gallileo, if you will.

More important, the problem we're having with DMCA, and other legal
control  intellectual "property rights" -- actually software, if you
define software as anything which can be copied -- means that the
technology *is* winning.

Remember, the inquisition was exactly the Church's backlash to the
nation-state's ability to create *national* religions -- or,
ultimately, to defend the establishment of *no* national religion
whatsoever, which is what prevails, for the most part, in the
political world today.


One expects that the ability of politics to command force will, at
the end of all this, go the way of the ability of a single
developed-world religious denomination to command any force at all.
Still dangerously possible at the margin, at virtually the individual
level, but increasingly less possible in the overall scheme of the
universe.

(Yes, totalitarian political groups, communism, fascism, or any
other, operate, functionally, as religions, and, yes, there are many
explicitly theocratic states out there, violent and otherwise, and
certainly many tribal/religious groups aspire to their own
nationhood, but that just makes the problem more, shall we say,
interesting, if they don't actually prove the rule.)


Anyway, let's hope significantly more treasure than blood is expended
on this particular turn of the wheel of progress.

It would make sense, though politics, like religion, and unlike
science and technology, is rarely about sense.

Cheers,
RAH


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 7.0

iQEVAwUBO3w4Y8UCGwxmWcHhAQEUfwf9E7DH+txjsGYvyU/C6HcGffP88aVXEzVp
FZMjwUfH7TmNNQHlUK7G/LmuNMBSzXblHcXAii5ZGJMhes8ioUILYLXolrsETRFE
GcR/O6H7ymL9SLqLmlpzpGhL2esSQxHTyEy3eaQQL53bXVXCEyBkYiIO34KlwvtE
Z0PTVwTSYPtpPhOogDIPXD0Pi7fOWqXC+u8KxXzTeaj8neoJCbqCq0ItPBaUt2vz
PpM79JZ1XFLggVAcq2BTBuZM0NQLDYBI7vyO4aUfNOcm7B3N+V/FKuV+faXV7a9/
nfOjjIQjwjfjYj0HMPK/SPomKGH5STEleSKnxeQ93AMh7+mvar0m8g==
=WTBl
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

*********

From: "Thomas Leavitt" <thomasleavitt () hotmail com>
To: declan () well com
Subject: Re: FC: Dutch crypto whiz broke dig-vid scheme -- but won't publish?
Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 16:10:41 -0700

Declan,

I'll qualify this by saying I'm not an engineer, but at some point, some 
kind of electrical signal needs to be delivered to the individual pixels on 
the display - it shouldn't be that far beyond the ability of your average 
EE to arrange to intercept or evesdrop on those signals, and then 
reconstruct the picture from there... this would seem to me to be an easier 
task, and from there, creating a box that will digitize the resulting 
signals and record them (to a PC for example) should not be that difficult.

This would seem to be more simple than recovering the master key... 
although that obviously has more signicant effects.

I've got to wonder why they didn't just crank up the number of bits in the 
encryption to make the system more secure from brute force attacks.

As for a Dutch researcher not publishing his results because of a U.S. law, 
I don't understand how this would be an issue, except if (reasonably 
enough) he expects to need to travel to the U.S. on business or pleasure at 
some point.

Regards,
Thomas Leavitt

*********

From: "John Reis III" <jreis3 () bellsouth net>
To: <declan () well com>
Subject: RE: Dutch crypto whiz broke dig-vid scheme -- but won't publish?
Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 17:27:19 -0500


I have mirrored the file for public use at:

http://www.Featured.ws/home/dvi_10.pdf

John

*********




-------------------------------------------------------------------------
POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list
You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice.
Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/
To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html
This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------