plagiarismtoday.com — Social news sites have had to develop copyright policies and work to comply with the DMCA. Most larger social news sites have designated DMCA agents and processes in place to handle complaints of copyright infringement. Here's how the major social news sites (Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Netscape) stack up...
May 1, 2007 View in Crawl 4
subliminalurgeMay 2, 2007
The number violates the DMCA because it was not discovered accidentally, it was discovered as a willful and intentional effort to circumvent a copy-protection mechanism. (and this was obvious to anyone with even the most minimal of knowledge on the subject. A claim that it was discovered "accidentally" would be laughed out of court.)Posting the number violates the DMCA because it is a willful and knowing dissemination of that circumvention procedure.This puts all posters who posted the number at risk. It, however, puts Digg itself at no risk at all because Digg is not responsible for user comments.Or, well, it wasn't. Digg became legally liable for each and every comment that has ever been made on this site the moment they made a demonstrable effort to censor, edit, or curtail even ONE comment...They could have been free and clear, but they're firmly on the hook now, and probably will be forever....
sinfonyMay 2, 2007
You're getting dugg down because you're an idiot. As both Jay and Kevin made clear, pulling down those stories was a matter of keeping Digg from facing a shutdown at the hands the MPAA, a very real concern in this case. Digg can't provide user-driven news if it gets shut down.
tercMay 2, 2007
I think it says a lot about the US government when laws purely designed to limit what consumers are legally allowed to do with products they purchase can be bought by lobbyists for private businesses."That people should not fear their government, but that a Government should fear its people."The notion that Digg could be prosecuted for hosting a number used in the encryption process of HD DVD media is absurd. This has already been an issue and other sites such as aaskeys.com and hdkeys.com, I ask you world, why? "A government by the people, for the people"Is there some benefit gained by the people of the United States by preventing the decryption of HD DVDs or is this a capitalist monarchy? What percentage of American citizens wanted a law to prevent reasonable use of digital media?Fair use!Fair use!Fair use, I cry.Did ANYONE other than those paid directly by the media industry want or benefit from a law to limit their freedom of what they could legally do with digital media they had legally purchased?I propose a new law!I would like to see a law preventing any digital media marketed and or sold in the United States from being stored under any type of encryption. THIS is a law in our best interest, a law BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE! End this capitalist bulls**t. Corporations have no business in what we choose to, or not to do with their legally obtained products in the privacy of our own home.Here is where the root of our problem lies, because I have no significant money to offer, no lobbyists to send to pressure the powers to be into enacting this law, it, although in our best interest, will never have a chance. It will never be heard, so I ask, where did it all go so very, very wrong?
blackadderiiiMay 2, 2007
"""How about "Fight the law if the law is broken"? Breaking the law validates it in the eyes of the legislator. Fighting the law in the legal system is more likely to be effective."""Don't talk garbage.Law is partly commercially owned, partly top-down autocracy, has been for years.There are countless unjust, unreasonable or even unlawful twists in the law around at the moment which benefit those two systems. Software patents, the right to fair trial, double jeopardy, arbitrary detention for life, and so on and so on. Hell, the bilateral decision to go into wars where in one of those countries the publicly released "intelligence report" used as evidence is somebody's plagiarised phd thesis.If you live in Europe or the USA at the moment you aren't changing jack - the suggestion people accept that proposition or do nothing is an insult to the intelligence.
plokeMay 2, 2007
f**k the DMCA indeed. the question is, is this the best way to f**k the DMCA or the best way to f**k DIGG?
cquinndMay 2, 2007
"Why should a law cover up for DRM's inherent weakness" It is not DRM that is inherently weak, it is the methods they use to implement DRM, that are subject tofairly easy attack using modern technology. You mention that it is a form of cryptography. Do you remember when the US government restricted forms of encryption (above 56-key iirc) as munitions? And some people (in the U.S.) had to download browser updates from overseas locations to get 128-bit or higher secure http to work? Eventually the government acknowledged they could not stop people from wanting to use more powerful encryption for personal use, but only by the time they were already moving into more secure methods themselves. But they had laws in place to protect their content (classified information) while they worked out the rest of the process. The same idea applies to the DRM methods being used for HD disc content and players. The flaw is that they are trying to use DRM as a blanket solution to the possibility of media piracy, and are trying to create an artificial timeline of when one method of DRM can become obsolete and be replaced by another. DRM might work fine if they would just limit it to what it is really good for, short term authentication and enabling secure sessions for simple transactions. But when they try to apply it as an end-to-end restriction on use or playback of content, they are basically challenging the rest of the world to work around it. The reason DRM is covered by law now is the same as why it was covered by the DOD back then, the difference is the people trying to use (and abuse) that law are not trying to protect information that could be considered compromising to the security of a nation. Same legal foundation, similar technology, different objectives.
cynicistMay 2, 2007
Its not a prime number... a more accurate description would be a hexadecimal set. But ANYWAY, how can a set of numbers/letters be considered a device? Maybe you should look at a dictionary before doing all that research on the dmca.Can anyone provide me a good solid reason for this to be illegal?
shaunoMay 2, 2007
@cynicistHex doesn't come into it. You can state this as binary, decimal, hexadecimal, whatever you like. it's still just a number.But yes, it turns out you're right .. it's not a prime: it is astonishingly close to one, however ("the code" + 0x1B = a very large prime number), and factoring large prime numbers is the basis of most modern encryption methods (ie, Public Key methods).Usually, you require only one of these primes (the public key) to encrypt, but both (private & public) keys to decrypt, which works out real nice. If you're the only person with the secret key, you're the only recipient that can (easily/reasonably) decrypt the message.Media players throw this on its head, however. Because every player is a potential recipient, every player needs the 'secret' key. Which is why these systems never work out. Once your secret is public, you're shafted.That these numbers are keys in a "protection afforded by a technological measure" is what attracts the attention of the "Circumvention of copyright protection systems" article of USC 17.
shaunoMay 2, 2007
(that said, this does reek of DVD-CCA vs Bunner, which was eventually dropped. Once this is public, which it has been since february, it's very difficult to defend it as a trade secret. As far as I can tell, and IANAL, their only real chance of a successful prosecution would be against the original source, not a few thousand parrots on Digg.)
alricscaMay 3, 2007
Am I the only one that thinks that the whole case with DeCSS where the judge ruled that source code was not free speech but was instead a form of circumvention device, needs to be readdressed? Look at what just happened. Does this not prove that even if the code can be used as part of a circumvention device as defined by the DMCA, that it does not matter because the US Constitutional protection of free speech takes precedence over this law. I for one think the original judge erred because at the time, and to be frank, people like him were just too damn ignorant of technology to know any better. What is more important, we have now had several years of legal problems caused by this ruling and a potent planet wide protest that essentially framed the fact that source code is a form of speech and should be protected.
poetshewroteJan 29, 2010
Can you explain what DMCA and DRM mean? I'm a grandma just trying to get up to speed on lingo. Thanks.