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The spread of "super-DMCA" bills
Much attention has been paid to copyright legislation at the U.S. Federal
level. There is less awareness, however, of what is going on in state
legislatures. In fact, something is going on: numerous states are
considering (or
have already passed) "super-DMCA" legislation based on a model law that is,
according
to Ed Felten, being
circulated by the MPAA. This law has some unpleasant implications which
are worth looking at.
Take, for example, the proposed law for LWN's home state of Colorado. The bill looks like a fairly mundane effort to (further) criminalize acts like the theft of cellular phone service. But, one of the acts criminalized is:
...to conceal or to assist another to conceal from any
communication service provider, or from any lawful authority, the
existence or place of origin or destination of any communication
that utilizes a communication device;
Those who believe in freedom in general should certainly balk at a law which requires all communications to happen in the open. But this law also criminalizes many routine acts carried out by users of Linux systems (and computers in general):
And so on; the above list does not go near services like anonymous remailers or Freenet. It's a poor law, and deserves to be rejected. The Colorado version has already passed the state House, but the final debate in the Senate has been pushed back to April 7 as a result of expressions of concern from Colorado residents. You Colorado folks out there may want to add your voice; this page has the information you'll need. Residents of other states may want to have a look at Ed Felten's super-DMCA page to see the status of legislation in your state. One might well ask what the MPAA's interest is in this law. It seems unlikely that Jack Valenti would be all that seriously disturbed by the theft of cellular telephone service. The most likely answer would seem to be in the MPAA's desire to crack down on peer-to-peer file sharing services. It is hard, after all, to shut down "pirates" if you cannot even find them. Rather than face the problem and come up with a better business model, the MPAA would rather just require us to carry out all our communications in the open. We should not allow them to do that. (Log in to post comments)
The spread of "super-DMCA" bills Posted Apr 3, 2003 7:02 UTC (Thu) by seanpor (guest, #2564) [Link] So would that make SSL illegal? if so wouldn't that put "ecommerce" out of business? www.mpaa.org doesn't appear to be running ssl on port:443 - but they're running IIS/5.0 which allows one to run https, would IIS be illegal under this? 'course if ssl is illegal, then the mpaa's sponsors wouldn't be able to sell anything over the net...
The spread of "super-DMCA" bills Posted Apr 3, 2003 9:13 UTC (Thu) by beejaybee (guest, #1581) [Link] Yeah, well, what's the legal value of pi in Indiana?It's as though it's not sufficient for the law to _be_ an ass, it has to be _seen_ to be an ass as well. Guess it's a good time to buy stock off whoever runs the jails in Colorado; I guess they're going to get pretty full. Either that, or the whole population will decamp to somewhere with a more enlightened legislature. (Perhaps the whole state could be given back to the Native Americans, or sold to the Russians for $50) And there are still loopholes ... don't know what they are, yet, but every law so far written has them!
Misunderstanding? Posted Apr 3, 2003 11:37 UTC (Thu) by vidileo (subscriber, #7891) [Link] "...to conceal or to assist another to conceal from any communication service provider, or from any lawful authority, the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication that utilizes a communication device"Could someone tell me if I misunderstood this paragraph? I do not see how it affects encryption of the transmited data. It is my understandig that this paragraph states that you cannot hide V.
Misunderstanding? Posted Apr 3, 2003 12:45 UTC (Thu) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link] Say you connect from your site to Site-A via SSH... Then, from there,you connect to Site-B, and perhaps from there Site-C... Your ISP has no way of knowing of those sites, which were your ultimate destination, because you've "concealed" them all in your SSH connection to Site-A... Or, say you have a web proxy running on some remote machine somewhere, Etc... There are countless things this would make illegal, taking it all
Misunderstanding? Posted Apr 3, 2003 14:15 UTC (Thu) by vidileo (subscriber, #7891) [Link] Thanks very much for the explanation! I had not thought of that...(I'm no networking expert, as you see :-) I wonder if only American citizens are getting ther rights snapt away or if the rest of the world should be worring about those issues too... V.
Misunderstanding? Posted Apr 3, 2003 17:57 UTC (Thu) by george (guest, #1197) [Link] "Your ISP has no way of knowing of those sites, which were your ultimate destination ..." Perhaps I've missed it, but I don't see any mention of "ultimate destination" in these bills. Suppose Alice sends Bob an email asking him to forward an attached dinner invitation to their mutual friend Charlie, because she doesn't know Charlie's email address but she thinks that Bob does. The destination of her email is Bob, not Charlie, and her intent (that Charlie should come to dinner) is irrelevant with respect to the proposed law; and this is still true even if Bob is actually a "communication device" and not merely the user of one. If the law were to require the sender to disclose the ultimate destination of any communication, however, then Alice is clearly a menace to whatever is left of the society that would foolishly enact such a law. Here's a very similar example: Acme MegaMusic send Bozo MegaNetworks an email containing an attached MP3 (a sample of Acme's latest release, intended to drum up sales) with a request to forward it to radio stations everywhere. If Acme haven't disclosed all of the intended recipients of their subversive email, they are just as guilty as Alice, the dinner invitation terrorist. IANAL, but I suspect that "ultimate destination" was deliberately omitted from the model legislation to avoid absurdities such as these. Of course, merely pointing out that these bills are most likely not written by incompetent lawyers is little reason for comfort; there is more than enough offensive language in them that we should not distract ourselves by what isn't there. Speaking of distractions, though ... an interesting curiosity in the MPAA's model legislation is that "communication devices" are explicitly defined as electronic, but a "communication service provider" is defined (in part) as anyone using any "data transmission [system]". This means that we'll still be able to use any non-electronic communication devices (see, for example, RFC 1149) that don't involve a CSP. Bwaaa-ha-ha-ha....
Misunderstanding? Posted Apr 3, 2003 21:08 UTC (Thu) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link] Well, as George Carlin once said, "All destinations are ultimate. That'swhat the word means. If you haven't gotten where you're going, you're not there yet!"... ;-) (Actually, he said "final", I think, but close enough to steal for my use... ;-)) To take my SSH example, if you were only using Site-A as an intermediate I'm certainly no lawyer, so maybe you're right in that it's saner than
The spread of "super-DMCA" bills Posted Apr 3, 2003 15:36 UTC (Thu) by virtex (subscriber, #3019) [Link] I'm not sure I understand why a NAT would be illegal under this law, assuming that all the machines behind it are at the same residence. The ISP can tell the traffic is going to and from my house, just not which machine (or if I even have multiple machines). Making this illegal would be like saying having multiple phones is illegal. After all, if you call me, you don't know which phone I'm picking up, or even if I have multiple phones.
Re: The spread of "super-DMCA" bills Posted Apr 3, 2003 18:19 UTC (Thu) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link] Because you are "hiding" the existance of those boxes from your ISP without permission from the ISP to do so.
The spread of "super-DMCA" bills Posted Apr 3, 2003 16:58 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] This law would forbid RTS (ready to send) and ACK (acknowledgement) frames in the 802.11 protocol because they have no transmitter address.
802.11 RTS/ACK clarification Posted Apr 4, 2003 10:25 UTC (Fri) by rise (guest, #5045) [Link] RTS/CTS can be completely disabled without killing 802.11 protocols - it's a bad idea, but it's not required that all frame exchanges use it. However, RTS frames contain both a receiver address and a transmitter address. Perhaps you meant CTS and ACK frames, since they contain only a receiver address, but they can only be sent in response to frames that contain both transmitter and receiver addresses and thus no information is missing (much less concealed). Even if the RTS/CTS/ACK frames gave you no way to determine the participants in the link layer, the phrase is "conceal ... the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication". It would be hard to argue effectively that traffic that carries no information between participants is "communication" in the sense that the FCC and courts tend to use it. Here we're hitting a term of legal art and IANAL, but the same standard would seem to ban anything like walkie-talkies that uses a carrier but doesn't stamp it's identity all over the signal. References:Gast, M. 2002. 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide O'Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol, Calif. IEEE 802.11 Standards (free access):802.11 802.11a 802.11b 802.11b Corrigendum1
Federal pre-emption Posted Apr 3, 2003 17:41 UTC (Thu) by N0NB (guest, #3407) [Link] It seems to me that this could be more a legal harassment, than anything that could be utilized effectively against its intended target.There is this little matter of federal pre-emption and since the Internet has to be considered a vehicle for interstate commerce. I'm sure the FCC and Congress wouldn't be amused at 50 different laws on the Internet or the telephone networks they claim jurisdiction. That said, this is still bad law and must be defeated.
DSL modem example Posted Apr 3, 2003 18:16 UTC (Thu) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link] It wouldn't be illegal for the service provider because they can grant themselves permission. Such acts are illegal without the service provider's permission though, so you are correct that you would be breaking the law if you didn't obtain explicit permission first. Nobody will because they shouldn't have to.I found it amusing that the preamble to the law and the first 25% or so reads like something to protect cell phone from cloning and telephone companies from phone phreaking. But the rest of the law shows the true reason: to force all Internet users to be trackable individually. We didn't really think the MPAA was interesting in protecting the cell phone companies did we?
DSL modem example Posted Apr 10, 2003 7:41 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] EXCEPT ...Don't know if it's this law or others - it makes the mere possession of equipment capable of doing this an offence. So the ISP could grant itself permission to do it, but if it's illegal for it to be in possession of the equipment it needs... I think the simplest way of getting rid of a law like this (provided it has the possession clause) is for the citizens to demand that the government comply with the law. When they discover that the law requires them to rip out all their NAT boxes, their firewalls, maybe some of their routers and switches ... I think it would get repealed damn fast :-) Cheers,
The spread of "super-DMCA" bills Posted Apr 4, 2003 21:48 UTC (Fri) by TheManInBlack (guest, #8154) [Link] "...to conceal or to assist another to conceal from any communication service provider, or from any lawful authority, the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication that utilizes a communication device"Wouldn't that make it illegal to use a cell phone? or call forwarding? Let's say for example I use my office PBX to forward my calls to my cell phone while I'm on vacation in say... Hawaii. The phone company or law enforcement wouldn't be able to tell that the call was forwarded or where the physical destination of the call was, or even what number it was forwarded to.
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