illegal prime

In addition to an excellent investigative look at the simultaneously ludicrous and thoroughly chilling methods of “plugging the analog hole” that certain parties are trying to legislate into our electronics, Kathryn Cramer’s article on VEIL technology and legislation contains some most excellent and worthwhile sci-fi allusions. Also, commentors on the post provide some informed technical analyses of the language of the legislation that conjecture as to the nature of the technology itself.

Cramer’s analysis perfectly demonstrates the absurdity of the wide range of attempts to protect “intellectual property” (read: commercial media content) with laws enforcing the use of secret technologies that restrict the abilities of content creators and users alike to interact with cultural substance. This thing in particular is creepy because, as she points out, the secrecy of the technology creates a situation in which a law is being considered despite the fact of its contents (i.e. the nature of the technology to be compulsorily applied to consumer and commercial electronics) being unavailable for public review. The post in full is a must-read.

(via BoingBoing)

Inga Chernyak, student president of Free Culture @ NYU, has been fired from her job at an intellectual property law firm for advocating methods of resisting intrusively restrictive copyright-enforcement measures in an interview for the Village Voice. This is hardly the first time someone has been fired for expressing an opinion in print outside of work. However, it does represent a trend towards sanctioning people for simply expressing oppositional views on the issue of DRM.

A couple of weeks ago, Mark’s announcement over at Sysinternals of the Sony/BMG inclusion of a rootkit on their newest CD’s created quite an uproar. The Slashdot discussion covers most of the relevant aspects and implications of this move, but a quick summary of the issue as it has progressed can be found over at Schneier’s. Suffice it to say that people are pissed and that this won’t be the last time. But, interestingly, clever hackers have once again found a way of manipulating systems of control to subvert other ones.

update: A portion of the code used in creating their copy protection is in violation of copyright. It’s stolen from open source code originally used to defeat another DRM scheme, written by Jon Lech Johansen.

Since this blog is to be concerned with efforts to combat, evade, and withdraw from commercial mass culture, the title “illegal prime” seemed appropriate. In 1998, the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyrights Act established legislative basis for the placement of severe and often crippling restrictions on the development and use of communications and media technologies. Under the DMCA, possession or distribution of source code that can be used to create programs that circumvent copy-protection schemes is deemed illegal. In a suit by the Motion Picture Association of America, DeCSS, a program to decrypt copy-protected DVDs for fair-use backups and otherwise, was deemed in violation of the DMCA and thereby its source code became illegal information.

Of course, the idea that pure information in the form of source code can be considered contraband has rubbed more than a few people the wrong way. As Wikipedia notes, many hold that “because source code conveys information to programmers, is written in a language, and can be used to share humour and other artistic pursuits, it is a protected form of communication” under the first ammendment. A number of efforts have subsequently been made to demonstrate how ludicrous such attempts to legislate knowledge out of existence are. And so, in 2001, the first illegal prime number was born.