Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

jandrese

Wouldn't publishers just refuse to distribute keys to said browser?

View on HN

You build a plugin framework that lets users pirate keys without exposing the author to excessive DMCA risk.

I think the author of such a plugin would be at considerable legal risk.

That sounds like a strong case for anonymous authorship.

If they where in the US.

Lots of this stuff is so US focused. Any European nation for one will let you reverse engineer stuff you buy or download to your own heart's content in the safety of your own home. I expect many countries in the world are civilized like that.

Almost every country, with the exception of Israel, has implemented the anti-DRM provisions of the WIPO Copyright Treaty using similar language to the United States, or worse. In the European countries, it's embodied in the European Copyright Directive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Directive#Technologi...

That's one of the reason why we argued so strongly that the W3C should include a covenant. Even if EFF continues to successfully obtain temporary exemptions from the DMCA in the tri-annual review, we can't do that for security researchers or lobby for similar fair use exemptions in every country.

You're right. I've done some digging, and some similar language has been implemented at least in the Netherlands (for the Dutch, this is article 29a of our Auteurswet). Although it's somewhat vague, it does bum me out. It seems the Dutch implementation has not been enforced all that often (mostly to combat game console mod chips), but it has been used to fight security researchers publishing stuff on security weaknesses in our public transport RFID cards... Thought we were better than that.

It's a terrain, some points are higher than others.

Not convinced any country isn't underwater though.

New Zealand isn't a party to that WIPO treaties [1], but it does have a law implementing restrictions on circumventing Technological protection measures (TPM) [2]. But unlike the DMCA, the NZ law lists lots of exceptions that allow you to circumvent TPMs. In fact it says "Nothing in this Act prevents any person from using a TPM circumvention device to exercise a permitted act under Part 3." Part 3 of the Copyright 1994 [3] is the (very long) part that lists everything you can do with a copyrighted work, including the NZ equivalent of fair use, research, education, archiving, backup, decompiling software, etc, etc.

[1] http://www.copyright.org.nz/international.php

[2] http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2008/0027/latest/D...

[3] http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1994/0143/latest/D...

> download to your own heart's content in the safety of your own home

Nein.

> I think the author of such a plugin would be at considerable legal risk.

If they are caught... ;-)

So are all major piracy operations in existence today and yet most of them operate without any real penalties. Look at The Pirate Bay and Giganews, both of those have been operating under enormous "legal risk" for over a decade.

Piracy is never going away and this re-run of corporations trying to control content created by people (corporations are not people) will fail the same way that every single previous effort has failed. Piracy will outlive the old fools pushing for these programs.

I'm not saying piracy is the answer, but once these troublesome corporate fools have all died sanity will return to the market and piracy will be replaced by pro-consumer models.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com