Vitanuova for 2001 May 4

Thursday

There was more interesting news I can't talk about. It isn't job-related.

Teaching people how to commit crimes

Mr. Alter compared DeCSS to code that crashes airplanes, etc. Dave Farber forwarded my response:

> > >    U.S.: DVD Decoder is Terrorware
> > >    By Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com)
> > >    6:16 a.m. May 2, 2001 PDT
> > >
> > >    NEW YORK -- To the U.S. government, a DVD descrambling utility is akin
> > >    to terrorware that could crash airplanes, disrupt hospital equipment
> > >    and imperil human lives.
>
>Since the U.S. still has no Official Secrets Act, telling people how
>to commit serious crimes is still legal, unless you are conspiring or
>aiding someone in committing an actual crime (or breaching a special
>duty, etc.).  Investigative journalists are constantly describing and
>exposing vulnerabilities and risks, even, sometimes, in military
>security.
>
>A recent "Boondocks" cartoon showed a student asking why it is legal to
>publish plans for pipe bombs on the Internet, but (supposedly) not
>information on decrypting DVDs.  Although some politicians don't like
>it, it's legal to know how to make pipe bombs, it's legal to teach the
>public how to make pipe bombs, it's just not legal to make the pipe
>bombs (without proper pyrotechnics licenses) or to use them in a
>terrorist attack.
>
>Mr. Alter's comparison is extreme hyperbole.  Still, I think U.S.
>legal precedent would support publishing details of serious risks and
>threats (which the breaking of CSS isn't), including computer
>software which could be used to exploit them.  On the other hand, giving
>information out _in order to facilitate a crime_ is never protected.  If
>I know that someone is trying to build a bomb, even providing a standard
>chemistry or engineering textbook might be actionable.
>
>Once again: if I know that somebody is planning to commit a burglary,
>simply looking up an address in a phone book could make me an
>accomplice.  Intent is critical, and the burden of proof should be on
>the organization trying to suppress speech.
>
>With their "course of conduct" arguments, the government and the MPAA
>cleverly ask us to overlook that magazines and web sites _aren't_
>generally trying to facilitate crime by offering information to the
>public.  And, by outlawing the information itself, they would relieve
>plaintiffs of the burden to prove otherwise.
>
>Jack Valenti said so in a speech on February 7:
>
>         The minute you give one professor the keys to the kingdom,
>         you're going to be ransacked.
>
>--
>Seth David Schoen   | And do not say, I will study when I
>Temp.  http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/  | have leisure; for perhaps you will
>down:  http://www.loyalty.org/   (CAF)  | not have leisure.  -- Pirke Avot 2:5


For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/

Some clarification of the Official Secrets Act point: in some countries, like the U.K., there are government secrets which you're not allowed to tell anybody, regardless of how you found them out. Even if you, for example, read them in a newspaper, or on a web site, you might still get in trouble if you passed them along to other people. In the U.S., there's no such thing -- if you learn a government secret "legitimately" (in the sense that you weren't to blame for its unauthorized disclosure), its secrecy is simply lost. This is true for almost all categories of factual information under U.S. law; there are very few things you could be punished for revealing if you learned them by legitimate means. (It appears that the DMCA has created a new category along these lines, though.)

Legal citations

My script is back on-line at http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/~schoen/cite.html, but I still need to make it so you can cite to more things.

Posters

I'm planning to make posters out of the DVD region code map and the Federal judicial circuits.

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