Pornography Good - Napster Bad?

Reports from around the world show companies and courts defend pornography (even child pornography), but attack copyright infringement aggressively

A woman identified as Kathleen R. brought the case after her 12-year-old son downloaded sexually explicit photographs at a city library in Livermore, a community of 70,000 about 60 miles east of San Francisco. The boy viewed pornographic sites on about 10 occasions and later showed some of the material to friends. The mother alleged that the boy suffered psychological harm and sued to prevent Livermore's libraries from dispensing obscene material on computers used by children.

The court, rejecting her suit, based its decision on a federal law that protects Internet Service Providers (ISP's) from liability for failing to edit or restrict offensive material.

"The library's Internet policy . . . did not compel minors to use the library's computers or create any of the harmful matter accessible through such use," the court said.

Curiously, the same general guidelines do not apply to Napster (see below). Like the library, Napster is simply a provider. Certainly they "do not compel anyone to use the computer..."

LONDON, UK Following the rape of a 13 year old girl by a man she met in a YAHOO chat room, ZDNetUK has been waging a heated campaign to close down chat rooms on Yahoo that are operated by and for pedofiles and are often targeted at children. Six months after ZDNEt notified Yahoo, nothing has changed and the clubs and chat rooms are open and functioning in both England and the US.

But YAHOO quickly and very aggressively closed down 13 chat rooms that were used by hobbiests who traded tips on decoding encrypted sattelite broadcasts.

Wendy Mcauliffe reported on ZDNEt: "Internet piracy is apparently given a higher priority by Yahoo than protecting children online, it emerges this week, as the Internet portal has reportedly removed 13 chatrooms found to be trading encryption techniques, while ignoring hundreds of pedophile groups that it was alerted to six months ago."

With the commercial interests of large companies at stake, Yahoo responded quickly to request for the offending chatrooms to be removed.

However, Yahoo has not been as rapid to respond to complaints about chatrooms used by pedophiles.

READ THE COMPLETE STORY ON ZDNET BY CLICKING HERE

SAN FRANCISCO, CA U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel issued her injunction against Napster late Monday, March 5, 2001. Under the terms of the injunction Napster has a three-day window to remove copyrighted music from its file-sharing system from the time it is notified by the copyright holder.

According to District Judge Marilyn Patel's order, Napster has a five day grace period to outline prepare its plans to police its users. However, the injunction does require the copyright holders to monitor the system and notify Napster of copyright infringements. Napster is then responsible for the day-to-day management of its users and their files.

To have a song removed from the system under the terms of Patel's injunction, the recording industry must send Napster the song title, artist's name and the name of one or more files that have been available on the Napster system. Napster would then have three days to filter that song out of its directory. While it is unclear how deligent Napster would have to be in removing files purposely misnamed by users to prevent detection, the RIAA had originally requested that the files themselves be removed based on content, not just file names.

When this system doesn't work (and the WIZARD assures you that it won't), it is likely Judge Patel will modify her order to a much stricter standard which will then effectively close Napster.

CAMBRIDGE, MA Meanwhile, don't underestimate the inventiveness and persistence of the end users of copyrighted materials. Using only seven lines of Perl code, two "hackers" have created the shortest-yet method to remove the thin layer of encryption that is designed to prevent users, especially Linux system operators, from watching DVDs on hardware not equipped with industry mandated decoder chips.

Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz's "qrpff" (click to see code) program is a elegant and simple version of the DeCSS utility that eight movie studios successfully sued to remove from the website of 2600 Magazine. But unlike the more cumbersome DeCSS program, "qrpff" is abbreviated enough for "fair use" advocates to reprint is e-mail signature files, backs of tee-shirts and even bumper stickers.

Differing from the DeCSS program, "qrpff" doesn't include the necessary five-byte title key -- such as 153 2 8 105 225 -- which must be given to the program so it can perform the necessary decryption. Winstein says that means qrpff doesn't violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which the movie studios used in a federal lawsuit against 2600.

WASHINGTON, DC  Meanwhile in Washington the Bush White House weighed in to the now totally irreverent DeCSS dispute. In a brief in U.S. District Judge Kaplan's court, the Bush administration sided with the movie industry against DeCSS, saying that software is not speech-protected by the First Amendment but can be regulated like parts to a machine: "This function is entirely nonexpressive, and thus does not warrant First Amendment protection."

Judge Kaplan ruled last August that DeCSS violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DCMA) prohibition against circumventing copyright-protection technology. The law prohibits anyone from publishing or publicly distributing any hardware or software that "is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner."

2600 Magazine, with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has appealed its loss.

Pittsburgh, PA  Dr. David S. Touretzky, a scientist in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University is an expert in both the areas of free speech and computer science. Touretzky testified for the defense in the 2600 Magazine lawsuit. He has placed on the Internet the very famous Gallery of DVD Descramblers. The gallery includes Winstein and Horowitz' "qrpff" code.

Touretzky exposes the insanity of Judge Kaplan's ruling on deCSS by showing and linking to various permutations of the code. For example he shows a .gif image of a screen dump of the code! Touretzky writes, "This is not the source code; it's a picture of the source code. These GIF files are not directly readable by a C compiler. However, a human looking at these images could certainly type the C code into a text file. Or the files could perhaps be converted automatically, by an OCR program."

He also links directly to a legal brief filed in court by John Hoy, president of the DVD-CCA (and therefore a public document) to the complete source code.

Most incredible, Gallery even includes a DeCSS Haiku. Touretzky writes, "This ingenious poem is both a commentary on the DeCSS situation and a correct and complete description of the descrambling algorithm. Truly inspired."

No doubt the will completely surprise all WIZARD, fkap readers, but the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) demanded that Touretzky take down his page.

He responded: "I would like to know if it is the intent of the MPAA to exert editorial control over scholarly publications by computer science faculty that deal with DeCSS, and if so, exactly which sort of publications will the MPAA permit in the future, and which sort will result in legal threats such as your letter of yesterday."

the WIZARD'S COMMENT:  Sadly, these stories speak for themselves. The rules in our society seem to have become tragically simple: FOLLOW THE MONEY. The creative media bureaucracy (the RIAA, MPAA, major studios and record companies) has the money and the power to influence legislation, to influence corporations, to influence government officials and, it would seem, to influence judges and courts. Money is power and it buys access and influence.

Tragically, children have no money and no power.

The courts and companies will protect free speech, for example the free speech of pedofiles. But, if you have money and influence, you can brush free speech aside like leaves on a bench.