Behind The Scenes of the Swiss DMCA Fight
Written by Ben Jones on December 12, 2007Whilst America is often considered by many to be the home of overreaching and overprotective copyright laws, the Swiss government has decided that it can do better, and so quietly passed a bill in an attempt to catch the US. However, the Swiss won’t accept such a law without a fight.
The law, dubbed by many to be a ‘Swiss DMCA’ was slipped through on October 5th with little fanfare, and overwhelming legislative support. Annoyed, Florian Bösch started the ‘No Swiss DMCA’ campaign to do something about it. Unusually, Mr Bösch is actually a coder that works on DRM systems. He agreed to talk with TorrentFreak to discuss the law and his aims.
TorrentFreak - What brought this law to your attention
Florian Bösch - BoingBoing, through slashdot
TorrentFreak - The law wasn’t publicized at all?
Florian Bösch - It was, but it’s… a convoluted topic, and I don’t care about politics. There’s a trail of press releases and actions that accompany the passing of this law. It just didn’t gain any mainstream attention. Don’t know if it did now, I certainly hope so. You see I didn’t really know I cared that much about all of this, but somehow the news hit me and I knew it did.
TorrentFreak - Have you contacted your representatives in either council?
Florian Bösch - I didn’t contact the representatives in the councils no. Two reasons mainly, I don’t think it’ll help anything (with exception of two all voted for this law, no abstains), and I was pretty busy of late. (I have a day job too, one with deadlines) It’s a bit controversial, I work as a programmer for a company that sells DRM technology and services.
TorrentFreak - I would think that would put you in support of this law
Florian Bösch - I’m not. I think it’s a bad law, for the industry as well. See I think the DRM industry does just fine, it doesn’t require laws to protect it. They’ll make a shoddy product that will not be able to compete with actually free content once that becomes commonplace. And the cynicism of the industry is somewhat ungraspable for me.
TorrentFreak - This 50,000 signature rejection, is it common knowledge, or is it something brought up on rare occasions?
Florian Bösch - It is a very commonly known that it’s possible.
TorrentFreak - is it utilised often?
Florian Bösch - Yeah it’s usage is commonplace. Usually parties hold it up as a Damocles sword for discussions, at any time there’s 1-3 referendums running. It’s a bit rare that it’s started by people with no backing and clue how to do it.
TorrentFreak - How has this drive been met by the general citizenry?
Florian Bösch - I don’t know actually. I started last Friday (November 31st), spent the weekend doing the website, buried myself in mailing around and talking to people to do something, organized stuff.
TorrentFreak - What’s the response been like so far?
Florian Bösch - By the people who come to the mailing list and to the IRC channel, I’d say thankful and concerned. By people who worked on that law openly hostile (such as here). They basically think this law is the best we can manage, and the next one will be worse, so if we now abolish it, we will have to fight again, and it’s not sure it’s going to be better. (or the worst happens and the people vote for this law)
TorrentFreak - According to that thread, you believe DRM will soon be impossible to circumvent?
Florian Bösch - So hard it won’t matter, yes, I think that. See the DRM as you know it is already the past. That’s kiddie stuff, the future is polymorphic DRM that changes algorithm and inner working with every content item, because on it will be some bytecode that executes on a secure VM. Whilst it certainly won’t be uncircumventable, it will just be hard to keep open.
TorrentFreak - Yet, there’s the possibility that it will become undesirable
Florian Bösch - Yes, actually I think it’s inevitable this becomes undesirable, but I rather see it happen sooner then later.
TorrentFreak - More and more are going away from DRM and copy protection, and some of the best arguments came from a company called StarDock when they released the game GalCiv2 - that the only person it hurts and inconveniences are the legitimate consumers.
Florian Bösch - I don’t think that’s true. It hurts the whole content industry.
TorrentFreak - How so?
Florian Bösch - See we set-up music services for say mobile network operators. to do that you need players on mobile phones. To get content from the labels you need to prove that you do effective DRM. Then you have to explain to your client what he can and cannot do with DRM. It’s always funny when you get to the point where they absolutely want ripping to CD of your music, but insist that everything must be quite protected. Plain content on iPods (you got to support iPods) so the company I work for has this really good DRM, and your non-techie customers rip it apart with their real world business cases. Not that I mind, it’s just ironic. Then there’s the nature of obscurity. It permeates the whole system, you have to keep track of device IDs and userIDs and public keys and do the right dance against some piece of patented software to be privileged just to hand out a download url. I mean, something essentially simple, handing out a file, has become a huge and complex task.
TorrentFreak - So its log jamming itself, and that’s part of what is the problem with these laws, it not only hurts the consumers, but also the industries its intended to protect?
Florian Bösch - Exactly. it encourages the industry to more of that when it should do less. DRM in your business case is not quite yet the kiss of death, but it feels quite familiar.
TorrentFreak - How many signatures have you collected so far?
Florian Bösch - Embarrassingly few. we keep track here. It’s a lot more probably, but who knows.
TorrentFreak - and the signatures all have to be verified by the canton government?
Florian Bösch - By the municipality of the signatory; there’s about 1000 municipalities in Switzerland. The trouble is we should collect on the order of 2000 signatures a day. Those all have to go to the municipalities first and then be collected centrally; it’s a huge task. I think the important thing that happens isn’t so much the signatures as that people are talking more about this now then before. I’m happy I could help with that at least, and It’s a very interesting experience to go trough the signature collecting thing, I’ll write a tutorial/howto about it so more people can do it.
TorrentFreak - How do you plan on ‘expanding’ the campaign over the next few weeks?
Florian Bösch - I have no idea honestly. I try to make a breeding ground for like-minded and get them to talk to each other, and I hope we can form a network of action to have more local effect. I do just one thing, I express that I’m not happy with this law, and I thought I was not alone, and others might join in.
TorrentFreak - A laudable aim. Thank you for your time.
More information on the campaign can be found at http://no-dmca.ch
Previously: BitTorrent XXX Next Target For Anti-Pirates
Next: What Happened to Demonoid, Will it Ever Return?
27 Responses
Pages: [1] 2 » Show All
Interesting read.
thanks for bringing the news as always:]
There’s also a current battle in Canada’s parliament over the Conservative government’s proposed new draconian copyright law. The new law reportedly too willingly caved to US entertainment industry and US gov’t demands.
But fortunately, the Cdn. gov’t is getting so much heat over the bill, and so much opposition to it, that the bill, as proposed, has now been shelved, and won’t see the light of day again till it’s been toned down and rewritten!
http://tinyurl.com/2o7kow
Well,
maybe they should adopt the methods used in Canada to raise awareness. You have to pick up the “target audience” where they are, I suppose nowadays that’s Facebook or StudiVZ (whatever it’s called in switzerland). It should be easy to convince the demographic over there to sign such a petition. Check out Michael Geists blog, he was able to get a Facebook group about the Canadian DCMA above 15000 members in a couple of days.
Good luck!
with regards to the Canadian bill being shelved till it’s rewritten, there is no actual evidence of this. The conservatives could also be pulling it, simply till the heat dies down, at which point it could pop right back up with zero changes. Since nobody, with the exception of Jim Prentice, and maybe a very small handful of other individuals know exactly what is in the bill he was planning to introduce, we won’t know for certain whether or not any actual changes were made. At this point, the contents of the Canadian bill are strictly speculation, and if anyone says otherwise, they are talking out their ass.
With regards to the Swiss fight, I wish you the best of luck.
me so horny
ok so you should probably put in the title “warning this is mostly about boring drm nonsense, and you shouldn’t read it” So other ppl like me won’t waste their time.
DRM done correctly is great for the publisher and for the clients of that publisher. they can protect their world and go about business their way free from interference. there are many working DRM systems out there and it is absolutely the perogative of the publisher to protect their content
you can see how the problems arise when publishers use:
1. ineffective DRM, or
2. bad technology DRM (root kit example) or
3. bad law DRM (iTunes monopoly) or
4. no DRM but expect some moral or legal protection against copy technologies
it gives me the distinct impression the current crisis in copyright has been created by publishers, perhaps not intentionally, but certainly indirectly by piss poor management. indicative, incidently, of a fat bloated industry full of free cash and economic inefficiency
imagine for one second the hypothical (but rediculous) idea that every digital content in the world was secured by an efficient DRM. then the opensource world would be the most popular software supplier, and the independent movie/music maker would be the most popular content supplier, and nobody would pay for anything with DRM
the paradoxical situation where copyright owners want customers to whom they do not want to supply their products are well stated by Florian Bösch, this is one of your better articles guys. you are touching on real world cases and highlighting the bizarre primitive mind of the incumbent media business development teams as they attempt to breathe oxygen as their prehistoric industries crawl out of the mud
@ h33t
I think you misunderstand the general population, they know what they want and they don’t care if there’s DRM because they are automatically authorised when they click the buy button in iTunes.
If all the digital media was protected by DRM the only thing that would happen would be an increase in sales. Open source and indie media have been around all through the evolution of DRM, and whatever successes they’ve enjoyed have been completely unrelated.
Ha, polymorphic DRM. Not gonna happen. Remember when people were all “ooh argh eek polymorphic viruses are going to destroy computing” back in the nineties? Well guess what happened: it didn’t!
Thing is, there’ll always be some bit of code that stays constant. Or constant enough. Or you eventually do an execution trace and boom, there you have your stuff (be it the decrypted data, or VM opcode lists, or whatever).
Some guy even figured out the inner opcodes of the Transmeta Crusoe CPUs from a firmware dump. It’s just not all that hard.
As always, it’s quite possible for a person or a company to make an encryption or whatever that they themselves cannot break. However, this says nothing about how breakable that encryption (or other security system component) is in the absolute sense.
[quote]Ha, polymorphic DRM. Not gonna happen. Remember when people were all “ooh argh eek polymorphic viruses are going to destroy computing” back in the nineties? Well guess what happened: it didn’t![/quote]
Hehehe, same technology as viruses ;P
DRM is a virus.
They can DRM there asses for all I care, im still never gonna pay for that shit and im always gonna get high quality stuff that I can do what I want with it.
Then im gonna go to the artists show, pay for the concert and buy a shirt and might even hand the artist a $5 or $10, and tell him I downloaded every one of his fucking songs, and im not paying your fuck face record company a fucking dime.
WE have a way of freeing file sharing, convince the artists that they dont need the MPAA and the MPAA will be out of a job, support the arists you listen to, thats ALL that matters.
hey people
im asking somebody of you out there to get me an invite for a private tracker i do upload a lot on the public sites but i really would prefer private ones (i only have access to a german one if anyone wants an invite so id need an offer for one with international releases…) but havent met anyone yet that was willing to help me… i would appreciate your help :)
murdoclu@gmail.com
@ 12
Dude! e_e
[quote comment="237767"]Ha, polymorphic DRM. Not gonna happen. Remember when people were all “ooh argh eek polymorphic viruses are going to destroy computing” back in the nineties? Well guess what happened: it didn’t![/quote]
Polymorphic viruses are a completely different thing, they mutate on their own (just as in nature).
That you can always reverse engineer your way around this technique is obvious, but with constantly changing VMs you’d be hard-pressed to keep up.
Did Torrentfreak just discover the word “Whilst”? It seems like it shows up in every article lately.
[quote comment="237756"]@ h33t
I think you misunderstand the general population, they know what they want and they don’t care if there’s DRM because they are automatically authorised when they click the buy button in iTunes.
If all the digital media was protected by DRM the only thing that would happen would be an increase in sales. Open source and indie media have been around all through the evolution of DRM, and whatever successes they’ve enjoyed have been completely unrelated.[/quote]
Yes, open source and indie media have been around all through the evolution of DRM. As has unlimited, unrestricted, DRM-free pirated material, which makes up the vast bulk of every person under 30’s music collection.
To take away all of the pirated material would not make all of these fans and music lovers switch from paying zero dollars for a years supply of music (x dozen albums) to several thousand dollars for a years supply of music; no sirree Bob!
Six thousand (say) dollars of free cash does _not_ magically appear in your bank account the day the pirated music ends completely.
Nor does my love of music die the day pirated music ends completely.
I can _easily_ see a jump in indie music should DRM live and piracy die. [google "The ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny", and tell me that's not catchy/better than rihanna's latest crap]
when did geekdom decide to address the problem the world was being raped by micro$hit and design a linux desktop gui (Gnome, KDE) that a mac bunny could use (and his wife and kids too)?
when did openoffice.org offer a direct replacement for Office?
when did YOU shift from playing games on your desktop to playing games on your Xbox360, Wii, and PS3?
everything you could do on a PC you can now do 100% free on a linux desktop at reduced overhead and zero software cost. except gaming, on which we all spend 1,000’s of dollars a year. actually my PS3 is an online computer in my living room that i can play games, surf, type letters, install any o/s i like …
now i want a bittorrent client for my mobile so i can connect to h33t.com and download mp3’s avi’s and thinstall and portable appz
game over for DRM
ansa: actually very recently, within the last 12 months.
it has not quite hit them yet, but it will, and when it lands they will not have the breath left to protest
As respectful as I am of Florian’s opinion here, I also share the frustration felt by Tonnerre in trying to get Florian to join forces rather than attempt to create a (in my opinion futile) media storm over something that it is clear he fails to fully understand.
“By people who worked on that law openly hostile” I can only assume he is referring to Tonnerre and that statement (amongst others) is a clear indication of Florian’s miscomprehension of reality. Tonnerre was at all stages, including his “final word”, trying to impress upon Florian the valuable nature of joining forces, his “hostility” is the manifestation of butting his head against a brick wall.
If Florian et al had already been involved in the political process rather than jumping on the figurative bandwagon (or rather creating their own) he could have been involved in the lobbying process from the start. Not that I am trying to deny his right to express his opinion, late as it is, but if he can’t grasp the simplicity of being involved in the political process by just reading/watching the news (and it is clear that there was media coverage of the laws proposal) then why should he be entrusted with the greater responsibility of figureheading a referendum. Tonnerre valiantly tried to make this point to him but apparently it sailed over Florian’s head.
Still, made for an interesting if ultimately frustrating read.
Keep up the good work TorrentFreak!
big up torrentfreak!
http://paidandpopular.blogspot.com
[quote comment="237828"]Polymorphic viruses are a completely different thing, they mutate on their own (just as in nature).
That you can always reverse engineer your way around this technique is obvious, but with constantly changing VMs you’d be hard-pressed to keep up.[/quote]
Oh come on. It’s always taken more time to come up with a new DRM system than it has taken to crack it, barring things like DVDs initially being so chock-full of material to not be worthy of warezing.
And constantly changing VMs? Something needs to remain constant, because in order to have “constant change” you need it to be systematic at some level. Boom! That’s where the hacker comes in. It’s exactly the same thing as polymorphic viruses!
Like I said, it’s easy to come up with a security system that you yourself can’t figure out how to crack.
They can add as much DRM as they like.
Just pop the cd in a drive and record via analogue just like in the old days of cassette tape. It only needs one person to purchase a cd and do the initial recording.
It just requires a bit more effort.
@Alan UK
Good old analoge hole…
Too bad that they are trying to plug even that with things like HDMI. Sure, it’s ultimately useless but that won’t stop them from trying.
Can you cover more on the Canadian DMCA thay they are trying to introduce in Canada? Our facebook group Fair Copyright for Canada grew to 21 thousand in just over a week
P2P= Freedom
Sharing = Happiness
RIAA=DEAD
MPAA=DEAD
They don’t own us.
Everything should be free like oxygen, air, water, sun light,natural resources…
To own something and make everyone drool for it is to enslave all
The rich wants to own us using money, banking that benefits them.
Don’t let them. Resist them and do whatever it takes to not let them manipulate us with bs news… and propaganda are full of bias opinions or lies.
Pages: [1] 2 » Show All
Responses are closed
All remaining responses will continue to be archived. Use the TorrentFreak forums if you want to discuss something.