The crack was Hollywood’s worst nightmare as it opens an “analog hole” that allows everyone to copy digital video, including pay-per-view streams. Intel, the developers of HDCP, were also outraged and promised to crack down on abusers of the key.

“There are laws to protect both the intellectual property involved as well as the content that is created and owned by the content providers. Should a circumvention device be created using this information, we and others would avail ourselves, as appropriate, of those remedies,” Intel warned.

Soon after the master key was published the first circumvention devices were put on the market but neither Intel or the Hollywood studios took any action against manufacturers or retailers. That position has now changed.

Yesterday Warner Bros. and Intel’s daughter company Digital Content Protection filed a lawsuit at a federal court in Ohio against the technology company Freedom USA and its CEO Alex Sonis. The Hollywood studio and the chip maker accuse the Ohio company of copyright infringement and violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions.

Freedom USA, which also operates under the names AVADirect and AntaresPro, makes several devices which allow consumers to convert HDCP-encrypted digital signals to analog signals. This means that users could potentially record pay-per-view broadcasts, including Hollywood movies.

“Warner Bros. requires the use of HDCP in many of its distribution licenses for pay-per-view, video-on-demand and other premium digital content delivery services to which Warner Bros. licenses its film and television programming,” the movie studio writes in the complaint.

According to Warner the bypassing of HDCP leads to more pirated copies being made available, which in turn decreases the demand for legal movies.

“When HDCP is circumvented, the risk of unauthorized copying and redistribution of the content formerly protected by HDCP is dramatically increased,” Warner Bros. writes.

“This damages Warner Bros. because the unauthorized and uncompensated reproduction and distribution of Warner Bros. copyrighted content decreases the demand for such content through legitimate distribution channels, such as home video, video-on-demand, premium broadcast channels and the like.”

The defendant is accused of selling devices that allow for this circumvention. Although the earlier referenced leaked master key is not mentioned, the complaint does explain that the devices are capable of decrypting HDCP.

“The [device] transmits HDCP-protected content to non-HDCP devices by performing HDCP decryption, without the authorization of either the copyright owner of the HDCP-protected content or DCP, and by avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, and/or impairing the HDCP authentication process,” the complaint reads.

Both Warner Bros. and Intel accuse Freedom USA of violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, and the movie studio also holds the company responsible for the copyright infringements that were induced by these devices.

Both plaintiffs ask the court to prohibit these devices from being sold and want to be compensated for the damages they’ve suffered.

Considering the ongoing debate on the legality of these circumvention devices for fair use, this case is going to be one to watch. Aside from the “piracy” element brought up in the complaint the devices sold by Freedom USA also have legitimate uses, such as connecting a new set-top box to an older TV or monitor.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Smirnov comments on Relakks at the US Pirate Party site”

First, both the Relakks site and the announcement make it very clear that the service is supposed to provide anonymous access to the Internet. What isn’t as clear is that Relakks is just a PPTP (VPN) provider. Customers sign up, pay €5 a month and get on their merry way. All of their traffic is encrypted to the Relakks servers, at which point it travels the Internet like regular traffic.

As far as I can tell, all your traffic carries a Swedish Relakks IP, presumably mapped to your real IP somewhere on a Relakks computer. Now you can’t connect to Relakks anonymously, because then they’d have no way of verifying you are a paying customer (plus VPN authentication is based on identity verification), so Relakks knows who you really are when all your traffic goes through them.

Let’s compare this to something that has been traditionally called an anonymous network — Tor, a program implementing onion routing. With Tor you connect to an onion router, which then builds a path for you through other onion routers to your destination, in such a way that it makes it very hard to determine both the sender and the receiver of an on-going communication. The entire link is encrypted, unless of course you are outproxying to the intenet (then traffic has to be decrypted either way when it leaves the outproxy). But at least with Tor, it is very hard for the outproxy to figure out where the real request came from.

Today, the Swedish Pirate Party launched a new Internet service that lets anybody send and receive files and information over the Internet without fear of being monitored or logged.

The problem is that since Relakks knows who I really am, and that any outgoing connections from them are unencrypted, I really do have something to fear.. Relakks. What is the difference between trusting them and trusting my own ISP not to give me away?

Relakks could be logging behind the scenes, turning on a silent switch without telling anyone. Even in a case where we do trust Relakks not to keep the logs of the actual data that goes through, they will still have mappings between Relakks IPs and Real IPs at any point in time — this is just begging for an organization such as the antipiratbyran or the MPAA/RIAA to set up honeypots across various torrent sites, until finally they have enough Relakks IPs information to be able to sue them in court if they have a real IP, at which point the Swedish police could raid the Relakks location and get those real IPs.

If Relakks did not have their own direct connection to the internet, their outgoing ISP could be tapped and then setting up such a honeypot would be trivial. Otherwise, multiple peers could actively participate in swarms on sites such as the Pirate Bay, logging actively all of the IPs of the seeds and the superseeds on such swarms.

Secondly, the Relakks service is called a “Darknet.” After reading the paper that originally introduced the term Darknet at http://www.bearcave.com/misl/misl_tech/msdrm/darknet.htm, I am hard pressed to understand what makes a VPN tunnel a Darknet.

The idea of the darknet is based upon three assumptions:

1. Any widely distributed object will be available to a fraction of users in a form that permits copying.
2. Users will copy objects if it is possible and interesting to do so.
3. Users are connected by high-bandwidth channels.

This seems to me to describe a subset of P2P services, perhaps F2P. A program such as Waste, facilitating connections to your friends would fit the bill, but a general-connectivity tunnel? Would that not be akin to calling IPSec or IPv4 a darknet solution because it allows programs such as Freenet to operate under it? Would that not make any low level Internet protocol a Darknet then?

The service allows people to use an untraceable address in the darknet, where they cannot be personally identified.

Yet I do not recall Darknets having to be anonymous. Pseudononymous, perhaps, but only because that is a side effect of keeping the connections limited to a group of friends. Even if a Darknet had to be anonymous though, as I said earlier, Relakks hardly keeps your identity safe — they have to know who you are at all times (unlike say Tor)!

Lastly, I have some less related comments I wish to share with you:

The PPS does not own Relakks, they seem to be affiliated and perhaps will get a share of each person they refer to Relakks?

I wonder what political repercussions the PPS is hoping to achieve by actively promoting a network which will incentivize users to engage in illegal activities (such as unauthorized works distribution) behind the scenes of a “trusted” outproxy.

P.S. My views do not represent the official views, positions, standings or otherwise, of the Pirate Party US, unless otherwise stated by an appropriate party official.

Via p2pnet

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

We all know that “copyright holders” means “MPAA, RIAA and other anti-piracy groups”, that will claim their representing the copyright owners. So, in effect, if this bill is passed, Swedish legislation has given room for a situation where special interest groups can demand personal information from companies to conduct their own private investigations. So the new law will give the anti-piracy lobby more power, at least in Sweden. On the other hand, not far from Sweden, the Dutch anti-p2p organization BREIN recently lost a case where they demanded personal info about filesharing ip’s.

This new law would be in line with how Sweden has worked before. Last year, the police made a bust on a large Swedish ISP called Bahnhof, after an investigation from the Bureau of Anti-Piracy (a Swedish copyright owner interest group). The interest group filed a report almost immediately after the bust, indicating they had exclusive information from the prosecutor. The ISP then released all their logs, which indicated that it was the interest group that had hired a mole to use their computers to commit copyright crimes. Of course, this didn’t lead anywhere. And the Pirate Bay bust on May 31 should be proof that it did not discourage Swedish police and prosecutors to walk errands for copyright “representatives”.

But what frightens me is the prospect that this kind of behavior is getting legally sanctioned.

I made a translation of Linander’s blog entry and provide some further arguments on Piracy Unlimited.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Instead, the RIAA gives the family of the deceased defendant 60 days to grieve, before they start taking depositions of the late Mr. Scantlebury’s children.

In the “motion to stay case and extend all deadlines” we read:

Plaintiffs do not believe it appropriate to discuss a resolution of the case with the family so close to Mr. Scantlebury’s passing. Plaintiffs therefore request a stay of 60 days to allow the family additional time to grieve.

Way to go….

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.