A court has ruled that it is legal to remove works from the public domain and put them back under copyright in the United States.
Okay. That’s it. I can’t take these ridiculous decisions anymore. I’ve been thinking this for a long time, but now I’m just gonna come out and say it:
Intellectual property law in the United States no longer serves the public, and until it has been reformed to do so, it is to be ignored.
We the people of the United States of America have the right, and duty, to disregard and oppose these unconstitutional sections of the law. They no longer serves to, as stated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution, “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The law in its current incarnation actively impedes the Progress of Science and the Arts, and the limited Times are now so lengthy so as to be effectively unlimited. Copyright, patent, and trademark law together not only no longer matches the description in I.8.8, but it in many cases violates the First Amendment.
I believe in the necessity for there to be laws which promote the progress of science and art, and grant the creative persons responsible for such advances the exclusive right to claim a reasonable level of authorial control for a limited time. The former need is not being met by the law at all, and the latter is incidentally met in an unsatisfactory way by the current overarching and easily-abused law. But by upholding the current useful portions of the law, we validate the entirety of it.
As a citizen of the United States, I hereby declare that I do not consent to governance by Intellectual Property law, including, but not limited to, the current laws pertaining to copyrights, patents, and trademarks. I encourage the like-minded people of the United States to join me in affirming our non-consent, and continuing to do so until the law once again serves the public good as outlined in our Constitution.
In regards to my own work, I would appreciate it if the spirit of the Creative Commons licenses I release them under were respected, but please do so out of goodwill, and not out of a false sense of legal obligation to do so.
To the extent possible under law, Zacqary Adam Green has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Intellectual Property Law Has Gone Quite Far Enough and Is Now Hereby Null and Void and the header image preceding it. This work is published from the United States. Not that any of this matters as of this writing, of course, because copyright is null and void; I’m just saying this for when one day it’s valid again.
Major Breakthrough in Cracking HDCP, the DRM System That Restricts the HDTV You Bought
HDCP, or High-bandwith Digital Content Protection, is a system that degrades the quality of or blocks audio and video from, among other things, Blu-Ray discs being sent to an unlicensed piece of equipment, with the intent of preventing unauthorized copying. In practice, it doesn’t actually prevent copying at all, and only serves to cripple older HDTVs that predate the technology, equipment built by hobbyists and smaller companies without the means to pay the technology’s licensing fees, Mac and Linux users with Blu-ray drives, or even a PS3 being used in a completely normal fashion. Fortunately, its defeat may be imminent.
An anonymous individual posted the master key for HDCP, the (now former) trade secret on which the system’s encryption algorithm is based. This master key is what’s used to generate the vendor keys unique to each model of TV, Blu-ray player, etc., and now that it’s out in the open, anyone with cryptographic tools can create their own working keys.
Essentially, the system is blown wide open. Permanently. A new master key can be created, but it would be incompatible with all of the HDCP devices currently in existence.
No word yet on exactly how the master key was discovered, but it was probably reverse-engineered; it’s been known for a while that one could calculate the master key using less than fifty different vendor keys.
The person who posted the key requested that it be mirrored, so I’ve decided to do so. Hit the jump if you’d like to see the HDCP master key.
Continue reading ‘Major Breakthrough in Cracking HDCP, the DRM System That Restricts the HDTV You Bought’