From: jdenoy at digital-connexion.info (Johan Denoyer)
Subject: Student faces suit over key to CD locks

It's funny as how companys are running crazy. Throwing lawsuit at anyone
that proves that they are complete idiots!

They might as well sue a whole group of companies for not implementing
"the autorun feature" that automatically installs their "protection
driver" to prevent anyone from copying the software. (which can easily be
disabled in less than 5 minutes)

Hopefully, we won't get sued for knowing how to bypass the protection
scheme...

(You can read the paper in question at :
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jhalderm/cd3/)

Salutations,

Johan Denoyer
jdenoy@...ital-connexion.info
Digital Connexion
http://www.digital-connexion.info

Richard M. Smith a dit :
> http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5089168.html?tag=nefd_top
>
> Student faces suit over key to CD locks
> Last modified: October 9, 2003, 2:01 PM PDT
> By John Borland
> Staff Writer, CNET News.com
>
> SunnComm Technologies, a developer of CD antipiracy technology, said
> Thursday that it will likely sue a Princeton student who early this week
> showed how to evade the company's copy protection by pushing a computer's
> Shift key.
>
> Princeton Ph.D. student John "Alex" Halderman published a paper on his Web
> site on Monday that gave detailed instructions on how to disarm the
> SunnComm
> technology, which aims to block unauthorized CD copying and MP3 ripping.
> The
> technology is included on an album by Anthony Hamilton that was recently
> distributed by BMG Music.
>
> On Thursday, SunnComm CEO Peter Jacobs said the company plans legal action
> and is considering both criminal and civil suits. He said it may charge
> the
> student with maligning the company's reputation and, possibly, with
> violating copyright law that bans the distribution of tools for breaking
> through digital piracy safeguards.
>
> "We feel we were the victim of an unannounced agenda and that the company
> has been wronged," Jacobs said. "I think the agenda is: 'Digital property
> should belong to everyone on the Internet.' I'm not sure that works in the
> marketplace."
> The cases are already being examined by some intellectual-property lawyers
> for their potential to test the extremes of a controversial copyright law
> that block the distribution of information or software that breaks or
> "circumvents" copy-protection technologies.
>
> Several civil and criminal cases based on the Digital Millennium Copyright
> Act have been filed against people who distributed information or software
> aimed at breaking through antipiracy locks. In one, Web publisher Eric
> Corley was banned by a federal judge from publishing software code that
> helped in the process of copying DVDs.
>
> In a criminal case, Russian company ElcomSoft was cleared of charges that
> it
> had distributed software that willfully broke through Adobe Systems'
> e-book
> copy protection.
>
> Both of those cases dealt with software or software code, however. The
> issue
> in Halderman's case is somewhat different.
> In his paper, published on the Princeton Web site on Monday, the student
> explained that the SunnComm technique relies on installing antipiracy
> software directly from the protected CD itself. However, this can be
> prevented by stopping Microsoft Windows' "auto-run" feature. That can be
> done simply by pushing the Shift key as the CD loads.
> If the CD does load and installs the software, Halderman identified the
> driver file that can be disabled using standard Windows tools. Free-speech
> activists said the nature of Halderman's instructions--which appeared in
> an
> academic paper, used only functions built into every Windows computer, and
> were not distributed for profit--meant they would not fall under DMCA
> scrutiny.
>
> ....
>
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