Fwd: [free-sklyarov] Fwd: Smell Test for a Certain Unconfirmed Meeting Report

[Karsten M. Self]

Following post calls to question the legitimacy of the Cryptome RIAA
meeting report.  Others have expressed doubts as well.  I don't agree
with most of its points (see free-sklyarov archives for my response),
but would appreciate back-propogation to point of origin for response.

John, anything you can do?

on Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 02:16:20PM -0400, Seth Johnson
(seth.johnson at realmeasures.dyndns.org) wrote:
>
> (Forwarded from p2p-legal list)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: hal at finney.org
> Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2001 10:38:05 -0700
>
> This report fails the "smell test".  It sounds like the quotes have at
> least been doctored to provide red meat to the opposition.
>
>
> > "The failure of the CPRM specification to be applied to computer
> > hard drives was a giant step back for the publishing, music, and
> > entertainment industry, and we will work to develop a new
> > specification that accomplishes what CPRM would have done."
>
> CPRM was never intended to be applied to computer hard drives.  It was
> for removable media.  The reason it was added to the spec in question
> was for support of Compact Flash drives, which are accessed via the
> ATA hard disk spec but which are removable.
>
> There was considerable debate about this point at the time the
> accusations were made that it was part of a conspiracy.  IMO the
> defense won.  There were a lot of technical people involved in that
> committee who were not the conspiratorial type and they had a good
> explanation of what was involved.  The purpose of the CPRM spec was to
> allow writing the data encrypted on one drive and reading it back on a
> different drive which lacked the same encryption keys.  This is a
> technical complication which CPRM was designed to solve.  There is no
> need for this complexity if the data is being written and read on the
> same drive, as the accusers suggested, since the same keys would be
> available for both steps.
>
> See http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/16300.html for a
> "response" article and you will see that the specific accusations
> about CPRM have been dropped altogether in favor of a general set of
> complaints about copy protection.
>
> Hence it is highly unlikely that Rosen would say that CPRM was
> intended for computer hard drives, but it feeds exactly the fears of
> the conspiracy theorists at whom this document is apparently aimed.
>
>
> > "Once we stem piracy, we will be able to raise prices in order to
> > regain lost profits from piracy."
>
> Again this is a highly improbable quote.  In the first place it is too
> obvious, everyone there would already have such thoughts in mind.  In
> the second place it can only hurt the group in the event that it was
> leaked out.  And in the third place it assumes that piracy is forcing
> them to keep prices down, which seems unlikely (although not
> impossible).
>
>
> > Sony's Heckler stated that, "Once consumers can no longer get free
> > music, they will have to buy the music in the formats we choose to
> > put out."
>
> Again, an unlikely thing to say unless the intention is to get
> consumers riled up.
>
>
> > Gerald Levin stated, "There has been an unconfirmed break in the DVD
> > audio encryption scheme in Russia. We cannot ignore this threat, as
> > DVD Audio represents the future of this company.  We will have to be
> > vigilant, and prosecute anyone who posts a program or source code to
> > defeat CPPM in an extremely expeditious manner."
>
> I'm not familiar with this.  What is DVD audio?  Are they distributing
> songs on DVD disks now?  And what about the well known decss DVD
> encryption breaking algorithm?  Doesn't that already retrive the audio
> stream?  Levin represented AOL Time Warner.  Do they really think that
> DVD audio is "the future of this company"?  It's a pretty big company
> to be betting its future on one unproven technology.
>
>
> > Paul England stated, "By tweaking hardware slightly, we can stem
> > content piracy by making software attacks a thing of the past."
>
> This seems technically unlikely and in a group like this which has
> been burned so often by broken copy protection schemes, it would seem
> strange that someone would make such a bald claim.  These people are
> not idiots and they would be highly skeptical that any such
> technological fixes could work.
>
> > One particularly disturbing fact is that Codex Data System's DIRT
> > software is supposed to be restricted to law enforcement agencies,
> > yet the RIAA, MPAA, and IFPI have all purchased it, and use it
> > routinely to monitor servers which are suspected of infringing
> > content, yet are password protected such as servers which require
> > one to sign up for a password account like hotline servers that have
> > no guest download.
>
> I don't know much about this but I'm skeptical that there is automated
> software to break into hotline servers.  Besides, those which have no
> guest downloads are used by only small groups, typically no more than
> a few dozen users, and are unlikely to be a significant threat to the
> RIAA.  They don't care that much about small scale piracy, it is the
> big systems which they want to shut down.
>
>
> All in all it looks like at least some of these quote have been
> manufactured or enhanced for political purposes.
>
> Hal Finney
>
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--
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