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

[Seth Johnson]

(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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