The dangers of DRM

Let us also be clear about what unauthorized means... Unauthorized copying does not mean illegal copying, in fact, the foundation of fair use depends on and requires that the public can make 'unauthorized' copies. Imagine the journalist having to get a movie studio's permission before using clips in an online article critical of that movie.
Letter to the T13 technical committee from the EFF

I have created this website as a place to find information, instructions and tools for breaking any form of copy prevention. I am doing this because I believe most media companies are interested only in their own profits and are both willing and able to go to any length to raise their profits at the expense of consumers, other industries and society in general. This idea is of course central to the economy: Each corporation acting in its own interests, and hopefully an economy will emerge from the competition. But this is a situation where one industry has just gone too far.

In the last 20 years computer technology has advanced from Z80s able to display 16-color bitmaps and beep simple tunes to a worldwide communications network able to transmit text, sound or video anywhere, instantly, and make almost any information accessible to anyone. At the same time a revolution in entertainment has taken place. Where previously entertainment could be sold as a physical book, or CD, or video tape, now it is all just data. A finite string of binary digits, copyable, manipulateable.

Most of this content is produced by just a few corporations, entertainment giants with effectively limitless money. They have been understandably worried about the effect of this unexpected computer revolution. There are many incidents where they have attempted to suppress technology which is potentially harmful to their business model. This is certainly nothing new: The industry has been noticeably luddite since an attempt to ban player pianos. But they have recently become alarmingly good at it. The famous betamax case (Sony Corp. of Am. v. Universal City Studios, Inc. (1984))came dangerously close to banning video recorders, with Universal City Studios, backed up by many others, claiming home taping was a copyright infringement and therefore video recorders had no purpose except infringement. Fortunately they failed, the judges ruling that home video cassette recorders had substantial noninfringeing uses. In a similar case in the UK CBS songs sued Amstrad for manufacturing the first dual cassette deck (CBS songs v Amstrad Consumer Electronics) and also lost. Attempts were also made to ban radio, television, color television, digital television, movies with sound, DAT, wax recorders, records and mp3 players, all of which failed. The RIAA also attempted to ban CD rental stores, and was successful. So no CD rental. Libraries are allowed largely by luck, publishers resisted the idea fiercely believing people wouldn't buy what they could borrow. In fact, every major technology related to entertainment has been met with great resistance from part of the entertainment industry afraid the change would destroy them.

I am worried about a more recent trend though. The entertainment industry has been showing great interest in moving to an all-digital platform now, but insists on one condition: It must be THEIR platform. They will not be satisfied if their content can be played on anything that isn't tamper-proof, proprietary, encrypted, and copy-proof. Their ideal system is a black box where the consumer pays for a DVD, puts it in a slot and spends the next two hours staring at a screen. They certainly won't allow copying, even for backup. With this system they want other undesirable features. They can't legally stop people trading DVDs internationally, but they managed to put in a regioning system so DVDs from other countries won't play. Broadcasters will do anything to increase the viewer count for their adverts. They publicly admit fast-forwarding through adverts is considered theft of service. Given a chance to disable the fast forward button during the adverts they will. This isn't only a possibility. Broadcasters started an interesting lawsuit against the manufacturers of a DVR which has a button for skipping 30 second adverts. Some Disney DVDs, such as Hercules and Remember the Titans, use the unskipable area usually used for copyright notices to show trailers which must be watched before the movie starts. Sky plus recorders also recognize a flag which will mark adverts for mandatory viewing, though it has never been used.

These corporations don't care what you want to copy for. In their collective minds there is no difference between making a backup, singing parody lyrics over a karaoke song or selling copies illegally. If you want to use content in any way they haven't exclusively approved you are simple a Pirate, a criminal. If they are allowed to make DRM as ubiquitous as they plan none of those will be possible. You will not be able to download "Will the real slim shady please Shut Up". Anything not expressly permitted will be forbidden. The only permitted uses will be those that involve money leaving your pocket.

The technical companies are not entirely innocent. Given that a system incorporating copy prevention cannot be open their interest there is understandable. It would give one manufacturer or group of manufacturers the exclusive ability to manufacture appliances of software able to access protected content and each other. Interesting examples include Sony, who copy-protected the magicgate memory sticks so no other manufacturer can build them or equipment interfacing with them, and Microsoft, who use DRM in their Windows Media player and utilities to limit their use to their own Windows operating system and prevent users people from converting windows media files to open formats.

In summery, this means copy protection technology is a serious threat to consumer rights, the right to modify your own appliances, hobbyists in electronics and computing, small business unable to afford license fees and innovative technologies. This threat is too serious for me to ignore.

All copy prevention technologies depend on one central concept: The user is the enemy. Whatever they might try to say about improved quality or the ability to view their proprietary formats, remember copy prevention has only one purpose: Preventing you using your equipment fully. Digital rights management gives unacceptable power to the copyright holders and equipment manufacturers. This site will hopefully reduce the damage, both by helping to disable this technology and by demonstrating just how ineffective even the strongest schemes really are.

Join us to Take back the Net!

My site is completely legal, aside from a minor violation of the ISPs AUP, which I have complained about. Someone thought they would put the section about not running servers under "internet protocol services", so I missed it when checking before setting up the site and im now indexed in too many search engines to move. When the EUCD comes into effect for England it will be borderline legal, but that law is basically a way to give copyright holders more power they don't deserve and its unenforceable anyway, just an excuse to sue more people for daring to annoy Big Buisness. So I will ignore it.

If you would like to link to this site please do so. I would like to be informed through so I can ensure the connection isn't overloaded with p2p downloads during a sudden flash crowd.

I do have a legal policy. If I get an email asking me to remove something I will, I can't afford a legal battle. I will complain to a few newsgroups and put a notice on this site. However if I get a message from my ISP saying my account has been cancled because of a complaint of copyright infringement I will instead rant about the source of that complaint all over usenet and on mailing lists, and attempt to contact minor news sites, causing severe bad publicity. I will then find a new server and put the site back up again, complete with content. Complain to ME, not the ISP. The server will return the address to any bots that ask, one of the reasons I run my own rather than using the blueyonder-hosted space.

I try to keep the site as legal as possible, but the topic isn't very easy to legalise. The main objective of this page is to show people how to get around restrictive DRM systems, and that is itsself illegal in america. Fortunatly this server is in England so the Digital Millenium Copyright Act doesn't affect me. A european version is on its way. I might attempt to keep legal under that, but I WILL NOT self-censor the site to comply with any law which is the result of endless lobbying from an industry which will not be satisfied until all technology is destroyed. It won't be a problem for some time through, these laws take years before they actually do anything.

The Address: Goldenpi.2y.net, Goldenpi.no-ip.org, Goldenpi.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk, Sharedserv.no-ip.org. Yes, the server has been moved a few times. The domain was even stolen once by a hotel-scam company. But im on a zero budget here, and dont like leaving it on the ISP server in case of legal problems. The 2y.net service closed their free service and demanded money. Now im on sharedserv.no-ip.org, with goldenpi.no-ip.org running for old links.