Digital Tripwire: The Future with Bill C-32

Videogame cheater fined for cheating.

Based on: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5133/125/ A user was fined for breaking the TPM of a videogame. He used a program called a trainer which allowed him to cheat at a videogame he was playing. The cheat gave him unlimited lives in the videogame and allowed him to eventually beat the game. But the videogame phoned back home to the publisher and reported it had been modified by the user. The user was brought before the court and charged with violating the videogame’s TPM. He was charged $5000 for the use of the videogame trainer.

Turn off Javascript? Pay a fine!

A user of the popular Safari web browser for the Mac found out the hard way that he was breaking technical protection measures (TPM). This user saved an image off of a website, but the web designer had explicitly banned saving images by using JavaScript to enforce this action. When the web designer inspected his logs he saw that this user had indeed downloaded the image without using the JavaScript TPM that the web designer had wrote. The judge saw that the image was TPM protected against saving due to the JavaScript code that was embedded on the web-page which had the image in question. The judge said that the Safari user violated the TPM of the web page because he circumvented the TPM simply by not running it. The user claimed he turned JavaScript off by default in order to stop various kinds of attacks against his PC (as suggested by a security professional), and then claimed there was no warning that he was violating TPM. The judge declared that the infringement, although unintentional, was still an instance of TPM breaking and thusly reduced the damages the Safari user had to pay, yet he still was guilty of breaking the TPM by not running it. The judge also warned computer users that using software such as anti-malware programs like spybot or antivirus programs, browser extensions, such as NoScript, and disabling JavaScript could render a user liable for breaking TPM to access content online.

International Company found liable for infringing copyright licensing with their VPN

A famous and global international company was brought to court via C32 recently. The case in question was about how the employees of this company violated the TPM of hulu.com by streaming American licensed content into Canada via their international virtual private network (VPN). A VPN is a network that operates over another network (the Internet) that allows employees to access the same resources securely regardless of where they are. Often VPNs allow the routing of internet traffic back through it. Hulu.com argued that the VPN hid the origin of the employees of this company and the VPN node that routed internet traffic out was American, so all of the employee traffic looked like it originated from the United States. Hulu.com is not licensed to operate in Canada. Hulu.com claims that many employees watched shows on Hulu licensed only to the US and thus by routing packets they circumvented Hulu technical protection measures and caused Hulu to violate copyright IP contracts it had with many of the IP providers. The judge agreed that routing packets was used to violate the TPM and said that even unintentional routing was still violating TPM so the company was still liable for its employees.

Handbrake user rats out an Handbrake developer in order to reduce TPM violation damages

Canadian woke up today to the reminder that format shifting was only to be done if the media was did not have TPM, discounting 99.9% of all DVDs. Handbrake, a popular video encoding application for the Mac, is used to convert your DVDs to iPod compatible videos. Under C32 Handbrake has been declared illegal to distribute, sell, or create in Canada. http://handbrake.fr/ A handbrake developer was visiting an Open Source Conference in Canada and was supeona’d to appear in court in regards to his distribution of TPM breaking software. The developer was targetted because one of his users tried to reduce their damages by informing the DVD consortium that a Handbrake developer was visiting Canada and could be charged for the crime of allowing Canadian to format shift video (which C32 supposedly allows if you didn’t break TPM).

Copying Images Hazardous?

A university student purchased a stock photo to use as a desktop wallpaper for their computer. However, the image’s copyright was protected through the embedding of a digital watermark, hidden in the image itself. When the student converted the lossless image to a lossy format for more convenient storage, this watermark was eroded, and was no longer recognizable using the authentication process provided by the photo distributor.

This watermark was intended to provide a means of preventing the photo from being copied by software that recognizes these embedded recognition tags. However, because the student used a free program that did not use the recognition technology due to fear of software patent lawsuits, this information was ignored, and ultimately stripped.

Even though the student pled unintentional infringement, and even though the student was using the image for their own display purposes, a $5000 in damages were levied, in spite of a $10 000 initial request for damages.

Filesystems are TPMs now?

In a recent ruling a thief copied some image data files off of a DVD presentation made by a famous artist. This brazen thief had the gall to parody the images by drawing mustaches on the figures pictured within. The court ruled that this act was criminal because the thief ignored the file permissions of the image file. It was expressly read-only, the author of the image said the image was read-only because he didn’t want anyone to make any changes to it. The thief argued the file was read-only solely because it came from a read-only medium: a DVD disc. The author’s lawyer argued that when the thief copied the file from the DVD and then proceeded to “chmod it”, to change the file permissions, via “chmod 600 figures.jpg”, and by doing so they violated the inanate TPM encoded in the disc: the file permissions were a the technical protection mechanism and they said no writing/changing! So not only was the thief violating the copyright of the image by changing it and distributing, they were criminally liable for breaking the TPM on the image! Now according to the ruling based off of C-32: permissions that we’ve been changing for years now are now illegal to change unless you’re a sysadmin and administering that machine or you own the copyright to the files. This current ruling has caused the opensource world to respond by ensuring that you can’t change file permissions on archive files. Chmod was also changed, anytime permissions are made more liberal a warning is sounded saying that this must not violate the TPM of the underlying files.

GTKPod usage declared illegal

GTKPod is an iPod program that competes with iTunes for using the iPod. It doesn’t act as a store it simply lets you put on and take off music from your iPod. http://www.gtkpod.org/about.html GTKPod once thought to be legal under C-32 turned out to be illegal because while the checksum used to protect the iPod’s music database was generated by software, GTKPod was not interoperating with software such as iTunes it was infact interacting with a copyrighted database full of copyrighted music. It was argued in court that GTKPod did more than interoperate, in fact it was used to ignore the TPM of the database checksum in order read and write music files. This ruling was contrary to an EFF suggestion about the interoperability of GTKPod: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/11/apple-confuses-speech-dmca-violation

A view from the future

I just wanted to welcome everyone to Digital-Tripwire. Digital-Tripwire is a blog of dedicated Canadians from the future, in a Canada after Bill C-32 has been passed. We will report, when we can, about the crazy lawsuits that are flying about due to copyright infringement accusations due to circumventing so-called digital locks, or TPM.