U.S. CITIZENS TAKE NOTE!!!!!!!!!!!

The senators may be the ones you see,but who would gain more from a bill of this sort,surely not the consumer,and it's as though they donot have anything else to sponsor that would help ,so this is another opurtunity for big businesses to gain theupper hand
I donot think this will be any different than Intel trying to track chip implants

Antivirus firms refuse to create FBI loophole

Reuters News Agency

San Francisco ? Anti-virus software vendors said on Monday they don't want to create a loophole in their security products to let the FBI or other government agencies use avirus to eavesdrop on the computer communications of suspected criminals.

Under a project code named "Magic Lantern," the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is creating an e-mail-borne virus or Trojan horse that hides itself on the computer andcaptures all keystrokes made, including passwords that could be used to read encrypted mail, according to a report on MSNBC.com in November.

Despite subsequent reports to the contrary, officials at Symantec Corp. and Network Associates Inc. said they had no intention of voluntarily modifying their products to satisfy the FBI. Spokesmen at two other computer security companies, Japan-based Trend Micro Inc. and the U.S. subsidiary of U.K.-based Sophos PLc., made similar statements.

All fouranti-virus companies said they had not contacted or been contacted by the U.S. government on the matter.

The FBI declined to confirm or deny the report about "Magic Lantern," when it was first published by MSNBC.com and a spokesman was not available for comment on Monday.

"We're in the business of providing a virus-free environment for our users andwe're not going to do anything to compromise that security," said Tony Thompson of Network Associates.

"Symantec's first priority is to protect our customers from malicious and illegal attacks," Symantec chief executive officer John W. Thompson said in a statement. "We have no intention of creating or leaving a hole in our software that might compromise that security."

If anti-virus vendors were to leave a hole for an FBI-created Trojan horse program, malicious hackers would try to exploit the hole too, experts said.

"If you leave the weakness for the FBI, you leave it for everybody," said Fred Cohen, an independent security expert and digital forensics professor at the University of New Haven.

From the industry perspective, leaving a hole in anti-virus software would erode public confidence and damage the reputation of the vendor, sending customers to competing companies, the vendors said.

The government would have to convince all anti-virus vendors to co-operate or the plan wouldn't work, since those not co-operating would have a market advantage and since they all share information, said a Symantec spokeswoman.

"The thought that you would be able to convince the industry as a whole to do this is kind of naive," she said.

Symantec and Networks Associates, both of whom have investments in China, would not jeopardize their footings in that market, said Rob Rosenberger, editor of www.vmyths.com, a Web site that debunks virus hoaxes.

"If [the Chinese] thought that the company was a tool of the CIA, China would stop using those products in critical environments," Mr. Rosenberger said. "It is in the best interest of anti-virus vendors not to heed the call of the FBI."

"We always try to co-operate with the authorities when it's appropriate. Having said that, our No. 1 goal is to protect our customers," said Barbara Woolf of Trend Micro. "I've heard reports that the government is upset this got out and is going back to the drawing board."

Appeasing the U.S. government would be difficult for vendors who have parent companies and customers outside the United States, they said.

"If the laws of the land wereto change to permit this kind of activity then we would abide by the law," said David Hughes, president of Sophos' U.S. subsidiary.

But "how would a vendor provide protection for customers outside of the specific jurisdiction?" Mr. Hughes asked. "If we were to do this for the U.S. government we'd also have to do it for the government of any other nation that would want to do something similar."

This is a repeat of the '70s and casette tapes,
The '80s and video tape.

The music industry even goes after bars and resturants that play recorded music and demands per play payments for all recordings played.

The entertainment industry assumes that every blank tape and every CD is used to make "free" copies of copyrighted material and takes money out of their pocket.

Look at what is going on with MP3s now. The entertainment industry wants everyone to pay for every copy, in every format that they use the product.

After this current effort is stopped, the best way to defend our rights is the responsible use of our technology.

Making copies for personal use is one thing.
Downloading and using a copy of copyrighted material that someone else has posted on a web site is another.

We need to start policing ourselves and our peers to reduce illegal copying if we want to prevent these kinds of draconian measures.

A lot of people are excited about the SSSCA, a bill being put forward by a couple of U.S. senators on behalf of large corporate backers in the software and music industry, which would make it a crime (not just an actionable civil matter) for end users to copy certain kinds of information on their computers, or even attempt to read or play it, if the copyright holder didn't want it used that way. In company with the DMCA, this bill could conceivably make it illegal even to use software that COULD be used to accomplish that purpose (including open-source OS's, such as Linux).

If this bill were to be signed into law, it would represent the first such restriction on the individual use of intellectual property (at least in a Western democracy) since the Middle Ages. The medieval church, which was the primary institution of its day, comparable to the large corporations of the industrial era in its ability to influence or even dictate the policies of governments, controlled what was readand who got to read it. All books were held in church libraries and copied only by monks, and it was necessary to take religious orders even to learn how to read. We call it the Dark Ages. Fortunately, culture was being kept alive by the Moslems.
Those in the Holy Land kept having to fend off attacks by ignorant, religion-crazed terrorists from Europe, called Crusaders, who believed that butchering infidels indiscriminately would secure them a place in heaven. The invention of moveable typemade it possible for writers and readers to bypass the church's control of information, and communicate with one another directly, which made it worthwhile for ordinary people to learn to read, and sparked the Renaissance. Ordinary people began reading the Bible for themselves for the first time, which sparked the Reformation.

The SSSCA (along with other measures being put forward by the people who now interdict the flow of information, for reasons of profit rather than religion) is almost certainly unconstitutional, and unlikely to become law. Although the current atmosphere, thanks to the destruction of the WTC, increases the odds a bit. My guess is that it represents a testing of the waters, to see just what degree of control the market will accept - and also a smokescreen, to divert the attention of those most concerned while less dramatic (but more pragmatically effective) measures slide through unnoticed, attached to bills ostensibly for other purposes. That's how things have been done for a long time now.

The biggest ally the RIAA and other such information middlemen have, however, is not their influence in government, but the degree to which people on the Internet - precisely the people who ought to know better - are willing to accept what these organizations tell them about copyright law and the ownership of information without looking into it themselves. It seems intuitively reasonable to most people that information property should be treated like any other sort of property, and that those who hold "title" to it (in the form of copyright) enjoy the same kind of absolute property rights they do to, say, their cars. But that's not true, never has been, and in fact is counter to the whole point of copyright law (if it weren't, copyright law wouldn't be needed).

If you leave your car in the driveway, with the windows down and the keys in the ignition, and someone drives it away, that's still theft. You're entitled to get the car back, and the other person can go to jail. Not so with copyrighted property. The burden is on the owner of the copyright to defend it. If he doesn't, it goes into the public domain (and it stays there forever). There is no way to recapture copyright to public domain works. If a big company issues a CD of ragtime-era music, the music on that CD doesn't somehow, magically, become the property of that company. If it did, I could reprint all of the novels of Dickens and Twain and claim copyright.

Copyright is a concept of the industrial era. It arose late in the 19th century, after the book publishers that evolved earlier in the century had established the basic industrial model that people now take for granted - large-scale packagers, distributors and merchandisers purchase copyright from those who create information, and resell it to the mass market of consumers, controlling the creator's access to his audience, determining what works will be available to the market (usually for purely economic reasons), and dictating prices at both ends of the chain. Like moveable type in the late Middle Ages, the Internet has introduced a way for the creators and end users of information to bypass that control and deal directly with one another.

Copyright did not come into being as a way of protecting inherent property rights. Quite the contrary. Since the Renaissance, the "natural" condition of information is that it belongs to society at large. Even under copyright law, it is not the workitself that is owned - even by its creator - but the right to make copies of it. Copyright law came into being to allow creators of information to support themselves in an industrial economy by exercising limited, temporary, property-like rights with respect to what they created. It has failed miserably in that purpose, by the way. Most creators of information still cannot support themselves by that alone. Only about 5 percent of PUBLISHED novelists make enough from that alone to support themselves - not get rich, just support themselves. The numbers in the music industry are comparable. Those people who now say that "information wants to be free" are not spouting New Age mysticism. They are citing solid western legal and cultural traditions going all the way back to the Renaissance. A society requires a free flow of information to survive and advance. Cut it off and you get the Dark Ages - or the Soviet Union - a stagnant society spiraling into ignorance and poverty.

The members of the RIAA (to use a prominent example) are attempting to create the impression that they own all music - and at the same time attempting to create technology that makes that a de facto truth, and to pass laws enforcing it. The truth is, however, that the members of the RIAA (like other such entities) only own the copyright to a small minority of all musical works in existence or coming into existence. The vast majority of recorded music is either in the public domain, or the copyright is stillheld by the creator. Its members have commercial value in the mass market. Not the best ones, in any sense.

The ones it thinks it can sell the most copies of, given the marketing structure it employs.

Make no mistake. There is a war being waged by the existing information industries, and it has nothing to do with the actual principles of copyright law, the rights of the creators of information, or anything of that sort. It has to do with the death of the mass market - the existence of large corporations who make their money by controlling the availability of what is available to consumers, and who rely on being able to sell the works they select in large quantities, and in the ways most profitable to them. The book publishing industry relies on the kind of mass- market demand generated by national best-seller lists, and is tightly linked tothe film industry.

The big music companies make most of their money by selling songs nobody wants - the other songs on the album, apart from the two or three you really want. They are currently trying to give the appearance of wanting to participate in creating some sort of "legal Napster," but the truth is they only want to destroy that kind of market if they can, because it would inevitably mean great losses of profit. Is there any model that would induce you to pay the same amount for downloading the two or three songs you want, that you would pay in a store for the entire CD?

There is a widespread, mistaken presumption that stronger "digital rights management," the kind sought by the various information industries, also protects the interests of the creators of the works. It doesn't. I'm a published novelist, and all my personal income over the last decade has come from the copyrights I own, and I consider myself very lucky to be living in a time when I have the means to bypass the big publishers and deal directly with my readers. Without the middlemen, I can sell abook for half the price and make twice the money - but the truth is, I'd be happy to give my work away if I knew it was going to the people who really want it and appreciate it, and that was the only way I could get it to them.

We don't need these big corporations between us anymore - and they know it, and are doing everything they can think of to defend themselves, including attempting to criminalize the use of other models for the dissemination of information. A number of well- known recording artists and groups are actually opposing the RIAA, in its lawsuits against online organizations, by filing amicus briefs. That's because most serious writers, artists and - I assume - programmers are not doing it primarily to make a living or to get rich. It's nice if that happens, but there are lots of easier ways to make money, if that's all it's about. We do it because it's what we do, and the real payoff is getting it to the audience that wants it and needs it.

How many people who have worked for months, or years, to perfect a piece of software that works exactly the way they want it to, and that is unique, would sell it, for a million dollars, to someone who intends to destroy all copies and make sure that nobody else ever sees it or hears of it? Some, probably, but not many. And not the best. Would Chris take a million dollars to wipe Lockergnome off the face of the earth and agree never to create anything like it again? I doubt it. The people who run the information industries would pay the million - in a minute - if they thought it would somehow increase the bottom line. Their interests and ours are not the same.

Yo, Spyderdog. May I humbly suggest that this post really belongs over in "Discussions"? You haven't really asked a question, and there seems no way that you will ever "award" your offer of 150 points ("trade 'em in for cool cars and adventure travel!").

As to the subject of your post, what I have concern with is the notion that our 'Merican neighbours' legislators don't ever seem too concerned with the rest of the bloody world. "Oh we'll just legislate this and legislate that" seemingly without a concern that those products might be exported, perhaps to a country with a different set of values, and therefore, without the need for whatever tricky new "feature" they've got in mind. The only time they even consider the export market is when they see some "threat" from outside. Remember the long key encryption bullsh**?

On an aside, speaking of not recognising values outside of their own, there's a terrific scene in Full Metal Jacket where the Colonel is addressing the platoon before they head out for some mission. His advice: "Remember, son. Inside every gook, is an American, trying to get out!"

This question was closed by the author