die@hydra.UUCP (Dave Emery) (09/15/85)
Theft is Theft.
I started poking around the terrestrial and then the celestial
microwave spectrum in the mid 70's. Amoung the things I found were the very
powerful (someone told me 100+ watts) MDS transmissions that carried
HBO and of course the satcom cable feeds (which were much harder to receive)
and various terrestrial feeds that all carried the HBO signal. I thought
long and hard about whether I had any right to watch movies from these HBO
signals and decided that in doing so I was obtaining a service that
I would otherwise have to pay for, and which someone paid to provide,
transmit and so forth. This seemed to me to be theft pure and simple.
I could see no difference in kind or substance
between paying for a copy of these signals from a downconverter or cable
so I could watch them on my tv for whatever amusement I could get from
the old and usually second rate movies they run, and hooking up a
kluge of microwave hardware to my tv and pointing a horn out the
window at Boston's Prudential building. Granted I had provided the
receiving hardware, but it seemed very clear to me that I was receiving
exactly the benefit I would get if I subscribed to the service. It
seemed a very stretched interpretation of 605 or
for that matter simple morality to argue that I had some inalienable
right to use the service for free just because I provided the receiver
and they beamed it at me. I was never able to rationalize
my right to pirate a service that someone had gone to considerable expense
to provide, so I never watched it.
I feel that this same principle applies to using any rf
service for which there is a usual fee, particularly if this fee is intended
to cover the costs of providing the service and transmitting it, not just to
cover the cost of the receiving equipment. It seems to me that a somewhat
stretched analogy can be made with the widely accepted view
that it is not morally appropriate (or legal either) to copy and/or use
licensed software in violation of it's license terms simply because it
is easy, technically trivial, and often conveniant to do so. It seems
to me that the same kind of moral scruples that lead us to frown on those
who make pirate copies of our software ought to be raised when we point
our tvro's at satellites that carry programming that someone paid to
provide as a service they charge for.
In short, whether or not it is legal to intercept signals from one rf
source or another (which was a subject of considerable disagreement on the net)
obtaining a service without paying for it by intercepting such signals
is theft.
The only contrary perspective I can think of is that radiation of
information into space owned and occupied by others is somehow equivalent
to putting it completely into the public domain (or at least ceding
all rights to it to those whose space it traverses) and that the provider
of a service therefore cedes all rights to collect for providing his
service when he transmits it by radio. This viewpoint would give anyone
the right to do absolutely anything they want with any
information that alters the E or M field in any space they have control
over. As a practical matter this would eliminate unencrypted radio as a
medium for transmitting any form of proprietary or confidential or
private information, and elevate cryptography and cryptology to
the status of crucial arts.
One has to wonder whether this view is justified as one tries
to balence the rights of individuals to make sense of photons impinging
on them with the social purpose of providing communications and services that
would be otherwise impractical or impractically expensive to provide.
In any case as a hacker, I still occasionally poke around and
try demodulating random signals I find (as a strictly technical challenge
and recreation) but I remain careful not to allow myself to use my
knowlage and skill to obtain services that I am not paying for. My
recreation (very occasional these days now I have a wife and child
to soak up my time) is technically quasi-legal since I am only looking
at data and other signals not covered by 2115 (did my posting on this
get out?) but is probably a dying sport as broader laws and encryption
steadily encroach.
I would not recomend the kind of technical swl'ing I became addicted
to in my youth to a child of the modern age, aside from the fact that
we are gradually waking up to the need to secure communications and starting to
install encryption and non-rf links at a rapid rate, the temptation
to cheat and use one's skills to obtain services grows more difficult
to resist as rf based services proliferate.
It is probably better to regard listening to anything but what
one can pick up on an ordinary unmodified tv or AM/FM radio as forbidden
fruit, the same way we carefully avoid using a UNIX (tm) utility
on an unlicensed machine.
David I. Emery Charles River Data Systems 617-626-1102
983 Concord St., Framingham, MA 01701.
uucp: decvax!frog!dieprg@mgweed.UUCP (Phil Gunsul) (09/17/85)
I must disagree with what you are saying about tvro being illegal to receive. Congress just ruled late last year that as long as a signal is NOT encrypted, it is legal to receive it, where there is no established means of paying for the service. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with paying for HBO (if I wanted to watch it) on my tvro or even CNN, but I will not pay a 1000% inflated price to do so. I currently have a tvro and also have cable and PAY for a premium service. However, there are people out in the 'sticks' that will NEVER have cable. Why should they not be able to erect a dish and receive these services? Sure they should pay for them, but why should they pay the middle man (cable company) for their equipment when they have their own? All the tvro owners are asking is for a fair shake. The cable companies have gone out of their way to kill any competition from the tvro market... They run advertisements in local papers to scare perspective buyers into thinking the "sky will go dark"... Where is judge Green when he could do something useful??? I'm mad as hell... and I'm not going to take it anymore!!! Phil Gunsul -- WB9AAX
die@hydra.UUCP (Dave Emery) (09/20/85)
And apparently private is private.
I had occasion to hear Sen. Gore's legislative assistant who
wrote the changes to the communications act of 1934 that authorized reception
of unencrypted cable feeds at a seminar at MIT. It was quite clear from the
discussion that the mood in congress is to regard receiving any private radio
transmission as strictly illegal, including such almost public
things as network backhauls and the portions of network feeds to affiliates
that aren't meant to be put on the air. The general legal situation was
summed up: the satellite television viewing act created "a small and
very carefully defined exception" to an otherwise absolute prohibition
of reception of private communications. And further, the philosophical
justification was not that cable TV feeds were a special case
of private communications that could be made public because that served
a public good but rather that they were somehow not really private
because of their broadcast nature and wide public distribution.
It seems clear that Sen. Leahy and Rep. Kastenmeier, who have
filed a bill extending 2115 to cover most classes of radio transmission
other than broadcast (including cordless phones), reflect a powerful
sentiment in congress. It seems quite likely that receiving anything
other than broadcast transmissions intended for general use may soon
become major federal felonies. I have yet to take the time to read the text
of their bill so I do not know whether it applies just to point to
point or similar communications or whether it would apply to all non-
broadcast radio communications such as police, fire, news crews, aircraft,
ambulance and other such things so beloved of the millions of
Americans who own scanners. It definately extends protection to data
and record communications, however, and thereby closes that loophole in 2115.
I suspect that if a broad bill covering interception of almost
everything sent by radio becomes law this act will be another of
those unfortunate American laws that are enforced only at the discretion
of prosecuters and likely will be used more as a method of harrassing and
pressuring selected private citizens out of favor with the authorities
than as a real means of controlling private listening. I regard
such laws as very unfair because they are not uniformly or fairly
enforced. They encourage disrespect for the law by making an innately
private act that can never be effectively policed (and which
many millions of citizens practice and accept as their right) a crime, and
not only that but a crime which the law usually winks at.
After listening to the very economic arguments about scrambling
cable feeds, I've come to the conclusion that the gentleman who claimed
that it was cheaper to hire lawyers and lobbyists than buy cipher machines
is right. Unfortunately, however, real security is only obtained by
encryption. (I might add that the audio, data, and authorization side of
the M/A Com Videocipher II seems to be impressively well secured -
using DES, but the video is only lightly scrambled so watching pictures without
sound will no doubt become common).
I am sorry to say that everything I hear convinces me that
the very strong economic interests in protection of communications the
cheap way (laws) will no doubt force national policy in the direction
of draconian penalties rather than universal encryption. It is too bad
that this approach which is more PR than substance is being substituted
for a more effective cipher based one, but such is life...
David I. Emery Charles River Data Systems 617-626-1102
983 Concord St., Framingham, MA 01701.
uucp: decvax!frog!diedie@hydra.UUCP (Dave Emery) (09/23/85)
>From the artificial intelligence of hplabs!hpscda!hpscdx!garyg >Gary Gitzen >Hewlett-Packard >I saw your recent posting re > Theft is Theft. >and concluded that you have obviously thrown away your TV set because >it will receive signals that someone has paid to transmit. >Your argument is specious. Perhaps more accurately poorly phrased. Broadcast TV transmission, program material, and production are funded by people who want me to watch it and who do not charge a fee for normal home use. Many other signals are transmitted by organizations that are providing a service to subscribers who are expected to pay for that service. If I pirate that service for free then I am doing nothing to cover the costs of providing it, (what I meant by `paid to transmit'). By pirating the service I deny the provider just compensation for his costs in obtaining and transmitting the material, and also (another subtler point) his right to control who uses it and for what. I find it very hard to justify such an act from a moral standpoint, It seems to me that obtaining a service for free that cost someone many thousands of dollars to provide is theft pure and simple. It is clear that some signals are provided for all to use, some distribute material meant for a group of specific subscribers, and some contain private material meant for one or more authorized recipiants and no one else. It is not clear, whatever the technical ease and simplicity, or the traditional American belief in "free public airwaves" that I have the moral right to use either subscription material or completely private material just because it was there. Granted there is a subtle argument about taking reasonable precautions to ensure privacy (which I strongly beleive means encryption now it is possible, relatively cheap, and does not significantly degrade signal quality), but I do not beleive one has a moral right to use information picked out of the ether that was not transmitted for one's use. David I. Emery Charles River Data Systems 617-626-1102 983 Concord St., Framingham, MA 01701. uucp: decvax!frog!die