Nastic Gryzunova. Seine: issue 96

The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls on the population who to one degree or another consider themselves hackers to boycott the call of the Secure Digital Music Initiative. Its organizers turned to the community with a proposal to hack the systems developed by SDMI to protect digitized music recordings from unauthorized reproduction and copying: from September 15 to October 7, everyone can try to hack SDMI developments. Anyone who succeeds is promised 10 thousand dollars.

As always, at the first moment after the announcement of such initiatives (and this is by no means the first), the community simply took note of this information. A few days after the announcement, human rights activists woke up. The Linux Journal was the first to call for a boycott of the initiative: “If you say: “Hackers can’t hack our system even for a ten thousand dollar prize,” you would be mistaken. Hackers should not and will not provide consulting services to an organization that uses technical means to violate a normal balance between the interests of copyright owners and music lovers . " The EFF has now joined the boycott: “The EFF understood very early on that hacking security systems is essential to security. However, we question the motives of SDMI, which intends to severely limit your ability to listen to digital recordings in your favorite format and prevents all distribution models from developing digitized music not compatible with SDMI formats . "

It is clear that each side has its own interests. If the technologies developed by SDMI ultimately prove to be quite effective (and this effectiveness will not be achieved without the help of hackers), there is a high probability that the scheme for protecting proprietary copyrights in musical compositions, adopted offline, will be implemented in an even stricter version on the Internet. But even offline, no one abolished the concept of “fair use”. Not to mention what is already obvious: on the Internet, the concept of copyright is facing significant transformation; It’s kind of stupid to turn a blind eye to this. One way or another, it will be possible to judge who played more effectively - SDMI with its provocation or the EFF and the editors of Linux Journal with its revelations - only after October 7. We will assume that everything stated above is just such an announcement.