I wouldn't bet on these guys holding off for "liability" reasons. They have vast legions of lawyers, and a shortage of good sense, as well as a very loose grasp of the technology. Also, in the case of the Satellite TV Cards, it is a much clearer thing. You attach unauthorized equipment to a utility of some type, and you run the risk of damaging your equipment. The Satellite companies can realistically get away with this because they are really limiting the amount of damage they are doing, and because they have an extremely high accuracy rate. And even if they screw up, and zap a real subscriber's card, they can make them whole through a usage credit - no permanent harm. If they were causing people's TV's to implode, they wouldn't be able to get away with it. This sort of heavy-handed action by the anti-p2p folks will backfire in the end. The folks we should be saving our indignation for are the congressmen who have sold themselves to the RIAA/MPAA/BSA - Hollings, Berman, etc. These guys are pretty close to wholly owned subsidiaries of their respective patron industries. - Daniel Golding
Richard A Steenbergen Said....
On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 02:37:15PM -0700, Rowland, Alan D wrote:
I fully agree this is Not Good (TM), hence the BAD in my
response. Having
said that, satellite providers periodically 'kill' hacked access cards on equipment in the user's home with no legal ramifications. How would this be significantly different? Waiving the fourth amendment flag is just FUD in this case.
Satellite access cards are technically the property of the individual companies and are not allowed to be sold, so if they want to send down some code which disables your access to their system they are allowed. Causing damage to someone's receiver on the other hand, would be bad mojo.
However, someone's computer is NOT their property, nothing on it belongs to them (except maybe the copyrighted material of the clients they represent :P), not even a service you are getting from them.
I can't imagine they would actually follow through with this though, all it takes is one incident where they cause financial harm to someone with an mp3 they misidentify and their highground is gone. Then again, I can't imagine congress being so massively stupid either, so I suppose anything is possible.
-- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)