[Free-sklyarov-uk] DMCA/EUCD issues discussed at HAL2001

[Julian T J Midgley]

>From a correspondent who attended HAL2001:

HAL2001 went very well indeed, this was the first event like this I'd been
to and I really enjoyed it.  I stayed for Sunday night and helped take down
the lighting rigs, etc which really was a highlight - pulling free beer from
the Grolsch tap at 2:30 am!

I was not a diligent note taker, so I'm hoping that HAL2001 will sort out
their archive footage soon so I can brush up on the details and give a
little summary of the most important stuff I attended.  There was excellent
coverage of the DVD CCA from Tom Vogt, and he has his talk online now at
http://www.lemuria.org/decss/hal2001.html.  I believe that Tom did mention
the EuroRights website, I have a note of it in my palmpilot against his
lecture.  He was most concerned that equivalent legislation to the DCMA does
NOT get passed in Europe.

Gus Hosein from the London School of Economics gave an excellent and
frightening talk on the Cybercrime Convention currently winging its way
through the Council of Europe, this has massive implications for prosecution
of foreign nationals under another country's laws, even without the need for
dual criminality - i.e. if it is a crime in my country I can ask your
country to spy on you and extradite you.  Mandatory extradition for all
copyright related crimes that carry a sentence of 1 year or more in the
foreign country.  Gus's homepage is http://is.lse.ac.uk/staff/hosein/

Niels Ferguson, an independent cryptography consultant, gave an excellent
talk on analysis of the new AES cypher.  At the end of his lecture he
switched of his overhead projectors and gave a five minute talk on how he
had recently discovered flaws in Intel's HDCP protocol, had contacted the
EFF and been advised that publishing his academic paper on the subject would
leave him open to being sued in the US.  As he visits the US and intends to
continue doing so he is left with no option but to supress his academic
research and NOT publish the paper.  Details on
http://www.macfergus.com/niels/ and
http://www.macfergus.com/niels/dmca/index.html

John Gilmore spoke on the US legal situation, bad law, freedom of expression
and many other subjects.  He noted that he had passed a general description
of the problems in Intel's HDCP protocol to them from Niels' description,
with a note that because of DMCA liability they will not know the details,
and that they may be leaving themselves open to going ahead with an insecure
protocol.  I have not seen any coverage in The Register yet, I'm not sure
anyone has picked up on this story yet but it is another Felton.  By the
way, in case it was not obvious above, Niels was absolutely livid that an
American law could have such a chilling effect on his academic free speech
in The Netherlands.

In case you haven't seen it, the ACM has filed a brief in support of Dimitry
noting the chilling effect of DMCA on their US conferences and the ACM's
overall standing and mandate.

Dave Del Toro at the CryptoRights talk spoke of a new axis between
traditional greens/human rights organisations (Greenpeace / Amnesty) and
programmer activists.  His message was that they now realise they need us
because we have new technologies in areas such as communications that they
see uses for in their activism.  We should be talking to them because they
have the expertise in organising public opinion, campaigning and raising
funds.  An interesting point, well made.