Companies decide to spend alot of money setting up Information, especially in digital form, has a zero cost to copy, and does not deprive the "owner" of their copy. telephone, post, etc.Įven then the only real use of encryption is to make things so that it is cheaper for someone to buy a decryption service from the provider than employ cryptoanalysis You really need a completly separate channel for updating keys, e.g. Sending them over the air isn't much good though. The encryption is static (including keys) and the decryption mechanisms are freely available.Įncrypting a broadcast signal is more likely to work, since you can at least change the keys, possibly the algorithm. The problem in quite a few cases is that the organisations concerned do not understand the basics of crypography.
People are finding ways around the arcane protection that these companies think will protect them. We just happen to be able to pick up their programming.įinally, I'm beginning to see the fruits of all that "trying to make bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet" talk.īut we also have the "pass laws so people arn't allowed to use water to make things wet, unless we want them to" :) There is no 'lost revenue', they don't even try to say there is any. You are NOT subsidizing anything as a paying customer we are not part of their marketshare, and not part of their business plan.
DirecTV is NOT ALLOWED to sell television to us, they have no license to broadcast in Canada. It's only the US that has to have certain frequencies 'blocked'.Īlso, as Canadians, we are *not allowed* to buy direcTV.
We only regulate who can transmit, that's it' When the cellular companies lobbied to have this chagned here, the CRTC and others said simply (and rightly so) 'the radio spectrum is a public resource, it belongs to the people.
The same goes for most of the rest of the free world anyway. It is perfectly legal for us to have unblocked scanners that cover *any* frequencies. The only reason many Canadian stores carry scanners that don't have these frequencies as well is because they are manufactured in the states. Scanners with cellular frequencies are illegal *in the united states only*. Don't play loosey-goosey with the language. Otherwise he'd be known as a c-kiddie or maybe a "1337" hacker. A script kiddie, can't by definition write c code. This wasn't some two-bit script kiddie reading some t-phile on how the interface worked, no this was a serious piece of reverse engineering.
But use of the term "theft" here makes one think of a far larger insidious deed than was perpetrated, While free TV is a legal possible outcome, under law, it is not "theft".Īnd the last thing you were wrong about is the hack itself. And it's also not illegal, at least in canada. A more accurate statement might be "It's Unauthorized Decryption". The Canadian hackers did not "deprive" the use of the DSS signal from the DirecTV satellite service. There's also a question of what actually constitutes "stealing". Especially those illegal ones that happen to be broadcast over the boarder. They can distribute any and all devices that circumvent any encryption scheme. The Canadians *do* have more rights than Americans here. Moreover, since the DMCA doesn't apply to Canadians. So DirecTV is stealing usable frequency space in Canada, and the Canadians are happily stealing the broadcast feeds off those unlicensed signals. That simple fact and a couple of Canadian court rulings in favor of the DSS hackers buys a get-out-of-jail card north of the border. So in that respect the signal is fair game to those in Canada. And the DSS signal is probably being illegally broadcast in Canada, which, in case you didn't know, in outside the juris diction of the FCC. We're talking about Canada.Ĭanada doesn't have the DMCA on the books. You see, regardless of your beliefs on DirecTV, DSS and the DMCA, we're NOT TALKING ABOUT THE USA.