The Gray Area

With technology, it’s easy to break the law — or at least get close to the edge

Legally, it’s been a gray week for me.

I took apart and repaired a 15-year-old, Freon-filled air conditioner without an EPA permit. I destroyed a wasps’ nest with a makeshift flamethrower — using an aerosol can of cleaner “in a manner inconsistent with its labeling.”

And then I went hardcore. Well, sort of.

I got myself a new laptop at work; I bring it home on weekends for safekeeping. It has built-in Wi-Fi networking, and I had a Wi-Fi hotspot in my house.

As soon as I turned it on, the laptop found and connected to a Wi-Fi network. This was cool; I appreciate how easy it works. But it was also odd, because my Wi-Fi network is encrypted. You need a password to access it, and I hadn’t entered one.

I pulled up the list of networks, and there was mine, locked down, along with a few others, also locked. There was also one unencrypted one and I was connecting through it. The computer is set to search for the strongest network it can access and use it.

As I wasn’t planning on bringing my machine home more than occasionally, it was easier to piggyback on this mysterious signal than to set up my own network.

There have been plenty of stories about how you should secure your wireless network, and doing so isn’t difficult: a handful of clicks, really. Some neighbors had done so, but one had not, and now I was using his Internet connection.

Technically, this is theft. Sort of. (One reason it’s not is that I figured out which neighbor it was, and I told him. He didn’t mind.)

But it’s a good example of how traditional definitions don’t always fit in the brave new world. Was I stealing? It’s a solid argument that I was depriving him of bandwidth — that I was slowing his access. But what if he wasn’t online? (In fact, he wasn’t home at the time.) I wasn’t not depriving him of anything.

More importantly, he was leaving his network unsecured, so any PC with a Wi-Fi card in the area would pick it up automatically.

Try to make an analogy. It’s tough. He doesn’t pay for time on the network, so I’m not costing him anything. He wasn’t using the network then, so I wasn’t depriving him of anything — I wasn’t slowing his connection. Free WiFi connections are all over, so I wasn’t depriving an ISP of revenue.

Still, that hasn’t stopped other people from being arrested for “stealing” a signal.

(Amusingly, back in my office, I also get an unencrypted signal. This one’s from the Associated Press office across the street.)

Terrible twos

My two year old does not quite understand the concept of “don’t scratch your DVDs.” He’s already ruined a few CDs, but videos are more expensive and we’ve been good about keeping them out of his (literally) grubby hands.

The smart thing to do, of course, is make a backup and use that, keeping the original safely put away. That’s the beauty of digital, as I’ve said before: Lots of copies keeps stuff safe. This way Sam only risks a 50-cent disk, not a $20 one.

There are a bunch of programs out there for making backups of your DVDs with names like “1Click DVD Copy,” “DVD Wizard Pro,” and “DVD Cloner.”

I use one called DVD Decrypter, which I like for two reasons: 1) It’s free, and 2) it can remove UOPs from the DVD before making a copy.

If you have a DVD player, you’ve bumped into UOPs — “user operation prohibitions.” They’re the things that give the message “Operation currently prohibited by disk” (or something similar) when you try to do something you’re not supposed to.

For example, some of Sam’s disks come from a company — no names, please — that fills the first 10 minutes with commercials for its other products. The UOPs prohibit you from skipping them.

Can you imagine if you tried to read your child a book but couldn’t start until you flipped through 20 pages of ads? Of course not.

That’s why, when I made a backup of these disks, I also removed the UOPs. Now Sam can be as rough as he likes and we can skip the commercials, too. I know the original is safe, and I know he doesn’t have to be exposed to yet more advertising.

Is what I did against the law? Not yet, but the entertainment industry wants it to be. Right now it’s a gray area. I didn’t break the law, but the company that made the software might be on shakier ground… if it’s in the US. Of course if it’s in the free world (copyright wise) it might be perfectly legal.

Gray area

My father sent me birthday greetings with a card that has a photo of a New York scene — specifically, Fort Washington Park with the George Washington Bridge in the background. I’m always happy to see scenes of New York, but this one made me stop.

From the angle the shot was taken, you could just see, under the bridge, the Little Red Lighthouse. (If you don’t know about the lighthouse, you should.)

“Holy moly!” I said. Entirely by accident, he had sent me a card that brought back memories of one of my favorite childhood books. I scanned the card and sent it to a friend with a note, “Holy moly!”

Now that card was copyrighted art, yet here I was, scanning it and sending it to someone. Breaking the law or fair use? Obviously, fair use… I think. I wasn’t profiting from it, wasn’t depriving anyone of anything (it isn’t as if my friend was going to buy the card and now wouldn’t). It was pretty much in the context of a review.

Had it been a digital image I had paid for, however, and not an analog one (in this case, a printed one), that would have been exactly the kind of thing content creators would have wanted to prevent.

For now, though, I still have my copyrights — at least to some extent. (And let’s not forget that the idea of copyright was to protect the rights of content consumers as much as those of creators. It’s something the entertainment industry has paid Congress to ignore.)

I still can change my car’s oil without a license, permit, or certification. I can still build a potato cannon and fix my air conditioner. I can still copy my CDs to my MP3 player and use my TiVo to watch Friday’s Battlestar Galactica again.

But as technology marches on, our laws don’t always march with it. They’re written by men with agendas that are different than ours — men who don’t understand what they’re trying to legislate, or who are on the payrolls of companies that very much do understand it.

So chances are there will come a day there won’t be room for naughty men to slip about at all. The sad thing is that we’ll think them naughty in the first place.