On Fri, Mar 15, 2002 at 02:41:11AM -0800, Lyle Leavitt wrote:
> I have dealt with these issues though out my career. This is an age
> old problem which has exploded along with internet access. Few people
> understand the copyright or piracy laws of this country. All of them
> are broken on a daily basis often unintentionally. If a law isn't
> enforced people will not take the time to understand it.
While it's true that people do violate copyrights often unintentionally,
the legally accepted notion of allowed fair use is being dramatically
reduced by music and film industry lobbying.
Furthermore, such actions as the DMCA have had serious unintended
(or possibly intended) consequences: consider the Felten case where a
group of computer security researchers wanted to publish an academic
paper regarding security flaws in SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative)
technology. They were finally allowed by the SDMI group to publish their
research, but any additional followup research is not covered by the
agreement the SDMI group made. This is problematic, because the methods
Felten et al. used to find digital watermarks have a very high probability
of being applicable to seismology (potentially for oil exploration),
but because it also can be used to circumvent Digital Rights Management,
publishing research in this area is prohibited under the DMCA unless
expressly allowed by the SDMI group.
As another example, consider the Johansen DeCSS case: Jon Johansen
managed to break the DVD encryption scheme (it was very poorly
implemented, but telling you technical details about it could get _me_
prosecuted under the DMCA [1]) in an attempt to play his DVDs under Linux.
For this, he was arrested in his home country of Norway at the request
of movie industry groups and is currently threatened with a two-year
jail term. Furthermore, people in the United States are being prosecuted
under the DMCA for publishing the DeCSS source code Johansen on the
internet -- in some case, they're being prosecuted for merely _linking_ to
it.
The problem is that the music and video industries do not understand
that there are free speech problems with technology regulation itself
(a la DMCA and SSSCA). As Seth David Schoen put it so eloquently on
another mail list:
"Tragically, the studios are steeped in the attitude that, in effect,
the first amendment protects _their_ industry's right to exist and to
produce its products without government content mandates -- but that
this protection doesn't extend to technologists, and that technical
freedom isn't even contemplated by that amendment."
You can see this directly in Eisner's comments to the senate that
started this whole discussion.
Technical regulation in the form of the DMCA and SSSCA are serious
impediments to the nation's computer and network security infrastructure,
as poor as it already is.
[1] There is a section in the DMCA that allows disemmination of
information for law enforcement, but for those of us not in law
enforcement, even doing something as discussing technical security
vulnerabilities on a mailing list like CRIME can be a violation of
the DMCA.
--
Steve Beattie Don't trust programmers?
<steve@private> Complete StackGuard distro at
http://NxNW.org/~steve/ immunix.org
http://www.personaltelco.net -- overthrowing QWest, one block at a time.
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