International Copyright Circumvention
A little under three years ago, I heard about a case where a programmer had been arrested for a program that bypassed the copy protection mechanisms in one of Adobe's products1. People who have published information on or performed security circumvention in the past, even when done in a non-destructive manner have faced some legal problems. Specifically, it reminded by of the Kevin Mitnick case2 a few years earlier. In that case, a hacker was detained for two years, without bail, pending a trial, for gaining access to (but not damaging) several corporate networks. This new case however had an different twist - the security circumvention was done only to let people access documents that they already had a right to have, and it was done outside the United States. That raises issues regarding the United States having any right to do what they did, and even if they did have the right, was a wrong even committed.
This case is an example of something which a decade earlier would never have even been considered to be illegal. But, it falls into in of the heavily opposed section 12013 of the new Digital Millenium Copyright Act which tries to halt circumvention of anti-piracy measures. There was opposition before the law passed, but it became stronger when the DVD CAA tried to oppress distribution of the DeCSS - code that could bypass the encryption used on DVDs.4
(this was before the Abode case)
The intended purpose of DeCSS was to facilitate the development of an open-source DVD player. There were no DVD players for Linux, BeOS, FreeBSD, or any of the other operating systems that now have DVD players thanks to the DeCSS code. However, if the DVD can be decrypted and decompressed, it can also be re-compressed and re-distributed in another medium more practical for bootleggers, such as VideoCDs. (Which could also be done simply by playing the DVD in a normal DVD player, recording the output, just not producing as high quality results.) At the time no such re-encoding tools were available, and such behavior would be protected under traditional fair use for personal backups. Furthermore, the code was released anonymously by someone outside the United States. This lead to an initial attack using trade secret laws (The DMCA's anti-circumvention aren't protected by international treaties on copyright such as the Berne c...
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...umvention tools is and has been illegal anyway. And trying to aggressively impose the views of our companies on our countries is certainly uncalled for.
Works Cited
"Fallout From Def Con: Ebook Hacker Arrested by FBI", Slashdot. July 2001 http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/17/130226&mode=thread&tid=93 (for more from
Slashdot on the case: http://yro.slashdot.org/search.pl?query=Sklyarov)
"Free Kevin Mitnick" http://www.freekevin.com/
"Unintended Consequences: Five Years under the DMCA", Electronic Frontier Foundation, http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/unintended_consequences.php
"CSS and DeCSS", DeCSS Central, http://www.lemuria.org/DeCSS/decss.html
"Berne Covention for the Protection of Literary and Scientific Works" http://www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/overview.html
"Enforcement of DMCA Criminal Penalties Suffers Setback", Copright Corner. March 2003. http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/Copy-corner53.htm
Locke, John. "Two Treatise of Government" Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1967. http://www.ecn.bris.ac.uk/het/locke/government.pdf
"Constitution for the United States of America" September, 1787. http://www.constitution.org/constit_.htm
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Abstract: This paper discusses the ongoing court battle between the Motion Picture Association of America, supported by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and various defendants regarding the DeCSS program and its source code. DeCSS is a utility that allows the circumvention of the encryption built into most DVDs. Specifically, the paper examines the implications of the court decision on a range of issues including source code as free speech, HTML linking, and fair use.
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Note that \ari defines material goods as being everything whose value can be measured in money. This same definition will be used here, implying that the domain of material goods would include services, not just tangible items. Thus, the extent of which an individual values money is, in part, proportional to their value of material goods. Recalling \ari's definition for generosity, a relationship can be drawn on how a generous individual might value money given how they value material goods. The generous individual should value money as he does material goods, which is to be reasonably detached from it.
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