> I fail to see how the delineation and protection of property rights in the
> DMCA is in any way "anti-Libertarian" -- most laws seem to be a mixed bag,
> DMCA included, but the DMCA seemed to me to be a general move in the right
> direction -- could you (or someone) explain why the DMCA does more harm
> than good?
DMCA = Digital Millenium Copyright Act
The problem with the DMCA is that it does not merely prohibit copying
digital works just as non-digital works are protected. It also
prohibits circumventing copy protection (technology used to make
copying difficult) even if the purpose of circumventing is to make a
perfectly legal copy. For example, it's perfectly legal (under normal
copyright law) to make a backup copy of a software CD in case you lose
or break the first one. And it's also legal for the software
publisher to try to make copying difficult to reduce illegal copying.
But under DMCA, it's illegal for me to circumvent copy protection even
to make a perfectly legal backup copy.
The real problem is that it also prohibtis "trafficking in any
circumvention device" which has been interepreted by some law
enforcement authorities (and by RIAA, MPAA, and Adobe) to include
writing, using, or distributing software to decrypt or use
copy-protected material in a non-standard manner.
For example, a computer science professor at Princeton, Ed Felten, was
prevented from giving a talk on encryption at an academic conference
because the talk exposed weaknesses in the algorithm of the Secure
Digital Music Initiative (SDMI). The irony is, Felten did the
research in response to a challenge from the SDMI folks to break their
system!
See http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/sdmimessage.txt
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/Felten_v_RIAA/
Another example: Dmitry Sklyarov is a Russian citizen who wrote a
program to allow blind people to read Adobe eBooks, which involved
cracking Adobe's encryption. He wrote the program in Russia, where
obviously US law doesn't apply. He gave a talk at a computer
conference in Las Vegas discussing how his software works, after which
he was immediately arrested by the FBI on federal criminal charges for
giving the talk. The irony of this is palpable.... his wife refused
to travel to the US to visit him in jail because she was afraid she
would be arrested as well. (Can Russia be a freer country than the
US?)
See http://www.freesklyarov.org/
Another example: DVDs are all encrypted. DVD players and MS-Windows
have officially sanctioned decryption software. Linux does not, since
there's not Linux organization to pay for it. But someone cracked the
code and wrote his own software to play DVDs on Linux -- remember,
these are not copied DVDs, but originals! -- and various people who
put that software on their websites have been prosecuted and/or
harrassed for it. The author himself was prosecuted under the Swedish
version of DMCA -- and remember, this software is for playing original
DVDs you legally purchased, not copied ones. And the lawsuits are
over software that is only a few lines long!
See http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/
(One person generated a prime number which, when put into a computer
and run through a compiler, produced executble DVD-playing code. Is
possession of that number illegal under DMCA? Probably.)
--Robert Book
