Just in case folks haven't figured out how sweeping the Hollings-Feinstein bill, aka CBDTPA is, well, keep reading.
The CBDTPA says that if I were to write and sell this BASIC program... 10 INPUT A$ 20 PRINT A$ ...after the regulations take effect, I would be guilty of a federal felony. That's up to five years in prison and up to a $500,000 fine. Distributing my two-line application without charging for it, either via handing out floppies or by posting it on a website would be at least a civil offense and, depending on the circumstances, a crime as well. It's no joke. CBDTPA regulates "any hardware or software that reproduces copyrighted works in digital form." My program above does that, especially if my BASIC interpreter permits arbitrarily long strings. The business end of the CBDTPA says that "a manufacturer, importer, or seller" of such software cannot "sell, or offer for sale, in interstate commerce, or cause to be transported in, or in a manner affecting, interstate commerce" their code unless it "includes and utilizes standard security technologies that adhere to the security system standards adopted under section 3." The FCC gets to invent those. But I can't see how my two-line program is going to incorporate such standards. If I'm using C, must I "#include <sys/copycheck.h>?" In Perl, will I "use Parse::DRMVerify?" If so, who at the FCC will ensure that these modules are available for the languages I'm using? (It is true that folks at the FCC are smarter than the folks in Congress, though that is not saying much. FCC staff will try to make the standards workable. But the CBDTPA gives them -- and the public -- precious little wiggle room.) By design, programming languages are terribly flexible. The only way to prevent software from removing do-not-copy bits from digital content would be for Congress to ban the programmable PC. And replace it, perhaps, with WebTV television-top boxes. In case you're curious, the felony penalties kick in when you try to sell your post-ban BASIC program -- not to mention any commercial software -- and perhaps even if you're a free software developer hoping to gain reputation capital from your code. They say that violators "shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both, for the first offense; and shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned for not more than 10 years, or both, for any subsequent offense." (http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/1204.html) Yes, this is silly. No, it is probably (I hope) not what senators Hollings and Feinstein and their colleagues intended. Yet it is what the text of the bill says. And this is after the good senators had seven months of correspodnence from computer scientists and industry representatives worried about the scope of the legislation after it was widely circulated in August 2001. Don't believe me? Read it for yourself: Text of CBDTPA: http://www.politechbot.com/docs/cbdtpa/ Politech archive on the CBDTPA: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=cbdtpa -Declan ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Politech dinner in SF on 4/16: http://www.politechbot.com/events/cfp2002/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
