The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)

Or take another example: almost everybody has locked himself out of their car. If the DMCA applied to real-life things I would be a crimianl if I told you that you could bend a coat hanger and push it through the frame and window of the door and try to hook the lock handle inside to open the window. After all, criminals could use that information to steal cars. Never mind the fact that there are perfectly legitimate uses for circumventing the car's lock!

If the DMCA does not apply to physical objects, why should the DMCA still scare you?

It should scare you greatly because there are multiple uses for the need to circumvent certain copy protections that have nothing to do with illegal activities!

A company in Russia, for example, has produced a highly useful utility to convert eBooks to PDF so that people whose vision is impaired can have their PDF viewing software read the eBook aloud to them. The software even requires that the eBook is a legitimately owned copy. But the programmer who worked on the software, a Russian citizen, was arrested in the U.S. recently (arrested, not just sued!) on criminal charges of violating the DMCA, a law that applied to the U.S. and not to Russia.

Some operating systems do not have a lot of market share; these include the various BSD and Linux variants, as well as Amigas and numerous other platforms. No DVD playing software is available for them because the software houses that have the licenses to produce such software don't care to produce such software. Some kids in Germany broke the feeble CSS code on DVD playes and produced a piece of software called ``DeCSS'' (Decode CSS) that allowed DVDs to be played on those platforms where DVDs were simply not playable before. It has been claimed that this software opened the door for widespread copyright violation, but with the price of blank DVDs costing as much as three times of a commercial disc, it would be easier for the thieves to break into a DVD warehouse than spend $30 to $40 to duplicate a DVD and then be outsold by a $12 price tag on a legitimate disc that includes a nice box and cover art.

And then there are researchers, who have an interest in researching data processing techniques, who analyze data and algorithms, and who, by the age-old rules of academic research, looking to share their findings with the rest of the academic and research community; one such researcher, Professor Felten, was recently sued to prevent him from presenting his findings on the pathetically inadequate digital watermarking techologies used by the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI).

And we, at Ringlord Technologies, are probably bound to have the FBI and police show up on our doors merely for mentioning that there are ways to circumvent digitial copy protection measures, or for linking to the NewsForge article on the topic (see link below).

But what's more: the actual thieves, the ones who reproduce content and distribute it illegally, are unlikely to be scared of the law at all. When in all of history have criminals ever been turned from the path of crime by the existence of a law?

It seems rather obvious: the DMCA is not meant to curb or eliminate the illegal distribution of digital content, but rather create precedent in the law to build stronger and more restrictive walls against the freedoms that all law-abiding people hold dear. The law cannot stop the criminals, but it will restrict the freedoms of the rest of the people, starting with those whose only intent is fair use but who are made criminals by as little as that.