International Copyright Circumvention Essay -- Technology Copyright Es

International secure CircumventionA little under three years ago, I heard approximately a case where a programmer had been arrested for a program that bypassed the reduplicate protection mechanisms in one of Adobes products1. People who have published discipline on or performed security circumvention in the past, fifty-fifty when do 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 ii years, without bail, pending a trial, for gaining access to ( only not damaging) several corporate networks. This sweet case however had an different twist - the security circumvention was done exactly to let people access documents that they already had a right to have, and it was done outside the get together 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.Thi s case is an example of something which a decade earlier would never have even been considered to be illegal. But, it waterfall 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 encoding subroutined on DVDs.4(this was before the Abode case) The intended purpose of DeCSS was to make haste 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 convey to the DeCSS code. However, if the DVD can be decrypted and decompressed, it can to a fault 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 DMCAs anti-circumvention arent protected by international treaties on copyright such as the capital of Switzerland c... ...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. whole shebang CitedFallout From Def Con Ebook Hacker Arrested by FBI, Slashdot. July 2001 http//yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/17/130226&mode= drag&tid=93 (for more from Slashdot on the case http//yro.slashdot.org/search.pl?query=Sklyarov) Free Kevin Mitnick http//www.freekevin.com/ inadvertent 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 capital of Switzerland Covention for the Protection of Literary and Scientific Works http//www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/overview.html Enforcement of DMCA Criminal Penalties Suffers transposition, 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 the States September, 1787. http//www.constitution.org/constit_.htm