The Digital Millennium Copyright Act

CJMClark writes "I am a university student working on a public policy analysis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and I am interested in (since the government's stance is pretty clear) the opinions of members of the computing community as regards this particular piece of legislation and its effect on the freedom of information. Has the government, in your opinion, gone too far or overstepped its bounds? Have you been affected by the DMCA? How is it that the government can prohibit an average U.S. citizen from decrypting encrypted files, and yet also attempt to force Kevin Mitnick to decrypt his personal files? Is this a blatant violation of the fair use clause of Title 17? All replies will be held strictly confidential, as I am simply trying to get a feel for how this legislation affects those citizens who, on the whole, are technologically oriented.

Please feel free to post replies to this post, or simply e-mail them to me at CJMClark@hotmail.com. I welcome any and all opinions on this matter.

Carl J. Clark
"Justice for All in the Digital Age" "

Comments

I am a university professor

[Anonymous Coward]

And I am carrying out research on the use of the Internet for plagiarism. And I will be very interested to see how much original thought and how much cutting and pasting goes into your term paper, Carl.

A few random thoughts...

[Chops-Frozen-Water]

OK, firstly, the link's to the original House Bill, before the amendments to allow research and for interoperability. The parts that edit the existing U.S. Code to implement the WIPO (et al) treaties don't bother me. It's Section 3 that deals with the Copyright Management & Protection Laws.
Now, it's not just illegal to violate copyrights, it's illegal to consider violating copyrights. In some sense, it's a free speech violation, as it's leaning to the point that one must have a PhD and a research position to be able to research copyright management systems without violating the law. It grants a copyright holder not only a monopoly on the copyrighted work, but a monopoly on how you can access it. This has nothing to do with the WIPO treaty implementation.
Also, consider, that developing DeCSS to copy an encrypted DVD to an unencrypted medium violates that section, but doing a raw bit-for-bit copy doesn't fall under Chapter 12 (the additions regarding Copy Management & Protection) as it's just a "normal" copyright violation (illegal copies for commercial gain). I'd be kinda interested in checking the numbers for potential damages awarded, as for which is considered more damaging: infringement, or creating the ability to infringe without infringing.
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