Slashdot Mirror
Comments On The DMCA Published
vectro writes, "Well, the copyright office has published all the comments they've received. It looks like all the comments are pro-consumer, with the exception of those from media companies: Time/Warner (movies), Sony Computer (interestingly, comments focus on Playstation rather than movies or music), and the MPAA." These are in .pdf format, so you'll need Acrobat Reader.
since washington is 0wn3d by those media corporations, they will have their way of course.
I think recent /. posts indicate that the
DMCA is law... since when does any gov't
agency solicit comments on laws that are
already passed... usually comments are only
solicited on pending laws...
You should also be able to use xpdf if you don't want to deal with installing Acrobat.
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/
"Wherever you go, there you are."
I am not a lawyer, so I would like to post this question - Just how effective are the comments?
In other words, I want to know what's the role the comments play in the whole scheme of things.
Is it juat "comments" and then forget about it type, or is it I would really take your comments seriously and I will see what can I do?
What happens when there are opposing type of comments - as you have pointed out, the pro- and anti-consumer type, from different entities?
What will the copyright office do in such instance?
Will they base their future action on the comments on the businesses - anti-consumer - or will it be based on how many pro-consumer vs. the anti-consumer?
I just want to know, so, many thanks for any comments (yes, I take your comment seriously) that you may have.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Most of the comments concern DeCSS. While the initial comments are no longer being accepted, you still have time to reply to comments (March 20th). If you have any input, you can rebut and reply to any of the comments posted. Mine is up there. Several issues concern most of the visitors to /., including DVDs, encryption, reverse-engineering (how about not being able to make your new hardware work on Linux because it was illegal), and other copyright issues.
Comment #224 has notes about one computer association's concern with DMCA, #209 concerns the input from the MPAA, and #43 is the yacking of Time-Warner. Some very interesting notes were posted by Universities and Museums.
If you want to play DVDs on your Linux box, and you have an interest in how Linux continues to develop, make your voice heard. Post replies to comments. Some of the comments are very well written and thoughtful.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
235 comments out of 250+ Million Americans? This, in short, is why we'll never win... The American populace at large simply doesn't care about anything the government decrees anymore, nor about protecting their rights. We're talking less than .001 of a percent of the population bothered to respond. Hell, it's not even a significant percentage of REGISTERED /. readers.
This
Consider what would happen if an open-source encryption/decryption algorithm was created (like CSS, the strength of the algorithm is not important), with a license that explicitly forbade both commercial and governmental use. Now any warez/mp3/movie pirate could encrypt their warez and post them for the public consumption with complete impunity. No law enforcement agency or company could bring any action against this pirate, because in order to do so, they would have to prove that they performed an act of piracy in the first place, which would entail infringing upon the terms of the license of the encryption algorithm.
Perhaps the government has legal methods to work around this.. perhaps they are even built into the DMCA. Nevertheless, this sort of "restricted license" encryption, if employed by pirates, would make it more difficult for any company to protect their copyrights online.
Lets do it! :)
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Excuse me, i did a mistake. God please forgive me. I hope i won't go to hell.
I wonder how the LoC is gonna react to all of these excellent replies; it's so overwhelming, I'd be pretty surprised if they didn't declare DVDs exempt. Let's all cross our fingers.
Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
Some of my favorite lies and FUD:
David Carson, General Counsel for Time WarnerGee Dave, how about a person who owns a Linux-based PC with a DVD-ROM drive (but not a set-top DVD player) who wants to legally purchase a DVD movie and watch it on his (legally purchased) computer hardware? What about an American who buys an obsure Japanese-language Anime DVD, but can't watch it on his legally-purchased DVD player because of the regional encoding? What about the person who hooks up his new DVD player thru his VCR, because his TV only has a 75-ohm input, and can't watch any movies because of the Macrovision feature? These are all perfectly legitimate scenerios where a law-abiding consumer would be forced to defeat "technical protection measures" (in violation of the DCMA) in order to use a legally-purchased product.
I'm sure you do, so long as it is Time Warner who is making fair use of someone else's intellectual property. They just have a problem if someone else wants to make fair use of their IP. Sorry, Davey; you can't have it both ways.
I really, really hope that some Federal judge out there has the stones to strike the DCMA down; or at least issue an injunction to keep it from being enforced till it makes it up to the Supreme Court. Even though the current Court has a pretty lousy track record in upholding civil liberties, at least they pretend to give a crap about the Constitution; which is more than I can say about Congress & the President.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
Can your IM do this?
A lot of closed-source companies in there fighting for Linux rights. Good to see...
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
Can your IM do this?
In the future might it be possible, without this right, that all media will require decryption software that must be licensed per use no matter what the form of media it is or who owns it, just because the encryption is "owned" regardless of the media?
Why dont we fight for this right, and everything else (DeCSS, restrictive copy protection, ect) will fall into place under one big umbrella right? This is where the line needs to be drawn, and all these issues would reside on one side of this line.
I have no need of a Linux DVD player, however, I want the RIGHT to posess my media in readable format, and I will fight for that right, lest it gets chipped away at like so many other rights these days...
--AROS is an Open Source AmigaOS clone, and source compatible with AmigaOS! Try the x86 build at http://www.aros.org
If you cut and paste the string into a browser window, nothing happens. Click the link, and well...
Actualy, win98 dosn't crash per se, it just 'destabliezes' and starts acting weird. I don't know if loading it as an image would cause problems though.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
They only got 225 total comments. I gues we don't really care that much...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
What about the person who hooks up his new DVD player thru his VCR, because his TV only has a 75-ohm input, and can't watch any movies because of the Macrovision feature?
Macrovision dosn't stop the signal from passing through VCRs, it only stops it from being recorded to a VHS tape. If your going to rant, you should at least get your facts straight.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
These are in .pdf format, so you'll need Acrobat Reader.
.PDF" then just get the file it tells you to and place it over the old one. Simple!
But you can do with "gv" too, which is an X11 interface to GhostScript. It's installed by default on RH 6.1 systems for example. The author is Johannes Plass, if you need to search for it.
If it complains about "encryption in the
WTF? This is not interesting, or insitefull. Well, not that interesting, anyway. I will rape anyone I see In metamoderation... if I get the chance.
'click-wrap' licenses are uninforceable, and the govt would just need to get a warrent anyway. dumbas.
I'm wondering how much thi stinking law will effect othercounrties allied to the US? i mean i live down under, we work closely with the US, are we gonna have to live by bits of this law?
If you want to quickly set up your copy of Netscape under linux to read PDFs like these, go to the Preferences dialog and look for the "Portable Document Format" type. Change this to "Application" and for the program name, type "gv %s". If you have acrobat reader, you can use "acroread %s" as well.
I suggest doing this for "Postscript Documents" as well. Makes life way easier.
æeee!
The rules can't be too byzantine, this made it in.
Many of the DMCA comments follow /. stories (within several days) .. notable blocks are around Jan 21 and Feb 16...good work people -- you may have made a difference today.
--
Been, been!
Here I'll do it for you.
This is the biggest crock ever! Why don't they focus on important issues, for example, cheese?
Brought to you by The Troll Corrector.(TM)
---
Warning: Use of this product in a manner inconsistent with its labelling is an offense punishable by law.
If you are unsure about the legality of your intended use please refer to the DCMA.
If you believe you have a warranty please refer to UCITA.
I had two big smelly logs. One was a true floater, the other was a half floater; it was standing on end.
While funny to think this is true, this is just a fantasy, Think of Drugs being actally sold or brought to actually bust drug dealers or erotic sites with underage models that are actually FBI stings.
better start encrypting all you download, you never know if you downloaded something you shouldnt have.
'In order to read these comments about unfairness to the consumer, you *MUST* use this proprietry software'.
That's it, take the piss.
Unfortunately I sort of agree with you here. The thought that kept coming to mind when I was reading the comments was, why did the DMCA publish these in the first place? Are they sincere in the effort, or are they just doing PR diligence. I really feel it's the latter. Making a token effort to say we did our research, got input from all sides, etc. In the long run I think the DMCA is going to do whatever the big corporate mongers want them to do. Quite depressing.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
I like it, but you have to post as an AC so people will bite. At number eight, that post should have gotten half a dozen responses at the very least.
Yeah.
I mean, how outright stupid do you have to be to troll under the UID "TrollKing" and sign your troll "TrollKing" in bold italics ? You're not going to get any responses except for people telling you how bad a troll it was.
No real responses at all. Worthless.
The sole purpose of DeCSS is to allow DVDs to be played on Linux machines. There's no "playback protection" involved, since encoded DVDs can be played on any DVD player. Encoded DVDs can be copied without need for decoding. The encoding in DVDs has nothing to do with copyright protection.
You and I both know what DeCSS will be mostly used for, and it won't be legal.
I know what DeCSS will be used for. You apparently pretend you don't know.
A FINE example that this is true was ABC News' story on DeCSS this week.
Yes, the story we waited to see on ABC last month about Jon and DeCSS - it was on... sort of.
The story was about piracy. There was no mention of any other issue, and Jon's presence was about 3 selected lines that, in the context of the story, left the viewer with the inference that he was just one more teen cracker.
ABC followed the CSS story with one about napster, also spun down the piracy line.
You can download the wav of both stories at http://www.galstar.com/~mctech/abcnews.wav
You might also take ABC up on their invitation to tell them what you think... after you read the linux advocacy page, or course.
My metamoderation cancels your moderation
Post a reply comment to the LoC! Let your voice be heard!
Consider this... US bans all production of hardware that omits copyright. But that is only in the US.. Won't Japan/Europe get a profound advantage in making hardware since they are not under such serious restraints? (I.E. It is not legal to make the hardware you want). You can apply this to software as well. I think that the US Goverment is getting very restrictive... It is NOT a free country anymore IMO.
It's good that they did put this up on the web and took results via email.
Will they listen to us?
Fight Spammers!
One should take some comfort from court decisions such as this one that respect the principle of "fair use". Comments to rulemaking bodies, letters to your representatives to Congress, serve to protect the narrow interests of, for example, legitimate users of DeCSS. Will you vote in November?
Keep in mind that the DMCA primarily exists to implement U.S. obligations under international treaties. The U.S. has probably the greatest interest in those treaties because intellectual property ("IP") is a significant contributor to U.S. citizens' higher than average standard of living.
It wasn't that long ago that copyright holders could not protect their IP in foreign contries. H.M.S. Pinafore was a great hit in the U.S. in the 1870's but Gilbert and Sullivan couldn't collect royalties. See here. If it was your ox being gored by a Chinese sweatshop reverse engineering your code and putting your company out of business by selling a copycat product in the U.S. via the internet, I expect you would look more kindly on the treaties and the DMCA that enable you to protect your company's IP and your job.
Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years
I'd like to point out some brief excerpts from three of the comments. Others have rightly complimented the EFF comments - which we can probably assume will be a good indication of at least part of the approach EFF's team will use in the courtroom.
The heart of the EFF comment is this:
Second, the MPAA comments are extremely revealing - and will probably be important in the courtroom, too. In essence, they argue that CSS gives them important protection against more than just piracy:
And, the third (and final) excerpt I want to quote is this, from the Computer and Communications Industry Association. They point out an absurd conclusion that the law might lead to if there is is not a broad protection for interoperability.
Now, here's what happens next. The court cases are going to proceed - which I think is plainly thuggish behavior on the part of the MPAA and the Copy Control Authority. Court procedures are slow, but so is the regulatory process. It is conceivable that some of the court cases will be in the appeal stage before the Copyright Office makes any final decision.
Slashdot users can do two things:
The rules for sending reply comments appear here. If anyone is unclear about how to send these reply comments, or wants to send their comments in PDF format (which is not necessary), I would be willing to help clean them up or convert them to PDF and send them on to the Copyright Office as a service to the
2. Keep fighting the battle of public opinion. Most people don't know anything about this issue, and those who have heard of it largely don't grasp its importance. Tell your friends and family - and, if you can, write letters to your local newspaper. Anything you can do to move the battle from the online world to meatspace will help.
This is going to be a long fight.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
I'd like to comment briefly regarding how incredibly friendly and helpful I've found the people at our U.S. Copyright Office to be. My submission was at the last minute, and there were problems. I used Linux and, quite innocently, used "DMCA.comment-letter.1" as my letter's filename. Our U.S. Copyright Office used Windows, which did not handle the ".1" suffix gracefully.
I was polite. Members of our U.S. Copyright Office were even more polite, and worked with me to resolve the [technical] issue.
Do not assume these people are out to hurt us. Like politicians, they do *NOT* benefit from harming the general population. One of the small advantages of living in a democracy.
We all know that DVD's can be copied bit for bit. However, we can't recreate new DVD's with the encryption codes in the right location.
Question: Can somebody out there, with more skill than I, hack a windows-DVD player so it thinks it's reading a DVD, but actually reads the data off a harddrive? In other words, can someone deliberately hack WinDVD (or equivalent) to play pirated DVD's?
I'd love to be able to show everyone how CSS doesn't protect against piracy, and only serves to prevent legitimate use.
PS> Are click-through licenses legally valid? God, I hope so. I like to rewrite those things. Certain firms now owe me some rather large sums of money in exchange for my services in utilizing their software...
This can not be stressed strongly enough!
Yes, DVD/DeCSS is a major fight right now. But do not mistake the skirmish for the war. Other forms of protection will be developed under the DMCC that will be equally evil, such as baring the use of Windows software under Linux. Who among us thinks Microsoft won't consider implementing such techniques?
Speak up now, or forever hold your peace...
S/he has promise, though. Maybe Santa will teach him/her the True Spirit of Trolling and s/he'll ditch the login. Either that or s/he's somebody I already know, who just forgot to click "Post Anonymously"
...that Sony states how much money and how many businesses they deal with and how many employee's they have in the very first line? Well i hope the copyright office relizes that all those employees are people too, and that they will also be hurt by the law. Businesses aren't allowed to vote, nor should they be allowed anywhere near the lawmaking process. If buiness had its way, there wouldn't be seat belt or airbags in cars, they'd never inspect air planes, and we'd be getting disease filled food. But what can you expect from an entity thats sole motive in life is greed.
Ghostview doesn't support much of anything - it is only a frontend for the ghostscript renderer underneath.
Ghostscript does not support many constructs in pdf format - it is horribly incomplete.
gs version 6 is better, but not there yet. The GNU version is now 5.5, and Aladdin's
version 6 differs in pdf compatibility by quite a bit.
Xpdf is by FAR the best at accessing the most of the pdf spec among free (as in speech, not beer) software.
None of these is as nice at the display as Acrobat Reader. And Acrobat Reader is a truly painful program to use in other respects.
---
If you are writing a reply comment, (as I am, and I hope that everybody will!) please check out comment #100. (Not mine-- mine is #17 if you care) The comment is by a gentleman who runs a video-editing business with Linux machines, and who is losing business as a direct result of DeCSS becoming illegal. This is an excellent comment to quote in your reply, along with those listed in the article summary from the "big boys" of industry.
This comment helps us make the point that the encryption restrictions hurt not only the honest end user who wishes to play DVDs from another region, connect their DVD player to a coax-only TV, make a backup of a DVD, or play a DVD in their Linux machine, but also honest businesspeople.
Please take the time to write a reply comment-- it doesn't have to be long, just make your point concisely and with references to actual facts. Please feel free to cannibalize my comment if you need a place to start. (it probably isn't the most beautiful of comments, but I tried)
The most worrying thing about the DMCA, and its biggest weakness, is that it provides legal support for any usage restriction that can be implemented in technology. The restriction doesn't even need to work well, you just need to prove it's in there.
So, to defeat the DMCA, all you need to do is to implement a copy protection mechanism that does something clearly unconstitutional. Then all you need is a friend who can afford millions of dollars worth of legal fees to circumvent your copy protection mechanism. Oh, and of course you need to be able to afford millions of dollars worth of legal fees yourself so you can keep on sueing them all the way up the court system. But you didn't really expect to be able to change the law without being rich, did you?
fish and pipes
None of these is as nice at the display as Acrobat Reader. And Acrobat Reader is a truly painful program to use in other respects.
Not to mention that Acrobat Reader's "Linux" version is actually an x86-only binary, which is useless to users of other architectures.
I'm henceforth-heretoforonout OpenSourcing my comments to the Librarian, #16.
Everyone needs to read the comments also by the big companies so that we can punch holes in their arguments and also try to find the comments by companies that ARE hurt by this (as opposed to us normal users).
IANAL, but I play one on
Now that responses to the comments are due by 3/20, and it's only 3/11, I have plenty of time to review the comments submitted and prepare a rebuttal to the blatanly false assertions by DMCA proponents.
I strongly encourage you and all other /. readers to do the same!
I AM, therefore I THINK!
If you only read one of the posted comments, make it 162 (from 5 library associations). It's 39 pages, but this document slices right to the heart of the matter: that DMCA was intended to distinguish between access and use, but the technological measures combine the two. Those of you/us trying to have our electeds take another stab at moving copyright law into the Digital Age would be well advised to incorporate many of the points made in the associations' comment.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
He may not be aware, but we do exist. I have a Diamond V550 AGP retail, which included a copy of Zoran's Software DVD player. Playing recent games with it necessitates using nVidia's reference drivers since Diamond, as a part of S3, no longer has access to nVidia's driver source. There are recent drivers from Diamond, but they are nothing more than the nVidia reference drivers with Diamond's InControl tools and install utility.
With the nVidia reference drivers, the Zoran softDVD - for which I hold a perfectly valid legal license - will not play DVDs. It just tells me that my hardware does not support Macrovision. The most recent drivers that will allow the DVD player to work are dated March of 1999 and are obsolete. Requiring me to use those drivers is totally unreasonable, especially given the target demographic of the V550 was gaming.
Does anyone know if people from other countries (I'm Canadian) can submit a formal response to these comments? If it's possible, I'd like to let them know that if the customer ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
Hmm. I whiped acrobat from my systems in favor of xpdf... if only because xpdf has far less problems with weird pdf files.. ok.. acrobat ddisplays a little better, but since it chokes on many files that is of little help.
- 1 citizen == _2_ Time/Warners
- for every citizen speaking up, there are _10_ Time/Warners asking favors.
This is the way it works: the citizen actually counts for more than you think in these matters, but very few get involved. In a way, it's _because_ so few get involved that they carry weight: the default assumption is that no citizens will be bothered enough to speak up. If any do, that's a red flag right there. This applies especially to elected officials like senators and representatives- every dirtball corporation is hitting up these people for more favorable laws and zoning regulations and so on and so on- but it's not anywhere near as common to hear from a constituent/voter.Yup, had my Apex for a month or so now.
Works really well, considering how much it cost!
--Kevin
=-=-=-=-=-=
In Bernard Sorin (Time Warner), letter is very carfully worded, but it might be an in for a countersuit.
3 .pdf
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/1201/comments/04
"4)I am aware of no works... because of technical protection measures, become unavailable to persons who desire to be lawful users..."
5) same thing but "become less available"
Let's try this. Lots of DVD and videos go out of print, so they do become less available.
And Linux users cannot use them without resorting to "illegal" software, so I guess linux users are not lawful users.
Of course, they might argue that you can always go out and get a consumer DVD player.
But then you might argue that region encoding is not being used for the prupose intended. To allow for video release in areas where the film has been released, and to prevent viewing in areas where is has not been released. Instead movies which have been widely released are region encrypted to encourage maxiumum profit.
It's funny they use the word "encryption" in their description of the Playstation copy protection. From what I've read (and tried), they've just zero'd the CRC/header portion of the sectors 12-15, and place a little text string saying "Licensed by blah, blah blah" in the first.
I'm rather pissed I cannot create a copy of a game I have. Final Fantasy Tactics is a rare game on the Playstation now, but is the best one I've found. So if I should break this particular game, I'm S.O.L.
Imagine being cheezed you just broke your $49 Playstation game and then finding out you _can't_ get another copy. (Except at Ebay for $80) Squaresoft has stopped making the game, years ago. And all this because they see fit to stomp on fair use.
That being said, if anyone knows of a CD-R, CD-RW, or CD-ROM drive that will allow me to read a data track as raw audio, let me know. I want a backup!
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright /1201/comments/175.pdf
This paragraph in particular:
In short, if CSS gets in the way of their mission to archive important material, they're going to crack it. That's the sort of thing we want to hear, since it acknowledges CSS as "access control", rather than an anti-piracy measure.Acrobat Reader is one of those amazing programs that choke when you try to run them at 24bpp under XFree86... Very annoying.
I know this message is offtopic, but one thing about it irks me. Adobe Acrobat Viewer isn't the only program that can dispaly PDF files. Ghostscript can also do the deed. This is probably more insiteful than insightful, but my question is this: Why is /. advocating the use of a commercial software program when a free alternative exists?
>If it was your ox being gored by a Chinese
>sweatshop reverse engineering your code and
>putting your company out of business by selling
>a copycat product in the U.S. via the internet,
>I expect you would look more kindly on the
>treaties and the DMCA that enable you to protect
>your company's IP and your job.
Do you know what? I am SICK AND TIRED of the RACIST thing that is going on on Slashdot.
ALmost everytime when you guys want to dump your trash on, you dump it on the Chinese.
In your little minds, it's CHINESE SWEATSHOPS that are doing harm to you. And it's your little mind that can never think that SWEATSHOPS is never a Chinese phenomena. You have AMERICAN SWEATSHOPS in America, but you well "Chinese sweatshop" at the drop of a hat just because it is fashionable to do so.
Shame on you !
And on the other matter, the copyright acts do NOT protect you from being REVERSED ENGINEERED !!
You go read the legal documents first.
REVERSE ENGINEERING happens all the time. In the Open Source arena, MOST OF THE DRIVERS were the result of reverse enginnering, simply because the vendors doesn't want to provide any details about their products.
Geeeeesh... you guys who want to place restriction on ANYTHING will do ANYTHING to protect your own selfish interests. Now you even want to get on the turf of reserse engineering.
What's next?
One look at your product and we must buy it, or you'd say we "stole" the "look" of your product and "embedded" it into our minds?
Gimme a break !!
I rather have my ox gored than to kow tow to assholes like you. If my ox being gored, then I just go and get another ox. After all, this world is build on innovation, not protection of OLD AND OBSOLETE IDEAS !!!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The comment in the story pays to use Acrobat Reader, but Ghostview will render most PDFs (and will do it faster and nicer than Adobe's Acroread (IMO). It won't do the fancier interactive of some PDFs (they are very rare).
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
I've said this before, but got little response. Perhaps someone can explain if there's a real problem with this or not.
I think I see a way to make DMCA eat itself. DMCA prohibits defeating the access control, except under a few circumstances. Let's take the good old popular DVD CSS case as an example. I don't see anything in DMCA that makes it legal for any DVD player -- whether it was licensed by the DVD CCA or not -- to decode a DVD.
I know that sounds weird, but consider this: CSS is unpatented. Anyone can encode things with CSS, and there's nothing in DMCA to prevent this. If I make my own DVD disk, encoded with CSS, what right does the DVD CCA have to grant anyone a license to access my work? None that I see, at least from looking at DMCA. Except for the major points made about reverse engineering, evaluating security, etc., there's nothing in there that seems to give DVD CCA (or anyone else) any authority at all.
As far as I can tell, all DVD players are in violation. It's just that since no one except the MPAA members (who are in cahoots with the DVD CCA) are making CSS-protected DVDs, there is no one to sue the manufacturers.
DMCA effectively outlaws copy protection, since no one is allowed to play the works (except for reverse-engineering purposes, blah blah) -- license or not. Because no one has the authority to grant such a license. In fact, even if DVD CCA had a patent on the CSS algorithm and therefore had some way to claim "ownership" of the algorithm, they still wouldn't be able to use it w/out violating DMCA. But even that's just hypothetical, since no one owns that algorithm.
To kill DMCA, simply create a work whose technological-access-protection algorithm is compatable with a bunch of existing devices, and then start suing people right and left. I suggest CSS, since it seems to be on everyone's mind. Once this causes the price of DVD players rises to a few thousand dollars per unit, I think the appropriate bribes, blowjobs, drugs, blackmail threats, etc. will quickly be given to our men in Washington to repeal or ammend the DMCA.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
As a /. reader service: of the dozen or so that I read at random, 12 was the most persuasive. 235 and 36 were also thought provoking.
SHUT UP YOU FUCKING IDIOT
Besides, a license is a contract, and contract terms which are contrary to the public interest are unenforceable (in US courts, at least). License terms forbidding the use of the algorithm by law enforcement would certainly be held as contrary to the public interest, and if you tried bringing a case against a police agency for using your algorithm you'd probably be slapped with fines by the court for bringing a frivolous action (if you could get the case to court at all).
Don't forget, the system is rigged to support the interests of the people who've bought it and run it. You have to be more clever than that to trip the lumbering giant which is the establishment.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Do we really expect the same company that DESIGNS Playstation2 with AT LEAST 3 KNOWN BACKDOORS TO BREAK REGION CODE CHECKS to seriously supporting DMCA?!?!?! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.....