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EFF Makes Call For DMCA Help
We are looking for diverse, real world examples of the ways in which the lives of ordinary fair users are strangled by the anticircumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
According to Judge Kaplan's ruling in the New York DVD Case (where 2600 publisher Eric Corley was ordered to take down DeCSS and any links to DeCSS), the DMCA makes circumventing access controls wrong, regardless of the reason you are circumventing. If your circumvention intentions are grounded in fair use, good for you. Fair use continues to be constitutionally protected by the First Amendment, but making and providing circumvention tools and even circumventing to do legal fair use is no longer allowed, thanks to Section 1201 of the DMCA.
Applying this rule to videos would mean that although recording David Letterman is constitutionally protected, the use of VCRs and Circuit City's "trafficking" in them are illegal.
We at the EFF feel that following this path will essentially destroy fair use. We foresee countless scenarios where librarians can't create a copy of encrypted material to archive, even if the archiving itself is a lawful use; professors can't use excerpts of encrypted material in classrooms even though the excerpts are a form of protected expression; scholars can't write their own computer programs to analyze the full digitized versions of copyrighted works in all media; and music aficionados can't customize digital searches for thematic research. But what else?
Surely there have got to be more examples, and we need to collect a short but powerful list of them. Tell us your most Draconian visions for a world where circumvention is always criminal even to get to the fair use that's not. Who would lose? And how?
Points will be given for brevity, concreteness and the ability to have your grandmother easily grasp the problem. Demerits applied for overuse of technical jargon, long-winded diatribes and multiple, repetitive messages. The winning scenarios may be discussed in our legal briefs, and, if they're very good, maybe even relied upon in a landmark legal decision throwing the statute out as unconstitutional.
Let's "open source" this problem.
Thanks,
EFF
Note that I'm following here, because as a whole, my original post was triggering the lameness filter, oy!
Copy protection on CDs: Ok, this is a necessary evil to have to reduce piracy. However, as copy protection schemes move beyond current CD technology, people are finding that some older devices cannot read the disc due to the copy protection, and therefore can't use the media as purchased. In addition, it's been legal to make a backup copy of software for private use, but these copy protection schemes generally prevent the disc from being copied in it's entirity; if the disc is damaged, you can 'repurchase' a new one. However, there are sites out there that describe how to circumvent the copy protection to make such fair uses of the material, or small programs that do this, but by the DMCA, these are illegal. (Yes, these programs can enable further piracy as well, but that's not their only intent). The only solution for the fair use here is to spend more money to the media people, which is certainly not fair use anymore.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
DCMA is illegal in several ways.
1) By tying access controls to "Fair Use" materal they are attempting to control piracy by controling access to the data. Although their intension were ok, the way they do this block all legitimate use of the data without designing your own decryption device. Some of the "Fair use" items consumers can no longer take advantage of without breaking parts of the DCMA.
a) Backing up videos
b) Using segments for lawful criticism or journalistic features
c) Sound bites
2) The DMCD is and end run around the materal EVER going into the public domain. Copyright is a time limited monopoly, but if this kind of legislation were to continue movies will never fall under public domain. The copyrights might expire, but with no LEGAL way to recover the data the companies still retain full control and monopoly status on the media.
Some of the falicies that people work under is that we are living in a consumer driven society. The multinational coperations are driving our societies not us. They know exactly what to do to maximize their profits. Would CD's ever have taken off if the media companies didn't kill sales of records by refusing to buy them back. Do you think we have any control now as the media companies try to kill off "Piratable" media formats one by one. What happens when they do this next time? When DVD-RW are cheap and easy to copy.... when will it stop?
"Those who do not know their rights are bound to lose them"
Well, I live in Canada, so the DCMA doesn't apply to me, but I still think that its completely absurd that a law like that could even get to the parlament, let alone be passed.
.class files on his account at the school, but all the source code files were on his hard drive at home. His hard drive crashed, it was completely unreadable, he thought he had lost all his work and would have to start over from scratch, then one the members of his group found a java de-compiler, they used it on the program, and it managed to perfectly reproduce the code, saving him from hours of re-coding the project. Under the DCMA this de-compiler would be considered illegal because it can be used to circumvent the protection compiled code provides, and it can be considered a tool for reverse-engineering.
A couple of years ago, one of my friends was taking a class in Java programming, we had a final assignment where we were supposed to form groups and write a program of our choice (our teracher had to approve the program idea first, of course).
My friend and his group decided they would make a final-fantasy style RPG, after working for about 40-50 (hes not the quickest coder in the world) hours, my friend had a working overwold engine, where he could walk around and it looked pretty good. He had the compiled
I run my TV picture from my Netstream decoder card to it, and when I want to watch movies on TV and I'm running from my Windows partition, there's no problem, that's just fine--I use Remote Selector to turn Macrovision off.
Sadly, there's no Linux equivalent Macrovision disabler--so when I use the Netstream Linux drivers, I get Macrovision. And to add insult to injury, the Linux "miniviewer" program--which lets you play the DVDs to your X session, in which I could watch them unmessedup--does not work for me. So in Linux, I can only watch unMacrovised movies--my Hong Kong imports and the special-edition films from MGM/UA, which does not seem to encode its movies that way.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
However, in order to prevent you from pirating music with it (by plugging in the output of your music system to this thing's input), it has a copyright protection device on it, SDMI compliant. If it detects a SDMI watermark, it will record it but subsequently refuse to allow you to extract it to your own computer. Thus, it encrypts all recordings on it's internal hard drive so you can't just take the hard drive out, plug it into your computer, and extract the copyrighted audio. Thus, under the terms of the DMCA, this is an access control device.
So, having gotten a great deal on a device that records hundreds of hours of sound in a high-quality sound format, you decide to record your daughters band recital, where she has a very difficult flute solo. She pulls it off and brings tears to everybody's eyes, and the device captures it with ultra high fidelity.
Unfortunately, on the way out to the car, you drop the device. The hard drive and the recording is intact, but you cracked the circuit board the rest of the device relies on to communicate with a computer, and it's not ever communicating with a computer again. Unfortunately, the manufacturor has made it impossible to repair or move the hard drive to a new version of that device, because for security purposes, all of the devices use different factory-set encryption keys. (They don't want you to repair it, they want you to buy a new one.) The circuit board can't be repaired either, because you basically can't repair circuit boards that badly damaged.
If you could attach the device's hard drive to the computer, you could still extract your own recording, if it wasn't encrypted so you can't use the device to pirate. (It is safe to assume that somebody would come up with a way to decrypt the data if they can get at it, with brute force if nothing else.) It is, however, illegal to circumvent this protection measure, illegal to create a program that can decrypt this device's encryption format, and illegal to possess one. The DMCA makes it illegal to obtain your own recording because the access protection measure it is behind, put there to protect other people's recordings, is broken.
(Technically, you are allowed to break the protection under the exception it give you, but you must somehow do this without creating or obtaining a method or device to break the protection.)
Hmmm, lessee, Office goes to subscription model and holds your documents hostage until you pay up...
I don't want to pay and I wanted to move to StarOffice anyway. I use StarOffice to import the documents and then save them in sdw format.
So would StarOffice be a tool for circumvention?
Could MS sue Sun under the DMCA for the distribution of such a tool?
You are confused. The DMCA, contrary to it's name, doesn't merely regulate copyright. It has anti-reverse-engineering provisions, which is the point of this conversation. In the above examples, proprietary formats would have to be reverse engineered, and that's at stake.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Wait a minute... While the scenario you mention is indeed regrettable, I don't think it's a DMCA issue. If the database was created by the doctor, then the software vendor is surely not the copyright owner. The copyright owner is the only entity whose permission you need to circumvent. That's why MPAA (not DVD CCA) sued 2600 (on the assumption that a MPAA member is always the copyright owner whenever CSS is circumvented).
Wrong. The software has an EULA (End User License Agreement). The EULA is agreed to before the software is used. The License Agreement specifically states that all information entered into the software becomes the Intellectual Property of the software author.
This is not only not rare, it is standard.
Then the records belong to the company, and they CAN sue you for circumvention if you try to retrieve them. This is what Microsoft is going to do with word documents and Office subscriptions.
Scenario: You write a document in microsoft word that is critical of microsoft. Microsoft revokes your Office subscription. You are no longer legally permitted to access the document you wrote that was critical of them.
Hide and watch, the shaft is coming.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
If anyone wants to know how bad this can get, have a read of Road to Tycho over at the GNU website.
It talks about how reading books that someone else owns would be illegal.
Of course, if the school ever found out that he had given Lissa his own password, it would be curtains for both of them as students, regardless of what she had used it for. School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students' computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn't matter whether you did anything harmful--the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was.
Hi!
I'm the father of an eight-year-old with Down Syndrome. Annie is mentally retarded, and (like many Downs kids) she prizes the independence of watching videotapes on TV, and playing the companion CDs on her computer.
However, a mentally-retarded eight-year-old is nobody's idea of a "safe" user. She has proven, empirically, that crunchy peanut butter applied to a CD-ROM makes the perfect grinding medium for destroying the laser in the CD-ROM drive. She has proven, empirically, just how much popcorn you must stuff into an RCA VCR to make it eat the videotape. She routinely destroys videotapes and CDs.
I can address the problem by making copies--duplicating the media. Annie watches the copy, and when it is destroyed I just make another copy of the original. I can duplicate videos, CDs, and (through a client) DVDs. But--when I duplicate that content I am violating the DMCA.
An MPAA lawyer might ask "why not just buy another DVD? (or videotape or CD-ROM)?" For most media I could--but Annie particularly lives for Disney animation. And Disney, for years, has maintained the practice of only selling videotapes (and now DVDs) for a limited period of time. They will sell a movie, like Toy Story for a limited period of time. Once that title is removed from stores it is not available, anywhere, in any form. So the only way I can permit Annie to watch Toy Story is to duplicate the original, and let her watch the duplicate.
I have previously written to the EFF, offering to participate with Annie in any litigation regarding the DMCA. My offer still stands--I believe strongly in the legal benefits of intellectual property law, and am extremely conscious of the image that I project to my (other) children when I bootleg media for Annie. I'm violating the DMCA--and I know it. And they know it. And they know that violating the law is wrong.
All I want to do is let my little girl watch videos, achieving some pride in her self-sufficiency....
John Murdoch
jmurdoch@windgap.com
My TNT2 Ultra video card has TV-out. When I got it, I thought I could hook it up to my VCR and do some cheap video editing (since I have a capture card). Or I could hook it to my VCR to feed my big TV to play Quake (since my TV doesn't have video-in but my VCR does).
But the card has Macrovision, I suppose to defeat the criminal masterminds out there that would buy a $200 3D video card so they could make VHS copies of DVDs. Both of them.
Why put Macrovision on a stand-alone 3D card?
I have Quake. I bought the one with the mission packs ("The Offering"), and I have the case to it; however, I lost the Quake disc a while ago. Luckily, I made a backup of the directory structure in the disk (what luck!). Unfortunately, I didn't back up the ten audio tracks; the ambient music to Quake (composed by Trent Reznor; a must-have in any NIN-fan's collection!).
Now, I'm stuck with a choice. Should I give in, search for Quake (the Quake disc with WINQUAKE and GLQUAKE; that's what came with "The Offering")? Should I find someone who has the shareware demo disc (which has all 10 music tracks) and rip it to re-burn Quake? Or should I just search for the MP3's of the tracks (via FTP, Gnutella, etc. for a >140kbps collection) and re-burn Quake that way?
From what I've gathered, all of those methods fall under the "backup copy" clause of the license aggreement; however, it might fall under scrutiny because of the DMCA.
One thing really makes this thing ironic: the last time I had the disc, I was playing squake on RedHat 6.2! DAMN YOU LINUX, YOU MADE ME LOSE THE QUAKE DISC!!! (sorry, had to let out some steam.)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
As I understand it, Cue:Cat claims that the simple XOR scrambling they do of their output brings the device under the anti-circumvention provision. This points out a flaw in DMCA: it encourages content owners to be lazy; if (for example) ROT13 counts as "encryption" for anti-circumvention purposes, what's the incentive to use anything stronger? The end result is protection through legal intimidation rather than much more effective technical solutions.
I'm the sysadmin for a small local law enforcement agency. We have a proprietary custody management system that we've had for a very long time, and recently purchased some optical fingerprint capture stations using federal grant funds. One problem, though, was that the arrest data had to be entered twice; once into the fingerprint system, and once into the custody system. We asked both vendors to provide quotes to integrate the two systems, and the total cost was in the five figure range. It might not seem like a lot, but for a small department like ours that's a Godzilla-sized bite out of the budget.
It took two of us less than a month to reverse engineer the file formats and comm protocols on both systems and write our own interface in-house. Both vendors were hopping mad, but there really wasn't much they could do about it. We didn't break any laws, and we didn't violate any contract agreements we had with them.
Because of the DMCA, we'll probably be barred from doing anything like that again in the future. We can't risk having our software disabled, and we won't condone breaking a law. Not even a bad one. We'll just have to pay whatever amount of money the vendor demands, and siphon off the funds from the school district or the street department or whatever. This law is going to cost the taxpayer, one way or the other. They'll either get decreased service levels from government, or they'll pay more to get the same.
SDMI: needless to say, the ability of the music company to control how you can listen to your music, as well as forcing you to obtain a 'new' copy for a different device that you might want to play on, goes against fair use. Having a program that removes the protection but allows the music to be heard on any device you own will be illegal, though the final use is fair use.
HDTV: Broadcasters have been fighting to get into the HDTV standard a bit of data that prevents the ability for digital devices to record a show, even for purposes of time-shifting. Fair use in time-shifting has been upheld by the SC, but having a device that 'unintentionally' ignores this bit would be illegal.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
If IP controls had been in effect from the dawn of media (records, tapes, etc..), I would not be able to transfer my beloved copy of Yogi Yoresson's "Yingle Bells" from it's origional 78 RPM record to CD. I would not be able to transfer my copy of "The Carl Stalling Project" from tape to CD (in which it is not available). I would not be able to preserve a friend's origional Edison cylinder recordings to CD.
If IP controls existed on books from day 1, I would not be able to read my 1885 edition of the 'Last Days of Pompeii', or my 1900's Harold MacGrath books, or almost half of my collection.
What this boils down to is this: If IP is locked to a specific media, the ability to read those media will eventually be lost and the IP will be lost to the public domain and to the general public. If you find a bunch of Edison cylinders, you may not be able to find a player, but you can build one fairly easily. If, in the year 2090, you find a bunch of DVD's, how will you be able to recover the audio and video from them? When the next big thing comes out for video, do you HAVE to buy all your favorite movies again, many of which may not be available?
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I by a GeekBrand(tm) DVD player. Geekbrand is licensed and approved by the DVD-CCA DVD player. GeekBrand's CEO pisses off the DVD-CCA by failing to call them "your impereal majesties". All future DVD releases don't have the Geekbrand key on them.
This leaves me with a legally purchased DVD player that will not show any new DVD's. I am then forced to either buy a an "approved" player, or circumvent the encryption to view legally obtained movies on my legally obtained player.
Excuse me, reality interrupt.
First, you clearly haven't the faintest idea how much a quality designer costs per hour. I have worked for (among many others) grade-school textbook publishers. After spending thousands of man hours preparing camera-ready copy -- graphics, charts, graphs, layouts, formats, cross-indexing, etc. -- I assure you, the words are not the expensive part.
Second, one of the most popular applications used for precisely that kind of document is Quark which at least used to (dunno about now) had physical security. You had to put a dongle on your ABD chain, and if that frob got lost or damaged, you can kiss your documents goodby unless you're willing to pony up for another copy.
And if your copy of Quark or PageMaker decides not to let you access your document because it has decided that you might be a copyright infringer (not of your material, but of their software), suddenly you develop quite an appreciation for applications which crack the proprietary format of those documents and converts them to something useful.
Another example: I have been hired to do programming in Excel, which allows one to "protect" documents. I have been paid tens of thousands of dollars for single "Workbooks". If you were my client in such a case and discovered you had lost the password to a such a custom Excel document, how would you feel to be told that hiring a programmer to extract the code in such a document would be illegal.
And, Gosh, it would never happen that a secretary might quit a job in a huff and neglect to mention what password she used to "protect" her company's Excel spreadsheets or WordPerfect documents.
You know what? It's not illegal to break into your own home. It's not illegal to break into the home of someone else on their behest. It's not illegal to break into your own locked file cabinet. But the DMCA makes it effectively illegal to break into your own electronic home. You lock yourself out of a document, you might be able to card the door (dictionary attack on password), but you most certainly can't break down the door (parsing the document into another format).
In some places (e.g. NY) it is illegal to own lockpicks -- if you're not a bonded locksmith. I do not see any provision in the DMCA which allows for the virtual equivalent of locksmiths -- people who own cracking tools and use them within the law.
Imagine if you had put a document into a file cabinet and locked the cabinet and then, oops, lost the key. Imagine the locksmith showing up and saying "Hey, can I borrow a bobby pin? I'm allowed to pick locks, but not if I use any tool designed to do so."
Welcome to America under the DMCA.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
I produce the Tv show for my local high school, and have recently become the target of macrovision. Sony has saw it fit to cause all their video cameras to immediately self-destruct upon trying to record macrovisioned material. However, using copywritten material for the news is explicitly protected as fair use. Unfortunately sony does not provide a provision for legal fair use. I eventually managed to get around the problem, but I see now very clearly that non-circumvention limitations would severely limit protected speech in my high school publications.
So it will be legal to crack you own documents. Great. But as the software needed to crack will be illegal, it will be impossible.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Let me preface my comments with the obligatory invocation of IANAL.
Are you referring to accessing your own documents by fiddling only with your document files or by attempting to crack the word processor so you can view your documents?
In the first case, while it's an intersting example, doesn't seem to be covered by the DMCA. More specifically:
Since you're the copyright owner of the document, unless you're totally wigged out on cough syrup, I can't imagine you not giving yourself permission.
As for the second case, cracking the word processor to view your own documents, I think this would be somewhat analogous to stealing gas for your car. You can make the argument that your car is your property, but that it can't doing anything without the gas. However, I do admit that that analogy suffers from the possible flaw of trying to equate real property and intellectual property. Besides, virtually all word processors have options within them to save documents in non-proprietary formats. Admittedly, this can result in less-than-ideal formatting information, but in an ideal world it's the content that's much more valuable than the presentation.
The firm I worked for switched from Wangs to PCs without warning. Suddenly, the previous two years' work was inaccessible. I got together with a friend, and we jury rigged a Wang drive to the PC. (This took cursing and more cable than I ever want to see again.) Then we figured out a way to transfer the Wang stuff as RTF.
What we did to save the department's work would now be illegal under the DCMA, because we circumvented both hardware and software to read our obsolete information.
I also have obsolete images on CD-Rom that were processed over 12 years ago. These images are not in JPG, or even in GIF, which existed 12 years ago. They are on a proprietary format, created by a company which has since gone out of business. By the provisions of the DCMA, I am breaking the law when I try to reverse engineer the format to veiw the information.
The librarian of congress granted two short-term exceptions to the DCMA, but one is library related, while the other is related to obsolete hardware. My hardware can see the CD-ROM, and can see the fact that the files exist, and that they take up size. No software exists to let me see the pictures my husband took. The actual negatives were destroyed in a flood. The company which created this monstrosity no longer exists.
Lest anyone think that only small companies go out of business, please read Business Week for 1984 through 1986, and then discuss Wang computing.
1. Consumer Protection. If you buy frozen food, you have the right to expect that the package will contain the food that is listed on the front. You also have a right to expect that food to be safe for humans to consume, if handled correctly. By prohibiting the direct handling of digital information, consumers cannot guarantee their own safety.*
2. Consumer Protection II. If you were to go to a restraunt, you can be confident that, if the food is prepared in a manner which is unsafe, it will be observed and reported by consumers. Prohibiting consumers from looking to see how digital information is prepared ensures that no consumer can ever be sure if the digital products they buy are safe.*
3. The US Anti-Trust laws prohibit any company from using a monopoly in one area to acquire a monopoly in another. Any company, or group of companies, with a monopoly on the encryption technology must also have a monopoly on all players and recorders. Nobody else can build them. This also means that they have a monopoly on what gets recorded as they can decide who can use a recorder and what for.
4. It has already been decided by the US courts that digital recordings and computer programs are forms of free speech, as talked about in the first ammendment. If you were to digitally record your own spoken words, using a program you had written, and played them back, also using a program you had written, you would be performing an illegal act, even though every single thing you did was protected.
5. If it is illegal to preserve the history that is being made today, then that history will certainly be lost. The past happens only once. Many recordings in the past have been lost for this very reason. This must be weighed against the claimed possibility of a loss which cannot be known. The law favours that which is beyond all reasonable doubt. The certainty of past experience would seem to meet that. The claims on which the DMCA rests do not.
6. Medical establishments will suffer unnecessary delays in the sending and receiving of computer-based medical information. As this is the method most likely to be used only in the most critical of situations, it is likely to result in injury or death. Companies have no legal right to protection from manslaughter charges, especially if the defect is known in advance and cannot legally be prevented from harm.
*By "harm", I'm including such possibilities as:
a) Defective hardware, which cannot legally be examined for such defects, where the defect is likely to cause an electical fire.
b) Sounds, introduced by the decryption process or deliberately added at the time of recording, which interfere with the correct functioning of the senses.
c) Computer "viruses" installed by accident or design which can infect other devices.
d) The inclusion of offensive, indecent or otherwise controlled or illegal material being present on the recording or introduced by the decryption device.
In all these cases, the ability for third-party to lawfully and independently ensure that a product is acceptable is mandatory in every single part of life except that of digital recordings. At no time has there been proven damage to any other industry as a result of such safety and quality assurance.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Here is a real world example for the EFF.
This will require me to tell you all a little bit about my life:
I share a house with two other people, one other computer programmer and an air-conditioning repairman from Costa Rica I will call "John". John lives with us because, like us, he races mountain bikes, and we have built a little bike shop into the house for building and repairing race bikes. He's a good mechanic, but his english isn't very good.
We have a really good A/V setup, but no DVD player. Last week, John brought home a DVD player from Best Buy, and "The Matrix" on DVD. He hooked it into his T.V., only to discover that the picture was, as he put it, "shit".
I told John that the picture was screwy because of a technology called Macrovision, hidden inside his DVD player. It's purpose was to prevent him from criminally copying DVD's onto VHS. John said "but I don't want to do that, I just want to watch it!". I told John that the MPAA had assumed he was a criminal, and put Macrovision in his DVD player to stop his crimes. Because John's T.V. only has analog input, he cannot use his new DVD player. No one at Best Buy told him this. He has to buy a new T.V., which he can't afford.
John got mad.
Then I told John that buying a "Macrovision scrubber" to clean up the signal was against the law, as he would be owning a circumvention device. And I went on to tell him that when he went home to Costa Rica, he couldn't use any of the DVD's he bought there in his DVD player, because they had put a special code in the DVD's in Costa Rica so they wouldn't work, and he had to buy another DVD player when he went back there. If he tried to get around the code, he would be a criminal, because of a new law.
That's when John lost it. He got really mad. He threw the DVD player back in the box, took it back to Best Buy, and got his money back, but also got thrown out of the store for using his broken English to call them "Stupid Bastard Fucking People" - as he puts it.
I tried to calm John down, but I think in his culture they don't have the emphasis on restraint. When someone does something awful to you, you get angry, and you go yell at them. He doesn't understand that in America, faceless corporations do terrible things to people all the time, and you can't get mad, because all your anger will be wasted on some powerless teen-age clerk.
In America, the only way to do exert power is to spend money. That's why I donate to the EFF.
"John" now understands why the two rich guys he lives with only watch movies on VHS.
That's my real life example.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
true story. I bought a %100 legal good to go copy of UT (Unreal Tournament). I insalled it and had a load of fun. Then as will happen the CD fell into the hands of my 5 year old son. Needless to say it did not survive the encounter. Being used to this I had made a backup copy of said CD. But it does not run. Well I then went over to the fine folks at www.megagames.com and did a end run around the copy protection. This is an example of a tool that lets me get fair use from the product I purchased the I think is legal in the context that I used it and the would be illegal under the DMCA. What do you all think?
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
In the comment process for this part of DMCA, I found the following letter. I was surprised that this issue doesn't get more play
Briefly put: data produced or stored by a software package may effectively become the property of the software company, if stored in a proprietary format.
My doctor was 'held hostage' for a few years by his records software. He couldn't change packages without losing his records, even though he hated the software he was using. He finally had to hire a programmer to analyze the his records and write a converter to a tab-delimited database, so he could import it into another software package.
Under DMCA, this would be illegal. The proprietary companies often call their proprietary formats a security measure (to protect patient privacy), so it really isn't a very big step to call this 'circumvention of a security feature'
I don't know about today, but apparently this was not uncommon a few years ago -- and we can expect it to come back if DMCA gives the software companies a big stick