Anticircumvention Laws Seen as Threat to Science

Scott_Marks writes: "Science magazine has a review by Pamela Samuelson on the effect of anticircumvention rules on the pursuit of scientific knowledge. The abstract: 'Scientists who study encryption or computer security or otherwise reverse engineer technical measures, who make tools enabling them to do this work, and who report the results of their research face new risks of legal liability because of recently adopted rules prohibiting the circumvention of technical measures and manufacture or distribution of circumvention tools. Because all data in digital form can be technically protected, the impact of these rules goes far beyond encryption and computer security research. The scientific community must recognize the harms these rules pose and provide guidance about how to improve the anticircumvention rules.'"

Comments

This is depressing

[Nessak]

But there is a good side to all of this:

No encyrption = No annnoying formats for DVD/Audio. The people who are going to fight stuff like this the hardest are not scientists but recond and movie componies.

Quote

[lunk]

Every article I read about anticircumvention laws and policies reminds me of the following quote:

Bruce Schneier says, "It's not so much about what people can do, it's more about how they think. There's nothing anyone can do; trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again." Schneier is the author of Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World (John Wiley & Sons, 2000).

A Copyright Proposal

[Grech]

It is clear, to both sides, that the copyright system is broken, although the two sides disagree as to how. What is needed is, I believe, some way to balance the intrests of the corporations on one side, and the people on the other.

While I believe the most egregious pieces of the current trade alphabet soup need to be elminated, I think a longer-term solution would be the restructuring of copyright duration.

Rather than making copyrights last for some large X number of years, or the life of the author + X years, why not make a copyright short term, but infinately renewable, at an exponentially increasing cost? This will allow corps to protect their most valuable content, while forcing them to relinquish claims on anything that does not sell enough to cover the cost of renewing its copyright.

I do not claim to know what durations and costs would be required to make it work, here balancing the needs of the small publisher for protection, with the need for a large corps content to expire sometime, but I think it's an idea that's worth a thought.