International Copyright Circumvention Essay -- Technology Copyright Es

International Copyright CircumventionA little under three years ago, I perceive about a case where a programmer had been arrested for a program that bypassed the copy protection mechanisms in one of Adobes products1. People who dedicate published entropy on or performed security circumvention in the past, even when done 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 two years, without bail, pending a trial, for gaining access to (but not damaging) several corporate networks. This new case unless had an different twist - the security circumvention was done only to let people access documents that they already had a right to have, and it was done outside the united 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.This case is an example of somethi ng which a decade earlier would never have even been considered to be illegal. But, it falls 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 forrader the law passed, but it became stronger when the DVD CAA tried to oppress distribution of the DeCSS - code that could bypass the encryption used on DVDs.4(this was before the Abode case) The intended part of DeCSS was to facilitate 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 give thanks to the DeCSS code. However, if the DVD can be decrypted and decompressed, it can also 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 ton e 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 secure such as the Berne 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.Works CitedFallout From Def Con Ebook Hacker Arrested by FBI, Slashdot. July 2001 http//yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/17/130226&mode=thread&tid=93 (for more from Slashdot on the case http//yro.slashdot.org/search.pl?query=Sklyarov) Free Kevin Mitnick http//www.freekevin.com/ Unintended Consequences Five Years under the DMCA, Electronic Frontier Foundation, http//www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/unintended_consequences.php CSS and DeCSS, DeCSS C entral, http//www.lemuria.org/DeCSS/decss.html Berne Covention for the Protection of Literary and Scientific Works http//www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/overview.html Enforcement of DMCA Criminal Penalties Suffers Setback, 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