Monday, January 13, 2003
Unintended Consequences Of The DMCA
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "OFF-TOPIC" @ 01:00 PM
We are four years into the DMCA - Digital Millennium Copyright Act - and seeing some things US Congressmen never intended. I am 100% for protecting the intellecutal property rights of digital media, be it music, ebooks or applications. There is no difference between downloading a program with a hacked/stolen registration key and walking out of CompUSA with a software box under your shirt. The law put into place to protect digital media, though, is asinine at best. Section 1201 of the DMCA is the one getting everyone in trouble. Look at what has happened so far:
• Hewlett-Packard resorted to Section 1201 threats when researchers published their discovery of a security flaw in HP’s Tru64 UNIX operating system.
• Security systems analyst Niels Ferguson discovered a major security flaw in an Intel video encryption system known as High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP). He declined to publish his results on his website relating to flaws in HDCP, on the grounds that he travels frequently to the U.S. and is fearful of “prosecution and/or liability under the U.S. DMCA law.”
• Microsoft invoked the DMCA against the Internet publication forum Slashdot, demanding that forum moderators delete materials relating to Microsoft’s proprietary implementation of an open security standard known as Kerberos.
• Start-up software company Streambox developed exactly such a product, known simply as the Streambox VCR, designed to time-shift streaming media. When competitor RealNetworks discovered that Streambox had developed a competing streaming media player, it invoked the DMCA and obtained an injunction against the Streambox VCR product.
• Lexmark, the second-largest printer vendor in the U.S., has long tried to eliminate aftermarket laser printer toner vendors that offer consumers toner cartridges at prices below Lexmark’s. In December 2002, Lexmark invoked the DMCA in its effort to eliminate competition in this market, suing Static Control Components for “circumvention” of certain “authentication routines” between Lexmark toner cartridges and printers.
• When Other World Computing (OWC), a small retailer specializing in Apple Macintosh computers, developed a software patch that allowed all Mac owners to use Apple’s iDVD software, they thought they were doing Apple’s fans a favor. For their trouble, they got a DMCA threat from Apple.
That is the tip of the iceberg. Read the article or download it in PDF format. The file is 338K and reformats nicely if you have Adobe Reader on your Pocket PC.
I have no doubt that if the DMCA had been in place in the early 80s, IBM would have invoked section 1201 against Compaq for legitimately reverse engineering the PC BIOS. Can you imagine the damage to the computer industry if that had happened? We'd all have a brand-spanking-new IBM PS/3 with Advanced Microchannel architecture, 64MB of RAM and a processor about the speed of a 486/200 with a built in connection board to connect to IBM mainframes. Woo hoo. :evil:
• Hewlett-Packard resorted to Section 1201 threats when researchers published their discovery of a security flaw in HP’s Tru64 UNIX operating system.
• Security systems analyst Niels Ferguson discovered a major security flaw in an Intel video encryption system known as High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP). He declined to publish his results on his website relating to flaws in HDCP, on the grounds that he travels frequently to the U.S. and is fearful of “prosecution and/or liability under the U.S. DMCA law.”
• Microsoft invoked the DMCA against the Internet publication forum Slashdot, demanding that forum moderators delete materials relating to Microsoft’s proprietary implementation of an open security standard known as Kerberos.
• Start-up software company Streambox developed exactly such a product, known simply as the Streambox VCR, designed to time-shift streaming media. When competitor RealNetworks discovered that Streambox had developed a competing streaming media player, it invoked the DMCA and obtained an injunction against the Streambox VCR product.
• Lexmark, the second-largest printer vendor in the U.S., has long tried to eliminate aftermarket laser printer toner vendors that offer consumers toner cartridges at prices below Lexmark’s. In December 2002, Lexmark invoked the DMCA in its effort to eliminate competition in this market, suing Static Control Components for “circumvention” of certain “authentication routines” between Lexmark toner cartridges and printers.
• When Other World Computing (OWC), a small retailer specializing in Apple Macintosh computers, developed a software patch that allowed all Mac owners to use Apple’s iDVD software, they thought they were doing Apple’s fans a favor. For their trouble, they got a DMCA threat from Apple.
That is the tip of the iceberg. Read the article or download it in PDF format. The file is 338K and reformats nicely if you have Adobe Reader on your Pocket PC.
I have no doubt that if the DMCA had been in place in the early 80s, IBM would have invoked section 1201 against Compaq for legitimately reverse engineering the PC BIOS. Can you imagine the damage to the computer industry if that had happened? We'd all have a brand-spanking-new IBM PS/3 with Advanced Microchannel architecture, 64MB of RAM and a processor about the speed of a 486/200 with a built in connection board to connect to IBM mainframes. Woo hoo. :evil:
