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I've decided not to beat this particular horse (that is, Cato's DMCA paper) any longer after today, especially as it is not quite dead. (Note to my SPCA friends and colleagues--it's just an analogy!) So just to sum up a few more problems, briefly, and then to make some kind of larger point, then, the end.
More problems in brief:
The Cato paper implies that Blackboard obtained an injunction against students seeking to present security research by "citing" the DMCA. A letter sent to the students mentions the DMCA, but the injunction was based on federal and Georgia anti-hacking statutes and trade secret law. Describing this case as involving "research" is problematic, although technical ingenuity certainly came into play, it seems to fit in the same class as the sort of ingenuity that racoons display in prying open trash cans. The Blackboard case arose when the students forcibly dismantled a debit card reader used by colleges and determined how to signal it. Very clever indeed. But it seems to me that the story loses some of its force as a horror story once one knows the details, and indeed throws doubt, perhaps deservedly, perhaps not, on other anecdotes related in this area.
Onward, relentlessly. The enthusiastic Cato author has acknowledged that his assertion that CSS does not prevent copying a DVD and playing back the copy in ordinary consumer equipment is not right. Ordinary consumer equipment will not copy the sectors of the disk in which the keys are stored and the result would not be playable.
So what? My last blog post on this topic ended up after some meandering with the larger point that the argument that a market could in fact thrive in a world without the DMCA was at least an interesting one, in being at the right "level" to qualify as a policy argument. That's the point I'm trying to work my way back to.
The argument about the CSS not preventing copies relates to a larger point about DRM and the DMCA that has been made repeatedly (by the unfortunate Tim Lee, by Adam Goldberg) namely that it does not prevent piracy. (This relates to a larger point still, which is that DRM is being misrepresented by evil corporations as an anti-piracy tool, when it is really all a plot to offer consumers less).
The statement that DRM does not prevent piracy is certainly true. It is also mostly false.
Continue reading Errors and Etiquette, Part Two: The End . . .
posted by Solveig Singleton @ 8:00 AM | DMCA , DRM & Watermarks, etc. , Theft of Service
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