[free-sklyarov] Fighting the DMCA

[Chad Horton]

I've had a thought that I've been tossing around for a few months now, but
haven't had any idea what to make of it. With these new events, and the DMCA
coming closer and closer to the public eye, I'm wondering if I might be able
to contribute something useful to the fight to get rid of it.

So far, most of the defenses of things like DeCSS that I've seen focus on
arguing soruce code as a form of speech. IMO, this is a bit of a stretch and
doesn't seem to have done all that good of a job. Has anyone ever considered
an attack on the DMCA under the 2nd Amendment, the right to bear arms? As I
understood it from my American Political Systems class, the 2nd Amendment
was created to preserve the power of the people to stand up to the Federal
Government if it ever got too Big Brother-like (Yes, I realize that specific
term didn't exist at the time). In many ways, "circumvention devices" are
much like weapons of the internet. This alone may seem like a bit of a
symblolic stretch of the original intent, but dictionary.com defines arm(s)
as "A weapon, especially a firearm", and also "(Law) Anything which a man
takes in his hand in anger, to strike or assault another with; an aggressive
weapon. --Cowell. Blackstone". With all the effort that the MPAA went
through comparing DeCSS to a crowbar used to break into a museum, it could
certainly be argued that things like DeCSS and the Advanced eBook Processor
as weapons. Of course, pushing these as weapons could also do just as much
damage if not handled carefully.

I had made a post on slashdot.org about this awhile ago, under the username
Gerad. I never got any interesting feedback about it, other than "Wow,
that's a really interesting idea". If folks on this list think this idea has
merit, I'm thinking about writing the EFF about it to see what they
think.

----
Chad "kupek" Horton | kupek at ntplx -dot- net
ICQ:1994680 | AIM:KupekCH
~Free...The Dream Within~