[free-sklyarov] An interesting idea......

[Tony Hursh]

What do you guys suppose would happen if some hypothetical person were to 
write something called, oh,
Ultra Mega Elite eBook Encrypting Hacker Repellant that took text files and 
encrypted them with, say,
rot-n rather than rot-13, (then you could advertise it as being 26 times 
more secure than Adobe's offering).

Then let's suppose this hypothetical person posted a free trial version of 
this software with the proviso that
if the user wasn't satisfied with the security after, oh, a year, the user 
would pay nothing but if the program
proved satisfactory (in the sole opinion of the user) that the user would 
pay the author $3,000 US.

Now let's further suppose that a whole lot of other hypothetical people 
downloaded UMEEEHR and used it
to encrypt some content (real substantive content, e.g., academic papers, 
would be best) with the content
owners offering to sell decryption keys to people who purchased the proper 
license.

Now let's imagine that many, many thousands of programmers proceeded to 
create "circumvention devices"
that cracked the UMEEEHR encryption scheme and offered these devices for 
sale on the web, and that
the UMEEEHR author were somehow notified (perhaps anonymously) of the name, 
address,  telephone
number, etc. of the authors of the circumvention devices, and that the 
author of UMEEEHR then demanded
that the FBI immediately arrest all these multiple thousands of people.

What would happen? Any lawyers care to comment?