[free-sklyarov] Effectiveness of the DMCA

[Barry King]

>If US companies start losing business, especially those who deal in IP, then 
>the pressure will mount to get the DMCA changed.  It won't be fast enough to 
>get Dimitry out of jail, but it can help to change the law and prevent other 
>countries from implementing a DMCA.

There is more of a point here than your are making out, I think, and it's the sort of point that the corporate stooges which run this country are more willing to try on for size, God bless their shrivelled little pace-makered hearts.

Because the DMCA is so vaguely worded, as soon as you go into the whole question of security challenges that take the form of software (and even a short perl script is still software) the line between what software will be prosecuted and what will not blurs.  For example, in this case, a small C routine which does rot-13 may or not be itself illegal because it may have been bundled via a library into the offending software [don't laugh], or how about strcpy()?  Obviously a copyright violator, that strcpy()!  This gives the programmer incentive NOT to make security-checking software or to make security challenges for anything but private use.  Because so few programmers have the time for this exercise, they won't do it.

So if programmers are afraid to program in the U.S. or to attend conferences in the U.S. because of their programming, it means the U.S. will become increasingly uncompetitive, undergoing a brain-drain, and open to weakly secure software monocultures.  (Oops, the monoculture is already here, with 34,000 viruses and rising!)  By vague parallel, we saw this before, in the late 80s with the so-called "Bulgarian Virus Factory" where some really good copy-protection cracking and virus creation was going on behind the iron curtain.

Now this process has a second punch, in that the DMCA is not going to protect any corporations' private interests in any case.  In fact, it's counter-productive.  People will simply make the software in any country, in the U.S. under another name or in another.  As soon as it's the law is enforced on the software in question, the popularity of the cracking software skyrockets, and it can't be stamped out because, no matter what law you pass or what economic system you do business under, or no matter what illusion of marketing, software is still an idea, not a product.  You can't legislate reality any more effectively than you can legislate morality.

So, hell, if I was one of those North Koreans, or Palestinians, or Libyans, or Iraqis, or Iranians the military-industrialists are trying to get us afraid of so they can sell their next generation of arms, I would be in full support of the DMCA.  It's like judo, using your opponents butt-headedness against him.

BK

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"Any bureaucracy sufficiently complex is indistinguishable from religion" - Yours Truly