-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- All software companies who sell (really licence) software must deal with the inevitability of software piracy. It is a brute fact that any usefully product sold in the U.S. will eventually appear as an unauthorized copy for sale abroad. This fact must be recognized in the software companies' business plan. The question occurs to me "why can not this fact be used to defeat the ITAR?" What is to prevent a U.S company to licence a foreign company to sublicence and distribute a Crypto product abroad, if that foreign company obtains that product on the pirate market? I am not a lawyer, but I look at the definition of "export" on page 612 of Applied Cryptography and nothing seems to obviously apply. The scenario I imagine is this: U.S. company produces a crypto product. To be generally useful, the product supports all languages. (Those CDROMs really do hold a lot of data.) After all, Americans do need to do business with foreigners. The company licences and distributes the product in the U.S. taking special care not to distribute the product to any foreign persons. When inevitability, the product appears in the pirate market outside the U.S., the company makes a contract with a foreign company allowing it to distribute it and sublicence it. The foreign company can get their copy from the pirate market, being authorized to get the copy by the U.S. company. When this deal is cut copies have already been exported and are already being sold by the pirates, against the will of the U.S. company. In this scenario, the U.S. company had done everything it possibly could to prevent the illegal export of its product. But when its efforts have inevitably failed, it makes money by sublicencing. When I look at the definition of Export on page 612 of applied cryptography, I see one clause that defines transferring registration as export, but only for aircraft, vessels and satellites. OK, cypherpunk legal types, there has got to be something wrong with this idea. There are a lot of smart people in the world, so if this idea was good, somebody else would have thought of it before now! But what is specifically is wrong with it? I want to be educated! - -- Paul Elliott Telephone: 1-713-781-4543 Paul.Elliott@hrnowl.lonestar.org Address: 3987 South Gessner #224 Houston Texas 77063 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3 Charset: cp850 iQCVAgUBMeR9nvBUQYbUhJh5AQGkYAP/bN0lmkjF6uZ92MmWIqdZwVmLmsiIUg9L XbtYaeawNCMdi2BnkDUu4j/G1rNngFuAmRwABE9UxKOnwjMU5lfmxHev5RP9/CBF 81AnYc1bWeh52EuKJCKu47LMDn9PqfiCIGBwfRehgkZ72gO0+ywIP1fZrkwNNCF+ Md76LqUE5Z4= =k7M5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----