At 01:56 AM 7/27/01 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:
The DMCA may be bad, but it's not *that* bad. It contains a broad prohibition against circumvention ("No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access") and then has a bunch of exceptions.
I'm getting sick of calling *legal bypass* "circumvention" as if this were a dirty word. If I lose a key to my house it is not illegal to circumvent the lock. If I need to make a backup of licensed data its not illegal to bypass obstacles. "Circumvention", literally "to go around", is not illegal. Only unlicensed copying is. Period. Any prohibition on this is "overbroad" to the point of being dead at birth. (Not picking on Declan. Mostly venting.)
One of those -- and you can thank groups like ACM for this, if my legislative memory is correct -- explicitly permits encryption research.
So who arbitrates who gets to be called a "researcher"?? "We are all special objects."