At 12:30 PM -0400 7/27/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
Like I said, I'm not defending the DMCA. I was merely correcting the fellow who didn't know the exemption (of sorts) existed.
Not being an expert on the DCMA, I'm still trying to square the notion of an "exemption for research" (my words, summarizing my understanding of the various clauses) and the fear of the Felten gang that presenting their _research_ paper on the weaknesses in the new Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) scheme could expose them to prosecution. Felten wasn't building commercial devices for sale, he wasn't marketing a product to enable bypassing the SDMI...he and his group were doing standard cryptographic analysis of an algorithm...the bread and butter of determining the strenghts of ciphers and security methods. I think the threatened suit under the terms of the DCMA goes to the point the original poster made: that the way to stop cryptanalysis of a cipher ("Digital Snake Oil Bass-O-Mattic Encryptator 1.0"), or at least the publication of any results, is to do what was done to Felten. I just don't see how if a Princeton professor is not exempted from the DCMA that a guy in a lab in Sunnyvale would be. And so the chilling effect on research is in fact accomlished. The courts will no doubt have their say, but right now the DCMA sure looks to be a ban on publication of research. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns