On Tue, 17 Jul 2001, Black Unicorn wrote:

When a foreign national can be arrested for a bit of coding which was developed (I assume) outside the US and never, by his actions (I assume) hit US soil well it really is time for the DMCA to go.

On a more general level, is US law to be construed as granting personal jurisdiction over anyone on the US soil, regardless of where the actual crime was committed? I.e., if I do something wrong according to the Code, I'd better stay the hell out of US? Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy@iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front

On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 10:18:42AM -0700, Black Unicorn wrote:

When a foreign national can be arrested for a bit of coding which was developed (I assume) outside the US and never, by his actions (I assume) hit US soil well it really is time for the DMCA to go.

Without quibbling with your sentiment, this isn't unique to the DMCA. Holocaust revisionism is a crime in Germany, I understand. If I ran my naziswereswell.com website from the U.S. as a U.S. citizen and made the mistake of traveling to Germany, I could easily be arrested. Let's not even talk about what would happen if Rushdie wanted to visit Iran. Similarly, U.S. law prohibits money laundering. If a known Russian money launderer visited the U.S., he'd likely be arrested. This is unremarkable. That's not even talking about kidnappings by U.S. agents. As for the DMCA, it says: "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that (does the good stuff)." Nowhere does it limit its scope to Americans. As I wrote in an article in April, all this means is that cutting-edge security conferences will be held overseas, or maybe in Canada.