NYT this morning reports the that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act was adopted by the Senate Judiciary Committee: "WASHINGTON - The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday adopted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which takes a new step toward protecting creative content in cyberspace by outlawing the equipment used to commit a copyright infringement, not just the act or intent of illegally copying material. ... Most visibly absent was any exemption for devices used in encryption research, an issue Senate leaders said they hope to work out before the bill goes to the floor. " There's been a good deal of discussion of this issue around here, to be sure. But I think maybe it bears repeating that even with some kind of narrow exemption for "encryption research", this bill is conveniently poised to be used not only against Evil Copyright Infringers, but also against the kind of troublemakers that expose, for instance, the deliberate weakening of GSM authentication. Gawd. What bullshit. 571830573294323629934765012348436263285853260687657402192238 Corvus Corvax 324908584730535672342307543875016719214012473014020239437239 ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
On Fri, 1 May 1998, Corvus Corvax wrote:
"WASHINGTON - The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday adopted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which takes a new step toward protecting creative content in cyberspace by outlawing the equipment used to commit a copyright infringement, not just the act or intent of illegally copying material. ...
Yah. This same was mentioned on a digital watermarking forum I read. A great deal of my own research centers around attacking & finding weaknesses in such schemes, and as it's science I am obliged to write code to prove my hunches. This bill may make me a criminal! This struck a nerve at the time, because the fella who mentioned the bill was (a) an employee of a watermarking company and (b) mad as Hell at the rest of us for developing watermark attack software. If that law was on the books (and the guy was the CEO or such) at the time, I have no doubt a few of us would be in big legal trouble. Now, I should disclaim that that particular company is much more understanding than that one guy. I met a bunch of their employees (as did a couple other attack-makers) at a conference, and they were quite clueful about the importance of watermark robustness research. However, countless other watermarking startups exist. Many have the whole business bet on a potentially breakable scheme. Further, watermarking involves people from non-crypto disciplines, such as image processing, where folks are more likely to make security mistakes and less likely to appreciate the need for an adversarial research mode. This spell DANGER, boys and girls. Some company consisting of few people, lots of venture capital, little experience and lots of tunnel vision is IMHO likely to resort to this law when researchers find a big hole in their breadwinning technology. I should add that watermark attack tools like unZign and StirMark are now used as benchmarks by developers of new schemes. It's only been, what, half a year since StirMark was created? A gaggle of watermarking papers already cite it, and include it in a standard volley of tests. These are not evil warez from Hell here. -Xcott ==- Xcott Craver -- Caj@niu.edu -- http://www.math.niu.edu/~caj/ -== "Also note that elecronagnetic theory proves that if you microwave a bar of Ivory soap it turns into a REAL MARSHMALLOW THAT YOU CAN EAT." -James "Kibo" Parry
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Xcott Craver