"Engineer for Haloid Corp. arrested for producing circumvention device"

[Tim May]

At 6:27 PM -0700 7/21/01, David Honig wrote:
>At 01:47 PM 7/21/01 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>>As Declan and others have said, this may be the last time a DefCon is
>>held in the U.S. (Not that other countries are necessarily better.
>>Attendees in Canada may face arrest by the Mounties for hate crimes,
>>for violating the Teale-Homulka censorship, for working for a
>>magazine which has broken Canadian laws, etc. And as the Henson case
>>showed, the Canadian SWAT ninjas are perfectly willing to do a "take
>>down" when their bosses to the south order it.)
>>
>>--Tim May
>
>All this argues for anonymously coded projects, etc.  But that
>means you can't get credit for novel research.  This is one
>of the ways that the DCMA is counter to historically unimpeded
>research & innovation ---Its not rational for profs sans tenure
>to work without credit.

DCMA, it seems to me, has always been about "freezing things in place."

Large corporations like nothing more than having a powerful central 
government freeze the status quo. As I have written about several 
times, large chip companies _say_ they dislike the bureaucratic hoops 
they are forced to jump through, with OSHA and Labor and Justice and 
EPA and all the rest. But the fact is that a big chip company can 
easily hire the floors of people it takes to satisfy the bureaucrats, 
but a small upstart competitor cannot handle the blizzard of papers.

And big companies love it when little competitors are frozen out.

The DCMA is just another way to freeze out innovation. Those who try 
to do nearly any research on copy protection, crypto, locks, software 
tools face the likelihood that they are violating the DCMA in various 
ways. Hey, even *I* am in violation of the DCMA.

Had the DCMA been in effect in the 1950s, the Xerox Corporation and 
its execs and engineers probably would have faced charges for 
producing a "circumvention device" for enabling copyright violators. 
What, really, is the difference between a Xerox machine and something 
that allows copies of electronic text?

(Both have alternate uses besides pirating. Backups, for example.)


--Tim May


-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at 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