Criminalizing crypto criticism

David Honig honig at sprynet.com
Fri Jul 27 08:41:53 PDT 2001


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."






 






  








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