A bad year for off- and online privacy...

April 24, 2002

Kyle SGMS used our newssubmit to tell us about an interesting article over at Wired.com. Restricting online as well as offline privacy is discussed in the article and on the second page the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:

Long before planes slammed into the World Trade Center and anthraxed mail snarled Capitol Hill, privacy mavens had worried that a terrorist attack would spur Congress to approve invasive new laws. Then came Sept. 11's deadly attacks, followed by President Bush signing the USA PATRIOT Act the following month. Others, predicting that music and video could be locked up in ways that prevent legitimate backups as well as illicit copying, had fretted that Congress might make such protections mandatory.

Then an influential senator proposed doing just that last month.

These are trying times for technology activists, lawyers and other random savants who gather each year for the ritual of the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, which pits them against their ideological foes in government and the entertainment industry. Last week's summit, which ended Friday, comes at a time when Hollywood is eager to restrict technology in hopes of restricting privacy, and governments are becoming positively entrepreneurial in testing new technologies of surveillance and eavesdropping.

[...]

On Thursday afternoon, panelists role-played what might happen if a researcher was arrested under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for presenting his research at a conference -- a thinly disguised reference to Russian hacker Dmitri Sklyarov, whom the FBI nabbed last August at the Defcon convention.

The consensus, however, seemed to be that the DMCA does not prohibit merely presenting a paper. The law restricts distributing a technology, device, or component that could be used to circumvent copyright -- and if you sell such a product, it's a federal crime.

Sklyarov's company, Elcomsoft, sold a product to remove copy protection from Adobe e-Books, which is why the Justice Department says it is prosecuting the firm. Sklyarov is no longer in danger of prison time if he testifies against his employer, according to a deal announced last December.

Even though the recording industry threatened Princeton University professor Ed Felten with DMCA charges over a paper last year, the threats were likely spurious. Jessica Litman, a professor of law at Wayne State University, said she thought it was "very unlikely" a judge would apply the DMCA to scientific research.

A bill introduced last month by Senate Commerce chairman Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina) would go further than the DMCA, prohibiting the sale or distribution of nearly any technology -- unless it features copy-protection standards to be set by the federal government.

Source: Wired.com