International Copyright Circumvention Essay -- Technology Copyright Es

International Copyright CircumventionA minor under three years ago, I heard about a wooing where a programmer had been arrested for a program that bypassed the copy defense mechanisms in one of Adobes products1. People who take a shit published information on or performed security circumvention in the past, even when done in a non-destructive manner have faced some legal problems. Specifically, it reminded by of the Kevin Mitnick case2 a few years earlier. In that case, a hacker was detained for two years, without bail, unfinished a trial, for gaining access to (but not damaging) several corporate networks. This new case however had an different twist - the security circumvention was done only to permit people access documents that they already had a right to have, and it was done exterior the United States. That raises issues regarding the United States having any right to do what they did, and even if they did have the right, was a wrong even committed.This case is an examp le of something which a decennary earlier would never have even been considered to be penal. But, it falls into in of the heavily opposed section 12013 of the new Digital Millenium Copyright hazard which tries to halt circumvention of anti-piracy measures. There was opposition before the law passed, but it became stronger when the videodisk CAA tried to oppress distribution of the DeCSS - code that could bypass the encryption use on videodisks.4(this was before the Abode case) The intended purpose of DeCSS was to facilitate the breeding of an open-source DVD player. There were no DVD players for Linux, BeOS, FreeBSD, or any of the other operating systems that now have DVD players thanks to the DeCSS code. However, if the DVD can be decrypted and decompressed, it can also be re-compressed and re-distributed in another(prenominal) medium more practical for bootleggers, such as VideoCDs. (Which could also be done simply by playing the DVD in a normal DVD player, recording the out put, just not producing as lavishly quality results.) At the time no such re-encoding tools were available, and such behaviour would be protected under traditional fair use for personal backups. Furthermore, the code was released anonymously by someone outside the United States. This organize to an initial attack using trade secret laws (The DMCAs anti-circumvention arent protected by international treaties on copyright such as the Berne c... ...umvention tools is and has been illegal anyway. And trying to aggressively impose the views of our companies on our countries is certainly uncalled for.Works Cited fallout From Def Con Ebook Hacker Arrested by FBI, Slashdot. July 2001 http//yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/17/130226&mode=thread&tid=93 (for more from Slashdot on the case http//yro.slashdot.org/search.pl?query=Sklyarov) Free Kevin Mitnick http//www.freekevin.com/ Unintended Consequences flipper Years under the DMCA, Electronic Frontier Foundation, http//www.eff.org/I P/DMCA/unintended_consequences.php CSS and DeCSS, DeCSS Central, http//www.lemuria.org/DeCSS/decss.html Berne Covention for the bulwark of Literary and Scientific Works http//www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/overview.html Enforcement of DMCA Criminal Penalties Suffers Setback, Copright Corner. borderland 2003. http//www.unc.edu/unclng/Copy-corner53.htm Locke, John. Two Treatise of Government Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1967. http//www.ecn.bris.ac.uk/het/locke/government.pdf Constitution for the United States of America September, 1787. http//www.constitution.org/constit_.htm