Archives

The US Digital Millenium Copyright Act

This was a paper I wrote for the third year of my Computer Science bachelor degree in 2004. It’s obviously relatively old now, but the DMCA still exists and I thought I might post it here – researching the paper was how I was introduced to the DMCA, and I was reminded of it when posting the previous article on a new Swedish law

With the advent of the ‘information age’, unauthorised reproduction of copyrighted works has become far easier. The tools to reproduce such material in any desired form are freely available, as are tools to distribute this material to others all over the world. Piracy is commonplace, with use of interned-based file sharing systems such as Kazaa and eDonkey becoming vastly widespread. 2003 revealed software piracy losses of $341 million AUD in Australia, and $6,496 million AUD in the United States (Australian Institute of Criminology).

In an environment where, feasibly, only one individual needs to purchase a copy of a work to enable the whole world to gain access, various industries – such as the music, film and software industries – are growing increasingly concerned.

An international treaty drafted by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), defined a requirement that participating parties “provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty…” (WIPO Copyright Treaty, Article 11). In order to implement this requirement, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was signed into U.S. law on October 28, 1998.

The controversial act, labeled by some as unconstitutional and a threat to public liberty and free speech, states that “No person shall circumvent a technological protection measure that effectively controls access to a (protected work)” (DMCA, Section 103). It constitutes a protection of software that restricts access to copyrighted material, and outlaws any effort to circumvent this software.

Since coming into effect, the DMCA has been frequently drawn upon for purposes outside of the original expected scope of the Act. In several instances, it has been used by companies to suppress the publication of research into security flaws in their products. Prominent security and cryptology researchers are now choosing to leave their fields out of fear of the DMCA, and security conferences are leaving the U.S. for safer countries.

The DMCA has been used by Sony to maintain a monopoly over production of Playstation console games, Adobe and the U.S. Government have attacked a Russian company for writing software that enables eBooks to be read on braille displays, and a student has been taken to court after submitting a post online explaining that holding down the Shift key disables copy protection on some audio CD’s.

Contrary to the expectations of Congress, the DMCA, as stated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Chills free expression and scientific research”, “jeopardizes fair use”, and “impedes competition and innovation” (EFF, ‘Five Years under the DMCA’).

New Swedish IPRED big-content lovin’ law: “Totally F**king Bats**t Insane”

Jesper of Waffle Software writes on a directive (the IPRED EU directive) written into Swedish law recently that gives ‘rights holders’, provided that they can display ‘cursory evidence’, powers well above those of any governmental agency. Paraphrasing from Jesper’s comments, if Big Content suspects you of having involvement in copyright infringement activities (downloading from BitTorrent, etc.), they can:

• Start a private criminal investigation against you
• Force your ISP to release your personal information (although there’s no guarantee that an IP address associated with the activities in question directly relates to your activity)
• Freeze your bank account and seize your home (allowing them to search the premises)
• Threaten you with court action unless you pay a tens-of-thousand-USD fine
• Take you to court “where you’ll have to prove your innocence without a lawyer by your side since you can’t afford one, because they froze your bank account”
• Collect their enormous damages, and charge you for the legal fees

Read the full article, and the preceding introduction for more.

Jesper outlines some specific nasties about the IPRED EU directive, but essentially we’re at least looking at a breach of “several human rights, including the rights to privacy and due process”. We’ve had some pretty nasty laws thrust upon us in the name of Big Content recently, but this one is absolutely insane. How far are governments going to go with this? I’m reminded of the Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson, set in the future, where countries and governments are more-or-less irrelevant, and the real powers are the big ‘multinationals’, immense international corporations who have sweeping powers, including their own militaries.

If this law actually remains in place, and is used, it will be very interesting to see what happens. As my partner Katherine commented, surely a citizen looking down the barrel of this baby can take the matter to the EU, citing human rights infringement – assuming Sweden has signed a human rights convention.