[cc-community] rewritten section in Bounty Hunters

Ross Gayler r.gayler at gmail.com
Wed Apr 5 03:32:58 EDT 2006


Nice.  I was particularly interested in your section on "anti-circumvention"
as a back-door route to patent-like powers.  You mentioned the possibility
that a car-maker might put an electronic lock on a car hood and invoke the
DMCA anti-circumvention clause to prevent anyone but them working on your
car.

I would like to continue that argument in the spirit of reductio ad
absurdem.  I presume the DMCA doesn't say anything about the strength of
encryption that is required to enable the anti-circumvention clause.  This
raises the question: how weak can the encryption be to still enable the
anti-circumvention clause to be used?

What about a simple substitution cipher a->b b->c etc.?
Mathematically, the identity function (a->a b->b etc.) is a perfectly
respectable transformation, so you could probably get a mathematician to
testify that it is an encryption (albeit, very very weak).
You could argue that encoding the information as a pattern of pits in a DVD
is an encryption, so the very act of reading any data from the disk is a
decryption.

Ross

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cc-community-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:cc-community-
> bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Greg London
> Sent: Wednesday, 5 April 2006 1:15 PM
> To: cc-community at lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: [cc-community] rewritten section in Bounty Hunters
> 
> Hey all,
> 
> I just wanted to post a note that I've updated Bounty Hunters with some
> slight changes. The main one is that folks have a hard time with my
> proposal to reset copyright terms to 40 years. It seems too arbitrary for
> them. (As if Life-Plus-50 was something that scientists and mathematicians
> figured out via some objective method, but I digress.) Anyway, I tweaked
> my proposed change to copyright terms from 40 years to 42 years on the
> basis that America had copyright terms set to 42 years or less for over a
> century, and a number of famous american authors were willing to write
> with a 42 year term, Mark Twain being one of the most famous and most
> successful from a commercial point of view. I also address the fact that
> Mark Twain, though he was willing to write for a 42 year term, lobbyied
> congress for a life-plus-50 term to match Europe's recent change to their
> copyright law. Twain, as it happens, used some of teh exact same flawed
> metaphors that Disney and the Record companies and Movie industries use
> today: physical metaphors. Interestingly enough, Twain used these physical
> metaphors about literary works to then argue for infinite copyright terms.
> It's almost creepy how those same metaphors showed up almost a century
> later by one of the most successful and richest copyright holders in 1976
> (Disney) to finally get Life-Plus-50 terms. Then they showed up again in
> 1998 to add another 20 years on to that. And they seem quite intent on
> getting Mister Twain his wish of copyright terms that last for Perpetuity.
> 
> Anyway, there is one section that has been completely rewritten to justify
> a 42 year term. I just posted it on my website. It is licensed CC-BY. You
> can read the changed section here
> 
> http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/bountyhunters.htm#3_2_5_Resetting_
> the_Bounties
> 
> Feedback is always welcomed.
> 
> Greg
> 
> --
> Bounty Hunters: Metaphors for Fair IP laws
> http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/
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