[cc-community] rewritten section in Bounty Hunters

drew Roberts zotz at 100jamz.com
Wed Apr 5 07:27:48 EDT 2006


On Wednesday 05 April 2006 03:32 am, Ross Gayler wrote:
> 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.

Oh, they can do more than prevent you from using any but their mechanics, they 
can prevent you from selling it on the used car market. A car could easily 
come with a EULA due to the onboard software. (By inserting the key and 
opening the door, you agree to blah blah blah and so on for two hundred pages 
of dense unreadable text that says that the agreement you are agreeing to can 
be changed at any time (see the web site) and that by opening the door after 
a change, you have agreed to those new changes.

By the way, some are already trying to patent novels themselves.
>
> 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.

It is already interesting that the encryption on DVDs prevents access and not 
copying in any case.
>
> Ross

all the best,

drew

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