Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] DeCSS Creator's Trial Over; Ruling ExpectedSoon

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, Matthew W. Ross wrote:

> If he didn't distribute it, how has he committed a crime?

He did distribute it, on the internet, but he wasn't selling it and he
hadn't pirated it.  It was his own program.

The thing that seems crazy to me is that the law seems to provide that you
don't really need to protect your software with good encryption because it
is illegal for someone to write code that can decrypt things that you
don't want decrypted.  How does that make any sense?  Is that not what is
happening in this case?  I think it is.

Suppose I wrote "encrypted" a book using this scheme...

this character: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
represented as: BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzA

...and I distributed the book with a program that decrypted the book for
the reader.  Now, if someone were to send a message to mlug revealing my
secret decryption scheme, they might have committed a crime, but if they
were to send a message with this "program," written in the evil Unix
language, I'm sure they would be guilty as sin (under DMCA):

tr '[B-Z][a-z]A' '[A-Z][a-z]'

Do we really want to live in a world where it is illegal to say that?

Mike


> > This is another interesting case.  If someone had told me a decade ago
> > that a kid would be prosecuted for writing a computer program, I
> > wouldn't have believed it.  How can it be illegal to write program?
> > Anyway, bizarre things sometimes happen.  I hope he gets off
> > altogether, but I doubt it.

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