CNN/IDG: DVD and the digital copyright act

“The U.S. court system is beginning to enforce one of the more
controversial provisions of the recent copyright protection
legislation. It is far from clear whether the organizations that
pushed for the inclusion of this provision ultimately will be badly
hurt by its enforcement….”

“But if this prohibition is carried to its logical extreme,
the act will outlaw the software that cryptographic researchers use
to figure out if encryption algorithms are any good. Without
this kind of testing, copyright holders might just pick an
encryption algorithm that is even weaker than the current DVD one
to try to protect even more valuable content. You not knowing that
your protection is weak will not prevent others from finding
out.”

“Note also that the act only covers the U.S. – the DeCSS program
was written outside of the U.S., so it is not directly subject to
U.S. law. The U.S. courts may be able to prevent U.S.-based Web
sites from knowingly making DeCSS available, but there will always
be plenty of non-U.S. sites where it will remain available. And
DeCSS will get posted periodically to newsgroups that will
automatically distribute it to millions of U.S. Internet
users.”

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