Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The DigitalMillenniumCopyrightAct (DMCA)

http://www.hrrc.org/html/DMCA-leg-hist.html

A thought-provoking comment by MichaelSwaine can be found here: http://webreview.com/swaine/2002/02_04_02.shtml

Link above is broken (shame on you, DrDobbs?! ...of all sites to do that...) but the article was worth tracking down: http://www.drdobbs.com/legal-and-binding/184413233 --CraigEverett?

AlanCox E-mail The Digital Millennium Copyright act is an Evil law set to stop mp3 sharing, etc. It, however, does more than that. Have a look at this:

List: linux-kernel Subject: Linux 2.2.20pre10 From: Alan Cox <laughing@shared-source.org> Date: 2001-10-22 10:21:49

Things took a bit longer than intended with various security fixes needing to be done. If this tree tests out ok, it will be 2.2.20

2.2.20pre11

oSecurity fixes

| Details censored in accordance with the US DMCA

(http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=100374609914587&w=2)

As you can see, the DMCA is censoring people from saying what they fixed. Can anyone say NineteenEightyFour?

I am still trying to figure out why the DMCA stopped Mr Cox from publishing details of security fixes. An explanation, rather than a 'nudge-nudge' quote and accompanying lambasting would be nice. Mind you, I don't care much for the DMCA myself, but I still don't understand this whole bit.

It's the whole thing with people being sued recently for publishing information describing security vulnerabilities in commercial software ("assisting the circumnvention of copyright-protection mechanisms"). The details presumably affect some commercial software in some way... or possibly DVD drives. I suppose looking at the diff is the only way to know.

I wouldn't be surprised if AlanCox really had no reason to be afraid, but was just being sarcastic to make a political point.

There was more than sarcasm behind Cox's action. See http://kerneltrap.org/article.php?sid=343 for some of the mails he wrote after the changelog. Alan also resigned from the Usenix ALS committee as a reaction to the arrest of DmitrySklyarov: http://lwn.net/2001/0726/a/alan-quits-als.php3.

Since I could not view the kerneltrap link, I tried digging up one that works. I dunno why the above link does not work, and I am not sure what article it is supposed to be pointing to, but here is a link that WorksForMe: http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/9

For anyone who want to look at the dots and comma's, I eventually found the full text of the act here: http://www.legalarchiver.org/dmca.htm

CategoryEvil