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cory doctorow
access control — around a copyrighted work, it is illegal to break
that lock. It’s illegal to make a tool that breaks that lock. It’s il-
legal to tell someone how to make that tool. One court even held
it illegal to tell someone where she can find out how to make that
tool.
Remember Schneier’s Law? Anyone can come up with a se-
curity system so clever that he can’t see its flaws. The only way
to find the flaws in security is to disclose the system’s workings
and invite public feedback. But now we live in a world where any
cipher used to fence off a copyrighted work is off-limits to that
kind of feedback. That’s something that a Princeton engineering
prof named Ed Felten and his team discovered when he submit-
ted a paper to an academic conference on the failings in the Secure
Digital Music Initiative, a watermarking scheme proposed by the
recording industry. The RIAA responded by threatening to sue his
ass if he tried it. We fought them because Ed is the kind of client
that impact litigators love: unimpeachable and clean-cut and the
RIAA folded. Lucky Ed. Maybe the next guy isn’t so lucky.
Matter of fact, the next guy wasn’t. Dmitry Sklyarov is a Rus-
sian programmer who gave a talk at a hacker con in Vegas on the
failings in Adobe’s ebook locks. The FBI threw him in the slam for
thirty days. He copped a plea, went home to Russia, and the Rus-
sian equivalent of the State Department issued a blanket warning
to its researchers to stay away from American conferences, since
we’d apparently turned into the kind of country where certain
equations are illegal.
Anticircumvention is a powerful tool for people who want to
exclude competitors. If you claim that your car engine firmware is
a “copyrighted work,” you can sue anyone who makes a tool for in-
terfacing with it. That’s not just bad news for mechanics — think
of the hotrodders who want to chip their cars to tweak the perfor-
mance settings. We have companies like Lexmark claiming that
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