Re: Legal issues

On Mon, Dec 30, 2002 at 01:29:55AM +0000, Pete Bentley wrote:
> On Friday, Dec 27, 2002, at 21:12 Europe/London, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> >Well, I have read all 999 messages, but there was mostly an expression 
> >of
> >fear that the DMCA might be violated, which I think is not true.
> 
> Au contraire.
> 
> Both the DMCA (for those in the US) and the EU Copyright Directive (for
> those in the UK) outlaw reverse engineering to a large extent.

Not really.  I have not checked the EU Copyright Directive, but the DMCA
outlaws reverse engineering for a specific purpose.  And that is
"circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that
effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title
in a work or a portion thereof;"

However, only descrambling an OMG file can be considered to be such a
circumvention.  In fact, the DMCA defines:

  o (A) to ''circumvent a technological measure'' means to descramble a
   scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid,
   bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without
   the authority of the copyright owner;

But this is not what we want to do!  We don't want to decrypt an OMG file. 
We want to encrypt an ATRAC3-encoded music file into an omg file or
something similar that can be used to load it onto the MD player.  The
decryption technology is included in the player.

Furthermore, there is no copy made less or more than with Sony's
technology.  So a case based on copyright law can not even be made for this
reason alone.

What I think is the important difference between something like DeCSS and
something like uploading a file to an MD player is the direction of the
encryption/decryption process.  With encrypting a music file into the OMG
format, Sony can sell music files on the internet for download to the
player.  It is important for them to make copying the same file onto
multiple players impossible, this is what their "technology" implements. 
Now, if you were to decrypt the OMG format, you would circumvent this.[1]
However, solely by encrypting a raw music file (which you roduced yourself
possibly) you are further restricting rights and possibilities you already
have, you are putting yourself into chains.

The DMCA protects copyrighted, protected works against copying by making any
attempts to extract the original data illegal.  We don't want to extract
copyrighted protected works.  We want to protect works.  The whole subject
of using protection schemes in the intended direction is not covered by the
DMCA.

I would be more careful about patents.  If the encryption algorithm is under
a software patent, that might be a much more serious obstacle than the DMCA
or any other copyright law.

> Besides, I have a feeling that preventing me from working to
> make use of a product I have bought on a platform unsupported
> by the manufacturer would go against the EU Convention on Human
> Rights.

Thanks,
Marcus

[1] This would be necessary to load files from the player to the computer,
which apparently isn't even supported by the hardware, as unfortunate as it
is.

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU      http://www.gnu.org    [email protected]
Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
[email protected]
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/