The encryption prevented customers from making copies of their books to read on multiple systems, so Sklyarov produced a tool that bypassed this restriction and handed out a trial version at the conference with information about how to purchase the full tool. One of the first controversial uses of the DMCA occurred in 2001 when the FBI arrested Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov at the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas after he gave a presentation about bypassing the encryption code Adobe used for electronic books produced with Adobe Acrobat. The security community and the software industry has long been at odds over companies threatening legal action under the DMCA to prevent researchers from publicly disclosing software vulnerabilities found in their programs, particularly when those flaws are in the copy-protection mechanisms the companies craft. The issue with Volkswagen points to a core problem with the DMCA and its stifling of legitimate research. It also makes it illegal to manufacture or distribute tools or techniques for circumventing copy controls.īut in reality the controversial law's effects have been much broader by allowing game developers, music and film companies and others to keep a tight control on how consumers use their copyrighted works, preventing them in some cases from making copies of their purchased products for their own use or from jailbreaking smartphones and other devices to use them in ways the manufacturers dislike.
The DMCA was passed in 1998 as an anti-piracy statute effectively making it illegal to circumvent copy protections designed to prevent pirates from duplicating digital copyrighted works and selling or freely distributing them. The source of the fracture? The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Lawmakers have ordered a slate of studies to look into how to fix what has become a broken system, and activists are cautiously optimistic that this could be the first step toward reform.
The call for copyright reform in America has grown so loud that Congress has finally heard it.
0 kommentar(er)
