There is a conflict in cultures between Internet engineering and the technical practices of the U.S. entertainment industry. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was born of that clash.
One of the more alarming aspects of the DMCA is that it discourages the creation of technologies that "circumvent" a "copyright protection system" (CPS). A "circumvention device" is hardware or software that lets people override the CPS controls on storage, processing, or output of digital content. By some interpretations, this definition could include most research and development into Internet and information technologies, especially work on open standards.
Those who favor the DMCA often argue that research into the flaws of a technology is a form of circumvention, and thus illegal. Developers involved in such research could face civil prosecution or threat of prosecution, as in the case of Edward Felton, a Princeton computer science professor. Felton and his team defeated four watermarking technologies designed to protect digital music. The music industry tried to suppress the team's results with a threatening letter (www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/announcement.html).
Exposure of CPS flaws for commercial gain could result in criminal prosecution. Consider the case of Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian computer professional who was jailed for giving a lecture on how to defeat the copyright protection scheme used for many e-books and proprietary documents. (See Bret Fausett's "DRM For the Forces of Good" in the November 2001 issue of Web Techniques.)
These concerns haven't been lost on open standards advocates. And though the DMCA probably won't succeed in restricting research and development of open-standard technologies, the battle may be long and costly nonetheless.
Internet vs. Entertainment
The way Internet standards are created resembles Internet data sharing, where information products flow freely. Organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) publish open standard technology specifications that are available to anyone interested in writing a computer program or bringing a new product to market. Unlike the IETF and W3C, however, the entertainment and consumer electronics industries license their technology for a price.
The right to license is based on the companies' patent pools, their intellectual property rights on certain technologies. Companies that own patents can license their technology to digital entertainment device manufacturers. The license usually places constraints on how content is processed, stored, and output on a particular digital entertainment device.
Open-standard and proprietary-licensed technologies are complementary. Open standards are essential for interconnecting computers, but technology licensing is useful in preventing unsecure or unsafe modes of operation. While both approaches are necessary, the DMCA threatens the open-standard approach.
For this reason, the DMCA is dangerous to scientific investigation and engineering practices in the U.S. and worldwide. The DMCA may extend the reach of licensing authorities beyond their patent pools to encompass technologies that are in the public domain or are the intellectual property of others.
