Chapter 1: A digital security company called SunnComm (corporate motto, "Lightyears beyond encryption") releases an "advanced copy protection mechanism" to prevent users from copying music CDs. Chapter 2: Princeton doctoral student John ("Alex") Halderman discovers that if you hold down the shift key while inserting a CD, you bypass SunnComm's security routines. They never load and the disk is open for copying. Halderman posts his results online. Chapter 3: SunnComm is a laughingstock and loses $10 million in market value. Chapter 4 (unfortunately predictable ending): SunnComm announces that it will charge Halderman for the "possible felony" of distributing a circumvention device in violation of the DMCA. News coverage. (PS: Behind the music copying angle, the anti-circumvention angle, and the kill-the-messenger angle, notice that this is really an Edward Felten case. This is a story about using the DMCA to suppress scientific research into security systems. Felten, BTW, was one of Halderman's advisors on the project.)
Update. SunnComm has dropped its plan to prosecute Halderman. (PS: Either SunnComm would have won in court or it would have lost. If it had won, it would have exposed the DMCA as brutal and itself as a bully that used a bad law to suppress the truth about a bad product. If it had lost, then it would look even more foolish than it does now. The legal threat was lose-lose, and finally someone noticed.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/10/2003 08:12:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
