If nothing else, this event demonstrated that the DMCA has teeth. Unfortunately, these teeth have
been used not only to protect legitimate commerce, but to pursue computer scientists at academic
institutions researching content protection schemes, encryption, and a range of other technologies.
Because the DMCA makes it a crime to manufacture and transport technology used to circumvent
copyright protection schemes, many researchers have abandoned valuable research that could yield
better (stronger and more useful) protection schemes or reveal critical flaws in existing ones.
While DCMA has provided some clout for content providers to legitimately protect their material,
such as persuading search engines to drop information about links to illegally posted and copyrighted
information, there are times when that clout has been abused. Some copyright holders, it
seems, are more than willing to use the DMCA to curtail three ???rights??? allowed under pre-DMCA
copyright law. Copyright law stipulates:
Users can make a copy of any copyrighted work for academic purposes, reporting, or critique.
This includes a wide range of uses, from students or instructors copying materials
for research to someone creating a parody of published materials. But what about a student
making a copy of some DVD materials for a multimedia presentation? The student
514
Running Applications Part IV
has fair-use access to the material on the DVD, but the DMCA makes it illegal for the student
to break the DVD encryption that would allow the student to copy the material.
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