Letter to the Editor

(the following is a letter to the editor that was published in the Industry Standard (remember that?) in May 2001)

Lawrence Lessig’s May 14 “Copyright Thugs” article points out the legal conflict between DCMA and fair use, but I believe that the RIAA example also points to a technical absurdity in the RIAA interpretation of the law.

As you recall, originally Prof. Felten’s team spent a few weeks to crack the RIAA codes. But imagine that instead of taking time X to break the RIAA codes, Prof. Felten’s team had done it in twice the time. This would not seem to change the RIAA legal position – they still would have blocked them from publishing, though they may have felt better about their codes.

Now let’s go the other direction – imagine that Prof. Felten’s team had done it in half the time. Seems like the RIAA would not have changed their position. Let’s cut the time in half a few more times until you get to the point where Prof. Felten’s team was able to break the four codes over lunch. From everything I understand, the RIAA legal position would still apply.

This suggests that the quality of the protection scheme is actually immaterial – it is merely there as a legal crutch!

Now let’s go a step farther, and imagine that not only could Prof. Felton et al break these codes easily, but that you or I could as well. This might lead to the following exchange:

“I’m giving you a document, but you can’t copy it since it’s protected by a copyright protection scheme”

“Hey, your copyright protection scheme is simply to swap each letter for the next one in the alphabet – I had a Cracker Jack ring that did that!”

“You tell anyone and I’ll sue you!”

Seems like if the RIAA really believes their position, they could have saved alot of money on encryption engineering!

Dave Douglas