On Tue, 4 Jan 2000, Ray Hirschfeld wrote:
> > Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 18:43:52 -0800 (PST)
> > From: bram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> > I'm a little confused. Are you saying that as of October it will be legal
> > to do any amount of reverse-engineering, publishing, and writing to APIs
> > you want without violating the original author's copyright? Does that mean
> > that, say, Bsafe will have the rug yanked out from under it by allowing
> > alternate non-infringing implementations?
>
> No, October 28, 2000 is when the act of circumventing an effective
> technological measure becomes a violation (with exceptions for fair
> use, crypto research, reverse engineering, law enforcement, etc.).
> Until then it is legal under the new copyright law.
>
> Circumvention for interoperability purposes is already permitted, but
> not as broadly as you state.
Specifically, is it, and will it be, legal to create an alternate
implementation of an API you didn't write?
This may be re-opening an old can of worms, but I couldn't help but notice
the extreme looseness of the encryption research exemption -
(1) Definitions. - For purposes of this subsection -
(A) the term ''encryption research'' means activities necessary to
identify and analyze flaws and vulnerabilities of encryption technologies
applied to copyrighted works, if these activities are conducted to advance
the state of knowledge in the field of encryption technology or to assist
in the development of encryption products; and
(B) the term ''encryption technology'' means the scrambling and
descrambling of information using mathematical formulas or algorithms.
Does breaking a proprietary algorithm 'advance the state of knowledge in
the field of encryption technology'? Is breaking protocols, with no
breaking of algorithms (as happened to ICQ) covered under (B)? Is it
illegal to point out that a product sends a challenge/response of some
trivial secret message before sending everything cleartext, since that
neither deals with the scrambling of information using mathematical
formulas or advances the state of encryption technology?
-Bram
