"Everything is very fast-moving and the culture is young," he said, and then handed me his business card, which read, "I am the most illegal circumvention device of them all".
On May 7, 2007, the AACS LA announced on its website that it had "requested the removal solely of illegal circumvention tools, including encryption keys, from a number of web sites", and that it had "not requested the removal or deletion of any... discussion or commentary".
To avoid a pointless back-and-forth, copyright reform advocates say the law that makes circumvention illegal should be changed.
In the same spirit, Mr. Boucher's legislation would make circumvention illegal only if the primary purpose was to violate copyrights.
The answer, according to Sina Khanifar, an entrepreneur and digital-rights activist who initiated the White House petition, is simply to rewrite DMCA's Section 1201, to tighten the definition of what exactly it is that is illegal to circumvent or whether the circumvention provisions are, indeed, still needed now the job they were designed to do (protect DVDs from piracy) no longer exists.
As for the second requested exemption, Soghoian pointed out that the creation, manufacture, and distribution of circumvention tools, which is illegal under a separate part of the DMCA §1201, has always been "the elephant in the room" in these rulemaking proceedings.
But under the anti-circumvention provision, it is illegal to crack a copy protection technology for any reason.
The most profound implications are likely to come from the Administration's provision for what is called "anti-circumvention," which makes it illegal, under any circumstances, to crack a copy-protection technology.
In a statement issued by the EPA, Cynthia Giles, the assistant administrator at the EPT's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, called the intentional circumvention of federal emissions tests "illegal" and "a threat to public health".
The rule is section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, the "anti-circumvention" rule that makes it illegal to break an "access control" for copyrighted works.
The "anti-circumvention" provision under the DMCA makes it illegal for people to circumvent these digital locks, or to share tools that can be used to unpick the locks protecting copyrighted works.
