[apologies to Anthony for the double mail]
On 11/05/07, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote:
What the law
here is prohibiting - let us assume for a minute that the
law would stand in court, and that the interpretation of the key as
forming such a tool is valid - is possession of a tool intended to
bypass copy protection.
No. You are very very wrong. That is not what the law is
prohibiting. It prohibits trafficking "in any technology, product,
service, device, component, or part thereof" ...
It most certainly does not cover
mere possession of a tool intended to bypass copy protection.
My apologies; that was an error left in from a previous draft, when
I'd been working on starting with analogies about the dubiousness of
possessing innocuous items in certain contexts. I did mean to say
something other than possession - perhaps supplying? Making available?
Disseminating? "Trafficking" is the term the statute uses, but I
confess to not being very fond of it - it does have overtones that
confuse matters a bit.
The second part of that sentence is also very very
incorrect. The
chances of a random 128 bit string being the key is about one in
339,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
(give or take a couple trillion...). A computer one million times
faster than current computers could generate random data for 6
thousand, trillion years before coming up with the number by accident.
Huh. I got something on a much lower order. (This is probably due to
something exceptionally stupid like having done the calculation
assuming digits were bits, and juggling numbers mentally... some days,
I am amazed I ever passed my exams)
... because
you're knowingly providing something which was produced
with the intent of circumvention.
No you're not (IOW, you are once again very very very incorrect).
You're knowingly providing something which was produced with the
intent of encrypting and decrypting DVDs. You've actually stumbled
upon what is probably the best argument so far that distribution of
the HD DVD encryption key itself does not fall under the DMCA.
I'm not sold on the distinction here. Surely the key was released to
the world ('released' by the guy who studied the system, not by the
manufacturers) for the purposes of encrypting/decrypting *in order* to
circumvent the protection?