[dvd-discuss] Colin McMillen's Letter on CBDTPA/SSSCA/S-2048

[Seth Johnson <seth.johnson(at)realmeasures.dyndns.org>]

(A very nice letter by the guy whose order of a Dreamcast
Coders' Cable, which he intended to use in legitimate
research, was blocked from import by UPS and the US Customs
Department as a "DMCA violation."  At the URL he provides,
you find that he's been trying to fulfill an EFF request to
provide evidence that SEGA explicitly endorses the kind of
use he wanted to exercise.  Forwarded from DMCA Discussion
list, dmca_discuss@lists.microshaft.org  -- Seth)


-------- Original Message --------
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 15:17:20 -0600
From: Colin P McMillen <mcmillen@cs.umn.edu>


I am an undergraduate student and research assistant
studying computer science at the University of Minnesota,
and am concerned about the effect that the "Consumer
Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act" (S-2048,
proposed by Sen. Hollings) will have on legitimate academic
pursuits. My academic research interests have already been
stifled due to the passage of the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA). As a quick summary, a legitimate piece
of computer hardware was prevented import into the United
States due to the DMCA, and the lack of this piece of
hardware prevented me from pursuing a legitimate field of
research as part of my Real-Time Systems Laboratory
coursework. For more details on this, see my web page here:
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~mcmillen/dmca/

The restrictions on digital devices mandated by S-2048 will
stifle research, innovation, and fair use.

As a consumer, what line of recourse do I have if my
computer mistakenly denies me legitimate access to a
copyrighted work I own? Or to a non-copyrighted work, or to
a work that was previously copyrighted and has recently been
released into the public domain? This can (and will) happen
by accident, as it did in the case I refer to above. Do I
have to talk to the good folks at Intel to ask why their
processor doesn't let me load images I took with my own
digital camera? Or do I contact Microsoft, asking them why
their operating system doesn't let me load a digital
recording of my little sister's piano recital?  Am I forced
to trash my 6-year old clunker of a computer, replacing it
with a new, more expensive model with purposely crippled
features?  As a college student, I can't afford to do that.

As a student, what do I do if I accidentally write a piece
of software that allows someone to make a copy of a
copyrighted file? In my operating systems class, the first
homework was to write a program which copies a file from one
location of a hard drive to another. Could I be prosecuted
for writing such a trivial program? Even if I tried to
incorporate "digital rights management" into my homework
assignment, what if there were a bug? I am just a student,
after all; trial and error are part of the educational
process. Could my professor be prosecuted for posting a
slightly buggy version of the answer key for this assignment
online?

As a researcher, what do I do if I'm afraid some
interesting, cutting-edge project of mine might run afoul of
this law? Do I need to pay for an attorney to consult with
me about the bill? Do I need to hire someone to audit my
code and help me certify that it is free of any violations
of this bill? Again, it is perfectly possible and reasonable
that my code might accidentally have security holes in it
that allow people to illegitimately copy data.  Modern
software projects are some of the most complex engineering
problems known to mankind; chances are that any reasonably
large piece of software will have dozens, or hundreds, of
such bugs. The process of fixing these bugs is often a slow
one, as users report problems with the software and the
developers work to fix them one by one. Large companies like
Intel and Microsoft might have the resources to furiously
audit every single line of code to verify that there are no
such liabilities, but my research lab (consisting of maybe a
dozen people) does not have such resources.  If this bill
were to pass, our research pursuits would be completely
stifled.

In conclusion, this bill will negatively affect many aspects
of my life. That may not have been its original intention,
but all the scenarios I enumerate above are perfectly
plausible.  Given enough time, each of them will happen. In
each case, science, consumers, and our society as a whole
will suffer.

-- 
Colin McMillen
Research Assistant, Center for Distributed Robotics
University of Minnesota
_______________________________________________

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