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[dvd-discuss] A blast from the past....



You remember the thread about a week about ago about 'embed' and whether
two bits is a protection measure...

Well, it became a slashdot story today, and one astute reader [1] found
this, which addressed the situation and suggested an exemption:

--  http://www.loc.gov/copyright/1201/comments/004.pdf

Pages 1 from Comments on Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention Measures

Aladdin Enterprises

January 21, 2000
Copyright Office
Library of Congress
1201@ loc. gov

To the Copyright Office:  There is a substantial and important class of
exemptions to the "circumvention" prohibitions of the Digital Millenium
Copyright Act that apparently is not being considered, namely,
circumstances where the technological control measures were applied
incorrectly. There is, in fact, a commercially important situation where
this is currently the case. A software package called Fontographer is used
very widely for creating TrueType font files. A bug in Fontographer causes
it to improperly mark the fonts it produces in a way that causes certain
other widely used software packages to consider that the font may not be
embedded in documents that use the font. This incorrect marking happens by
default, contrary to the wishes of the font author. The authors of
Fontographer have been unresponsive to users and authors and have not
fixed this problem. Thus a situation has been created where the author of
the font wishes to allow users to embed it, but users who remove the
protection marking (which is extremely simple technically --it involves
changing one easily-located bit in the font)  will be in violation of the
law.

To address this problem, we believe an appropriate exempted class would be
"works to which technological control measures have been applied
incorrectly (contrary to the intent of the copyright holder)."

--

(Aladdin Enterprises makes 'ghostscript' which is a postscript interpreter
thats used in UNIX and in many printers.)

Scott


[1] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=31982&cid=3447333