[dvd-discuss] How many bits is a technical protection measure?

[Scott A Crosby <crosby(at)qwes.math.cmu.edu>]

Remember we were having discussions as to whether or not a single bit flag
was an 'effective technical protection measure'.. Well, it seems that at
least one organization believes that two bytes is a protection measure.

True Type Fonts have a couple of flags that indicate in what and how they
may be embedded into a document. Most programs for editing them set those
flags to 'not embeddable'.

So, a lounge-rat here wrote a program that would reset those flags to
allow him to mark his fonts as embeddable.. He has recieved a DMCA
takedown letter (which is on its way to ChillingEffects.org) from a font
house ordering him to remove the program.

Yes, the program does nothing other than parse the TTF header, overwrite
two bytes with 0's, and calculate a new checksum.

        http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~twm/embed/

If the program *is* found to be a violation of the DMCA.. Would that imply
that the Microsoft TTF specification is also a violation? Or would it
imply that a set of instructions for how to change those two bytes (using
a hex-editor) is a violation? Or is a hex-editor itself a violation?

Scott