May 1, 2003

Digital Freedom Update

I'm a bit late with this, but the Knoxville News Sentinel carried a perceptive column about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The column was written by Diana Holden, a graduate student in the University of Tennessee's School of Information Sciences. It doesn't mention efforts to enact a state version of the DMCA, which I've written about extensively below. (Start here, follow links.)

Also, here's a story from Information Week about the negative impact of state-level DMCA legislation. An excerpt:

In the days following the July 2001 Code Red worm outbreak, which infected 359,000 systems in 14 hours, software developer Tom Liston started work on an application that would turn the tables on worms. He created LaBrea, which essentially acts like a digital tar pit, trapping hackers and worms, forcing hackers to break off attacks, and preventing worms from moving on to other computers.

The free, open-source application has been heralded in security circles and nominated for awards as a unique weapon. It's also been pulled from Lipton's Hackbusters.net site by its author. He yanked it April 15 when the Illinois resident learned that a 4-month-old state law makes it illegal to create a device capable of disrupting a communication service without the express authorization of the communication service provider.

The law also makes it a crime to conceal the existence, origin, or destination of any communication from a service provider or any lawful party. Technically, LaBrea disrupts communications and conceals the true origin of network communications. So Liston pulled LaBrea rather than risk prosecution for what he believes is, at best, a vaguely worded piece of legislation. Some software security experts, academics, and consumer-electronics-industry representatives say such legislation will curb legitimate research and speech. They refer to the state rules as "super-DMCA" laws because they claim the laws tend to be more restrictive than the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.