Friday, 24. January 2003

DCMA and Locks

mutatron and Edward Felten have some interesting thoughts as a followup on Matt Blaze's Masterlock thing. Basically they say if a key protects copyrighted material tinkering with the key or the lock is prohibited by the DCMA.

While this is a interlectually stimulating argument it also is a great example of the thoughtpattern which leads geeks to loosing legal and political battles over and over.

Geeks take a law or idea or something other they don't like and use cold logic to carry them much further than they where meant to be. Then they claim that the results by doing so lead to absurd results and so the original idea must be wrong, too.

While using this techique in a dispute is not stupid per se (see Schopenhauer) the geeks seem to think that it isn't just a tool for dispute but that they really have prooven in a logical way that the idea they are attacking is wrong.

Come on. Nobody will think of outruling hardware shops copying keys based on the DCMA. Statements like "You can't outrule prossessing hacking-tools since than you also have to outrule the possession of telnet and ping" just lets policy makers think you are a lunatic.
01:04 | #

disLEXia, a research project by Maximillian Dornseif