The people who invented SDMI--a technique for preventing users from putting copyrighted material onto their hard drives--are idiots, really. They have yet to learn that by threatening people, you draw attention both to the threat and to the thing that you're worried about. They've apparently threatened a professor who discovered ways around the encryption scheme. Since they've threatened him under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, significant parts of which are purely US codicils to the Berne Convention, as it were, The Register published the paper in their journal. Since they're British, the relief available to the SDMI coalition is quite limited; the Register does not publish in the US, as such, and so cannot be enjoined by a US court ... although I would think that the professor and his research team are still easily as liable as they were before.
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
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12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!