Originally published October 11 2003
DMCA law makes you a criminal for pressing the shift key
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
This story highlights the absurdity of the ongoing DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and its Police State-like implications. Because the law makes it a crime to circumvent copyright mechanisms on intellectual property, and since you can circumvent the copyright on these protected CDs by pressing the shift key as they load, pressing the shift key makes you an instant criminal under federal law.
As the story suggests, this also potentially makes all keyboard manufacturers accomplices in crime, since they manufacture the "device" (the keyboard) that allows users to crack the protection mechanism.
As all this is designed to point out, the current DMCA law is quite ridiculous and has no place in a free society. It was promoted through the paranoia of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) which has since demonstrated its true intentions by, for example, suing 12 year old girls for downloading MP3 files.
As this law demonstrates, the DMCA is the result of a dangerous overreaction to the problem of online music piracy -- a problem which is right now being solved by the free market anyway, thanks to Apple's iTunes service.
But some people don't seem to understand free market solutions to problems that are, at their core, economic ones. When no mechanism existed for honest people to pay for music downloads, people were going to download music for free. The solution was to create a simple pay-per-download infrastructure, not to criminalize a third of the entire population.
That's right: if the DMCA were fully enforced, nearly 1/4th of the U.S. population would right now be in prison.
The recent flap about a Princeton University student who found a way
to beat music CD copy protection reignited calls to change a
controversial copyright law.
John "Alex" Halderman discovered that by simply pressing the Shift key
when loading a copy-protected music CD into a computer's hard drive, he
could disable SunnComm Technologies' MediaMax CD-3 software, which is
supposed to prevent CDs from being ripped.
"The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, though intended to stop digital
piracy, is being used to squelch legitimate research," said Fred von
Lohmann, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Gadflies suggested keyboard makers also should be sued for creating
the offending circumvention device -- the Shift key.
Boucher's bill would permit circumvention for fair-use purposes,
including scientific research.
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