If you live in Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia or Wyoming you may be breaking the law by having a firewall, encrypting your emails, using NAT (network address translation) or connecting to your employer’s network using a VPN (virtual private network). Other states (Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas) have similar legislation pending.
The legislation in question is being referred to as Super-DMCA. DMCA refers to the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act passed in 1998. The DMCA was designed to update United States copyright laws to reflect the changes necessary to manage intellectual property in the Information Age.
DMCA has been hotly debated since its inception. The recording industry has used it to bring legal action against popular sites such as Napster for aiding in the illegal trading of copywritten works. A Princeton professor was threatened with a lawsuit for his work on cracking digital watermarks. Russian programmer Dmitry Skylarov was arrested under provisions of the DMCA for creating a program to crack Adobe Systems e-books. Both of these individuals did what they did to show that the copy protection was flawed and not for personal gain.
The law states that it is illegal for people to possess or traffic devices that can be used to circumvent copyright protection. The DMCA has put fear in many in the industry and borders on outright censorship the way it is being applied. Programmers and computer security researchers are sometimes reluctant to make their information public for fear of being prosecuted.
Hardware and software vendors have threatened researchers who have discovered security flaws in their products and made them public. Silencing those who take the time to do the research the vendor should have done before selling the product does not make the product more secure. It only means that the underground will get to know about the security flaws but the consumers that buy the products won’t find out until its too late.
In an effort to stop various hacking and spamming activity the various states have chosen to expand on the federal DMCA by instituting their own state-level DMCA laws. It should also be noted that the model for this legislation was created by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and has been lobbied to the various state governments.
