Your freedom is being taken away from you, quietly, behind your back, by corporations, by the government. The DMCA is being used to silence researchers, computer scientists, and critics. Corporations are using it against the public. People have been imprisoned. On October 28th, 1998 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was signed into law. The act is a typically long document which most importantly prohibits the creation/distribution of methods whose primary purpose is to circumvent a technology meant to protect copyrighted works. AKA it is illegal to create anything which can crack a technology that can protect copyrighted work. See Dmitry Sklyarov case for an example of how this law is exercised.
It's an extremely depressing law as it prohibits research on technologies, exposing holes in technologies, restricts freedom, and really aids the path to taking away basic freedoms which were legal prior to the year 2001 (it took two years for the law to go into full effect). This is corporate control over the consumer, aided by the government.
Conspiracy Example: Eventually companies think that regular paper books will be made obsolete by eBooks, books you get in electronic format, by downloading to your Laptop/PDA/Web Pad/whatever. The companies' goal is to maximize profits. These are the content controllers (not the creators, the authors, but those who own the rights) who want you to pay for your book and read it, basically pay for the rights to read the text. It's quite possible that the license you purchased for the book may expire after certain time, and the software will determine as you go through the pages, and not allow you to read the book twice. The software is also designed to not allow you to share your book with a friend. Your friend didn't pay the company to read it, after all. And of course you are not allowed to print the book. Any method you come up with to circumvent this, to allow yourself to print a copy of the text you paid for, or to allow your friend to read the book you purchased, is illegal. These are basic fair use rights which the DMCA is allowing companies to quickly take away. Look at this screenshot of an eBook. It seems as though it should be a joke, but it's real. Also, Microsoft and the Association of American Publishers have developed "Internet Surveillance services" to monitor eBooks. Do you want to live in a controlled world like this?
Forcing Low Quality Software: Within the computer science community it is a common practice to "crack" or attempt to break the protection of a piece of software. Why? Well, just like crash testing cars results in stronger, safer vehicles, cracking software results in stronger, safer software. As we have seen with the proliferation of viruses, worms, and hackers breaking into networks, some software is not very strong. The DMCA criminalizes certain research work done to create and develop stronger software. Your digital information is put at risk by this law. Don't let the government replace good software and security practices. Besides, that's our tax money being used to enforce weak research, weak development, and weak security. Let no one tell you software security testing is not as important as crash testing vehicles. In this digital era we live in, all of your important information travels through this software.
Hopefully freedom will prevail and this law will be overturned. Maybe ten years from now we'll have the same freedoms and rights as we did in the last century. But for now the corporations are taking over, buying unconstitutional laws. This is a movement. We have an agenda. We built these networks. We'll take them back.
