The Digital Millenium Copyright Act, or DMCA, was signed into law by President Clinton in 1998 and comes across very much like a prequel to the Patriot Act. The DMCA was originally intended (according to law makers) to stop people from beating copyright protection on digital media and from creating software applications that would beat copyright protection on digital media.
But, as with a lot of things having to do with the USG lately, it's been twisted into a tool for controlling what many of us do and say even in the privacy of our own homes. This is a tremendous subject to try to get into with a lot of examples as to why the DMCA is UnConstitutional. To whet your appetite, consider this, the hacker magazine 2600 was sued when they published the specifics of how they were able to beat the copyprotection on DVDs. They lost. Were they sued for beating the copyprotection on a DVD? No. They were sued for publishing that information.
Should books on safecracking be outlawed? What about manuals that explain how to use a gun properly? Any reasonable human can see that this is a classic case of the slippery slope argument. Banning certain kinds of speech in this way is wrong, but also it bans knowledge as well. If one person is prohibited from passing knowledge onto another, then that knowledge only exists in that one person and essentially can exist nowhere else, unless it is found the same way the initial person finds it. And now were instantly in George Orwell country where wrongthinking is punishable.
Think you can tell that person how you made a copy of your DVD? Nope. You'll be breaking the law.
Find out more about the DMCA at EFF.org. Please.
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