That reminds me of Alex Haldermann and his description of breaking the Sunncomm encryption scheme by pressing the shift key. Just as Haldermann you are only discussing a way of working around an encryption scheme. That is not providing a "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof," as required by the DMCA.
And just as in Haldermann's case, the workaround shows that the technology was not "effective" in the first place.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at March 8, 2004 04:26 AMPack-journalism to the contrary, the Halderman DMCA issue was not about the shift key. It was about descriptions over the internals of the program.
The problem is whether speech is "technology" in terms of the DMCA. Because if code is technology, and code is speech, can speech be technology?
For the DMCA "effective" doesn't mean "unbreakable", that's been established repeatedly.
If we assume those magic 8 lines do provide effective protection, then xpdf is probably violating the DMCA by leaving them off.
Posted by Cypherpunk at March 8, 2004 04:29 PMSee DMCA 1201(c)(3), discussed in comments of the next message, there's no DMCA "broadcast flag".
Besides, there is a minor bug in the phrasing of the threat-tag. It says you can't remove the tag, but doesn't say you can't remove the matress? Is there a difference? Perhaps they meant you can't detach the matress and the tag from each other, but that's not what they said. And that's not what the PDF tag says either. Just open it up, cut and paste, and leave the tag in the file like it says. Or is that too simple?