I lied

Alright, a short rant about the new copyright bill.

One of the worst parts of the bill is the blanket prohibition on breaking digital locks, and not just breaking them, but having or using the software used to break them. Here's the thing, if these (scare-quotes) locks (scare-quotes) actually locked anything you wouldn't need these laws, right? If DRM kept media secure and un-copyable then there would be no need to push for laws to punish people when it was copied.

Now it turns out that pretty much any DRM is broken as soon as it hits the market. It's not trivial to do, it takes a lot of work and brain power to break it, but there's a whole army of nerds out there who'll do it just for the intellectual exercise, and once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's trivial for anyone to get the software and break the DRM.

So, when a company puts some DRM on some media, it doesn't really prevent copying in any serious way, it only causes inconvience and headaches for people who have legitimately purchased it (while people who download it get an unencumbered, more functional copy), all it does is let the companies say "this media had DRM on it, and someone broke it, and because of the new law, that is illegal, give us money now."

It is as if, to prevent you from reading a book, they taped the covers together, and then, because they can be used to break this high-level lock, they had the government outlaw butter-knives and fingernails.

Finally, there's the question of what constitutes DRM? This encryption is just math. If I encode a file in a way that you can break in 5 minutes on a piece of paper with a calculator and a pencil, does that count? It's not enough for the bill to say something like "effective DRM" since as we know, no DRM is effective and in any event, the state of the art moves too fast for any law to keep up with specific implementations. Here, check this out:

The following encrypted text is copyright Richard Platel, 2008, all rights reserved

Guvf zbeavat V ernyvmrq gung V unq ab fhccyvrf sbe oernxsnfg, naq V jnf nyernql xvaq bs yngr, fb V tbg n ovt pbbxvr jvgu zl hfhny pbssrr, ohg gurer jnf n arj crefba jbexvat gur gvyy, naq fur qvqa'g xabj ubj gb punetr zr sbe gur pbbxvr, fb vg gbbx n ernyyl ybat gvzr.

There, I created some media and put some digital locks on it to protect it (cleverly shifting each letter in the text 13 spaces down in the alphabet). If you go to rot13.com and break it, you'd be in violation of this new bill, and the sophisticated piracy software at rot13.com ( letter = (letter + 13 %26)) would be too.

Please, do this.