HR 2281 and burglary

From: JQ Johnson <jqj[_at_]darkwing.uoregon.edu>
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1998 09:35:46 -0700

As I think most of us are aware, the U.S. WIPO treaty bill (H.R. 2281) includes an anticircumvention provision. I was rereading HR 2281, and it occurs to me that it seems to make burglary a federal crime. Suppose I have in my office copies of an unpublished work that I wrote (and am the copyright owner of). Further suppose that someone picks the lock on my office door and steals my book. I think H.R. 2281 applies. Do other readers agree?

Relevant definitions:

``(A) to `circumvent a technological protection' means to
    descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or     otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a     technological protection measure, without the authority of the     copyright owner; and

``(B) a technological protection measure `effectively
    controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary     course of its operation, requires the application of     information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of     the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

Note that in the case of a traditional lock, the protection information is encoded in a "token", typically as a series of raised portions along a bar. This is very similar to other authentication tokens such as security keycards, though the number of bits in the authenticator is quite low (probably under 40).

JQ Johnson                      Office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  mailto:jqj[_at_]darkwing.uoregon.edu
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Received on Mon Jun 29 1998 - 16:35:50 GMT

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