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 Suppose I have in my office copies of an unpublished work that I wrote (and am the copyright owner of).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 1299 University of Oregon phone: 1-541-346-1746; -3485 fax Eugene, OR 97403-1299 http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/Received on Mon Jun 29 1998 - 16:35:50 GMT
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