Against Intellectual Monopoly

program director of San Diego rock station KBZT
has said, "Basically, the radio station isn't playing a song because they believe in
it. They're playing it because they're being paid." This is payola plain and simple.
According to an article by Jeff Leeds of the Los Angeles Times, all five major record
corporations have at least dabbled in the sales programs, industry sources said, with
some reportedly paying as much as $60,000 in advertising fees to promote a single
song.... Nothing has really changed. If you want your song played on the radio,
you better cough up dough, and a lot of it. Once you stop paying, your song will
be dropped from play lists.... It is yet another corrupt practice of the recording
and radio industries that we are angry about. It exploits artists and shortchanges
fans, but more than that, it is a waste, especially when there is another method of
promotion that works just as well, if not better, and is free: File trading networks. To
paraphrase today's youth: radio is old and busted, file trading is the new hotness.12
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act
    The latest outrage of the large media corporations has been the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).13 This resulted from a heavy
lobbying effort in which these large corporations claimed, as usual, that
they must run twice as fast just to stand still - and in particular that digital
media, from which they earned no revenue at all twenty years earlier, are
especially prone to "piracy."
    The most offensive feature of the DMCA is section 1201, the anticir-
cumvention provision. This makes it a criminal offense to reverse-engineer
or decrypt copyrighted material, or to distribute tools that make it possible to do so. On July 27, 2001, Russian cryptographer Dmitri Sklyarov
had the dubious honor of being the first person imprisoned under the
DMCA. Arrested while giving a seminar publicizing cryptographic weaknesses in Adobe's Acrobat e-book format, Sklyarov was eventually acquitted
on December 17, 2002.
    The DMCA has had a chilling effect on both freedom of speech, and on
cryptographic research. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports on the
case of Edward Felten and his Princeton team of researchers:

    In September 2000, a multi-industry group known as the Secure Digital Music
Initiative (SDMI) issued a public challenge encouraging skilled technologists to
try to defeat certain watermarking technologies intended to protect digital music.
Princeton Professor Edward Felten and a team of researchers at Princeton, Rice, and
Xerox took up the challenge and succeeded in removing the watermarks.
    When the team tried to present their results at an academic conference, however,
SDMI representatives threatened the researchers with liability under the DMCA.
The threat letter was also delivered to the researchers employers and the conference
organizers. After extensive discussions with counsel, the researchers grudgingly
withdrew their paper from the conference. The threat was ultimately withdrawn
and a portion of the research was published at a subsequent conference, but only
after the researchers filed a lawsuit.
    After enduring this experience, at least one of the researchers involved has decided
to forgo further research efforts in this field.14
    The Electronic Frontier Foundation goes on to catalog a variety of abusive
DMCA threats, largely by corporations eager to avoid having their dirty
laundry aired in public, against various private individuals and organizations. One common use of the DMCA is to threaten researchers who
reveal security flaws in products. Another notable use is that of the ink-jet
printer makers, who use the DMCA to threaten rivals that make compatible
replacement cartridges.
    The second obnoxious feature of the DMCA is the "takedown" notice.
The DMCA creates a safe harbor for Internet service providers (ISPs) whose
customers post copyrighted material. To qualify for this safe-harbor provision, however, the ISPs must comply with takedown notices - basically
claims from individuals who purport to hold a copyright over the offending
material. Needless to say, such a provision may easily be abused and has
a chilling effect on free speech. For example, from the Electronic Frontier
Foundation we learn the following:
    The Church of Scientology has long been accused of using copyright law to harass
and silence its critics. The Church has discovered the ease with which it can use