Re: Bruce Schneier Gets It Wrong

jsavard@excxn.aNOSPAMb.cdn.invalid (John Savard) writes:

>On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 15:09:31 +0000 (UTC), daw@taverner.cs.berkeley.edu
>(David Wagner) wrote, in part:

>>By the way, I don't understand what you think Bruce Schneier got wrong.

>What I had thought he got wrong, I thought, was obvious - referring to
>the scheme as 'new'. But you may be right that there were details
>omitted in the article that would have made it novel. Also, another
>reply to my post indicated that Mr. Schneier *had* dealt with schemes
>involving similar principles before.

>I have the utmost respect for Bruce Schneier, and his knowledge of
>general principles of security as well as of modern cryptography. But,
>while my own knowledge in this area is dilettantish compared to his, I
>do think that at least when it comes to trivia about old-time
>cryptography, I have some advantages. Such as in identifying which rotor
>machines some recently declassified NSA patents pertain to.

>However, his record *is* pretty good.

>The only *other* instance in which I felt he got something just plain
>wrong is in a remark about the text of the DMCA, where he wondered if
>the DMCA's prohibition on circumventing technical devices that
>"effectively prevent the unauthorized copying of copyrighted material"
>means that it's legal to circumvent such measures if they don't work
>very well.

>Neither of us are lawyers, but I was disappointed he didn't recognize
>that the word "effectively" was being used there in a different sense.
>Instead of in the usual sense, of "bringing about a desired result", it
>was being used in a sense related to the phrase "in effect". And the
>reason it was there was because an encryption chip in a DVD player
>cannot form an *intent* to prevent the unauthorized copying of
>copyrighted material - it knows nothing of authorization or copyrights,
>it just manipulates bits.

>The word was there, therefore, to *make* the law hold up in court, and
>it *wasn't* some sort of stupid mistake that could be used to make the
>thing fall apart. Since he runs a big company, he must have one or two
>lawyers working for him who could easily have told him that.

Ah, but if you are taken to court for violating this law, and if
effectively is not defined in the act, then effectively means what the
ordinary useage says it does. Thus while your interpretation is a possible
one, so is his. He can thus use that in a defence, and since the law means
what it says, not what someone mindreading the framers of the law intuit
what it should mean, it is a defence that could quite possibly work.
Especially if, as you say, effectively has a usual sense of bringing about
a desired result, that use is the sense the law should be interpreted to
be using.

Your interpretation in fact makes the law so broad that it becomes
meaningless. Anything "in effect" prevents copying. Having it on floppy
disks stops it being copied in a DVD reader. Thus under your interpretation
my putting anything onto a floppy in order to prevent its being copied in a
DVD reader would bring forth the DMCA and make it a crime to sell floppy
readers or to figure out how to read things on floppies.

On the other hand, reading effectively in his sense actually restricts the
application of the law, and a law should be interpreted in its restricted
sense not its most expansive sense.

So, I think I would say he was not wrong.

(Again, I am not a lawyer, and noone should take the above as legal advice.
That is given by lawyers for large sums of money).
Received on Mon May 1 01:54:19 2006