dejavu, Re: Hijackers' e-mails were unencrypted

[Dan Riley]

Ed Gerck <egerck at nma.com> writes:
> Maybe it's time to put sanity back into the DMCA crying.
> 
> In the infamous case of Microsoft vs. Stacker many years ago, when MS
> was found guilty of using Stacker's code in a MS product, Stacker was
> nonetheless found guilty of proving it by reverse engineering -- in a
> notion similar to trespassing.

Nitpick: according to the meager references I could find, the
counterclaim Microsoft won was that Stac had reverse engineered DOS to
find the undocumented system calls used in the original Stacker
product.

Significant point: both the Stac suit and the Microsoft counterlcaim
were civil actions.  The DMCA makes "circumvention of technological
measures" for financial gain or competive advantage a *criminal*
offense.  This is a big difference.  Furthermore, the DMCA prohibition
of "circumvention of technological measures" is quite broad, applying
to far more than classic reverse engineering (for example, Felten et
al., where all Felten's group had access to were the results of an
"oracle" indicating whether the "watermark" was still detectable).
-- 
Dan Riley                                         dsr at mail.lns.cornell.edu
Wilson Lab, Cornell University      <URL:http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~dsr/>
	  "A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies"



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