I was reading a bit about the DMCA, and I got quite worried. Basically DMCA is a law that exists to make it a crime to crack copy-protection schemes. Sounds pretty good on the surface, right?

There are a few obvious problems with this, such as the fact that it prevents many fair-use applications that used to be legal. The most famous is the Adobe e-book example. A tool was created to extract the text from the e-book files that used a laughably simple 2000-year-old cipher. This tool was helpful so that (for example) blind people could use the e-book through speech synthesis, or the text could be used for academic criticism. When the man who created the tool came to the US, he was arrested by the FBI and incarcerated for years.

So now you can be arrested for attempting to break codes. Well, that’s good, now our codes won’t be broken, right? That naive thinking was proved ineffectual as far back as World War II. The Nazis believed in security by obscurity. According to them, the Engima code was so tough to crack that nobody could ever do it. So they relied on that one cipher in the hopes that its inner workings would remain secret. Once the math behind it was cracked, their entire intelligence was laid open to their enemies eyes.

Any cryptologist worth anything can tell you that security by obscurity is a pipe dream. If your security relies on the secrecy of the method, then once the method becomes known, you won’t have any more secrets.

So what’s the DMCA say about security? It says that it will stay safe as long as nobody tries to crack it. The other obvious ridiculousness about it is that the DMCA can only apply within the US. Therefore we are going to be relying upon copy-protection that is completely untested. When it gets released into a free market outside the US where DMCA rules don’t apply, the code will crack faster than a Windows NT password hash.

That’s not really all that frightening, as the only people who will suffer from its effects are those stupid enough to believe copy-protection works anyway. The ingenuity of crackers has always trumped that of copy-protection engineers, and there’s no reason to think that will change.

The implications of it are worse though. Apparently the US lawmakers think that a closed market of ideas is a valid way to keep things secret. If the government decides the open exchange of ideas is not the best way to develop, it’s inevitable that the US will fall behind in the progress of technology.

This is admittedly another idea I’ve reaped from Neal Stephenson. In his book Cryptonomicon, he makes a very convincing argument that the deciding factor in determining who has the technological edge is which side allows for the free exchange of ideas. The Nazis fell behind because they didn’t allow people to challenge the dominant ideas. This was detrimental because it disallowed the sort of paradigm shift that is necessary for technological advancement. The Allies encouraged the sharing of ideas that lead to advancements like Bletchley Park and the Manhattan Project.

Basically the scary thing is that I can see that the DMCA reflects the mindset idea that lost Nazi Germany the war. And that sucks.