I’m doing some research for my paper on protecting digital rights, and one of the main offenders happens to be the ever-inopportune DMCA. Section 117 of the law legislates when copies of software may be made: one (1) copy may be made for archival purposes when the software is obtained.

This has been the case for some time; it just clarified the CSCA from 1980. It seems pretty reasonable—one backup copy should be enough. Unfortunately this fails to take into account the fact that backups have to be done regularly if they are to be useful. So it turns out that backing up your hard drive which contains proprietary software is illegal—you only have the right to back up your program once: when you first obtain the software.

As if that weren’t enough, the DMCA also clarifies that copies of software and other digital material that are stored in RAM are also subject to the original copyright holder’s right of reproduction. That means it would be illegal for you to load up two copies of your proprietary program at the same time! This happens all the time in the case of servers. With Apache, the web server that runs about 70% of the web, each time someone connects to the web server, it spawns another copy of the program. Under the DMCA, if Apache weren’t open source, you would have to buy it over and over again for each concurrent viewer of the web site.

Needless to say, I don’t think I’m going to have a hard time coming up with digital rights abominations in the DMCA. Should be a relatively easy paper, unfortunately.