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investment, and given the generally jam-smeared character of everything the kids get their paws on, she decided to tape the DVD off to VHS and give that to the kids -- that way she could make a fresh VHS copy when the first one went south. She cabled her DVD into her VHS and pressed play on the DVD and record on the VCR and waited. 

Before I go farther, I want us all to stop a moment and marvel at this. Here is someone who is practically technophobic, but who was able to construct a mental model of sufficient accuracy that she figured out that she could connect her cables in the right order and dub her digital disc off to analog tape. I imagine that everyone in this room is the front-line tech support for someone in her or his family: wouldn\'t it be great if all our non-geek friends and relatives were this clever and imaginative? 

I also want to point out that this is the proverbial honest user. She\'s not making a copy for the next door neighbors. She\'s not making a copy and selling it on a blanket on Canal Street. She\'s not ripping it to her hard-drive, DivX encoding it and putting it in her Kazaa sharepoint. She\'s doing something *honest* -- moving it from one format to another. She\'s home taping. 

Except she fails. There\'s a DRM system called Macrovision embedded -- by law -- in every VHS that messes with the vertical blanking interval in the signal and causes any tape made in this fashion to fail. Macrovision can be defeated for about $10 with a gadget readily available on eBay. But our infringer doesn\'t know that. She\'s \"honest.\" Technically unsophisticated. Not stupid, mind you -- just naive. 

The Darknet paper addresses this possibility: it even predicts what this person will do in the long run: she\'ll find out about Kazaa and the next time she wants to get a movie for the kids, she\'ll download it from the net and burn it for them. 

In order to delay that day for as long as possible, our lawmakers and big rightsholder interests have come up with a disastrous policy called anticircumvention. 

Here\'s how anticircumvention works: if you put a lock -- an access control -- around a copyrighted work, it is illegal to break that lock. It\'s illegal to make a tool that breaks that lock. It\'s illegal to tell someone how to make that tool. One court even held it illegal to tell someone where she can find out how to make that tool. 

Remember Schneier\'s Law? Anyone can come up with a security system so clever that he can\'t see its flaws. The only way to find the flaws in security is to disclose the system\'s workings and invite public feedback. But now we live in a world where any cipher used to fence off a copyrighted work is off-limits to that kind of feedback. That\'s something that a Princeton engineering prof named Ed Felten and his team discovered when he submitted a paper to an academic conference on the failings in the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a watermarking scheme proposed by the recording industry. The RIAA responded by threatening to sue his ass if he tried it. We fought them because Ed is the kind of client that impact litigators love: unimpeachable and clean-cut and the RIAA folded. Lucky Ed. Maybe the next guy isn\'t so lucky. 

Matter of fact, the next guy wasn\'t. Dmitry Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who gave a talk at a hacker con in Vegas on the failings in Adobe\'s e-book locks. The FBI threw him in the slam for 30 days. He copped a plea, went home to Russia, and the Russian equivalent of the State Department issued a blanket warning to its researchers to stay away from American conferences, since we\'d apparently turned into the kind of country where certain equations are illegal. 

Anticircumvention is a powerful tool for people who want to exclude competitors. If you claim that your car engine firmware is a \"copyrighted work,\" you can sue anyone who makes a tool for interfacing with it. That\'s not just bad news for mechanics -- think of 
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