Re:What the DMCA did (Score 1)

Before the DMCA, it wasn't illegal to break encryption, only to profit from a copyrighted work that you didn't hold the copyright to. If someone was breaking encryption and distributing the work, on a p2p network, they were not benefitting, so there was nothing that could be done to them. Now, however, ditributing the movie, even of free, is a crime if you break encryption. Any person who's copyright has been infringed now has a legal right to punish both people, the person obtaining, thus benefitting from, the copyrighted work, and the person distributing, and breaking encryption of, the copyrighted work. I think that this is beneficial to society. Why would people stop sharing movies and other copyrighted works when there is no punishment to them? They wouldn't! And yes, I know what you're claiming, that your argument is that it is detrimental to society to make it illegal to break encryption, I read that in your first post. Your claims for supporting this argument, however, are just restatements on the theme "I can't do whatever I want to do, make the laws go away." You may be a responsible person that merely wants to put things in a convenient place, but society as a whole is not responsible, that's why we have laws. People were breaking encryption and posting things with no penalty, now there is at least the threat of penalty. If this law is so bad, can you explain how it passed both House and Senate nearly unanimously? Without saying that it was the recording industry's fault? The DMCA also put into effect international treaties regrading copyrights. It didn't just make breaking encryption illegal, it made a copyright granted in one's home country an internationally recognized right. That is another benefit to society. I do not think that repealing the DMCA is a good idea, maybe amending it is, but not repealing it. Amending it is only a good idea if there is a legitimate reason to do so, aside from "I can't break encryption of a copyrighted work and gain access to that work, even though I really want to and I think I should be able to."