[11061] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: New Chips Can Keep a Tight Rein on Consumers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John S. Denker)
Wed Jul 10 15:16:02 2002
Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2002 12:52:45 -0400
From: "John S. Denker" <jsd@monmouth.com>
To: Peter Gutmann <pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz>
Cc: cryptography@wasabisystems.com, dbs@philodox.com,
rah@shipwright.com
Peter Gutmann wrote:
>
> Actually I'm amazed no printer vendor has ever gone after companies who produce
> third-party Smartchips for remanufactured printer cartridges. This sounds like
> the perfect thing to hit with the DMCA universal hammer. I wonder if there's a
> good reason for this? Why is this particular field immune?
I don't know the whole story, and I don't know anything for
sure, but here's a hypothesis and a starting point:
Expand the acronym DMCA to discover the word "copyright".
IANAL but: As a rule, copyrights aren't supposed to be used to
protect functionality; that's what patents are for. Reverse
engineering in general remains legal ... not just laissez-faire
legal, but actually protected by the fair-trade laws. DMCA
carves out an exception in the case of reverse engineering that
promotes violation of copyrights. A micron-by-micron copy of
the smartchip would be a violation of somebody's plain-old
non-DMCA copyright in the mask, but a clone that reproduces
the functionality is fair game.
You might wonder about a hypothetical next step: printer vendors
could put some crypto in the system (so that every smartchip would
_need_ to have a copy of the key) and then invoke copyright on the
key.
IANAL but that might be asking for trouble.
0) Copyrights are not supposed to be used to protect functionality,
as discussed above.
1) Printer vendors aren't analogous to DVD vendors, because
the latter have "intellectual property" rights in the content,
long recognized by law, which they are allowed to protect.
Preventing piracy is a _perfectly legal_ limitation on
trade. In contrast, printer makers have far fewer recognized
rights in the ink. Trying too hard to mess up the aftermarket
in ink might be considered an _illegal_ restraint of trade.
2) Related point: The printer vendors claim that the chips
are there "merely" to provide necessary functionality, which
is legal. Court action against somebody who didn't copy
anything but the key would put the lie to this claim. And
then you would have questions about the legality of the chips;
see item (1).
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