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Comment by phire | Hacker News Reader

> the "decoy notes" may be considered an "effective technical measure" from the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act".

I really hope not. My understanding is that to be "effective" it needs to at least be a form of encryption with a secret key. At least, I'm not aware of any case law that allowed anything less than that.

IMO, "dummy notes" are nothing more than a form of obfuscation. If it's obvious how to filter them out, then I don't think it comes close to meeting the bare minimum of what might count as an "effective technical measure".

Of course, who knows what way the courts will rule if it ever reached that far.

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shitty CAPTCHA’s and simple checksums have been ruled to be “effective measures”, so this would probably be too.

However, Section 1201(f) is designed to allow developers leeway in reverse engineering to make "independently created computer programs" talk to other "computer programs". But this usually distinguishes between talking to a binary (good) and reading a media file (bad).

My guess is the encoder is probably legal under 1201(f) because it’s reverse engineering a DMCA covered application to create new media files for it to use. But the decoder would be illegal because it reverse engineers a DMCA covered application to extract copyrighted media.

No, on appeal the simple checksum was ruled to NOT be an effective measure. [0]

And while courts might have ruled that a CAPTCHA might count as a "technological measure" they haven't gotten as far as ruling them as "effective" yet.

But in general yes. The protection scheme doesn't need to be well designed or free of design flaws to count as "effective". But from what I can tell, it does need to be a valid attempt at some cryptographic scheme requiring a secret known only to the copyright holder.

[0] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/387...

You're underselling this report. The court found that a whole lot of computer code that's intended to be a roadblock to interoperability isn't copyrightable - great news for adversarial reverse engineers everywhere. Recommend reading.

Also it was an appeal to a preliminary judgement. The lower court said: okay, you're most likely going to lose so you have to stop selling these until we find out whether you lose. The appeal court said: actually this case is almost completely bogus and you're probably going to win, so you can keep selling them.

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