DMCA

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Opinionated Summary

This image is illegal under the DMCA. Do not view on U.S. soil.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is widely regarded as being one of the most idiotic pieces of technology legislation to come out of the US in recent years. Among other things, the prohibitions it places on any activity which might possibly be interpretable as an attempt to defeat copy-protection or encryption are truly ham fisted:

• Any "technology that can circumvent measures taken to protect copyright" is now illegal under the DMCA; this includes such sophisticated items as magic markers, which can be used to defeat certain CD copy-protection schemes, and t-shirts displaying the DeCSS algorithm (less than one page of C code).
• A Russian programmer was arrested, after giving a talk at a U.S. programming conference, for developing software to allow Adobe eBooks to be read aloud (which was not illegal in Russia)

Reference

• Wikipedia
• EFF on the DMCA