If you havent heard of DMCA, you probably should! With the US-SG FTA coming into effect next year, DMCA will come to Singapore.

DMCA is one of the harshest copyright legistration. Basically, it outlaws any attempts to break any copyright protection. But it provides exceptions such as “scientific exploration”.

Nevertheless, SDMI/RIAA has attempt to use it to stop Edward Felten from publishing his findings on the faults of SDMI, despite he is doing so under the open challenge from SDMI. Or Adobe using it to arrest a russian cryptographer who has break their Ebook technology.

Or recently, RIAA has been using DMCA to subponea ISPs to release informations about users who use file sharing software which causes some ISPs to countersue RIAA for their strongarm tactics.

And today, I learnt that ESA lawyers send a warning letter to gentoo because their automated engine found a file “/distfiles/INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip, picked out the words “Pac” and “Man” and conclude infringement of “Pacman”!

No doubt copyright is important but DMCA is outright abusive…