Copyright Cop Says “Too Late, You’re Busted”. Maybe.

[JackSpratts]

By Robert X. Cringely

If you look at Mark Ishikawa's business card, you'll notice that it lists no street address for his company, BayTSP, just a post office box. This is for good reason, since Ishikawa is one of the few Silicon Valley CEOs who regularly receives death threats. Uninvited visitors are not welcome at BayTSP, which has a post office box in Los Gatos, CA, but could really be anywhere in the Bay Area.

I certainly have no idea where the company lives, but I know why Ishikawa has so many enemies. It is because BayTSP acts as the primary enforcer for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a law that is widely reviled in the technical community.

The DMCA, which was put in effect in 2000, was an attempt by the U.S. Government to bring copyright law into the cyber age. But many people -- including, oddly, Mark Ishikawa -- think the DMCA goes too far by making it illegal for me to even tell you how to circumvent encryption or copy protection technologies. It makes the very passing of knowledge against the law whether or not that knowledge is ever used.

"It's a very flawed piece of legislation," says Ishikawa, who predicts that the government will rewrite the copyright law again "in eight or nine years" to correct the mistakes in the DMCA. But until then, the DMCA is the law of the land, and Mark Ishikawa is the Internet's top cop.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020919.html



there're a couple of guys in washington dc that make this outrage possible. call and let them know you're not pleased.

- js.