Re: MS Office 12 format
On 7/27/05, John Hasler <jhasler@debian.org> wrote:
> Not likely. Only _effective_ measures[1] are protected. From the DMCA:
>
[...]
> circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a
> particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying
[...]
> [1] Which is silly, because if the measures were effective, how could they
> be circumvented?
That depends on how you interpret "effectively". I could interpret it
in two ways:
1) The measure is an effective way of controlling access.
2) The measure has the effect of controlling access.
I'd interpret it as the latter, though you've interpreted it as the
former. Unless there's some more formal meaning given to
"effectively" in legalese, this sounds like something that's ambiguous
until a court rules on it.
Note that rot13 fails the test of (1), but not necessarily of (2) if
the user isn't told that rot13 was used for the encoding and no
standalone rot13 program was provided.
--
Michael A. Marsh
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh
http://mamarsh.blogspot.com
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