If I understand John Morrow's question correctly, it was what economics rights did one have under copyright law pre-DMCA which are lost under DCMA. Here are two examples:
1) You lose the right to use (read/view) copyrighted works in a manner that is perfectly legal and does not cost the author lost royalties, but was not contemplated by the author in advance. For example: If you buy a DVD, you have the right to watch the movie on it. DVDs are "encrypted" with something called "CSS" (COntent Scrambling System, I think) and the decryption algorithm is programmed into officially sanctioned DVD players, and Microsoft Windows. If you legitmately bought the DVD, you have the right to watch it, but if your have no DVD player and you computer runs Linux not Windows, you have no "official" way to watch it, since there is not officially sanctioned DVD software for Linux. CSS is very rudimentary and was cracked by a teenager in Sweden almost immediately. Many people have written Linux software to decrypt DVDs, some programs as short as a single line of PERL code. These programs, it has been argued, are an "illegal circumvention device" under DCMA, subjecting anyone in possession of them to criminal prosecution. In theory, I could send you a one-line e-mail, and you could be subject to criminal penalties for "possessing" that e-mail. And the only possible purpose of the "circumvention device" e-mail would be to engage in the entirely legal practice of watching a DVD you bought from the legitimate copyright holder. Another example: Similar story for the Adobe eBook system; a Russian computer programmer was arrested for giving a talk on the weaknesses in that system at a computer conference. He spent a couple of weeks in federal prison before he was released pending his completion of an agreement to testify against his own employer. (He was then denied a visa to return to the US to testify, but that's another story!) 2) Very simple "encryption" methods have been claimed to be encryption under DCMA -- e.g., "XOR"ing every bit according to a known pattern. This sort of "encryption" can be "decrypted" with age-old software tools, such as file-compression programs, which could potentially now be "illegal circumvention devices." 3) Research into certain areas of mathematics could not be illegal, since the knowledge could, in theory, be used to decrypt DMCA-protected material. Egregious example: SGMI sponsored a public contest to crack their encryption scheme. When computer science professor at Princeton (Ed Felten) succeeded, SGMI threatened to prosecute him for, essentially, winning their contest. 4) There is a claim that possession of a certain prime number is illegal under DCMA -- since, when that number is given as input to a decompression program, it produces code that will decode CSS! Is it really economically effecient to make "possession of certain numbers" a crime? --Robert
