When Adam Bresson showed how to make copies of copyright-protected videos in a speech at a hacker conference at the weekend, he realised he was risking arrest for violating US copyright laws that landed a Russian man behind bars after the same event last year.
But Bresson, 28, had his mother, brother and grandparents in the audience and his girlfriend videotaping his talk at the three-day DefCon conference, just in case he was accused of treading too close to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.
"There`s a fine line between creating technologies that bypass copyright protections and demonstrating them," he said yesterday. "I decided to do it because I think the message is important."
His message is that people`s rights to make "fair use" copies of copyrighted material for personal use are being eroded by copyright holders. He cited as examples recording companies selling CDs that can`t be played in PCs or car CD players, movie studios selling DVDs that can only be viewed in specific geographic regions and emerging technologies that prevent people from copying their own CDs.
In his demonstration, Bresson used a device sold online for about $200 by UK-based Canopus. The box allows people to make copies of video cassettes and DVDs even if the video is locked with software to prevent such tampering.
Bresson also announced a new company he co-founded called GetAnyGame, based in Lake Forest, California, that rents out people`s used video games for a commission.
The trade group for the video game industry did not object to the idea of Bresson`s video game rental venture.
"Many consumers use rental as a way to sample games before they buy them," said Doug Lowenstein, president of the Washington DC-based Interactive Digital Software Association. However, he says it is imperative that people who are renting out the games are renting copies that they own as opposed to copies they made.
A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) says the trade group stands by its claims that anti-CD copying technologies are needed to curtail piracy.
The copyright Act was on the minds of many at the legendary hacker conference, particularly given the arrest last year of 26-year-old Dmitry Sklyarov. He was arrested after giving a talk on unlocking electronic books. He and his employer, ElcomSoft, were charged with violating the Act by writing and selling a program that allowed users of Adobe Systems` eBook Reader to bypass anti-piracy technology.
Sklyarov was eventually released and allowed to return to Moscow with the promise that charges against him would be dropped if he served as a witness in the trial pending against ElcomSoft. The trial is set to begin on 26 August in San Jose, California.
After Bresson`s talk, ElcomSoft defence attorney Joseph Burton gave a talk about the ElcomSoft case at DefCon, which ended on Sunday. "I hope he`s got a lawyer and that they talked to somebody," Burton said of Bresson.
Although he believed Bresson was safe because he merely showed how to use the technology and was not marketing or distributing it, "that doesn`t mean you couldn`t find a prosecutor who would take on the case".
Companies have been quick to use the Act to threaten researchers and programmers with arrest. Just last week Hewlett-Packard cited the Act in a cease-and-desist letter sent to researchers who released software that would allow someone to exploit a hole in HP`s Tru64 Unix operating system. Within days HP had backed off its threat to researchers at Boston-based SnoSoft.
In late July, HP convinced an employee to drop plans to demonstrate at the O`Reilly Open Source Convention how to break coding in DVD players that prevents them from being played outside a particular geographical region.
In June 2001, Princeton University computer science professor Ed Felten filed a lawsuit challenging the Act, saying the RIAA had threatened to sue him over his research on technology used to prevent piracy of digital music.
Felten dropped his lawsuit in February after a federal judge in New Jersey sided with the RIAA.