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Comment by pasbesoin | Hacker News Reader

As a perhaps unnecessary (for HN) reminder: This is a primary reason that "anti-circumvention" legislation, that "outlaws" e.g. decompiling and/or reverse engineering (1) machine code in proprietary devices (in this case, for research purposes), needs to be permanently put down.

Without examination, existing circumstances repeatedly demonstrate that we more than a bit likely to be subjected to hidden weaknesses and exploitations we are uninformed about and have not agreed to.

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(1) decompilation/reversing, as in the referenced, recent D-Link case, or perhaps even simple extraction of a compressed fileset

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The DMCA Anti-circumvention clause explicitly makes an exception for "security testing" and "encryption research", amongst others. Search for those terms on this page:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

I am no law scholar, but I get the impression that, in general, reverse engineering and research are exempt from most forms of IP protection (which is what the DMCA is).

Except that as far as I know you can't share most of what you learned with anyone else.

As far as the text of the DMCA goes, the only restrictions on sharing what you learned are if that sharing could facilitate copyright infringement rather than advance knowledge or security. I can see how that could be a bit hazy in some cases, but certainly should not apply to cases like this one.

You're wrong.

Which is why the DMCA exempts most security testing, and, in particular, the exact kind of security testing performed in this analysis.

In one sense, I'll defer to your far greater experience. In another, though, I'm increasingly of the impression that the effect, or lack thereof, of the DMCA upon one is more about the lawyers and money for lawyers that one has, than about "rights".

I also seem to recall ongoing efforts to (further) criminalize various forms of infringement (as opposed to leaving them matters of civil law), taking accusations to a whole new level of hurt.

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