A couple of days ago I read on Slashdot that Adobe was using the
DMCA to
take down a project on SourceForge that had reversed engineered the "secure" RTMPE protocol. That final "E" is important, it means "encrypted". And as
Nicolas points out, it's the piece of marketing bullshit that allows Adobe to go and sell its technology as "secure" to operators such as
Channel 4.
It didn't take long to the geeks to reverse engineer that
E and allow anyone to access copyrighted material. And that's another key thing. Adobe is not claiming the Open Source project is breaking Adobe's patents, what the DMCA is about is:
It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as Digital Rights Management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works and it also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself.
So, because the project allows bypassing the DRM and SourceForge is based on the US (the only country where the DMCA applies), SourceForge had to take it down. Fair enough.
Now, what has Adobe achieved?
Two days after the news broke on Slashdot, the source code, the keys to encrypt/decrypt and a
clean room specification of the protocol are already being shared and hosted all over the internet in servers outside the US. So it seems that if Adobe was trying to avoid the "secret source code" to spread, mission failed, right? Well, I don't think so.
Adobe guys and lawyers are not that stupid, they of course knew this would happen so, why go after an Open Source project and get some bad PR from the community in the first place? Again, marketing bullshit. Adobe publicly has to do as much as they can to protect the content of their clients/partners, even if they know the effort is rather pointless.
This is only a battle of the much bigger war going on between
content creators copyright holders and users. Technology has changed very much how music, movies, books, etc are being consumed and copyright holders see how the extremely tight control they once had over their content is now slipping away through their fingers. And they see coming the day that they won't be able to make the obscene amount of money they make at the moment. And they feel threatened. And
they fight back.
I'll leave that for another post.