Once More, With Feeling: Security Research Should Not Be Chilled by Uncertainty in Copyright Law

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed in 1998 to help prevent and criminalize technology that enables the unauthorized use of copyrighted material. In this memo, the Center for Democracy and Technology filed comments in support of a petition to amend Section 1201 of the DMCA. The authors propose that security researchers should be exempt from the section which makes it illegal to bypass access controls called technological protection measures (TPMs), in order to allow researchers to study security vulnerabilities in voting machines and other software. Currently, computer security researchers must contend with the legal uncertainty of publishing their research or warning the public about unpatched security vulnerabilities in software or devices. This amendment would give security researchers the ability to conduct their work without risking liability under DMCA Section 1201.