TORONTO -- You say you don't like browser cookies? You're not quite sure if that program you download from the Net is revealing more about you than it should?
Well, here's something to make you really nervous: In the United States, it may be illegal to disable software that snoops on you.
The folks who came up with this idea turn out to be the large corporations that helped to draft the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which restricts some forms of tampering with copyright protection devices.
In some cases, that means you won't be able to turn off any surveillance features it might include, according to participants in a Thursday afternoon panel at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference.
"Privacy circumvention is possible only under a limited circumstance," said Paul Schwartz of the Brooklyn Law School.
As more and more copyrighted material makes its way online, content owners are turning to encryption to protect their works from widespread illicit redistribution.
Stephen King distributed his recent novel online in encrypted form, and music companies are backing Secure Digital Memory Card for audio players.
Privacy advocates fret that if future works are secure and thus protected under the DMCA, they could reveal consumers' private behavior --RealNetworks' RealJukebox player secretly did just that -- and tinkering with the program to turn off the reporting mechanism would be illegal.
"The practical impact is it's another area we're going to be fighting about," Schwartz said.
The DMCA, which became law in October 1998, does allow some very limited forms of privacy circumvention. You're allowed to do it if the software leaks "personally identifying information" about you without giving you the ability to say no, and if you're not "in violation of any other law."
But here's the rub: Many, if not most, programs include shrink-wrap licenses that prohibit reverse-engineering or altering the program.
Some courts have said that shrink-wrap licenses -- software license agreements that don't require a signature -- are binding. If you violate them, would you be able to take advantage of the DMCA's privacy-circumvention loophole?
The answer may well be yes. "The statute is basically totally incoherent," says Pam Samuelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and an influential copyright scholar.
"We're getting tortured by laws that are inherently incoherent," complained Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the ACLU.
Violating the DMCA is a civil offense, and "willfully" violating it for private financial gain is a criminal offense punishable by five years in jail and a $500,000 fine.
