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Let's Test Your Understanding

Let me test your understanding of the issues by spinning you a perfectly plausible scenario that, if the CBDTPA is passed and enforced properly, you will almost certainly encounter personally at some point in your professional career.

Let us say you have a paper document that you wish to send a copy of to somebody on the other side of the country, which came from a printout of an electronic document you have. The electronic document gives you permission to print it, but not to distribute it. How would you go about doing so, in a fully CBDTPA-compliant world?

Today, you might fax the document. A strict reading of the CBDTPA reveals that fax machines, as you know them, will be illegal. It will be impossible for the fax machine to know whether or not you have permission to make this copy of the document, therefore the only safe thing to do legally is to ban you from sending it at all. (Maybe, just maybe, the document is watermarked, and the CBDTPA-compliant fax reader can correctly read the watermark. You're still haven't sent the document, because the document's creaters won't allow you transmit it.) *bzzt*, please try again.

Perhaps you can scan it, and email it? Exact same problem. Either the scanner won't allow you to scan anything (i.e., no compliant scanner can exist, because it can't be sure the document is legal for you to scan), or the scanner will recognize that you will not have permission to mail the resulting image.

Well, maybe you can just print another copy and send that instead. It's possible that you'll only be allowed to print one copy, though, and successfully printing another will constitute circumvention.

Let's assume that's not the case, though, and you successfully print another copy. So you mail that copy across the country. Oops, you got too clever. Welcome to the slammer. You'll be staying five years. You have just circumvented copy protection using your printer and the United States Post Office. If the document was going to allow you to send copies of itself to others, it would have let you know in the permissions it carries around.

Any other technique you can think of to send that document will also count as circumvention. Retyping content from the document and send that? Circumvention. Reading it over the phone? Circumvention. For especially content-producer-friendly interpretations of how they can slice rights, even sending that person your own printed copy may constitute circumvention; again, if the document creaters intended for you to send printouts, they would have said so in the permissions.

Basically, in a fully CBDTPA-compliant world, this simple transaction, which occurs daily in offices around the world, is completely impossible. You have to hope that the content creater will allow your intended recipient to obtain their own copy of the document. You have to hope that they will not jack the price up to unacceptable levels, because they have you over a barrel. You have to hope, nay, beg the content producer to not abuse their powers over you. And your intended recipient must actually take the time to obtain the document; again, you're stuck hoping that that act won't take an unreasonable amount of time, like six to eight weeks for processing. You have to hope the source of the document still even exists.

This is plausible. This is direct consequences, pulled straight from the bill. This is exactly, exactly what the content producers want from you. This is the exact world they want you to live in. This is, to put it bluntly, the wet dream they have every night.

Can you believe it? Can you override that stability sense in your head?