Noncryptographic Security Issues - Codes: The Guide to Secrecy from Ancient to Modern Times - page 410

original scholarly material without having to go to each author. In fact, for each
journal and all its articles, there is negotiation with a single entity.
With nonscholarly material, there is still the problem of getting permission
from the copyright holder, and in the case of older works, this may present
problems simply in terms of actually locating that owner. Furthermore, in
some countries, such as the United States, laws have been passed to protect
highly profitable works by extending the copyright from the life of the author
plus fifty years, to the life of the author plus seventy years. This was the result
of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act passed by the U.S. Congress.
This means that there is a further two-decade-long moratorium on new works
entering into the public domain , that body of knowledge in general, in which no
individual or organization can lay proprietary claim. Thus, in many countries,
it will take some time to sort out the copyright issues related to the transferal
to digital form.
There are works, other than topics, which are intrinsically in digital form,
such as music and video. We would be surprised if topic publishers wanted to
restrict use of photocopy machines away from copyrighted works, or to fight
for a royalty tax on such machines to compensate the copyright holders from
pirating of printed works. The reason is simple: cost. Even in today's world,
if one wants to pirate a topic by photocopying it, and binding it, and taking
all the time to do this, the cost would be prohibitive. Even if one downloads a
digital PDF version of a topic and wants to convert it to bound-topic format, the
costs remain. Yet, with music or movies, which already exist in digital form,
and increasingly so, as we will discuss below, then we are not surprised that
the audio/video industry seeks a royalty tax on CD, VCR, and DVD players.
The problems for the musicindustry are quantitatively greater than for the
movie industry, the reason being that the size of movies prevents most users
from downloading, even when available. Moreover, many videos are encrypted,
and the network connections required to successfully and quickly download such
films are not in the hands of the average user. Actually, in today's world there
are bigger problems faced by the music industry that we need to discuss.
Copyright and Piracy Issues
Recent polls taken of teenagers in North America show that, although they
are not ignorant of copyright laws when it comes to downloading music from
the Internet, more than half admit to simply ignoring those laws. In fact, these
polls show that they are more concerned with getting a computer virus than
being prosecuted for copyright violations. This is a problem for companies
holding those copyrights. How do they get paid for proprietary data if they
make it public? Unauthorized copying (pirating) of software, in general, costs
the industry billions of dollars. How do manufacturers prevent unauthorized
copying of their software, called copy protection ?
There is a copy protection device, called the dongle . Basically, it is a mecha-
nism for protecting against unauthorized copying or use of proprietary software.
Typically, a dongle will be a hardware device, usually sent with the software