[KLUG Advocacy] The TEACH Act...

[Adam Williams]

>Comments, anyone? I got this via my ACM internal contacts...

It seams reasonable, and I understand the intent.  But the "how" is the 
tough part.  Say I download a PDF of a copyrighted work.  It needs to stop 
being viewable on mm/dd/yyyy.  I'm not aware of any way to do that.

But someone needs to be clearer on "copyrighted" material.  An LDP 
document is copyrighted material.  There needs to be a clause for content 
with deliberately open copyrights.

One could be constructed very easily, but it hasn't happened.  Simply 
encode a certificate in the header of the file.  That certificate has to 
be verified via a public key server (basically an LDAP box) located via an 
SRV records in DNS.  If the certificate can't be verified, than you can't 
decrypt the rest of the file.  The certificate can't be verified if the 
host agency has deleted it!  I'll wager this could be build right into the 
VFS of every current client OS (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) in no time flat.  
Then the certificate doesn't actually have to be IN the file, but stored 
as associated data supported by (NTFS, HFS, ext3, and XFS),  the VFS can 
manage the verification and decryption of the file with no application 
modification.  Of course, that will never happen.  To simple, to elegant.

>3) No Interference with existing technical measures. This addresses
>anti-circumvention of existing DRM technology that is applied to
>copyrighted work that is made available electronically by educational
>entities.

I'm not certain what this clause is supposed to mean.  The second run-on 
sentence seems a bit grammer whacked.