As if abuses of the abstractly-worded DMCA isn’t enough, lawmakers are quietly passing what’s become known as the “Super-DMCA” on a state-by-state basis. The law prohibits, among other things, the concealment of origin for one’s actions, making sites like Anonymizer illegal to use.
The law, prohibiting not only the use, but the possession of certain types of technology, is so abstractly worded as to include technologies that lawmakers may not have considered when writing the law (preventing fraud of cable and broadband providers seems to be the original purpose of the law).
Sadly, the law went into effect in Michigan and, by its wording, makes one student’s doctorate work illegal, forcing the student to move his work to offshore servers and preventing US readers from accessing it.
Already passed in a handful of States, and being considered in others, there’s still time for convincing officials to reword the law before it goes into effect elsewhere.
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