Dmitri and DMCA

Lyrics © 2001 Stephen Savitzky. CC-by-nc-sa. TTTO: ``Charlie on the MCA'' Please send donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in lieu of royalties.

Lyrics [pdf] [txt] [cho]

	D	G
N	ow let me tell you the story of a m	an named Dmitri

	D	A
On that tr	agic and fateful d	ay

	D	G
He left his h	ome in Russia, caught a pl	ane for Las Vegas,

	D	A	D
Got caught	up in D	MC	A.

D

And did he e ver return? No, he never returned,

A

And his fate is still unl earned.

D G

He may r ot forever in a f ederal prison

D A D

He's a m an who n ever ret urned.

Now Dmitri wrote a paper about Adobe's eBook format

And its copy protection flaw

And he wrote a little program that let folks recover passwords

And make backups as allowed by law.

But the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Is a law that says you can't invent,

Produce, sell or describe any device or program

Such protection for to circumvent.

So instead of thanking Dmitri for his help with their software

And for speaking freely what he'd learned,

They called in the FBI and had Dmitri arrested

He's a man who never returned.

Now there's one more little detail about copy protection

So ironic that it must be told:

If you can't make backup copies it's illegal in Russia

Where Adobe eBooks can't be sold!

Now you citizens and readers, don't you think it's a scandal

How the people have to pay and pay?

Fight for fair use rights, fight to free Dmitri,

And to bring down the DMCA!

Or else he'll never return. No, he'll never return,

And his fate will be unlearned.

He may rot forever in a federal prison

He's a man who never returned.

Please feel free to archive, perform, record, publish, and otherwise distribute this song. Feel free to add verses, but if you do make sure your poetic license is up to date.

Never anger a bard, for your name sounds funny and scans to many popular songs.

This document has been encrypted with TITE (Triple Invertible Transform Encoding) by encrypting with ROT13, exclusive or with the text of the U.S. Constitution, and byte-by-byte subtraction from the contents of the file /dev/zero, followed by the same operations in reverse order for additional security.

Describing the implementation details of this intricate procedure, and explaining why the document still appears to be readable afterwards, is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!