DMCA

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal to apply long established and legally recognized fair use principles, which allowed the reverse engineering of commercially available electronic technology that utilizes encryption. This prohibition on reverse engineering restricts the legitimate investigation of the claims made by electronic voting technology vendors about their equipment. The administration of elections in our nation is too important to allow this law to be used as a shield to hide potentially poorly designed and implemented electronic voting technology.

Principles:

• The DMCA should not apply to any research or investigation of the published claims of electronic voting equipment manufacturers regarding their technology that is currently deployed or intended for use in U.S. elections.
• The DMCA poses a grave threat to the continued leadership role of the United States in the area of computing security research and the development of effective electronic voting technology.
  
• The DMCA should be amended to address only infringing behavior and not actions that are associated with well established methods of innovation, such as reverse engineering.