Battleangel

Now that is sneaky.

Hollywood and large U.S. software companies chalked up another crucial yet little-noticed victory last week with the final approval of the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

You wouldn’t know it from a political debate veering between labor standards in Nicaragua and the evils of protectionism, but one major section of CAFTA will export some of the more controversial sections of U.S. copyright law.

Once it takes effect, CAFTA will require Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua to mirror the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s broad prohibition on bypassing copy-protection technology.

This prohibition, of course, has been problematic in the United States. Courts have interpreted it as barring news organizations from linking to DVD-descrambling utilities, and lawyers have invoked it to stifle discussion of security vulnerabilities and even prevent conference presentations from taking place. In an earlier column, I wrote how it prevented me from reading password-protected government documents.

Specifically, CAFTA calls for civil and criminal penalties to punish anyone who “circumvents” copy-protection technology or “provides” such tools to anyone else. Like the DMCA, that could cover everything from DeCSS (which removes copy-protection from DVDs) to products that do the same for e-books.

Now at least we know what some of those extra thousands of pages said.