Ernest Miller points to a draft treaty being considered by the World Intellectual Property Organization. It’s a truly remarkable document. And I don’t mean that in a good way.
Here’s the most amazing part, from Article 16, Alternative V:
2. In particular, effective legal remedies shall be provided against those who:
…
(iii) participate in the manufacture, importation, sale, or any other act that makes available a device or system capable of decrypting or helping to decrypt an encrypted program-carrying signal.
Every computer is “capable of decrypting or helping to decrypt” such a signal, so this provision, if adopted, would apparently require signatories to the treaty to ban the importation, sale, or distribution of computers.
Note this this is just an “alternative” under consideration. It was proposed by Argentina, and Switzerland proposed language that “roughly corresponds” to it. I don’t know whether the U.S. has taken a position on this, but I assume the U.S. is still in favor of computers being legal.
