If your interpretation is correct, the Berman bill seems to be an open invitation to indulge in legally sanctioned vandalism. The unbridled license to damage someone else's property for the sake of protecting one's own should not pass a Constitutional smell test - although anything is possible with the kind of Supreme Court we currently have. I regard the Berman bill as the kind of government-inspired corruption that should be discouraged.

I will make a general statement: (1) those companies that back the DMCA will have cause to bitterly regret their support of this misbegotten Act, as they find that they cannot reverse engineer their competitors' products - And reverse engineering should be considered a vital source of innovation and incremental technological progress, as well as a possible way to QA competitors' marketing claims, which we all know tend toward the lyrical and outlandish if left unchecked; (2) the pro-DCMA companies' capacity to innovate in a proprietary way will be drastically curtailed when this capacity collides against the GPL-protected revolutionary technologies that the Open Source movement will inevitably come up with.

My best guess is that the pro-DCMA companies will be caught in the jaws of the DCMA-GPL pincer and crushed to dust. They should remember this old adage: "Be careful what you want, because you just might get it!"

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