By Pia Heikkila, 31 July 2002 16:30
NEWS HP is threatening to use a controversial US copyright law to prevent publication of product vulnerability. The company's bosses have claimed researchers at security group SnoSoft are violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by publishing information about a hole in HP's Tru64 Unix operating system. HP said the responsible parties at SnoSoft could be imprisoned for up to five years and fined up to $500,000 for publishing details about the bug, according to US wires. The vulnerability was posted on Security Focus' BugTraq mailing list by a researcher called Phased, a member of SnoSoft. It is common practice for security professionals to publish details on possible vulnerabilities after informing the vendor to alert the security community. SnoSoft claims it told HP about the flaw months ago and the company should have issued a patch to fix the problem. DMCA has not been used against disclosing security information, but last year a Russian coder, Dmitry Sklyarov, was accused of hacking the code of Adobe's copyrighted e-books software. The case continues.
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