Dan Burk, who teaches intellectual property law at the University of Minnesota, says that Biden may have revised his bill to pick up where the controversial 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) left off. Burk says that if Biden's proposal were to become law, it would be "a real problem" for researchers working on steganography, a technique used to conceal information in computer files. "This bill doesn't say 'digital watermark' but the language about numbers, codes, and symbols may be broad enough to cover steganography, which suggests that it was altered in an attempt to plug a hole left in the original DMCA," Burk says. Biden might revise his proposal before it's sent to the Senate floor for a vote, and the bill is not guaranteed to be enacted into law this year. There's a simple reason for that: Congress only has about four or five weeks left before it's scheduled to adjourn so politicians can go home and campaign before the November elections. But in an environment where politicos are more worried about campaigning against copyright thieves than about carefully weighing the impact that new laws have on technology, don't expect caution to prevail. "Copyrights mean nothing if government authorities fail to enforce the protections they provide intellectual property owners," Biden said in April. "The criminal code has not kept up with the counterfeiting operations of today's high-tech pirates, and it's time to make sure that it does." Declan McCullagh is the Washington correspondent for CNET News.com, chronicling the ever-busier intersection between technology and politics. Before that, he worked for several years as Washington bureau chief for Wired News. He has also worked as a reporter for The Netly News, Time magazine and HotWired.
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